Rural humour

Minow’s list illustrates how, by 1961, the basic programming types still in evidence at the turn of the 21st century were already firmly in place. Minow was responding—negatively—to a new style of program that was emerging as television became the national mass medium. Seven months before Minow’s speech, the first Kennedy-Nixon debate had preempted the debut of a series that would be emblematic of that new style. The following week, on Oct. 3, 1960, The Andy Griffith Show (CBS, 1960–68) had its delayed premiere and was an immediate ratings success. During its entire run of eight seasons, the show ranked in the top 10 of the Nielsen ratings, leaving the air in 1968 as the highest-rated program on television. It also inspired two spin-offs, Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. (CBS, 1964–69) and Mayberry R.F.D. (CBS, 1968–71), both of which were also top-10 hits. The rural situation comedy had its foundation in a long American tradition of hayseed humour that included Al Capp’s Li’l Abner comic strip, vaudeville “rube” routines, and the Ma and Pa Kettle movie series of the 1940s and ’50s. Although this tradition had already been introduced on television three years earlier with The Real McCoys (ABC/CBS, 1957–63)—a sitcom about a family who left the mountains of West Virginia to operate a ranch in California—the success of The Andy Griffith Show firmly established the rural comedy as a dominant genre of the 1960s.

Besides its own spin-offs, the show encouraged a string of similarly themed series that were among the most popular of the decade, including The Beverly Hillbillies (CBS, 1962–71), Petticoat Junction (CBS, 1963–70), Green Acres (CBS, 1965–71), and Hee-Haw (CBS, 1969–71). The Andy Griffith Show, like other rural comedies, featured “just plain folks” who used words of few syllables, did not work on Sundays, and did not go in much for the sophisticated ways of the big city. As such, the characters were profoundly likable to most Americans who subscribed to these same unpretentious cultural ideals. Airing when they did, however, these rural comedies had another, more ironic dimension. They celebrated the Edenic way of life in small Southern settings just as real Southern towns were beset by racial unrest. As was the case with most entertainment programs in the first decades of television, these shows seemed to be providing a cultural anesthetic of sorts, presenting the contemporary world without any of its complex problems.

The 1960s in general was a watershed decade in TV’s transition to the escapist, commercial aesthetic that so many would come to discredit. During the 1960s the transition from the live, theatrical-style programming of the Golden Age to the sitcoms and dramatic series that still dominate prime-time television was for the most part complete. The critically respected anthology drama, for example, which was a central genre in the Golden Age, disappeared entirely during this period. When Alfred Hitchcock Presents (CBS/NBS, 1955–65) and Kraft Suspense Theatre (NBC, 1963–65) failed to return to the schedule in the 1965–66 season, only one anthology, Bob Hope Presents the Chrysler Theater (NBC, 1963–67), remained on the air, and it had only one remaining season.

Escapism

While the anthology series was disappearing, the rural sitcom and a whole collection of new genres that would come to define the escapist style of television in the post-Golden Age era were being introduced. An assortment of new shows from the 1965–66 season reflects this transformation: Gidget (ABC, 1965–66), a beach comedy about an energetic 15-year-old playing in the California sun; F Troop (ABC, 1965–67), which offered up an assortment of Native American stereotypes in a comedy set at a military fort in the post-Civil War West; I Dream of Jeannie (NBC, 1965–70), a comedy about the relationship between an astronaut and a beautiful, voluptuous 2,000-year-old genie; and My Mother the Car (NBC, 1965–66), which delivered just what its title promised. Of all the new shows of the 1965–66 season, perhaps Hogan’s Heroes (CBS, 1965–71) best exemplified the bizarre new direction TV entertainment was taking. Debuting in the top 10 of the Nielsen ratings, Hogan’s Heroes was a situation comedy set in a Nazi prison camp during World War II.

Some of the best-remembered series in TV history were first aired in the 1960s. They established the reputation of the medium in the eyes of many, and, because they were on film rather than live, they would continue to be seen by successive generations in perpetual reruns. Unlike the dramatic anthologies of the 1950s, which are mostly unavailable to contemporary viewers, the long string of “classic” programs featuring not only genies and talking cars but millionaire hillbillies and talking dogs, island castaways and talking horses, Stone Age families and suburban witches continued to be frequently rerun into the 21st century. For many viewers these programs brought hours of escapist pleasure; to others they came to identify American TV as a cultural wasteland catering to the lowest common denominator of public taste.

Though Minow had called for more relevant programming in the public interest, the escapist fare of the 1960s, in an ironic way, may have been the most enduring, if certainly accidental, legacy of his “vast wasteland” speech. Initially Minow’s speech inspired network executives to introduce a short-lived flood of what might be perceived as “quality programming.” A spate of public affairs and nonfiction series were created, and even the anthology form, which Minow had specifically praised, was given a temporary place on the prime-time schedule. Furthermore, themes of contemporary social relevance, which had been rare in entertainment programs until then, were injected into new dramatic series featuring a high-school teacher (Mr. Novak; NBC, 1963–65), a social worker (East Side/West Side; CBS, 1963–64), a state legislator (Slattery’s People; CBS, 1964–65), psychiatrists (The Eleventh Hour; NBC, 1962–64; Breaking Point; ABC, 1963–64), and nurses (The Nurses; CBS, 1962–65). Similar dramas that were being developed at the time of Minow’s speech—the medical dramas Ben Casey (ABC, 1961–66) and Dr. Kildare (NBC, 1961–66) and the courtroom drama The Defenders (CBS, 1961–65)—were given high priority at the networks after the speech.

Except for the last three, however, most of these shows were short-lived. Minow had complained more frequently about television violence, and Sen. Thomas Dodd, the head of the Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency, shortly thereafter had suggested a link between TV violence and youth crime. The escapist comedies, network executives probably reasoned, were at least nonviolent. The Andy Griffith Show’s Andy Taylor (played by Andy Griffith), for example, was known on the show as “the sheriff without a gun,” and he preferred to settle disputes with homespun good sense rather than brute force. Given their commercial mandates, the networks were not prepared to give Minow everything he called for, so they settled for reducing violence and hoped that would be enough. It was no coincidence when, in 1964, Sherwood Schwartz, the creator of Gilligan’s Island (CBS, 1964–67), a quintessential 1960s escapist comedy about seven people stranded on a deserted island, named the boat upon which the castaways had been lost the S.S. Minnow. By that time, however, Minow had resigned from his position at the FCC. What he had hoped for was a return to the Golden Age and a flowering of public-interest programming; what he got, in the long run, were such series as Gilligan’s Island and Mister Ed (CBS, 1961–66), a sitcom about a talking horse.