Obituary: Allan A. Buckhantz (1923-2011)

Live television director Allan A. Buckhantz died on October 10 in Los Angeles.  Born on January 3, 1923, he was 88.

Buckhantz was one of the regular directors of Matinee Theater, producer Albert McCleery’s lamentably forgotten 1955 effort to bring anthology drama to daytime television.  The NBC series presented a live hour-long play, in color, five days a week.  Buckhantz remained among the regular rotation of Matinee Theater directors for the entirety of the series’ three-season run, directing a total of over eighty segments.

Matinee Theater exists mainly as a memory today.  UCLA has a couple dozen of the roughly 150 episodes, none of them directed by Buckhantz.  We have to conjure them in the imagination, drawing from the names of the writers and actors associated with them.  Buckhantz’s Matinee Theaters included Henry Misrock’s “Beyond a Reasonable Doubt” (his first), with DeForest Kelley and Cara Williams; “Jigsaw,” with Tom Laughlin and a twenty-four year-old Angie Dickinson (who went on to star in several more Buckhantz segments); Sumner Locke Elliott’s “Friday the 13^th,” with Paul Burke in a small role; “The House of the Seven Gables,” with John Carradine; a version of William L. Stuart’s novel “Night Cry,” which Otto Preminger filmed as Where the Sidewalk Ends; a remake of Alvin Sapinsley’s “One Mummy Too Many,” originally directed by Sidney Lumet for The Alcoa Hour, with Nita Talbot; “Something Stolen, Something Blue,” with Jack Larson, Dolores Hart, and Frances Farmer; Theodore Apstein’s “The Quiet Street,” with Rip Torn and Suzanne Pleshette; and “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” which McCleery had deemed unproducible on live television until Buckhantz suggested the character experience an “organic” rather than a physical transformation.

Those sound rather like they would have been worth preserving.

Directing Matinee Theater was a thankless task: the schedule was grueling, the scripts were generally second-rate, and McCleery was an obsessive and difficult boss.  Matinee Theater originated from Los Angeles and most of the major dramatic directors were in New York, so McCleery recruited a motley crew of up-and-coming local TV directors, failed actors, and assorted other unknowns to direct the series.  Buckhantz had been a $37.50-a-week messenger at Twentieth Century-Fox when he got a job as a television stage manager at CBS and Los Angeles’s station KNXT; he made his directing debut on Peter Potter’s Jukebox Jury.  “Immediately,” he recalled years later, “I started a love affair with live television.”

In The Days of Live (Scarecrow, 1998), Buckhantz told interviewer Ira Skutch:

At CBS on the Coast, we didn’t do a show a day.  We didn’t do a show a week.  We did five, six seven shows a day.  Rehearsal was a luxury.  I was doing news, Peter Potter’s Jukebox Jury, commercials, and whatever else needed to be done.  I probably did the first band show ever to hit television – a local show, out of the Palladium.  The orchestra would sit on the stage while I made notes on when the trumpets came up.  Then I’d add whatever I could do to make it look more staged . . . .

After we finished Peter Potter’s Jukebox Jury at midnight on Saturday night, we’d stay an hour, setting the lights for a live religious show Sunday mornings on KNXT.  There were four or five staff directors who alternated.  Everybody hated directing it, because the various religious groups were always changing things.

On one occasion, he told Skutch, Buckhantz directed a group of children in a Jewish service.  One little girl dropped her cue card and exclaimed, on the air, “Jesus Christ, what do I do now?”

About half of the Matinee Theater directors transitioned into filmed television and went on to substantive careers as episodic directors – Walter Grauman, Boris Sagal, Lamont Johnson, Arthur Hiller, Sherman Marks, Lawrence Schwab.  The rest were never heard from again – Jim Jordan, Irving Lambrecht, Livia Granito, Alan Cooke, Alan Hanson, Pace Woods.

Buckhantz, alas, fell largely into the latter category.  His only other television credits of note were a single Kraft Television Theatre and two episodes of The Dakotas, a good 1963 revisionist western produced by Anthony Spinner, who had been a Matinee Theater story editor.  Immediately after Matinee Theater, Buckhantz produced and directed a disastrous Broadway production, Happy Town, from which (as reported in Dorothy Kilgallen’s column) Buckhantz was ousted following a “bitter feud” with the cast and crew.  The show closed after four days in October 1959.

The peripatetic Buckhantz moved to Germany and worked there as a television producer and director during the sixties.  Buckhantz resurfaced in the United States as the executive producer of a 1969 television adaptation of Hans Brinker, with Eleanor Parker and Richard Basehart, and as the director of an action movie, Portrait of a Hitman (starring Jack Palance and Rod Steiger) that sat on the shelf for years.

Updated on January 6, 2014, to add the dates of Buckhantz’s birth and death.

Who and Where Is Hudson Faussett?

The witty composition above is an image from Michael Powell’s last completed feature, Age of Consent.  A pariah and an exile after his confrontational 1960 film Peeping Tom outraged the bluenoses of Great Britain, Powell had to leave his native country to find work.  He directed a few American television shows for the producer Herbert Brodkin (who also threw a lifeline to Alexander Mackendrick, the expatriate director of Sweet Smell of Success), and then landed in Australia, where he made two features.  The second of those, Age of Consent, is a lovely, optimistic work that I’ve just seen for the first time.  It’s a sensitive, sensual study of sexual awakening, of an exotic, teeming semi-wilderness (an island off the Great Barrier Reef), and of the process of artistic creation.

The opening sequence of Age of Consent takes place in New York City, where the protagonist, a painter (James Mason), gets fed up with the cynical art world and decides to seek a place to recharge his creative batteries.  In an audio commentary for the DVD, film historian Kent Jones tells us that Sydney actually doubled for Manhattan in these scenes – a fact that’s obvious, upon reflection, from the bright red cab that James Mason steps out of, and from the presence of Frank Thring, an imposing Australian character actor who plays an art dealer.  But during my first viewing I assumed that Powell had spent a few days shooting in the Big Apple, because he was able to cast two actual Americans as the pair of gauche nitwits who respond to Mason’s abstract art with utter clueless.

Those Americans are the pair pictured above.  The lady in front of the red circle is Peggy Cass, a Tony-winning stage and television actress who was, at the time, best known as a game show guest (primarily on To Tell the Truth).  And the red triangle man?  His name is Hudson Faussett, and he’s one of the lost figures of early television history.  I’ve always wanted to know more about Faussett, and now, thanks to Powell’s film, I know what he looks like, at least.  Age of Consent is the last place I expected Faussett to turn up, but it’s appropriate.  It’s that kind of movie, a film of rebirths in unexpected places.

In one interview, which I can’t locate at the moment, someone who worked with Faussett said that the joke was, if you turned him the right way, the Hudson River would come pouring out into Manhattan.  (Get it?  Hudson … Faussett.)  That’s about as substantial a reference to Faussett that I can find (or not find, as it happens) on my reference shelf.  The Internet Movie Database spells his name wrong, and a search of old press clippings proves that the variant spellings go all the way back to the beginning of his career, when he was a bit player in (among other things) the 1937 cult marijuana scare film Assassin of Youth.  I believe “Faussett” is accurate, but in fact I’m not even sure of that.

Later, in the late forties, Faussett resurfaced as a Broadway actor and director.  By 1950, he was a staff producer and director for NBC, where he had a hand in the origins of several important shows.  Faussett produced the early seasons of the half-hour Armstrong Circle Theatre, a dramatic anthology that changed formats several times during its long run.  Faussett’s incarnation of Armstrong was not a venue for the kind of searing kitchen-sink dramas shown on The Philco Television Playhouse; rather, according to historian Frank Sturcken, it “offered sentimentality with ‘the pleasantly related moral.’”  Which may have something to do with why we remember Fred Coe and not Hudson Faussett today.

However, Sturcken (in Live Television: The Golden Age of 1946-1958 in New York; McFarland, 1990) also credits Faussett as the co-director of the historic two-hour telecast of “Macbeth” on The Hallmark Hall of Fame in 1954, for which Judith Anderson won an Emmy.  Faussett was the “camera director,” handling the technical side of the broadcast, while the younger George Schaefer directed the actors.  This kind of pairing occurred often in early live television – it echoed a brief practice of pairing experienced filmmakers with theater directors in the early talkie days of motion pictures – and usually what happened was that after a few shows the stage director, if he had any talent at all, learned camera technique and struck out on his own.  That’s how my friend James Sheldon, who later worked for Faussett on Armstrong (directing, among other segments, “The Bells of Cockaigne,” featuring a young James Dean), began.  So if Schaefer, who accrued twenty-one Emmy nominations (he won five) and continued his association with Hallmark for the rest of his life, learned a bit about directing from Faussett, that alone secures Faussett’s place in history.

At NBC, Faussett also produced The Ford Star Revue, a variety show hosted by Jack Haley, and The Paul Winchell and Jerry Mahoney Show (Winchell was a ventriloquist, Mahoney his dummy).  In 1958-1959, Faussett was the NBC producer for Tic Tac Dough; I’m guessing he was essentially an executive at this point, since Tic Tac Dough was packed by a pair of outside producers, Jack Barry and Dan Enright.

Tic Tac Dough was one of the casualties of the quiz show scandals.  It is the show for which Charles Van Doren auditioned before he was selected for his ultimately infamous stint on Twenty-One, a more popular Barry-Enright production.  Eventually, evidence emerged that Tic Tac Dough was also rigged, by producers who fed questions and clues to the contestants.

As far as I can tell, Faussett’s television credits end around this point.  It’s tempting to speculate that his career, like those of Barry and Enright and Howard Felsher (the hands-on producer of Tic Tac Dough), was derailed by the quiz show controversy, but I don’t have enough information to know if that’s the case. 

What we do know is that by 1969, Faussett was living in Australia.  Although Peggy Cass was imported from the States to play her bit part in Age of Consent, Faussett was evidently recruited locally.  Faussett played small parts in other Australian films and television shows as late as 1990.  Judging by his apparent age in Age of Consent, he must be deceased by now, but I can’t locate an obituary.  Perhaps my Australian readers (yes, I do have at least one) could be of some help in that regard?

CORRECTION: An earlier draft of this piece referred to Van Doren as a contestant on The $64,000 Question, rather than Twenty-One.

UPDATE: Please be sure to read the comments sections for some helpful contributions regarding the mysterious Mr. Faussett.  Australian reader (and media critic) Kit MacFarlane has unearthed a fascinating document from the National Archives of Australia (reproduced below) which confirms Faussett’s birthdate and the date of his initial move to Sydney, which was in 1960.  It looks as if Faussett was an employee of the ad agency McCann-Erickson at the time, and had a job waiting in the Sydney branch of that firm.  He listed his “intended profession” as “TV producer,” which then begs the question: did Faussett make any noteworthy contributions to the Australian television industry? 

Another point, which I thought too tangential to mention above, is that another American television producer emigrated to Australia sometime in the mid-to-late sixties: Charles Russell, the man famous for courageously giving blacklisted writers work on CBS shows like Danger and You Are There.  (He’s the basis for a character in Walter Bernstein’s screenplay The Front.)  Russell moved back to Los Angeles sometime before his death in 1986, but it’s possible that he worked in Australian television, too.  I wonder if Russell and Faussett ever crossed paths Down Under and stopped to reminisce about the bad old days….

David Dortort (1916-2010)

The Los Angeles Times and the New York Times have quite properly noted the passing of David Dortort, a relatively minor fifties screenwriter who struck gold when he created the aptly-titled Bonanza in 1959.  Dortort died on September 5 at the age of 93.

Bonanza was a vastly popular hit of a kind that’s hard to fathom today.  It was probably the original “flyover show,” that is, a show that scores in the ratings and runs forever without ever earning the approval, or even the attention, of the cognoscenti.  The modern equivalent would be something like NCIS or According to Jim: series that win no awards and get mocked by the press but that obviously work as comfort food for a lot of people.

I remain largely averse to Bonanza.  I haven’t seen all that much of it, but the episodes I recall were banal in their storytelling and persistently flat and cheap-looking in their imagery.  (Which is ironic, and unfortunate, given that Bonanza was the first really important series to originate in color.)  The show got an official DVD release last year and I don’t think it provoked the same excitement of rediscovery that accompanied the digital debuts of Gunsmoke or Have Gun – Will Travel (several years ahead of Bonanza, incidentally, despite being in black and white and thus a harder sell). 

Bonanza seemed to get lazy not too long after its longevity was assured.  One of the key stories I’ve found about the show is in Ricardo Montalban’s interview with the Archive of American Television.  When Montalban guested on Bonanza, he was appalled by the stars’ clowning around and their refusal to participate in a serious rehearsal.  Montalban rounded up the actors and reamed them out for their unprofessionalism.  I don’t know if Montalban’s experience was typical, but it jibes with the aspect of Bonanza that I find unpleasant.  The on-screen adventures of Hoss and Adam and Little Joe are also exude a certain tiresome, adolescent self-regard, and if Montalban’s description was accurate, that tone may have originated with the cast.

I did try to interview Dortort for my oral history project, but between my tight schedules and his unreliable health we were never able to get together.  I got as far as compiling a file of pre-interview research, most of which has been covered in the obits for Dortort.  But I did learn a couple of obscure things that might be worth reporting here.  One is that NBC hired Dortort to head its feature film division in the late sixties.  That was a moment when the other television networks entered the theatrical distribution world with some brief success – ABC released Take the Money and Run and They Shoot Horses, Don’t They, CBS The Reivers and Scrooge – but for NBC and Dortort the venture was apparently a bust.

The other thing that interested me about Dortort was his inclination to discuss his creation in intellectual terms.  In one interview, he cited Marshall McLuhan and called Bonanza the “conscience of the middle class.”  Not many TV pioneers of Dortort’s generation (especially in the taciturn genre of the western) are willing to entertain such hifalutin notions of the impact of their work.  I would have enjoyed questioning Dortort further about his theories on why Bonanza connected so successfully with such a wide audience – especially since its appear remains something of a mystery to me.

For further reference: The Archive of American Television has a thorough video interview with David Dortort, and there are good websites devoted to Bonanza and Dortort’s follow-up, The High Chaparral.

Lost

TO: Those Listed Below

FROM: James A. Glenn
               Director, [NBC] Television Network Operations

DATE: April 22, 1958

RE: KINE RECORDING

……………………………..

2. [NBC’s Hollywood studios] will make a videotape of all daytime shows, but will have no kine back-up for any of these shows including Today.

……………………………..

7. Kine re-recordings from videotape can be made on order.  However, because of the scarcity of tape, Hollywood finds it necessary to erase and re-use this tape as soon as practicable in order to meet the requirements of their work-load.  They will erase such tapes within 48 hours following broadcast unless they are notified in sufficient time to prevent tape erasure.

*

Mr. Aaron Rubin
National Broadcasting Corporation
30 Rockefeller Plaza
New York 20, New York

January 13, 1961

Dear Mr. Rubin –

Danny Welles asked me to write and officially tell you that you can wipe our FORD STARTIME TALENT SCOUTS color tape.  It is okay, since we will have no use for it in the future.

Sincerely,

Irving Mansfield

*

TO: Mr. Alan B. Fendrick

FROM: Douglas Lutz

DATE: November 18, 1963

RE: DUPONT SHOW OF THE WEEK
        Tape Retention

The Talent Administration and Legal Departments have completed their investigations, and have commented on our recommendation to erase some of the old DUPONT SHOW OF THE WEEK programs.

The following programs may now be erased.

               THE BATTLE OF THE PAPER BULLETS
               WONDERFUL WORLD OF TOYS
               TRICK OR TREASON
               HOLLYWOOD, MY HOME TOWN (Ken Murray)
               THE FORGERY
               THE ACTION IN NEW ORLEANS
               A SOUND OF HUNTING
               THE MOVIE STAR
               THE RICHEST MAN IN BOGOTA

All other programs in the DUPONT SHOW OF THE WEEK series must be retained.

*

TO: Joseph Hewes

FROM: Robert J. Dunne

DATE: June 7, 1973

RE: Tape Retention

This Department has no objection to erasing the 17 reels of Ford Startime and the 29 reels of Sunday Showcase currently being stored at NBC.

*

The text above has been excerpted verbatim from NBC correspondence and internal memoranda.  Kinescopes of some, but by no means all, of the television shows mentioned still exist.  In many cases those kinescopes are monochrome recordings of programs created in color.  The Sunday Showcase segment “What Makes Sammy Run” is an example of a color show for which the original tape is presumed to have been erased, and of which only a black-and-white print survives.

Sixty-Nine

Last month I bought a copy of the first season of The Bill Cosby Show for six dollars in a remaindered DVD store on Sixth Avenue.  That probably goes some way towards explaining why it’s taken Shout Factory, which distributes The Bill Cosby Show, four years to get around to releasing the second and final season, and only as a direct-mail exclusive.

If you’re confused about how anything Cosbyfied could lapse into obscurity or unprofitability, you should note that I’m talking about The Bill Cosby Show (1969-1971), not The Cosby Show (1984-1992).  The latter is the mega-popular, audience-friendly family sitcom that kept NBC in business during the eighties.  The former is the black sheep of the Cosby canon, a forgotten but far superior series in which the comedian took chances, engaged with the realities of the immediate post-Civil Rights era, and apparently annoyed the network (also NBC) enough to trigger a premature cancellation.  The first name makes all the difference.  Original recipe Cos is the one you want.

Backed by triple Emmy wins for his work on I Spy, Cosby executive-produced The Bill Cosby Show himself, independently.  It doesn’t look or feel like any other situation comedy from the time.  There’s no laugh track, no ensemble of colorful sidekicks mugging for attention.  A lot of the action in The Bill Cosby Show takes place outdoors (and off the backlot).  Many of the directors (Harvey Hart, Ralph Senensky, Seymour Robbie) had more experience working with dramatic material than with comedy, and the writers took care to depict Cosby’s character as a rounded, multi-faceted individual, an organic part of a well-defined environment.  It would be an overstatement to call The Bill Cosby Show a “dramedy.”  But it takes place in the real world, not in sitcomland.

The other aspect of The Bill Cosby Show that distinguishes it from most television comedies is that it has no set formula.  It goes in all different directions.  Each episode is very different from the others in its plot, setting, and even the style of humor.  Cosby plays Chet Kincaid, who in press materials about the show is usually identified as a high school gym coach.  That’s accurate, but incomplete, because this is not a workplace comedy.  Chet is, first and foremost, a black man in Los Angeles.

In the first episode, “The Fatal Phone Call,” Chet stumbles into a series of increasingly serious misadventures while out for a morning jog.  That activity is the only clue to his profession, which the series explores at its leisure.  Later episodes build out the character of Chet, gradually introducing members of a large family (siblings, sister-in-law, niece & nephews, parents), various girlfriends, colleagues from work.  Chet’s life at school dominates more episodes than any other subject, but many segments deal exclusively with his family relations, his sex life, or simply the scrapes that an average citizen gets into while going about his daily life.

My favorite episodes of The Bill Cosby Show fall into that last category, because they are the most unpredictable.   Unencumbered by all the usual sitcom fallbacks, Cosby and his head writer, Ed. Weinberger, could craft scenarios out of any whim that struck them.  “Rules Is Rules,” one of the funniest farces I’ve ever seen on television, pits Chet against an implacable public school bureaucracy in his quest to purchase a single valve that he needs to re-inflate his supply of basketballs.  “A Word From Our Sponsor” sees Chet accept a role as a cereal pitchman – because, he makes clear, he needs the money.  Rather than follow standard sitcom rules, the writer, Marvin Kaplan, offers a series of formless set pieces, climaxing with a howler of a TV commercial shoot in which the hapless Chet is soundly defeated by a precocious child actor and a misbehaving box of Corn Wispies.  The episode falters only because Cosby seems to have improvised at length, and his timing was altered when these sequences were trimmed to fit the half-hour frame.  It’s hard to imagine an episode of That Girl having that problem. 

A comparison to Seinfeld may be too easy, but the best of The Bill Cosby Shows are, indeed, about nothing.  This appealing minimalism reached its apex with Henry Fonda’s guest appearance in “The Elevator Doesn’t Stop Here Anymore.”  Instead of giving the movie legend a meaty star turn, Stan Daniels’s teleplay casts him as a meek English teacher who gets trapped in an elevator with Chet.  The pair pass the time with word games and breath-holding contests.  Fonda does get to deliver a touching monologue near the end, but for most of the show he seems liberated by the chance to riff with Cosby in a series of long-take two-shots.

Bill Cosby, Ray Charles, Henry Fonda, and an elevator

Cosby seems to have insisted on that setup as much as possible.  In “Home Remedy” there’s an amazing four-and-a-half-minute improvisation between Cosby and Lee Weaver (a semi-regular, as Chet’s married brother), in which they reminisce about faking illnesses to score sick days when they were children.  Long takes suit Cosby because he really gets going when he has strong, adult performers off of whom he can play.  (Cosby is less entertaining when he’s playing with children, or doing solo schtick.  The comedian foregrounded those elements in his second eponymous series, which was likable but not nearly as funny as the first one.)

Even more than Fonda, small-part actors who were often stuck playing exaggerated comic types in other shows came alive in the company of Cosby.  Kathleen Freeman must have drawn on her own experience as an acting coach in “A Word From Her Sponsor,” in which she plays a drama teacher who puts a hopeless Chet through a series of detailed and authentic-sounding acting exercises.  In “Let X Equal a Lousy Weekend,” Chet subs as an algebra teacher and gets stuck on a tough word problem involving amounts of candy.  Enter Bill Zuckert to deliver a hilarious aria as a candy shop owner who decides that Chet is crazy when he requests a hike in prices so they’ll match his math problem exactly.

And Fran Ryan, never one of my favorite character players, is a revelation as the stern school administrator in “Rules Is Rules.”  She’s playing her usual battle axe type, but it occurred to someone that Ryan’s Mrs. Beal should respond to the charm that Cosby aims at her.  With a hint of a smile, Ryan betrays a secret pleasure as Chet outwits the inane red tape that Mrs. Beal is charged with enforcing.  A cliched situation turns complex, warm, and real through the byplay between the two performers.

My favorite of Cosby’s sparring partners is Joyce Bulifant, the perky blonde who later appeared on The Mary Tyler Moore Show as Murray’s wife.  Bulifant plays a hip guidance counselor, Marsha Paterson, who has a lively, sexy chemistry with Chet.  But she disappears after a few episodes.  That a romance between Chet and Mrs. Paterson (carefully identified as a married woman in the scripts) remained off-limits brings us around to the issue of race, which lies palpably under the surface of The Bill Cosby Show.

Joyce Bulifant as Mrs. Paterson

Supposedly Cosby and Robert Culp, his co-star in I Spy, agreed that the camaraderie between their characters on that series “was the statement.”  Their interracial friendship was more powerful because race was never mentioned.  Cosby took the same approach when he got his own series.  Racial discrimination and identity politics form an important structuring absence in The Bill Cosby Show.

In “The Fatal Phone Call,” Chet gets picked up by the cops because he resembles a vague description of a burglar they’re looking for.  He is a victim of racial profiling.  But Cosby hedges his bets by casting African Americans as two of the police officers, and then by playing the actual criminal himself in the closing gag of the show.  Chet’s uncanny resemblance to the thief means that the cops can’t be faulted for overt bigotry.

Is that a cop-out?  I’m not sure.  Casting a squat, bald black man who looked nothing like Cosby would have made a powerful statement, but that’s not the kind of show Cosby wanted to do.  He’s more concerned with a minute study of how Chet deals with the problem: he gets exasperated, then alarmed, but he contains his emotions and plays it cool.  Most TV shows in the sixties either ignored racism or railed against it, and I’ll bet that Cosby’s down-to-earth attack on the subject held more meaning for viewers who actually faced systemic racism in their daily lives.

In “The Gumball Incident,” an innocent Chet gets arrested for breaking a merchant’s gumball machine.  Chet has the option of paying off the complainant, but he submits to the arrest because of his faith that the system will vindicate him.  Cosby does a funny routine where he has trouble holding his booking sign the right way as the police (who are, again, multiracial) take his mug shot.  The sequence conveys no explicit political message, but it’s freighted with a meaning that would not be there if, say, Ted Bessell posed for a booking photograph on That Girl.

(In case you hadn’t noticed: That Girl is this week’s banal-sitcom whipping-post.)

At the end of “The Gumball Incident” Chet reconciles with the surly storekeeper.  In the interim, he has received scrupulously fair treatment by the police and the courts.  The plot of the episode evokes the specter of the Watts riots – a black man is accused of vandalism by a white business owner – but Cosby chooses to paint the situation in the most optimistic terms imaginable.  It’s possible to take this as naïve, and I wonder how African American audiences reacted to it back in 1969.  The Bill Cosby Show’s approach to matters of race is non-confrontational in the extreme.  Whenever Cosby addresses the subject, he’s pointed but indirect.  A photo of Dr. King or a Ray Charles album on prominent display in Chet’s apartment contextualize him within African American politics and culture.  But no one ever mentions the color of anyone’s skin.

The most potent of these unreferenced images of blackness involve Chet’s sexuality.  To put it in modern terms, Chet is a player.  He’s an unapologetic bachelor who lays a good line on a different beautiful black woman in nearly every episode.  Chet has game, and a sex appeal that will surprise anyone who only knows Cosby as Cliff Huxtable.  Chet never gets serious about any of his lady friends, and then when he does – in “The Blind Date,” which features a lovely, relaxed Cicely Tyson as a potential soulmate who breaks his heart – it carries a great deal of meaning.  The Bill Cosby Show debuted just before the blaxploitation era of aggressive African American pimps and studs, at a moment when Sidney Poitier faced criticism for muting his own sexuality in films like Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner in order to court a wider (or whiter) audience.  In his typically subtle way, Cosby crossed one of the last barriers for black leading men.

That’s why I’m curious about Joyce Bulifant’s departure, and why The Bill Cosby Show poured cold water on her character’s flirtation with Chet.  Did Cosby oppose interracial dating?  Did he worry about provoking a controversy that would overshadow his quietly progressive take on race relations?   Did Cosby sacrifice Bulifant’s contributions in order to preserve the opportunity to place a variety of attractive black women in front of the camera?  Or was NBC simply too squeamish to put an interracial relationship on the air in 1969?

*

Since I started this blog, I have acquired a reputation as a Scroogy McScrooge who doesn’t like to laugh.  Except maybe when I’m kicking puppies or insulting dead actors.  Yes, that’s right: a sitcom-hater.  My detractors will be delighted to learn that I must be getting soft in my incipient middle age, because I have started watching Love American Style and I think it’s very funny.  Sometimes.

In purely formal terms, Love American Style, which also debuted in the fall of 1969, was as novel as The Bill Cosby Show.  An hour-long anthology, Love assembled three or four unrelated comic stories each week.  Interspersing with these were a half-dozen or so blackout gags, all less than sixty seconds in duration and featuring a regular cast of bit players.  The looseness of the format made the show feel more like a variety show than a sitcom, even though the material was typically sitcomic, right down to the laugh track.  The success of NBC’s free-form Laugh-In the previous year probably inspired ABC to dilute Love‘s structure and content to appeal to a wider audience.

A popular, five-season hit in its day, Love American Style has since acquired a reputation as a uniquely cringeworthy relic.  The show is redolent with nehru jackets and paisley party shirts, but the reason it’s dated now is because it didn’t tell much truth.  If the show had anything real to say about love or sex or relationships, its disinterment for DVD in 2007 wouldn’t have inspired a long say wha? in the New York Times, of all places.  Love took the easy route – it reduced its subject to a card-file of cliches, hoary vaudeville routines, and adolescent male fantasies.

The premiere episode, which was probably shot and broadcast first because it broached a “controversial” topic, concludes with a sketch entitled “Love and the Pill.”  The segment unfurls a dialogue between the parents of a teenaged girl and her mod young boyfriend.  Revealingly, the character who’s absent while the other parties discuss her reproductive rights is the teenager who may or may not be using the pill.  The big joke – wait for it – is whether or not the parents (Robert Cummings and iconic TV mom Jane Wyatt) will opt to mash up a contraceptive and spike their daughter’s food with it.

Love American Style is always like that.  Its default perspective is vaguely establishment and relentlessly male.  It takes a traditionally “female” genre (romance) and twists it into leering sex farce.  The funniest episodes are those in which a dweeby or creepy young man comes up with some clever trick for wearing down the resistance of a beautiful woman.  (If that sounds familiar, it may be because Judd Apatow’s modern, acclaimed “adult” comedies and their imitators founder on the same shoals of arrested development.)  Segments that revolve around middle-aged or elderly couples, or African Americans, usually play like musty old vaudeville routines.  Likely that’s because the youngish, white, male executive producers, Jim Parker and Arnold Margolin, couldn’t be easily budged from a point of view that came naturally to them.

Were a viewer to marathon-watch Love American Style today, the casual sexism would grow toxic.  But I did say that I liked this show, didn’t I?  Yes, that’s the shame: within its limits, here and there, Love American Style delivers laughs.

Exploring his options: That Girl‘s Ted Bessell must choose between stewardesses Diane McBain and Anjanette Comer in “Love and the Roommate.”

One reason for that is the anthology structure.  If you got tired of dropping in on Marlo Thomas and Ted Bessell year after year, you could click over to Love American Style, safe in the knowledge that this week’s quibbling couple would make their exeunt in twenty minutes or less.  This knowledge must have appealed to the writers even more than to the viewer, because they could end a script without having to return their characters to the same stasis they were in last week and would still be in next week.  Occasionally, a Love American Style segment takes advantage of that freedom and goes in for a bawdy laugh or out on a strange tangent.

“Love and the Living Doll,” in which Arte Johnson romances a blow-up doll in order to make a neighbor girl jealous, teeters intriguingly on the boundary between icky and cute.  “Love and the Watchdog” fetches some clever telephone humor out of a dognapping scenario (the owner wants to hear the dog bark before she’ll pay a ransom).  “Love and the Dating Computer” chronicles a botched blind date between two guys whose names are Francis and Marion, who find that the computer matched them perfectly in every other regard.  What sounds like an exercise in homophobia turns witty and endearing once it becomes clear that the writers, Michael Elias and Frank Shaw, aren’t going to coat the budding bromance with a layer of gay panic.  And the casting is inspired: Broderick Crawford has great fun playing against type as a sensitive, lonely bachelor.

Then there’s the segment in which newlywed Stefanie Powers tells husband Gary Lockwood that his mouth is too small, and he tries to prove her wrong by fellating a doorknob.  It’s called, yes, “Love and the Doorknob.”  I really don’t know what to say about this absurdist gem, except that suddenly I want to know more about the private lives of Doris and Frank Hursley, the soap opera royalty (they created General Hospital) who wrote it.

Only two things are worth mentioning about the tiny throwaway sketches that Love American Style used as a connective tissue between the main segments.  The first is that they made a star of sorts out of the rubber-faced Stuart Margolin (brother of Arnold Margolin, and later to play Angel on The Rockford Files), who was the only actor in the seven-member ensemble with any talent.  The second is that the “Love American Style Players,” as they were billed in the closing credits, were interracial (two black, five white).  That makes these otherwise innocuous vignettes as much a snapshot of network television’s take on race at the end of the sixties as The Bill Cosby Show.  It’s no surprise that Love American Style’s ideas on this subject are far more squirm-inducing and out of date than Cosby’s.  Partly that’s an accident of casting: Buzz Cooper, the African American romantic lead of the group, deployed an array of slack-jawed, sho’ nuff expressions that Willie Best would have envied.  (Cooper was replaced for the second season.)

But the more troubling aspect of the short sketches is that while the cast is interracial, the couples are always of the same race.  The vignettes pair off the seven performers in every possible heterosexual combination, except for mixed race couples.  After the first few episodes, Love American Style’s avoidance of that possibility becomes a pregnant case of passive racism.  I never understood why it was such a big deal when, in March of 1969, William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols enjoyed an interracial kiss in an episode of Star Trek.  Now I’m starting to get the picture.

Out of his league: Tracy Reed and Buzz Cooper of the “Love American Style Players.”

Correction (1/22/14): The original version of this piece misidentified the writer Frank Shaw (as Frank Davis).