Television: The Golden Hope

by GILBERT SELDES

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TELEVISION faces a critical year. Until now the question has been how last television, would develop; and all through 1948 the answer came that it would develop so fast that velocity itself would have an effect on the quality of entertainment, for television was skipping all the slow transitional states; instead of being developed, it was being inflated. During the same period an upheaval took place in both radio and the movies. The movies went down not only in their balance sheets; they lost initiative and became less important than radio, even to the point of trying to buy themselves a position in the entertainment field by acquiring one of the networks. In radio itself, a series of spectacular financial moves by CBS dislodged NBC from its long tenure as the dominant force in broadcasting.

The movies had failed to hold their audiences because almost their entire product was directed at a single group, the young and immature. The whole structure of a radio network was shaken when two or three programs of a single type were removed indicating that broadcasting also was concentrating its attention far too much on satisfying only a few interests. Coming into its own after the weaknesses of other mass media have been exposed, television has the great opportunity of becoming a fully integrated medium of commerce, communication, and diversion. The parallel danger is that it will he hurried and overextended, and will be used as a weapon in the war between rival networks and in the greater struggle between radio and the movies for control of the world of entertainment.

The brief past of television offers little that is useful in predicting the future. Its normal development was first checked by the war and then enormously accelerated by the wartime developments in the field of electronics. When the expected postwar recession failed to arrive, the Federal Communications Commission gave television an open field by assigning to it certain frequencies and encouraging commercial exploitation of the medium.

The FCC did not set up rules governing 1 he quality of programs, but by the method of indirection it had a profound effect in that area. Television, like radio, must operate with due regard to “public necessity, convenience, and interest"; and in the public interest, the FCC ruled that the holder of a commercial license must transmit at specified times, for a given number of hours per week.

These requirements grow slider at the end of the first eighteen months of transmission; after three vears on the air, a commercial licensee must transmit seven days a week and not less than twentyeight hours. Actually, where there is competition, most stations feel obliged to slay on the air longer than the FCC compels them to.

The cost of equipment is high, upkeep is difficult, and day-to-day operations of a television studio seem inordinately expensive to those familiar with the easy arrangements of radio. Licensees naturally looked for popular programs to at tract sponsors and for cheap programs to fill the unsponsored time. Decrepit old film was the cheapest filler, and for popularity there was always sport. Then a sort of benevolent spiral began: the sponsors came in; the audiences increased, and not for sports only; the sale of receivers boomed; more sponsors were attracted and more applications for licenses poured in; so that at the end of 1948, less than eighteen months after the FCC had established technical standards which were supposed to last for many years, the Commission had to call a halt while it looked for new air-space to accommodate “a truly nation-wide competitive system.”

By 1950 there will be some 400 stations in operation or licensed, in 140 metropolitan areas, connected by regional if not transcontinental coaxial cable (or by relay stations or by spectacular rebroadcasting from aeroplanes, the “stratovision" method of overcoming the natural barriers to transmission on the very high frequencies). Even in a few months the regular television audience will number four million people.

Of the million sets around which these spectators will sit or stand, more than half will be recent sales; and if we know why the sets are bought, we can get a fairly clear idea of what television is promising, for sets are bought to receive aclual programs, not the pious aestheic hopes of chairmen of the board; and these programs are represented in the advertisements by the pictures shown on the screens of I he various models.

In a special supplement of the New York Times last summer, 51 receivers were shown in advertisements (manufacturers, retailers, broadcasters); on the 51 screens, the little images showed

21 sports events

13 light entertainment

5 cultural cutertainment

4 spot news (of which 3 were political)

3 movie shots

The rest were scattered; among them were a televised radio program and, under the caption “Educational,” a woman demonstrating cookery.

That same week the television stations in New York City were on the air for 130 hours, of which 36 were movies. There were several dramas, children’s programs that included a very successful puppet show, much music, a serial trying hard to be soap opera, some quizzes made especially for television, and some vaudeville acts held together by a master of ceremonies. Of the 94 hours of live programs, more than half were given over to sport.

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THIS program pattern hasn’t varied significantly in the past half year. It is probable that the dominant types for the next ten years are being created, and the first thing to notice is how much of the television schedule consists of events primarily intended for an audience which has paid its way into a stadium or concert hall or opera house, or is in the theaters where radio’s comedy and participation shows are produced. Another large section of the schedule consists of programs which virtually duplicate material used elsewhere certain vaudeville acts, demonstrations of cookery, and the like. In all of these, television is a remarkable recorder and transmitter; its creative energies lie elsewhere.

Although sports take up an inordinate amount of time on the schedule and are important because of the large saloon audience, the home viewers give their preference to plays, vaudeville, and participation shows. Plays are very expensive and usually consist of hour-long adaptations of second-rate works (the first-rate ones, having been sold to the movies, are usually not available for television). All the ingenuity of directors is needed to overcome space limitations and the lumbering obstinacy of the equipment. The results rate A for effort but there is little room for creativeness when the major effort is either to come as close as possible to the stage original or to pretend that for $5000 an hour you can produce the equivalent of a movie which costs more than $15,000 a minute.

Participation shows, when they are genuinely spontaneous, turn out well — quizzes, forfeits, charades, and the like. They are better on television than elsewhere, but the faintest suspicion of preparation, I he slightest sense that anyone is ill-at-ease, can be fatal. There is room for faking in television, but not in the participation show. The “planted" contestant can add a few laughs, but in the end he harms the program irretrievably.

Vaudeville is good program material. Television gives the spectator a better view of marionettes, acrobats, trick and ballet dancers, ventriloquists, and all animal acts. But good material does not in itself guarantee good programs. Vaudeville needs some sort of framework to be exactly right for the intimacy of the home; and the framework chosen in 1949 is the one used in the last dying days of vaudeville at the old Palace Theatre some twenty years ago: the high-powered, quick-talking “personality” MC. It is of course easier to hire a personality than to invent a form appropriate to the medium; but television will not get very far on the false premise that Milton Berle is a better comedian than Lou Holtz.

It is to be expected that television would be derivative — every new form of popular art borrows from its predecessors; but it is surprising that mere inventiveness should have been so feeble. Nearly everything now on the air was tried or planned five years ago, and in several respects current programs lag behind those of the last days of the war.

News was visualized and animated in many ways and never dwindled into a sound-track for film shots. An art program worked out in conjunction with the Metropolitan Museum was foretelling an integrated combination of telecasting and museum techniques. Documentaries (one made with the coöperation of the Encyclopædia Britannica’s film unit) were recognized as an accepted part of the program schedule. And with insufficient money, with cumbersome equipment, beset by labor shortages and Petrillo’s veto on music, several studios still managed to feel their way toward basic forms which were television and nothing else. Unable to afford “personality" MC’s and great acts, they concentrated on finding a proper framework for vaudeville. They discovered a style of acting suitable to their drama, and some startling devices within their electronic controls. Because they had virtually no audience, they were not compelled to look for universal appeal.

In one other respect. television has slipped below the standards of 1945. In its formative years, television wasn’t rich enough to be dishonest. By 1949 the integrity of television as a reporter of news was already compromised. It hadn’t yet given out false bulletins, but its capacity to falsify was apparent; and also apparent was the lack of standards and ethics which would make falsification impossible. During the political conventions John Crosby of the Herald tribune caught the NBC-Life combination staging a dramatic scene (the seceding Southern Democrats flinging away their badges) and presenting it as a spontaneous gesture. “It was,”wrote Mr. Crosby, “a very effective shot and also, like many things in television, just a little phony.”

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WE SEEM to be watching, for the hundredth time, the traditional development of an American artenterprise: an incredible ingenuity in the mechanism, great skill in the production techniques— and stale, unrewarding, contrived, and imitative banality for the total result. It is almost as if the television industry had already abdicated its function as a creator of entertainment and were waiting for someone else to pump a blood stream through its arteries.

Two groups are already in action, outside of the studios, working on programs. Sponsors and their advertising agents are planning programs on paper. They have no studios, no cameras and monitors, to make experiments; and they have been hampered by a tradition of the studios: the final direction of a television show, the actual use of the cameras and the selection of shots to be transmitted, must be in the hands of an employee of the studio. No outsider can control the process which gives a television program the final stamp of quality and style.

Within a few years, studios for auditions and for recording programs will be available and this restrictive practice of the stations will he broken up. At the moment, it tends to deliver the sponsors into the hands of the second program group—the package merchants. Most of them work on film, several of them making series of dramatic shorts or novelties in Hollywood; and some are working in New York pulling on programs similar to those produced by the networks. There are some good names announced: Robert Capa and John Steinbeck; John Kieran; Ilka Chase describing French cookery; Elsa Maxwell; Ronald Column narrating and acting in twenty-six shorts by Charles Dickens. There are possibilities here; and if the end-product still looks and sounds a bit like travelogues and educational shorts, with a bit of dramatic art here and there, the great value lies in presenting competition for the radio-controlled studios.

Newspapers, manufacturers of television equipment, hotel owners, cattle and oil men in the West, publishers, movie-theater owners, individuals, and ad hoc groups are either in the business or planning to come in. With no traditions of entertainment, these stations can undermine the others (and the movies, of course) by transmitting programs which appeal to the mind and to the emotions at the lowest possible levels. Here is a sample of a day’s schedule on WPIX (owned by the powerful Daily News of New York): news, a children’s program, comic strips, phonograph records, more news, jazz music, and a baseball game taking up as much time as all the other items put together.

A slight improvement in the quality of these items, the addition of a quiz or a huge giveaway program, careful attention to a host of local interests, could make this sort of schedule attractive enough to cut into the audiences of the stations presenting theater and music and documentary. Sponsors would shy away from the costs of these more impressive programs, and schedules would lean more and more heavily on the least desirable items. Television would then become a mass medium in the current meaning of the term.

The alternative is still possible: television is peculiarly adapted for appealing simultaneously to various levels of interest, to people in all their complex groupings, to the many minorities. It does not have to appeal exclusively to the mass. It can create a total program schedule which will be at the same time popular and democratic. (The terms are not synonymous, nor incompatible.) For television exists at several levels, and can combine the two great powers, actuality and imagination.

The fact that television can transmit actuality is of prime psychological importance. It invites us to “the contemplation of things as they are"; it sets us on the way to maturity. So far, actuality has consisted of sports and polities, but we have just begun. Here is the most challenging opportunity for the new medium (and inevitably, the natural field for chicane and deceit and the undue influence we call propaganda). The creation of new techniques for handling news, for documentaries, for visualization of commentary, is a problem for technicians. The essential thing is to determine that television will satisfy the deep human desire to look, at times, on the lace of reality. Once that is done, the inane laugh for which our mass media compete will never entirely dominate television.

Between actuality and imagination lies an intermediate field in which television operates easily and successfully: the field of vaudeville and novelty shows and participations. It presents only problems of taste. The temptation to exploit people, to make them do foolish things for the gratification of others, is great. The good side is the heartening way in which people, when they aren’t badgered, come over in television, the whole character shining, the truth about them palpably delivered to us.

In the third area, that of the imagination, television is just beginning the essential process of self-exploration which every form of entertainment must go through, shedding its borrowed finery and learning to use its own best qualities. The movies, for instance, developed the old slapstick comedy and the gangster melodrama. Radio created both the poetic documentary and the daytime serial.

In its self-exploration, television may find a surprising answer to the problem of the dramatic production, taking us far from the double bastardy of a stage play masquerading as a movie and called a teledrama. Some of the current dramatic productions seem to be pushing forward a little, breaking through formal barriers. It is quite possible that the stage does not offer the most suitable material. Certainly the happiest field for trying out the techniques which make television unique will be the short story or the continued story.

Serials are as natural to television as to radio; soap opera, in radio’s current version, is only a debased example of an excellent form which television can adapt to its own uses, getting hints from Charles Dickens, and The Arabian Nights, and the “family” series in the movies, and radio’s cliffhangers. The purist may shrink from the thought of small chopped installments of the classics, but the serial is better adapted to the actual conditions of listening than an hour-long condensation of a masterpiece originally intended to be read in a week.

Wherever he finds his material, the television director will have to give it specific form. The discovery of this form will be a turning point in the course of television as a popular art. (There were such turning points in the movies: “The Great Train Robbery” was the first, “The Birth of a Nation” the second, and probably “Broadway Melody” the third, when sound came in. In radio, the early rise of Amos ‘n’ Andy was a decisive moment because it was then that Americans became conscious of the fact that radio was important to them.) When the right form is found, public recognition of the imaginative side of television will be as heartfelt as the present satisfaction in sport.

For instance, the basic rhythm of an acted fiction (from the stage or the printed page) is complex. It consists of the movement of the actor in relation to others on the stage, and of all the actors in relation to the approach, withdrawal, and angling of the cameras; and these two movements arc related to the cutting from one camera to another. The rhythm which appropriately combines these three beats will be totally different from that of the theater or the movies and it will give television a character of its own to which the audience will instantly, unconsciously respond. The moment that happens, writers will create new materials because the new medium will have found itself.

I mention ibis aesthetic detail because ultimately the way television tells its story will have some effect on the stories it chooses to tell; the development of a cutting tempo different from the excessively short takes of the movies will also influence the choice of stories.

Assuming that the programs now current will set the types for several years to come, we can note the more promising developments. Even if the hour-long drama, taken from the theater, is not an ideal vehicle, the capacity to handle a large number of players, in several settings, over a considerable period of time, is essential, and both the Philco Theatre and Studio One have made steady progress here. Actors Studio has used short stories for its originals, and thus has broken with the theater, but continues to use stage directors, since they work well in the framework of television.

In the field of variety there is no question that the style set by Milton Berle will be copied, because it is successful; he has the brashness and the ease of a professional entertainer at a smoker. The competition given by Arthur Godfrey may have a good effect, for Godfrey is the country boy unaware that he has strayed in front of the camera—an illusion revealing as much natural skill as Berle’s characterization. There is still room for the kind of variety show which does not depend on an MC.

The failure of television to create a successful quiz show is puzzling. The reason is that producers have worried about format and novelties and have forgotten that the television camera becomes passionately absorbed in human beings. Capitalizing on this quality, Helen Parkhurst’s “Child’s World,” reworked from its radio original, is an important success; and so are discussion programs when the character of the disputants comes through.

It is possible that television will prosper because it handles sports better than any other medium can, brings puppets to the young and Westerns to the weary, and provides welcome cookery and shopping hints; and all these have a legitimate place in the program schedule. To hope for more is merely to indicate confidence in the medium — confidence that there is the capacity in television to fulfill a great variety of needs. The important thing is the orientation — away from the fallacy of the mass audience and toward a great communication and entertainment medium in a democratic society. The decision rests with management, but every worker in the field and every critic outside it can contribute something, by divining all the remarkable potentialities of this new instrument, and by seeing that its powers are not wasted.

This discussion will be continued in the April Atlantic with our publication of “Television: The Inside View" by Charles C. Barry, Vice President in Charge of Television for the American Broadcasting Company.