From Rabbit Ears to the Rabbit Hole

A Life with Television

Kathleen Collins

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781496832313
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Biografie nell'ambito delle scienze sociali

For the past several years, critics have been describing the present era as both "the end of television" and one of "peak TV, " referring to the unprecedented quality and volume and the waning of old technologies, formats, and habits. Television's projections and reflections have significantly contributed to who we are individually and culturally. From Rabbit Ears to the Rabbit Hole: A Life with Television reveals the reflections of a TV scholar and fan analyzing how her life as a consumer of television has intersected with the cultural and technological evolution of the medium itself. In a narrative bridging television studies, memoir, and comic, literary nonfiction, Kathleen Collins takes readers alongside her from the 1960s through to the present, reminiscing and commiserating about some of what has transpired over the last five decades in the US, in media culture, and in what constitutes a shared cultural history. In a personal, critical, and entertaining meditation on her relationship with TV—as avid consumer and critic—she considers the concept and institution of TV as well as reminiscing about beloved, derided, or completely forgotten content. She describes the shifting role of TV in her life, in a progression that is far from unique, but rather representative of a largely collective experience. It affords a parallel coming of age, that of the author and her coprotagonist, television. By turns playful and serious, wry and poignant, it is a testament to the profound and positive effect TV can have on a life and, by extrapolation, on the culture.

In the Beginning

On a Monday morning in June 1965, my mother was not watching I Love Lucy, an activity far more leisurely than the one she was engaged in, which was giving birth to me. She probably would have even preferred seeing trimnastics with Jack LaLanne or Vice President Hubert Humphrey expound on US foreign policy, which were also on the air as she was pushing me out in a Lamaze-free milieu. Later that day, there was a plethora of game shows to choose from—Truth or Consequences, The Price Is Right, Password; talk shows—Girl Talk: Virginia Graham, Art Linkletter’s House Party; soaps—The Guiding Light, The Secret Storm, The Doctors; lots of news programs; full-on movies in broad weekday light, including The Boy with the Green Hair, about a bullied war orphan played by a preteen Dean Stockwell, and Betrayed Women, a 1948 drama about a women’s prison. At the end of that exhausting and life-giving day, if Mom was up for it, during prime time she might have chosen from I’ve Got a Secret, the panel game show hosted by Steve Allen, The Man from U.N.C.L.E., The Andy Griffith Show, or The Honeymooners.

The TV planet onto which I emerged might well have been in another universe, it was that different from the one onto which any given baby is born on any given Monday as I write this some fifty years on. Among the few options a viewer had on that June 1965 evening were the network offerings of the lively, star-studded Andy Williams Show or The Danny Thomas Show; or a viewer could go highbrow with the public broad-casting option of William F. Buckley debating James Baldwin on “the American Dream—has it been achieved at the expense of the American Negro?” There was the gamut, right there, something for everybody, if by “something” we mean a quite possibly ill-fitting program and by “everybody” we include a potentially apathetic viewer (or, per the laws of probability, in many cases a perfect match). Even so, you didn’t hear people whining, “There’s nothing on!” There was plenty, more than enough, and most were grateful and delighted. But I romanticize the yesteryears—intellectual debates popping up in prime time and Edward R. Murrow documentaries and British drama imports right there, unavoidable, in plain sight. But it was not all book discussions and classical music appreciation, lest we forget The Beverly Hillbillies and My Favorite Martian. These sitcoms got the eyeballs. And because TV was a relatively new culturally threatening upstart in the middle of the twentieth century, detractors at the time focused on the insipid, referring to the piece of furniture as the “idiot box” and the array of programming as a “wasteland.” Perhaps until very recently, TV has continued to be reflexively referred to as lowbrow rubbish. But grocery stores have baby kale as well as Cool Ranch Doritos, and we don’t call the supermarket a “junk food building.”

Televisual content (henceforth shorthanded as TV, albeit technically inaccurate in many cases) has mushroomed, and there is a lot more good stuff and a lot more junk. One could argue that we are in a more liberal place in the early twenty-first century because people watch shows for all different kinds of reasons. Consider, for instance, the existence of “hate watching.” Indeed, we are less likely to feel or express shame and embarrassment about watching certain shows, and there is so much to consume—now there really is something for everyone—but you could argue even more convincingly that we are in a more confining space. While the same viewer who watched The Honeymooners in 1965 may well have watched the decidedly different-toned Buckley/Baldwin debate, she may have done so because there were far fewer screentime options, and she’d rather watch something than nothing; or maybe “hate watching” has always been a thing. Fifty years ago she would likely be passively consuming what was presented to her, whereas now she is installed in her media viewing bubble, proactively watching on demand whatever she wants. We think of the latter as technological progress, but—and here I go romanticizing again—I think it was the former that was magical. I’m nostalgic for the idea that a Ralph Kramden fan might serendipitously be introduced to the racial ideologies of the author of Notes of a Native Son, simply because she didn’t feel like hauling herself off to bed.

The TV lineup on my first day of life was a pretty good bellwether for the era. I’m just mystical-minded enough to believe I might discover a clue from the TV universe I was born into that, in addition to my genetic material, explains me to myself. It sounds like hooey, I know, because I couldn’t have watched with any kind of cognizance for a few more years, but I was in the room when others watched it and absorbed my parents’ and grandparents’ and various other adults’ reactions to what was going on in the world and therefore on television. After the racial politics discussion on public broadcasting, a viewer could get up off the couch and switch the channel to escape via The Alfred Hitchcock Hour or wallow in some more Sturm und Drang with “The Berkeley Rebels,” a special report from CBS News with Harry Reasoner about the UC Berkeley anti-establishment student activists. “You don’t need any ideology to say that the society stinks!” said the promo for that special report in the newspaper TV listings. And that Reasoner special was not a one-off. What I was watching at the Paley Center that hot summer weekday was more in the same vein. On June 28, 1965, DJ Murray the K hosted a network special, It’s What’s Happening, Baby, sponsored by the bygone US Office of Economic Opportunities promoting its New Chance program—which hoped to nudge young people toward economic self-sufficiency—with a smorgasbord of big-name entertainers like the Temptations, Tom Jones, Ray Charles, Martha and the Vandellas, Marvin Gaye, the Dave Clark Five, the Supremes, and at least a dozen more. The kids were wild about it. Conservative congressmen, not so much. Later on, Murray’s camp claimed to have inaugurated the concept of the music video with that broadcast. What is certain is that the program telegraphed a national issue in a bouncier manner than a history textbook or Wikipedia page would.

The real world and mine continued to coexist on parallel tracks with me mostly oblivious. As it happened, in fact, just days before the Apollo 12 moonwalk and the My Lai Massacre were announced on the network evening news in November 1969, history was being made over in the neighborhood where Mr. Fred McFeely Rogers had put down roots the previous year. I was there on the ground floor of Sesame Street’s debut, an early adopter, and a strong supporter from day one, if support can be measured in unblinking fixation. Its debut in the midst of the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement was no coincidence; the show’s creators were politically liberal advocates of television’s educational and activist potential. Thanks to the Children’s Television Workshop, I learned to count to twenty in Spanish before I got to first grade and was introduced to diversity and creativity and the hippest of entertainers long before I would have otherwise. It was all so friendly and active and fun and education by stealth—how could that not have a prosocial effect on a mass scale? Of course it did, and there are piles of research to prove it, but a) I am not here to support my argument with hard evidence, and b) aren’t anecdotal testimonies more convincing anyway?

I came up in a groovy era, for better or worse. Things that are now categorized as child abuse or neglect were, in the 1960s and 1970s, not given concern. Kids’ domestic existence approximated that of indoor-outdoor pets. Seatbelts and an actual nutritious breakfast (not just a Pop-Tart sprinkled with colored sugar and trace vitamins and minerals) were rarely exercised options; we could stay alone in the car while our parents went into the store; bike helmets were worn only by (some) adults and only on motorcycles. And we sat mere inches away from the TV set, so close that our hair statically clung to the screen, crackling wondrously. I’m certain a passing adult occasionally admonished me, but I didn’t heed, and she would be out of the room before the words “ruin your eyes” had passed the cigarette attached to her lip.

There were a lot of things we citizens of that devil-may-care era weren’t afraid of that we should have been—first- and second-hand smoke, saccharine, the sun, Diethylstilbestrol, Bill Cosby—but also a battery of threats that gave me nightmares, terrifying scenarios of which no reasonable arguments could disabuse me. I was convinced that upon entering middle school, the “drug pushers” that my parents blithely, in my presence, tsk-tsked about with their friends would push me against the lockers and shove pills down my throat (thank you, anonymous author of Go Ask Alice). Any time my parents visited boat-owning friends who lived near the ocean, I waited in a state of heightened agitation for the news from my godparents that Mom and Dad had been chomped to their gory death by a shark (Spielberg, you devil!). The now-legendary Double Initial Murderer was on a spree in 1973 in Rochester, New York, and guess where I lived? I was genuinely concerned not only for the safety of my friends Marybeth Miller and Susan Scheff but even more so for my own potential gruesome demise—how would I be spared by this insane criminal who was most assuredly choosing victims based only on phonetics?

Even though the lurking of the alphabet psychopath and all the other sensational bad news was brought to me by television, I didn’t hate the messenger. Not even when we were subjected to a blood-curdling test of the Emergency Broadcast System. I don’t even want to think about what my mom told me that was for. I loved TV with all my heart and soul. Nothing could tear us asunder. The positive far outweighed the negative. Besides, most of the content I consumed was of the kid-friendly variety, offered up in a safe, day-lit timeslot or publicly funded zone and blissfully above the fray of the real world.

Weekday mornings consisted of TV time as the sun rose, before we drove my dad to work, my mom’s pink hair tape still holding her damp curls in place. I was supremely fond of Captain Kangaroo and Romper Room and had less room in my heart for Underdog, Tennessee Tuxedo, and The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle. Inexplicably, animation never sustained my attention (and never could—a crippling character weakness for when The Simpsons came around). Even though I am almost certain the cartoons, especially the Mel Blanc, Looney Tunes variety, were innovative and clever, given that they contained subliminal literary references, I always leaned more toward the live-action types—The Lost Saucer, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, H. R. Pufnstuf. The Jetsons and The Flintstones were exceptions (and much later Comedy Central’s Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist and much, much later BoJack Horseman and Bill Burr’s F Is for Family). These two were a class apart in my mental hierarchy. Maybe it was the space age and prehistoric settings, respectively, that made me feel like I was watching something approaching a movie, which overrode the juvenile animation. Would that I was attracted to the proto-MOOC, Sunrise Semester—who knows what variety of genius grants I would be boasting now? But I don’t recall ever laying eyes on the thing, so resentful was I of the very unintelligible, un-fun-sounding phrase taking up valuable space in the TV listings, not to mention on the air.

The Art Clokey claymation joints were also in a separate column. The Gumby Show and Davey and Goliath mesmerized me simply for their visual appeal. I enjoyed these clay figures, I believe, for the same reasons I enjoyed pre-cable cooking shows—they were slow and earnest, and suggested interesting textures. The content of these two series, however, I eschewed or forgot. I was no stranger to tuning out religious indoctrination—I attended CCD (indoctrination for public school Catholic kids) every week until I was confirmed at age thirteen—and I could not abide Davey’s treacly, goody-goodyness. The fact that it was probably relatively progressive—they had a couple of brown clay kids in it—was lost on me. Gumby did not likewise bombard with morality, and though I remember nothing of the plots, I was happy to own my own Gumby and Pokey facsimiles, whose real-life tactile consistency was only mildly satisfying. It’s not insignificant that these programs aired on the weekend, the bastion of endless cartoons. I gave Scooby and the Road Runner some attention—an animal lover early on—but for the most part I spent Saturday mornings away from the TV, probably engaged in a superior, mind-expanding activity, like pressing Silly Putty into the comics page or trying to get the Slinky to behave on my own staircase the way it did on the commercial.

Overall, in the genre of children’s programming, I preferred shows that weren’t complete kidocracies. I understand that it was supposed to be empowering and freeing for minors to be in charge with no specter of buzz-killing adults, but it made me uncomfortable. If there was at least some adult presence—Fran (of the she, Kukla, and Ollie trio), Miss Rita on Romper Room—I could relax. Rita Moreno and Morgan Freeman gave credence to the kid-tastic aura of The Electric Company. Sesame Street always had a Maria, Luis, or Mr. Hooper showing up on the reg. It felt safer, neater, more controlled. I didn’t like being part of something where the inmates were running the asylum. Grown-ups (and select animals and puppets) classed up the joint, and I also had a hunch that they understood me better than my peers did.

I didn’t know from public or commercial stations at this juncture, but I did feel an inchoate comfort in PBS land. As an impressionable youth being brainwashed by “state-sponsored leftism,” “viewers like me” were being groomed for nostalgia-driven financial as well as political support later on. That boy has been crying wolf almost continually since the inception of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting in 1967, and each time it seems like the real deal—the end of public broadcasting. “Viewers like me” find ourselves conscripted cyclically, frantically sending effortless and likely ineffectual precomposed emails to our legislators, though we are unable to remember the last time we donated to our local station. To add insult to injury, in a controversial but seemingly swift transaction, Sesame Street moved out of its flagship public neighborhood in 2016 and into the most coveted real estate of all at the time—HBO. Controversial because the gates of that neighborhood required an entrance fee, the antithesis of the welcoming, even basic cableness of PBS. While I haven’t really watched Sesame Street in about forty years, the movin’ on up felt like a betrayal and a significant loss, akin to finding out your favorite elementary school teacher gave up teaching for a career in finance.

For so many of us, Big Bird was synonymous with public broadcasting, but there were a lot of other reasons I spent my time watching my local WXXI, channel 21, too. While I went through most of my youth overtly disdaining Mister Rogers—he was as uncool as the adults on Sesame Street were cool—I watched his show in tandem with Cookie Monster et al. and was particularly fond of Picture Picture, with its mesmerizing factory mini-docs, and had a secret crush on Handyman Negri. The trolley’s bell, as it appeared on that enviable shelf above the enviable window seat, did not, in fact, make me roll my eyes but was a Pavlovian amuse-bouche. I was not above getting excited about seeing what Donkey Hodie, Daniel Striped Tiger, and my meow-meow girl Henrietta Pussycat were up to in the Neighborhood of Make-Believe, though I was precocious enough to realize that was too prosaic a name for such a wackadoodle place. It was most certainly thanks to that infernal trolley that I nursed a years-long daydream of being able to ride a moving sidewalk from my backyard all the way to Paris. Mister Rogers would smile gently in agreement at this but would not take the credit for sparking my imagination, instead telling me that I’m special, thereby instilling a base of self-esteem that really can, in part, be traced back to him. I owe him some credit, too, for my penchant for cardigans—oh, and humanitarian ethics.

Hodgepodge Lodge was a program that could have been a parody of public broadcasting, and I am reasonably certain it was shown only on my TV, and even I was not a regular, despite the fact that it was on for seven years. It was hosted by a naturalist in her fifties called Miss Jean, who seemed to live alone in a cabin in the woods. She had little children over and proceeded to talk to them very quietly in a Mister Rogers sort of way about nature things. Just as Sesame Street was meant as a mirror for city kids, so Hodgepodge was designed to introduce those city kids to nature. I grew up in the suburbs, and much of it was news to me, too. Even though there was an adult present, and even though she was a harmless middle-aged lady, I did not feel exactly safe the way I did on Sesame Street, where there were plenty of people around and places to hide if something went awry. I still feel more fearful in the country than in the city. But I also find, now that I am Miss Jean’s age, that I prefer the company of trees and wildlife to most people. So I suspect she might take some credit for that.

Unlike Hodgepodge, Zoom—strictly kidocratic, but I was nevertheless seduced—had a lasting effect on me and on my peers. For starters, Ubbi Dubbi was what Esperanto wanted to be in terms of mass adoption. Also, an unusually large swath of Americans pointlessly knows one Boston area zip code. I added to the burden of the mailroom when I sent a postcard to Box 350 requesting the American Sign Language alphabet card. If you’re keeping a tally, you will note that thanks to WXXI, I had learned the basics of three languages in addition to my native one before I even began my lifelong affair with French in a brick-and-mortar school. On Zoom, I also learned, in theory, how to make an operational raft using Styrofoam blocks and venetian blinds. But the most enduring legacy for me and every single girl in my middle school was Bernadette’s maneuver, best described as an intertwining baton twirl of the forearms. Zoom might also have provoked the first of many fashion trends I mindlessly followed—the striped rugby shirt—that did my pale face and gender-neutral hairstyle no favors.

I didn’t know what the entity of public broadcasting was, but I sensed that it was somehow different from the commercial networks, with their vivid, shouty ads and local interstitials—“Dialing for Dollars” and surreal spots for the local, though “world’s largest,” guitar store, House of Guitars (my Rochester brothers and sisters will count Eddie Meath among their time capsule gems, with his penny fund and gentle “quiet money” requests). Because much of my afterschool watching was on public broadcasting and took place at my Grandma Deedle’s, I associated that programming with her house. She and G...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: TV Matters
• 1 In the Beginning
• 2 Off-Label TV
• 3 Love Letters
• 4 Little Women
• 5 King Lear and Queen Mary
• 6 Luke & Laura & Sam & Diane
• 7 Beaucoup et Rien
• 8 Cambridge 02138
• 9 Big City of Dreams
• 10 Good vs. Bad
• 11 The Third Way
• 12 Wise TV
• 13 Peace, Love, and O. J.
• 14 I Rest My Case
• About the Author