Popular Culture with Panache

JOHN LEONARD WRITES ABOUT TELEVISION WITH SYMPATHY AND AFFECTION, but he understands that not everything on the tube is worth watching, even from a sociological perspective. Cop shows, tv movies of the week, sitcoms from the 1970s, and The Simpsons all meet with his approval. His list of dislikes includes Punky Brewster, Halle Berry, and the grotesque thirtysomething, about which he says, "Growing up hurts so much you want to suck your big toe."

He thinks that the medium's so-called "golden age" (the 1950s and early 1960s) has been overrated, and that by implication the industry's more recent output has been unfairly scorned. As a professional critic he gets paid to watch a lot of television, but his enthusiasm for what he regards as the best of the medium remains undiminished by insider cynicism.

Leonard's guiding assumption is that television is "full of surprising gravity and grace," and that "we'd actually be a kinder, gentler, healthier nation if in fact we embraced the scruples and imitated the behaviors recommended by most entertainment programs." Just as conservatives fear, television is a liberal-dominated medium that is "more welcoming of diversity and difference" and offers "more of a community" than the turbulent society that spawned it. He spends a lot of time trying to justify these provocative assertions, piling on example after example of television's inclusive humanism and the contrast it provides with the culture at large. "A medium capable of China Beach, M*A*S*H, St. Elsewhere, Northern Exposure, Homicide, and The X-Files has less to be ashamed of than many of its critics do, and most of its competition," he says.

As these examples suggest, Leonard expends a lot more ink on hour-long dramas than, say MTV dance shows or network news programs. His main focus is on big-budget prime time programming, and he mostly thinks in terms of individual shows rather than the relentless, 24-hour "flow" that Raymond Williams identified as the medium's single most important characteristic. He also doesn't have much to say about commercials, which generate roughly 90% of network income and which trivialize even the most innovative programming. In many respects Smoke and Mirrors is an optimist's book but for that reason it provides a welcome respite from the usual blather about how there are 57 channels and nothing to watch.

I would take issue with some of Leonard's specific assessments. Northern Exposure had its moments but it was by no means the "most remarkable series ever to sustain itself on network television." Early Star Trek deserves better than Leonard's abrupt dismissal. It seems churlish to even mention his infatuation with Blythe Danner, of all people. And, most important, he doesn't have a clue about Babylon Five. How could a serious critic compare B5 unfavorably to Fox's moribund VR5?

Yet, for some, understandably, it wouldn't matter if Leonard was writing about television or insect mating rituals. His pen is sharper than a razor. Television "resembles a household pet," and is "the most domestic of our distractions." Homicide is "Hill Street for Baltimore, so fast-forward we'd often wonder just what hit us, with drive-by wisecracks and percussive mayhem, as if not only the cameras were jumpy, but the actors, the director, and executive-producers Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana, too." Max Headroom lasted "just long enough on ABC for the network to figure out that this was a series that made savage fun of television itself." Law and Order, by way of contrast, "knew every geometric angle of New York City." And in writing about Miami Vice, Leonard admits that "as a content junkie, I hadn't failed to notice that Latin America had taken over from Vietnam in the pulp imagination as our pre-eminent third-world hell-on-wheels, with the drug lords as the Viet Cong and the Andes as one big Nose Cone."

Some of his choicest barbs are aimed at the Right. The following is practically hurled at the reader:

Momentarily, after the election of a guns-and-God Republican Congress in 1994 -- a Keystone Khmer Rouge pledged in its slash-and-burn Contract on America to cleanse Phnom Phen of every pointy-headed intellectual with a tutu in his closet, every parasitic lowlife painter who ever suckered a dime from the National Endowment, every third-world wetback here to steal a job and every child who was ever "difficult," not to mention their welfare mothers, crackhead fathers, shyster lawyers and other inconvenient codependents who ought instead to be growing rice and eating fish paste in the boondocks -- the focus of tube-bashing switched from network and cable, where "hidden persuaders" were accused of exploiting our vulgar appetite for blood and semen, to the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, where 'liberal elitists' were alleged to promote their ulterior agenda of multiculti/feminazi/gay-pride/socialized medicine/performance art.

I would not suggest that Leonard's prose be used in first-year composition classes as a template for inexperienced writers. This kind of manic assault is best left to the experts. But there's no denying that Leonard's sharp tongue packs a kick; and his dry CBS Sunday morning commentaries are pretty funny too. If the Right has anyone who writes about popular culture with as much panache and energy, then all I can say is that their work hasn't appeared in the American Spectator, Weekly Standard, or National Review. We should all take pleasure in the fact that Leonard is one of ours.

Contents of No. 23