Great Character Actors of Today #13

Name: Reg E. Cathey.

Trademark: Wry, sardonic delivery.  Although he bears a slight resemblance to Morgan Freeman (recently he reprised Freeman’s role in a stage version of The Shawshank Redemption), Cathey’s rich voice steers him away from Freemanesque authority figure characters and toward skeptical outsider/observer types.

Most Famous For: Supporting roles in The Corner, Oz, and especially The Wire, in which Cathey played seen-it-all political operative Norman Wilson, who counsels the underdog white mayoral candidate Tommy Carcetti (Aidan Gillen).

Recent Work: Funny as a talk show host on 30 Rock, scary as a crooked cop on Person of Interest, and having the time of his life as a Don King-styled boxing promoter in Lights Out (“Ah, the the-a-tuh,” he intones while watching a dirty fight).

Banal, TV-related EPK trivia: Cathey grew up watching Bonanza dubbed in German (check out his German Hoss impersonation).

Banal, TV-related IMDb trivia: Cathey’s early, late-80s bit parts include the final feature films by two major directors of the live-TV generation, George Roy Hill (Funny Farm, 1988) and Arthur Penn (Penn & Teller Get Killed, 1989).

Stanley Milgram Goes to Medical Center

Say what you will about the Warner Archive – and most of my early reservations about its product, apart from the pricing, have evaporated – but give them credit for having some dedicated amateur television historians on the payroll.  Not only did they unearth the bizarre backstory behind the 1971 Medical Center episode “Countdown,” but they also located two lengthy, very rarely-seen alternate endings for the episode, and included them on the second season DVD set that was released earlier this year.

Although the credited author of “Countdown” was Don Brinkley, a prolific freelance writer (Bat Masterson; The Fugitive; The F.B.I.) and a Medical Center story editor, the man who crafted many elements of its storyline was the social psychologist Stanley Milgram.  Milgram (whom TV fans will recall as the subject of the famous, largely fictionalized biopic The Tenth Level, with William Shatner) was known for two sociological experiments with implications that penetrated popular culture and made him something of a celebrity, at least within academia: the “small world experiment,” which established through an array of remailed letters the idea that each of us is separated by only six degrees of acquaintance; and the famous Experiment 18, which showed that ordinary people will commit otherwise unthinkable acts of cruelty (in this case, electric shocks administered to strangers) simply because an authority figure instructs them to do so.  Even though the supposed electroshock victims only pretended to suffer, Milgram’s work was condemned by many as unethical, because the shockers weren’t told what was really going on and some were plainly traumatized by their own conduct.  The experiment that Milgram would devise for – or rather, within and around – Medical Center had a similar whiff of sadism.

“Does television violence serve as a model that stimulates the production of violent acts in the community?”  That was the opening line of Milgram’s research proposal, dated April 23, 1969.  Milgram’s pitch was a result of a meeting convened on March 29 by CBS’s Office of Social Research, in which its chief, Dr. Joseph Klapper, solicited grant proposals on the subject of violence on television.  Not much has been written about the Office of Social Research, but it existed for a long time at CBS – from the days of radio in the forties until at least the late eighties – and it appears to have been a pet project of Dr. Frank Stanton, the highly influential CBS president who over saw most of the network’s scientific, political, and journalistic endeavors.  Although it’s hard to imagine a media conglomerate underwriting such a high-minded enterprise today, the OSR actually served two important purposes for CBS.  First, it collected early demographic data.  Second, following the 1961 Senate hearings on televised violence, it focused upon that topic and became an entity to which the network could point whenever it needed to remind someone that it was properly concerned about the social impact of its programming.  In 1969, the OSR awarded Milgram a sum of $260,000 to design and execute a study that would in some way demonstrate the connection (or lack thereof) between violence on television and in real life.

Milgram began with some false starts before he connected with Medical Center.  First, he wanted to deprive a community of “any violence shown on television” for an extended period of time, and measure the effects.  Needless to say, this proved impractical.  Next Milgram commissioned a script for a television movie that would offer a solid, easy-to-emulate act of violence within its narrative, but the script proved deficient (Milgram did not explain precisely why).  Eventually Milgram came to the conclusion that the violent stimulus could be less conspicuously embedded within an ongoing series.  Surveying the shows on CBS’s 1969 prime-time schedule, Milgram rejected saccharine sitcoms like Family Affair as well as programs like Mannix or Mission: Impossible, which were so routinely violent that isolating a specific act for study would be problematic.  Finally he settled upon Medical Center, a popular doctor drama in which a violent act could fit believably into a storyline but still stand out within a show that was typically rather talky.  In December 1969 Milgram met with the show’s executive producer, Frank Glicksman, and producer, Al C. Ward, and found them amenable to the idea.  The Milgram-infiltrated episode was slotted into the next season, Medical Center’s second.

For his study to work, Milgram needed the episode to contain an anti-social act – a clear moral and legal transgression – but one that did not involve violence against another person.  (Naturally, Milgram didn’t want to be on the hook for suborning murder!)  Milgram and Brinkley settled upon a series of minor thefts as the climax of the episode, entitled “Countdown.”  Their guest protagonist, Tom Desmond (Peter Strauss), would be a young hospital orderly beset by financial and personal problems, as well as a serious inability to control his temper.  Too proud to accept the help of friendly Dr. Joe Gannon (Chad Everett, the star of the show), Tom instead notices that collection boxes for a charity have been placed around the city in various locations, in connection with a telethon.  (Coincidentally, Dr. Gannon is helping to run the charity drive; implausibly, the boxes are stationed in places like a seedy waterfront bar.)  Will Tom bust into one or more of the boxes and steal the cash he needs to pay his wife’s medical bills and bail his charter boat out of hock?

Here is where CBS’s infusion of cash – an amount roughly equivalent to the budget of an entire Medical Center episode, although some of it went to staff and facilities for Milgram’s audience testing – came into play.  Milgram turned his Medical Center entry into a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure, concocting three different endings, in each of which Tom made a different choice and suffered a different set of consequences.  These were not little codas appended as epilogues.  Three highly variant alternate versions of the last act of “Countdown” were filmed, adding (in my estimate) at least two or three shooting days to five- or six-day production schedule.

Milgram designed the endings to dramatize distinct moral outcomes: two “antisocial” scenarios, in which Tom does or does not suffer punishment for illegal actions, and one “prosocial” scenario in which he commits no crimes.  In the first, Tom smashes the charity boxes, steals the money, and loses everything – his wife, his boat, his freedom – only to learn that Dr. Gannon had already gone behind his back and paid his debts.  In the second, he steals the money and flees successfully to Mexico, where his wife (Brooke Bundy) will join him after she is discharged from the hospital.  And in the “prosocial” ending, Tom opts at the last minute not to steal or to vandalize any of the charity boxes; in the last shot, he drops a coin into one of them.  With the variant “antisocial” endings, Milgram sought to determine whether the factor of punishment affected imitative behavior; with the “prosocial” ending, he expected to measure whether the mere contemplation of a crime could inspire viewers to commit that crime.  As a control, Milgram selected an entirely different episode, choosing one as anodyne as he could find, with no imitable anti-social behavior.  (Initially Milgram used the first season’s “The Fallen Image,” a soapy Cold War romance with Walter Pidgeon and Viveca Lindfors; for later stages of the experiment, he substituted the newer “Edge of Violence,” with comedian Jack Carter cheering up a possibly suicidal Joan Van Ark.)

Jail, redemption, or Mexico (the latter outcome relayed by the proxy of Tom’s ill wife): each of the three scenes above is unique to one of the different endings of “Countdown.”

One aside that’s worth pointing out is that the Warner Archive disc does not accurately describe “Countdown”’s alternate endings, and presents them in a way that will confuse the viewer.  An art card characterizes the endings as “negative,” “positive,” and “neutral,” but the terms “positive” and “negative” do not correspond to Milgram’s terminology, and “neutral” is misused – Milgram used it to describe his control episode, not one of the “Countdown” variants.  It’s hard to discern just Milgram was trying to achieve with each ending from the limited context provided on the disc.  (But now you know!)  Also, while the discs indicate that “most of the nation would view the positive episode in which anti-social behavior is punished,” which I believe is accurate, Warner Archive presents this as one of the alternates.  On the disc, the standalone version of “Countdown” is Milgram’s “prosocial” cut, which was probably seen by a smaller audience in 1971 than either of the other two.  But what about reruns?  The likelihood is that the “antisocial with punishment” version was the one intended for mass consumption.  (Its script presented first in the appendix of Milgram’s book about the study, and the other two seem unsuitable for mainstream audiences.  The “prosocial” ending is talky and pat even by Medical Center’s standards.  And if not for the Milgram exemption the film noirish version in which Tom slinks off to Mexico, and his wife unapologetically vows to abet his escape, probably would have been disallowed by CBS’s censors.)  If the complete version presented on the DVDs is indeed the same one used in syndication, then for decades viewers have been watching the dullest version of “Countdown,” probably contrary to the producers’ intentions.

Once “Countdown” was in the can, the mind games that Milgram crafted around it took a variety of forms.  In the first round of tests, he showed the different versions of “Countdown,” plus the control episode, to preview audiences in New York City recruited off the street or through newspaper ads.  These viewers, thinking their role was only to evaluate the program as a kind of test audience, were promised a transistor radio as compensation, to be collected within a week’s time at a different location (an office building at 130 42^nd Street, in the then-scuzzy Times Square).  When they arrived there, the subjects were met with a variety of stimuli that correlated to the “Countdown” scenarios.  The prize distribution office was unstaffed, and a note left on the counter told prizewinners either that the radios had all been given out, or (in a version meant to be less frustrating) that they were available at an alternate location.  On the wall, a charity box similar to the one in the episode held a small amount of money.  In one variation, a dollar bill dangled seductively from the box.  (Would the criminally inclined take all the money, or just the dollar that could be had without breakage?)  In another, the full Project Hope charity box was next to a similar March of Dimes box that had already been smashed and presumably looted.  Still another round of experiments transmitted the various permutations of “Countdown,” via closed circuit television, into a room in which the viewer was isolated with the tempting charity box.  All the respondents’ behavior was observed by Milgram’s research assistants via hidden cameras.

(The precise design of these scenarios was apparently proscribed by legal concerns about entrapment, a fact mentioned by Milgram and emphasized by one of his research assistants, Dr. Herman Staudenmayer, in an interview this week.)

 

An observer’s checklist and images of Milgram’s secret lab (both reproduced from Milgram and Shotland’s book Television and Antisocial Behavior: Field Experiments).  Click to enlarge.

Those experiments occurred between the completion of filming in September 1970 and the initial telecast of “Countdown” in early 1971.  Then Milgram conducted a broadcast survey, in which members of the actual television audience in New York and St. Louis received questionnaires about the episode, which they could redeem in exchange for the radio at Milgram’s disguised lab (where the same will-you-steal-the-money shenanigans ensued).  New York saw the ending with Tom in jail; St. Louis got the version with Tom in Mexico.  (By the time of the broadcast, Milgram had discarded the “prosocial” ending.)

A second broadcast survey prodded viewers to copy another aspect of “Countdown.”  Before smashing the charity boxes in both of the “antisocial” versions, Tom Desmond (a real prince, this guy) twice calls Dr. Gannon’s charity and verbally abuses the telethon operators.  Viewers of the new control episode, “Edge of Violence,” and then “Countdown” in Chicago and Detroit on February 10 and 17, respectively, also saw advertisements that solicited donations to Project Hope.  Calls to the charity on those nights were monitored by Milgram’s associates for harassment that might be imitative of that in “Countdown.”  No one took the bait; the few abusive calls contained no language that resembled Tom’s choice of invective.

Milgram and a co-author, R. Lance Shotland, published their results in 1973, in a book called Television and Antisocial Behavior: Field Experiments.  Milgram’s biographer, Thomas Blass, suggests that the Medical Center experiment is not widely known in part because Milgram did not correlate it with the large body of prior research on the effects of violence in media.  Another reason might be that (as Milgram conceded in his own analysis) it proved nothing in particular, except the rather reassuring fact that even a really, really tempting target provokes theft in fewer than ten percent of cases.  Not only did viewers of “Countdown” not steal money in significantly greater numbers than the control group, but in several of Milgram’s simulations, people who saw the neutral program stole more often than whose who saw “Countdown.”  To the extent that his methodology was valid, Milgram’s experiment indicated that violence and lawbreaking on television were unlikely to contaminate the audience (a fact that no doubt relieved, but probably didn’t surprise, Milgram’s backers at CBS).

In their book, Milgram and Shotland pointed out certain flaws in their methodology – but there were other, more obvious problems to which they did not call attention.  For one thing, the puppet-strings aren’t very well concealed.  Even though the experiment cleverly cast its guinea pigs as television critics rather than test subjects, wouldn’t many of them have suspected something was up when a scenario almost identical to the climax of the program they’d been asked to evaluate presented itself in real life, during the evaluation process?  This was well after the heyday of Candid Camera, and I have to suspect that many of these folks were dissuaded from taking the dangling dollar because they fully expected Allen Funt to appear the second they touched it.

Also, since Milgram conducted the broadcast portion of his experiment during summer reruns – presumably, CBS’s indulgence did not extent far enough to allow Milgram to tinker with programming during the regular season – then at least some of his subjects must have seen “Countdown” prior to the evening on which they were asked to evaluate it.  Mightn’t many of them have remembered the show and filled out the questionnaires without watching the rerun all the way to the end?  That would mean that they had observed Tom’s criminal act months rather than days prior to being tempted themselves.

(I think that viewers in Milgram’s broadcast experiments saw “Countdown” in both February and April of 1971, but it’s difficult to be completely certain.  Milgram and Shotland’s book indicates that “while most of the country saw a neutral episode,” twelve million viewers in the New York City area watched “Countdown” on April 28 as part of the free radio experiment.  An unidentified control episode was surveyed the week before.  However, in the section on the call-in experiment, Milgram and Shotland suggest that a control episode and then “Countdown” aired, respectively, on April 14 and 21.  Unless I’m missing something, that’s an internal contradiction in their book.  TV Guide’s listings in its Metropolitan New York edition and the TV listings of Long Island’s Newsday both give the following airdates: February 10, “Edge of Violence”; February 17, “Countdown” (meaning that the April broadcast used in the study was definitely a repeat); April 14, a rerun of “Trial by Terror”; April 21, a rerun of “Death Grip”; April 28, a rerun of “Junkie.”  If Milgram and Shotland’s account is accurate, then “Countdown” was substituted in New York for either “Death Grip” or “Junkie,” without notice to that effect in the local listings.  That’s certainly plausible, given the amount of influence Milgram had with CBS.  However, I am puzzled by the dates given in Milgram and Shotland’s book for the St. Louis broadcasts: April 12 and 19, two days before the corresponding New York airdates.  How on earth was St. Louis watching Medical Center on Monday nights instead of Wednesdays?)

From a historical perspective, the behind-the-scenes story of “Countdown” holds more interest than the results of Milgram’s experiment.  Even Milgram seemed to understand and admit this.  “Although the relationship between television violence and aggression was not something Milgram was intrinsically interested in – and, in fact, he harbored some doubts about the existence of such a relationship – the idea of being able to do research on a grand scale appealed to him,” wrote Thomas Blass.

It’s fascinating to map the competing agendas of the network, the producers, and the scientist.  CBS purchased a study that, regardless of the results, would serve as tangible evidence of its concern about televised violence.  Milgram got to undertake the best-funded research of his career – although in accepting the grant he opened himself up to charges that his objectivity would be compromised.

And why would the producers of Medical Center put themselves through the torturous process of Milgramizing an episode?  Ward and Glicksman may have coveted CBS’s extra dollars.  Two of the three endings of “Countdown” have more production value on display than a typical Medical Center.  There’s an extended foot chase scene, shot on actual outdoor locations and given a noirish flavor by director Vincent Sherman, who had been an A-level contract director at Warner Bros. during the studio’s golden age.

Milgram recorded his frustration with the production of “Countdown.”  “At points in the production of the film,” he wrote, “I found myself up against long-established traditions of directing and acting that, because of the group norms of the production team, became virtually impossible to change.”  Milgram was present on the set, trying – usually in vain – to get the episode to conform to his needs.  He objected to Tom’s “faint trace of inebriation” during the phone calls (in fact, an overacting Peter Strauss plays Tom as completely plastered throughout the climax or, rather, all three climaxes) and to several other story points.  Milgram complained that “the director insisted on inserting a chase scene . . . simply for the purpose of livening up the action.”  In writing that, Milgram revealed a basic ignorance of the production process.  Sherman could not have completely improvised the lengthy chase scene, which involves police cars, extras portraying policemen, and substantial day and night exteriors.  Such a sequence would have been budgeted and scheduled well in advance, which suggests that perhaps the producers were keeping Milgram in the dark about some of their intentions, and leaving Sherman to run interference with the good doctor.

Scenes from a chase that Stanley Milgram didn’t want.  Sorry, Stan.

It’s tempting to imagine Glicksman and Ward indulging and manipulating Milgram, using his experiment to buy themselves an above-average segment.  On the other hand, Milgram was still pulling the network’s puppet-strings – which may have been the whole point all along.  Blass points out that “what makes the study unique to this day is that Milgram had control over regular prime-time programming.”  Milgram managed to insert his own agenda into a closed capitalist system of popular culture that academia could typically observe only from the outside.  The electrocutors and the letter-mailers in Milgram’s famous experiments didn’t know that they were actually his guinea pigs.  Perhaps the CBS men who funded Milgram’s Medical Center shenanigans were, without knowing it, the true subjects of the experiment.

Sources: Stanley Milgram and R. Lance Shotland’s Television and Antisocial Behavior: Field Experiments (Academic Press, 1973) and Thomas Blass’s The Man Who Shocked the World: The Life and Legacy of Stanley Milgram (Basic Books, 2004).

Calling All Twits

Earlier this month, this blog’s fifth anniversary passed quietly by – so quietly, in fact, that I almost forgot about it myself.

To commemorate — or demean — the occasion, I’ve signed us all up for Twitter! If you’re on there, you can follow this blog at @smilingcobra. In case you’re wondering, @classictvhistory was one character too long (already, I am regretting this), and, although most of you probably already know who the Smiling Cobra was, I explained that on Monday.

Like several other writers I know, my attitude about Twitter has gone from “140 characters? That’s ridiculous” to “ah, crap, do I really have to get on Twitter?” to finally pulling the trigger. When the “Turkeys, Away!” oral history bounced around the internet a bit last month, my Google metrics provided an object lesson in where web traffic comes from these days — and, like it or not, Twitter was out front. There were also a lot of other social networking and aggregate sites that I’m not going to have any truck with (what the fuck is Getpocket?), but if it’s easier for you to follow the blogs you read on Twitter, now you have that option with this one.

Although I don’t have any concrete plans to produce unique content there, I suspect I won’t be able to resist posting goofy screen grabs and links that don’t warrant a full-on entry here. It will be on-topic and won’t (unlike my Facebook account) double as a personal space, in case you’re afraid of stumbling over some lefty politics.

The Smiling Cobra

One of the most fascinating behind-the-scenes figures in television history is James T. Aubrey, better known behind his back as ”The Smiling Cobra.”  At different times in his career Aubrey was perhaps the most hated man in New York (during his tenure as president of CBS in the early sixties) and the most hated man in Los Angeles (during his tenure as president of MGM in the early seventies).

I’ve touched upon Aubrey’s, er, contributions to television and film history in my production history of East Side / West Side and, tangentially, in this piece about the producer Herbert B. Leonard.  While I was researching the latter, I noticed that Aubrey is the beneficiary of a “featured article” on Wikipedia, which I guess means it’s less poorly written and inaccurate than your average Wikipedia article.  It’s actually a pretty interesting read, even though it leaves the most useful tidbit that I didn’t already know – the attribution of the “Smiling Cobra” moniker to John Houseman, who produced The Great Adventure at CBS during Aubrey’s reign - unsourced and therefore still in doubt.

Echoing the legendary stories of Aubrey’s enormous ego, personal coldness, professional ruthlessness, and mafia ties have always been rumors of epic sexual perversity – unusually public accounts, some of which leapt from the Hollywood gossip circuit into the mainstream press.  Wikipedia leaves most of those out, apart from one entry sourced from Harlan Ellison’s collection of television columns for the L.A. Free Press.

So here’s a juicy one, from William Froug’s book How I Escaped From Gilligan’s Island and Other Misadventures of a Hollywood Writer-Producer (another blind item from which sparked my investigation of the Laurence Heath story).  Here, Froug is paraphrasing an account told to him by an actress he dated once:

That Jim Aubrey is some kind of head case….

He took me down to Acapulco for a weekend with him and his friend, Greg Martindale, the lawyer.  [Froug does not identify "Martindale" as a pseudonym, but this is probably Greg Bautzer, another infamous Hollywood horndog, who was married to Dana Wynter during the same period that Aubrey was married to Phyllis Thaxter.]  Greg had his own girl.  I thought I knew what I was in for, some drinks, some sex, some laughs, what the hell.  But honestly, there’s no was I could have expected what I got from James T. Aubrey.  We’re in the hotel room and we’re both buck naked.  As we jump in bed, suddenly Aubrey grabs me by the arm.  “You’re going to have to lick my ass,” he says so quietly that I felt a chill go over my entire body.  I was speechless.

“You hear me, don’t you?”  His voice was ice cold and just above a whisper.  “You’re going to have to lick my ass.  Don’t worry, it’s nice and clean.  And get your tongue up in there.”

“I won’t.  No way, no how,” I answered.  I thought, is this really happening?

“It’s the only way I can get off,” he insisted.  “If you don’t, I’ll break your arm.”  His voice was nasty, threatening.  I was getting very frightened.

His grip on my arm tightened and he began to twist it, slowly but firmly.  It was very painful. . . . He was letting me know he had the strength to do it. . . .

I knew there was no point screaming.  We were in a suite with Greg and his girl.  They must have known what was going on; he and Aubrey were buddies.

“Get busy, lady,” Aubrey says.  “I haven’t got all day.”

I swung around and stuck my finger in his eye.  He jerked back.  His grip loosened for a moment and I broke loose, grabbed a big beach towel, and ran out of the room.

I stayed at the poolside bar, wrapped in that towel, until Greg came down much later and told me to get dressed.  We flew home that evening; the weekend was over.

Froug does not name his source but suppies the following description of her: “a beautiful young actress who had played second lead in a CBS hit sitcom of the sixties.”

So, TV experts, who is the mystery woman?  The sitcom in question had to have been on CBS during Aubrey’s years as president, 1959 through 1965.  The most obvious candidate would be Julie Newmar, who was one of Aubrey’s girlfriends during the mid-sixties; it’s been alleged that the series My Living Doll was put together by Aubrey as a gift to her.  Even though everyone’s eyes were on her, Newmar was billed after the show’s putative star, Robert Cummings, so the “second lead” part could apply.  But My Living Doll wasn’t a hit, and Newmar’s relationship with Aubrey probably laster longer than this unfortunate young lady’s did.

Froug did alter some details in his memoir to disguise identities (in the Heath case, for instance, he upped the body count), but let’s hypothesize that the teller of this tale is not Catwoman, and that the sitcom second lead part is accurate. Any guesses?

Turkey Sandwiches

I figured that last week’s tribute to “Turkeys Away” might be enough of a populist idea to reach some readers beyond the regulars here, but I wasn’t prepared for how viral it went.  The Washington Post and (ugh) The Huffington Post linked to it, Shawn Ryan (creator of The Shield) “tweeted” it, and it has already become the most widely read (or at least glanced-at) piece I’ve published here, by a wide margin.  So, I’m very … wait for it … thankful for that (and yet, still irritated that I couldn’t track down some WKRP folks, especially Richard Sanders, in time).

All of that being not to toot my own horn (well, not just that), but to recommend two recent articles you absolutely have to read if you liked the WKRP thing: Brian Raftery’s juicy oral history of Cheers (Kelsey Grammer, wotta joik) and Edward Copeland’s herculean three-part history of St. Elsewhere (here, here, and here), which is based largely on interviews with many of the show’s writer/producers and cast (and Michael Dukakis!).  Copeland devotes an entire page to one aspect of St. Elsewhere that I’d always found puzzling, then off-putting, then unintentionally hilarious: the Job-like suffering heaped upon David Morse’s appealing underdog character, Jack Morrison.  I actually had the idea to do the WKRP oral history before these pieces were published — in fact, it occurred to me last Thanksgiving, and I was steamed about having to wait another whole year to do it! — but I definitely had both of these articles, especially the Cheers one, in mind when I was assembling my little mini-history of “Turkeys Away.”

One of the more interesting tidbits in Copeland’s piece answered something only tangentially St. Elsewhere-related that I’d often wondered about:

The typical episode of St. Elsewhere took seven days to shoot, though the length of shooting days on series varies widely today. Tinker, who now serves as executive producer on ABC’s Private Practice, the spinoff from Shonda Rimes’ Grey’s Anatomy, continues to direct not only on that show but others as well as he has in the years since the doors closed on St. Eligius. “Most shows (today) are eight, some of them are nine. For all but the last year of NYPD Blue, we did eight days. For the last year, in order to take about a million dollars out of every episode, we did seven-day shows,” Tinker said. On (Private Practice), for the first five years we did nine-day shows and we sort of did the same trick for this year, and then we took a day off and made a bunch of budget cuts, so we’re doing eight-day shows now. Some of the cable shows, like The Closer,  did seven all the time.” Just for comparison to other cable shows currently on the air: HBO’s True Blood averages between 11 and 14 days to film an episode, while AMC’s Breaking Bad typically shoots an installment in eight days.

Of course, from the fifties through the sixties, shooting schedules were far more rigid: half-hour dramas were almost always filmed in three days (or less, at Revue and other cheapo outfits), hour-long shows in five or six.  Another sea change at work today: When I spoke to Michael Zinberg, calling in from the set of an episode of The Good Wife that he was directing, for the WKRP piece, he mentioned that almost all of the network TV dramas are shot on digital video today, the final (and surprising) exceptions being Shonda Rhimes’s shows (Grey’s Anatomy, Private Practice, Scandal).

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More essential reading: the Hollywood Reporter‘s sixty-five-years-too-late analysis of its own role in fostering the blacklist.  Be sure to check out the sidebars too, especially the profile of some of the few living blacklistees (all but one of whom I’ve had the privilege of meeting and chatting with at some point). Some readers don’t get the connection, but the blacklist is really a secret author of this blog.  You can’t underestimate the influence that the blacklist, and the anti-left hysteria surrounding it, had on the medium of television in its infancy.  And while it’s always nice to see the subject get some fresh attention (Dave Robb’s reporting for THR on the blacklist, and the related issue of Hollywood unionism, during the nineties was also exceptional), it’s dispiriting to see how much hate and ignorance has been expressed in the comments on those Hollywood Reporter articles, by a few people whose understanding of communism and the Cold War seems to derive entirely from reading Time magazine, circa 1949.  I don’t understand how anyone can still seriously believe that the Hollywood communists (and their fellow radicals) posed any practical or ideological threat to the United States, and also I don’t understand why anyone still has a stake in the matter, apart from the blacklist victims themselves.  Memo to Richard Schickel, et. al.: the Cold War is dunzo.

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P.S.  I mentioned last month that I’ve also been writing about the stage actress Dorothy Loudon on the New York Public Library’s blog.  Those articles were an offshoot of a new digital exhibition, which I helped to curate and which just launched today, that showcases the Dorothy Loudon Papers, an archival collection at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.

Turkeys Away: An Oral History

TV Guide named it as the fortieth best television episode of all time.  On lists of favorite sitcoms, or favorite holiday episodes, it invariably ranks even higher.  WKRP in Cincinnati’s seventh episode, “Turkeys Away” begins as a wholesome, almost bland, Thanksgiving show.  Around the midpoint, though, the standard-issue sitcom setup – Mr. Carlson (Gordon Jump), orchestrates a secret radio station promotion – takes a spectacularly morbid and off-color left turn, one that sets up punchline after hilarious punchline.  The last line of the show (which can be viewed on Hulu, albeit with substantial cuts and music replacement) has become one of the most oft-quoted gags in the history of television.

This month, in a series of entirely new interviews, members of the show’s cast and crew (along with the “real” Herb Tarlek) reminisced about the making of this historic half-hour.

HUGH WILSON (creator and producer of WKRP in Cincinnati): The starting point was that I was a young, kind of new writer at Mary Tyler Moore Productions – MTM.

MICHAEL ZINBERG (director of “Turkeys Away”): It was in the heyday of MTM.  We often referred to it as Camelot, which it was.  Those shows were hand-crafted.  It was a remarkable group of writers and directors and producers, headed by Grant Tinker.  Hugh Wilson came out from Atlanta, and in three years was creating his own show.  That’s what the possibilities were.

CLARKE BROWN (radio executive): Hugh first started in the business as an account executive for Burton-Campbell Advertising.  He was about to get fired, and they said, “Wait a minute, don’t fire this guy.  This guy could be a great writer.”  They moved him into a copywriting position, and he became arguably the best copywriter that’s ever been in Atlanta, Georgia.  Later he became the creative director, and ultimately he became the president of the agency.  Then he abruptly left.  He got a divorce, and without a job or anything, he moved to California and ended up almost immediately getting a job with Mary Tyler Moore.

HUGH WILSON: Grant Tinker, who was Mary’s husband, let it be known one day in the most casual of ways that if anybody had any show ideas, they should tell him.  I know pilot season [now] is more important than Versailles, but in the day he just said that. Anyhow, I was working on a short-lived show, two seasons, called The Tony Randall Show.  Tony had had great success with The Odd Couple, and we did this.  It never quite worked, but that was what I was doing.  Anyhow, I got this idea for a radio station [series], and I told Grant, and we went over to CBS, and they all said, “Yeah, hey, great.”  What was lucky for me was that most of those guys . . . had at one time or another been in the radio business.  I hadn’t counted on having that kind of built-in affection for the idea.

So I went back to Atlanta, where I had some real good friends, at what was the number one rocker there, and I sat down with the station manager and told him what was going on.  He was very excited, because it was [about] radio and also because it was good publicity.

CLARKE BROWN: WKRP was based on the radio station WQXI in Atlanta, and there were several characters who were very much based on people at QXI, and the others were sometimes amalgamations and sometimes just completely fictionalized.  I was Herb Tarlek.

HUGH WILSON: Clarke Brown was a salesman at WQXI, and I based Herb Tarlek on him, although Clarke’s a pretty cool guy.  But Clarke was dressing in these pretty bizarre polyester outfits back in the day.

CLARKE BROWN: Not to that extreme, but I was kind of known for dressing wildly, mod clothing and so forth.  But he was making fun of me, essentially.  It just made me laugh.

HUGH WILSON: The character of Johnny Fever, he was based on a guy I knew in Atlanta called Skinny Bobby Harper.  That was funny, because he was the morning guy, so Skinny had to get up at four in the morning to get in there.  But he also loved being in the bars at night.  He was like Fever – in the pilot, I said [to Howard Hesseman], “You’ve got to play it like you’re sleepwalking, because you should be asleep by eight, but eight is just when you’re going out.”

CLARKE BROWN: Jerry Blum was “the Big Guy,” Arthur Carlson, and there was another guy that some of his personality was in the character also.  His name was Doug Burton, and he was the Burton of Burton-Campbell.

HUGH WILSON: Jerry Blum was a little bit of Mr. Carlson, and Carlson is actually more of a wonderful man that I worked for in Atlanta advertising.  He was my boss.  He was a great, great guy.

CLARKE BROWN: The location was [changed to Cincinnati] because of its central location, with no accents.  And obviously, “WKRP,” “W-crap” was the pun intended.

Hugh kind of worked with me in the mornings.  One day he’d go and sit in the control room, and then one day he’d sit in the sales office, and he absorbed the actual workings of a radio station firsthand in that manner.  Then, of course, he and I were drinking buddies, so he heard every story that was worth repeating over the years.  When Hugh was writing the show, a lot of the incidents were real.

HUGH WILSON: I was allowed to see everything, and then Jerry Blum, the station manager, told me about a promotion – I believe in Texas, and I want to say Dallas, but I’m not sure – in which he threw turkeys out of a helicopter, and they didn’t fly.  They crashed to the ground, it was just a horrible disaster, and he wound up losing his job over it.  So I said to him at the time, “Jerry, I think you just won me an Emmy.”

CLARKE BROWN: The turkey drop was actually a real incident.  It was at a shopping center in Atlanta; I think it was Broadview Plaza, which no longer exists.  It was a Thankgiving promotion.  We thought that we could throw these live turkeys out into the crowd for their Thanksgiving dinners.  All of us, naïve and uneducated, thought that turkeys could fly.  Of course, they went just fuckin’ splat.

People were laughing at us, not with us.  But it became a legend.  There were other stories of this nature that were embellished [on WRKP]; that one was really not embellished that much.  Although the turkeys were thrown off the back of a truck, as opposed to how it was depicted on the [show].

HUGH WILSON: I didn’t dream up the helicopter.  My memory is Jerry said a helicopter.

CLARKE BROWN: It just ended with, the joke’s on us.  And of course, our guys played it up.  It turned out to be a great little unintended publicity gimmick, the fact that it failed the way that it did.  Probably got more mileage out of it being screwed up than had it not been.

HUGH WILSON: Since that time, a couple of people have claimed that story, but Jerry said it was him.  He’s the one that said to me, “You know, Hugh, turkeys can’t fly.”

CLARKE BROWN: It is very possible that another radio station at some point in time had done something similar.  But I know for a fact that we had no conscious awareness that it had been done elsewhere, successfully or not.  We weren’t deliberately trying to clone somebody’s promotion.  Not that we wouldn’t do that, because clearly we would, and have.  But not that particular day.

HUGH WILSON: It didn’t matter to me whether it was true or who did it.  I knew I could use it on the show.  We decided that we would make it our Thanksgiving show of the first season, which I think was the sixth one we did.

The teleplay for “Turkeys Away” is credited to the late Bill Dial.

HUGH WILSON: He was a friend of mine from Atlanta, from the agency I worked with, that I had brought out too, because I thought he was good, and also I felt that somehow or other I had been let past the guards at one of these great studios, and now my job was to sneak in as many friends as I could.

CLARKE BROWN: A lot of people from Atlanta were involved with that show – his writers and music people.  A guy named Tommy Wells, who just recently died, did the music for the show and wrote the theme song.

HUGH WILSON: I just thought [Bill Dial] kind of missed it completely.  Dial, bless his heart, would tell you the same.  He got the credit and I think he kind of dined out on it, but you know, I pretty much wrote every word.

The premise of “Turkeys Away” is a kind of continuation of the pilot, in which station manager Arthur Carlson (Gordon Jump) begins to feel left out and unappreciated following WKRP’s format change under the new program director, Andy Travis (Gary Sandy).

HUGH WILSON: That made sense to me.  The pilot was about a whole change there, and it would make sense that this guy, a dear man but an inept man, would want to reinsert himself into it.  It would be fun [to have] him to engineer it, rather than the angry Herb Tarlek.  It was good that Herb be his lieutenant.  Herb and Les, they kind of sided with the old guard, so it was great to have all of them on the wrong side of this.

Seeking to ingratiate himself with the staff, Carlson makes fumbling overtures to all of them.  To African American deejay Venus Flytrap, he proffers a watermelon.

TIM REID (“Venus Flytrap”): That actually came from a true story!  This was way back in 1968, about four years removed from the [start of] the Civil Rights movement.  I’d just come out of college. I was claimed as the first black hire to be a marketing representative for this company.    I’m not going to call the company’s name, but it was a major corporation and I was the first black hired in management.  Anybody with a college degree in a white company was looked upon as just landed from PlanetUniversity.  Nobody really knew quite how to deal with us.  We were all in training together, and there was a lot of joking, a lot of racial joking, and everybody got their turn in the barrel.

The person who [gave me the watermelon] was from the Deep South and I was from the South, and we had really been giving each other a pretty good row at the time.  I had given as much as I got.  It was a touché kind of thing, because I had really done something to him earlier.  Let’s just say I showed up in a sheet.  [Laughs.]  But that one topped it.  Then the shit hit the fan.  Everybody realized, Oh my god, this really isn’t funny.  This has gone too far.  So then the pressure all came to me as to how am I going to respond to it.  Which I never thought was quite fair.

That person and I never became great friends, but we – I saved his job, actually.  They were going to fire him because of that when word got around.  He came to me, very sadly, and asked, and I called [the bosses] and said, “Look, this was a give and take.  I don’t want to waste my opportunities on this one.  Let me save them for when I really need a chit.”  I knew he had learned his lesson, and I certainly had learned mine.

A lot of things in our lives became seeds of a story, or elements of a story.  Oftentimes when Hugh was writing, he’d talk to you, and you’d say something and he’d laugh and walk away.  Then you’d look up and it would be in the script.  Hugh would say, “Can I tell that?”  And I go, “I dunno.”  So, suddenly, innocently, Carlson doesn’t know what to do and he handed me a watermelon!

“Turkeys Away” has an extraordinarily slow build to its famous ending.  Arthur Carlson’s much-hyped secret promotion doesn’t emerge until the second act, and just what it is not revealed until the last few minutes.

HUGH WILSON: If you’ve got a real hot piece of comedy that you like, you sure don’t want to put it up front.  I tried hard to make it the climax, where the climax is supposed to be.

MAX TASH: We started with the table read on Mondays, and we would shoot on Fridays.  There would be a big rewrite Tuesday nights, and then usually a smaller rewrite on Wednesday night.

TIM REID: It was a great table read.  We’d get the script a day or so before table read, so you know going in whether or not you’ve got something that’s going to be a lot of fun to do.  And we all just couldn’t wait to get there.  I think it’s one of the first times in four years that we were all ever on time for a table read.

The classic payoff commences when Les Nessman’s live broadcast from the shopping center’s parking lot quickly becomes a bloodbath – one that echoes another famous disaster.

HUGH WILSON: I put in the thing that Les would be present, and I wrote that whole thing that made it sound like the Hindenburg and all of that.

TIM REID: The opportunity to see Les Nessman recount the falling of the turkeys in the style of the Hindenburg was just, tears to your eyes.  I mean, who takes on the Hindenburg, and does a comedy?  Takes one of the great tragedies in this country, and puts it in a comedy show?  We went there.

People don’t give us credit for a few firsts, but WKRP was the first television show to do an episode about Vietnam [“Who Is Gordon Sims?,” in which Venus Flytrap is revealed to have been a draft dodger].  Lou Grant did one after us, but we were the first, and it was so touchy and so difficult, that they sent the military to sit in the stands every day in the rehearsal.  It was literally going to be up to a commander from Camp Pendleton, that somebody had brought up as our advisor.  He was going to watch us rehearse for at least two to three days, and it was going to be his decision.  And if he said “no,” we were not going to do the episode.

MAX TASH (production associate): “Turkeys Away” was probably the most famous episode we did of that whole series, but there was an episode we did called “Les on a Ledge,” which had Les Nessman on the ledge of the Flimm Building, contemplating suicide because one of the Cincinnati Reds baseball players made a comment about Les after he had done an after-game interview, saying, “What a queer little fellow he is.”  So he took that to mean they think he’s gay.  And it was the third or fourth episode that we produced of this brand new sitcom, that was dealing with this issue, in a very funny way.  But that episode, to me, stood out even more than “Turkeys Away” because it showed the direction that the series was eventually going to go in.

Les quotes the famous line from Herbert Morrison’s radio coverage of the Hindenburg crash: “Oh, the humanity!”

HUGH WILSON: You know what, we’d put in a line, and invariably somebody from the network would say, “I don’t believe people, particularly younger people, know what that line about the Hindenburg means.”  And my answer was always, “So what?”  They were always deathly afraid that we would be going over people’s heads.  We did a commercial once that was for a beer where it said, “Look for the smiling face of Archduke Ferdinand on every bottle!”  Somebody said, “Hugh, it was his assassination that started World War I.”  And I said, “So what?”

The oft-told story is that Richard Sanders (“Les Nessman”) closely modeled his performance on Morrison’s broadcast.

MICHAEL FAIRMAN (guest star as the “Shoe Store Owner,” and Richard Sanders’s friend and writing partner on several WKRP scripts): We both listened to it together at one point.  It was Richard’s idea.  He said, “Why don’t I announce it as if it were [the Hindenburg broadcast]?”

TIM REID: We all did!  We all sat in the room and we watched the actual crashing of the Hindenburg as it was recorded [in newsreel footage], over and over, and we sat there as he [Sanders] did it.  And he did it so well.  If you look at him and look at the guy who gave the report on the Hindenburg, you’ll see the similarities.

MICHAEL FAIRMAN: Richard is an interesting guy.  Very – oh, what’s the word?  Very ordered.  Kind of strait-laced, kind of tight.  Sometimes we’d have little battles about that.  He had a very dramatic, teutonic kind of personality.  It had to be this way or that way.  He was very much like Les Nessman.  Compulsive, a little bit.  But a good guy, at base.

GARY SANDY (“Andy Travis”): Richard Sanders was my favorite character on the show.  I thought Richard was incredible in that part of Les Nessman.  He knew what he was doing every single second, every moment that he was on camera.  But, everybody was funny on that show.  Frank Bonner was funny in that episode.  I was young and cute.  [Laughs.]  Everything kind of worked.

As Les Nessman narrates the unexpected demise of hundreds of ill-fated turkeys, most of the other characters – Andy, Venus, Johnny Fever, and Bailey Quarters – listen in disbelief from the booth.

HUGH WILSON: That was all shot just as you see it.  They were in their set, and [Sanders] was in the swing set – that’s a set that you don’t see every week.  He was right there next to them on the stage; we didn’t shoot it separately and cut it in.  We did everything we could to make it work for the live audience.

MAX TASH: There were a few more extras [needed] than we had budgeted for, so our runner, Tim Womack, was one of the passersby when Les Nessman was doing the play-by-play.  In the background of that shot, also, was Hugh’s secretary, Lissa Levin, who eventually became a story editor and a renowned writer on her own.  And there were other production people and office staff who were in that episode as background people.  We were always throwing friends and family into the shots.

MICHAEL ZINBERG: You never know what you have until you get it in front of the audience.  Then when the laughter started, and turned into howls when those turkeys started coming down, it was hard to keep doing the show, because we were laughing so much watching the show.

HUGH WILSON: They were cracking it up.  There’s probably some good outs from that – I don’t know where – where they just started laughing and we had to cut.

TIM REID: We just could not keep from laughing throughout the whole taping of it.

HUGH WILSON: Richard Sanders never did that.  He was really amazing.  He could have the whole soundstage fall and he never broke character.  But the rest of them, being human . . . .   Particularly Gordon Jump, if he said something that amused him, he was sure as shit going to laugh himself.  Actually, those kind of things I enjoyed, because the audience loved to see somebody make a mistake.  They felt like they were on the inside.

FRANK BONNER (“Herb Tarlek”): My most fond memories of “Turkeys Away” are Richard Sanders’s (a very good actor) use of the reporter’s description of the 1937 Hindenburg disaster – [and then] “…the turkeys are hitting the ground like bags of wet cement.”

HUGH WILSON: That line was mine.

Before the turkey drop, Les reads aloud the text of the banner trailing behind the helicopter – even, slowly, the station’s call letters, as if he’d never seen them before.

HUGH WILSON: Where he had to read it?  That was his gag.  I’m pretty sure that that came up in rehearsal, and Richard did that.  Isn’t that good?  They were a funny bunch of people, all of them.

Jennifer (Loni Anderson), the station’s receptionist, fields a call from the Humane Society: “But, Mr. Colley, a lot of turkeys don’t make it through Thanksgiving.”

HUGH WILSON: That I don’t think I wrote.  I think that’s from Dial.

Finally, Arthur Carlson and Herb Tarlek return to the station, dazed and disheveled.

HUGH WILSON: I was a real grizzly about keeping to the lines.  There was a great deal of respect for writers at MTM.  Tinker and Mary were always right behind the writers.  I guess that started with Jim Brooks being so key to her show being a success.  So [the cast] stayed to the lines, but invariably they found funny things.  A lot of times they would find something and I would say, “Augh!  Nope, don’t do that!”  Then they’d try things and I’d go, “Yeah, that’s great.  Thank you very much.”  I must say I didn’t write it in the script that Gordon would show up with – Frank and him had makeup put those little feathers on them.  When I saw it, I fell down in laughter, so they realized I supported that.

No turkeys actually appear on-screen in “Turkeys Away.”

HUGH WILSON: No, thank God.  And I sure didn’t want one on the set, after Jerry said the turkeys attacked the people.  He was the one that said they landed and decided they’d let them out there so the people could grab them, but the turkeys were vicious to the people.  So I put that right in the script, too.

MAX TASH: I thought the funniest lines were happening because the audience was imagining what was happening.  You never saw turkeys thrown out – you only saw how it was being described.  You saw the aftermath when Carlson comes in with feathers in his hair.  So the funniest laughs were in the audience’s imagination.

Finally, Arthur Carlson re-emerges from his office, and utters the ten lines that would immortalize “Turkeys Away.”

GARY SANDY: The famous line from that show, “As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly,” is famous because, at the moment – and it’s like it was yesterday, I can see it – the genius of Hugh Wilson and Gordon Jump came together.  Gordon Jump was one of the nicest men that ever lived, really, he truly was, and I think his humanity, who the man was – he got by with a lot of stuff because he was just a great human being.  Gordon Jump was a very religious guy, so somehow or another “as God is my witness” is coupled with all that.

HUGH WILSON: Yeah, I wrote that.  That was from my mother.  She was always using God as her witness.  “As God is my witness, I have never in my life seen a boy,” etc., etc.  [I was] an only child who got caught for everything.  I mean everything.  I have five children, so I never really know who did what, but when you’re an only child, you’re screwed.

Jump does not utter the “As God is my witness…” line until after the end credits have begun to appear.

MAX TASH: The thing we learned from Hugh was: you tell the joke and you get out of there.  Don’t be hanging around.

HUGH WILSON: At the time, the show hadn’t been on the air [yet], and these were people [in the live audience] who were out vacationing, who were given these tickets at Universal’s [studio tour] and all, and they really wanted to see a show they had seen for years on TV.  They weren’t too happy to come in and see a show they hadn’t seen yet.  But that was the biggest success in terms of audience enjoyment up to that time.  So we were real excited about it.  So was the network.  People were just pitching fits.

MAX TASH: There were so many big laughs that you do end up cutting out laughs, because you’ve already established how funny the joke is, and you’ve already heard the audience, and if they went on maybe twice as long with a particular laugh it just takes away from the program time.

HUGH WILSON: That’s the kind of problem you prayed for.

MAX TASH: So, yeah, we did [trim the laugh track], but it wasn’t unusual on WKRP to do that.

Although it was meant to air the week before Thanksgiving, “Turkeys Away” was actually first broadcast on October 30, 1978.  The ratings-challenged series spent the holidays fighting for its life.

HUGH WILSON: I think after the sixth or eighth show we were taken off the air and put on hiatus for, quote, “repairs.”  That’s what Variety, I believe, reported that CBS said, that they were having a second look at the show and they were “tweaking it.”

Well, in point of fact, I just sat there and waited.  I didn’t tweak anything.  I went to some meeting where we all agreed that it should be funnier.  And then I turned in some scripts that they hadn’t seen, and they thought that they saw in there a reaction from me from that meeting.  But they’d been written way before that.  I just changed the dates on the drafts, so it would look like they were written after we were taken off the air.

I think, in a way, “Turkeys” saved us from getting cancelled, because it got a lot of talk.  Anecdotal, around town kind of talk.  Those people, of course, were ruled by necessity by Nielsens, but they also wanted to be involved with something that was thought around town to be good.

TIM REID: Today, not only could you not get away with that, nobody would get it.

HUGH WILSON: I meet people for the first time, and if we get to talking and it somehow comes up that I created WKRP, they immediately start saying, “As God is my witness, I didn’t know turkeys could fly.”  It’s rather amazing that the line itself is [legendary].  I’m just thrilled and tickled to death by it.  People either say “Oh, I love that show,” or they go right to “As God is my witness…”  It seems like half and half.

GARY SANDY: It’s not surprising to me that this has become what it’s become, because that moment was etched in my memory as being something really special.

HUGH WILSON: By the way, when I got a farm, I’d come up on wild turkeys.  They fly about two feet off the ground, and they can only go for about ten yards, but wild turkeys can fly.

Thanks to all of the participants in the above, and especially to Hugh Wilson, whose generosity in opening his rolodex made this piece possible, and to Justin Humphreys, who introduced me to Hugh.  For more “Turkeys Away” stories, check out the DVD audio commentary featuring Hugh Wilson, Loni Anderson, and Frank Bonner.

Further Into the Beaver

Late-breaking news here, of vital import to classic TV fans everywhere.

Two and a half years ago, I offered a no-prize to any reader who could identify any episode of Leave It to Beaver in which June Cleaver actually uttered the line, “Ward, you were awfully hard on the Beaver last night.”

Nobody has stepped forward to claim that prize.

Now, however, it would appear that Todd VanDerWerff, the AV Club’s indefatigable television columnist, has found the infamous episode.  Sort of.

According to Todd, it’s the second season entry “Beaver’s Ring” (ahem), and the actual wording is “Don’t you think you’re being a little bit hard on the Beaver?”  Which is kinda dirty, but not as perfectly dirty as the oft-quoted version.  You really need the past tense to suggest that – let’s see, how can I put this delicately? – that Ward was hittin’ it animal-style.

So again I pose the question: is that the closest Barbara Billingsley ever came to saying the infamous line, or is there another utterance that gets closer to the urban-legend?

In the meantime, be sure to read Todd’s piece in its entirety.  His descriptions of ten key Beaver episodes are an excellent reminder of why the show was so quietly transgressive, and also endlessly likable.