Title: Checks and Imbalances: Political Economy and the Rise and Fall of East Side/West Side
Abstract: American television criticism has tended downplay the significance of the 1960s, essentializing it as a continuation of the 1950s both in programming and industrial practices. With the network-Hollywood alliance solidified and the telefilm established as the predominant episodic series form by the end of the 1950s, the ensuing decade has been seen largely as a period of stabilization and stasis both commercially and creatively. There has been little in the literature, Mark Alvey contends, to indicate that American television between the late 1950s and early 1970s anything but homogeneous, formulaic, static, violent, and/or idiotic (154). The early 1970s, in turn, are perceived as a period in which stagnancy and inanity were replaced with socially relevant sitcoms, providing the moment, in Todd Gitlin's words, when television threatened grow up (205). Recent scholarship has begun challenge such received assumptions. As Alvey, in his revisionist study of the independent TV producer during the 1960s, asserts: Claims of the stability of the industry and its programming after 1959 give only the broadest outlines of the processes and practices at work during a remarkable period of change (154). Far from monolithic and trivial, 1960s television, Lynn Spigel and Mark Curtin suggest, was often a site of struggle between contending social factions . . . [and] also served as a barometer of changing social mores (5). As my own historical and textual analysis of the short-lived social-problem drama East Side/West Side (1963-1964) attempts show, 1960s television hardly qualifies as the escapist wasteland of conventional wisdom. On the contrary, what has come be called the New Frontier period appears have provided a brief window of opportunity of uncommon political and narrative boldness for prime-time commercial television. How and why this window opened, and just as suddenly slammed shut, are the questions that frame this case study. The Rise of East Side/West Side A Golden Age of poetry and power, of which this noonday's the beginning hour, declaimed Robert Frost at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy in January 1961 (qtd in Barnouw 282). Indeed, as America's youngest elected president replaced the oldest ever serve, it appeared as if a new, more idealistic age dawning.' Although the promise of the incoming administration clearly not fulfilled, and some degree even contradicted, certainly a climate more congenial social change, at least on the domestic front, encouraged. The civil rights movement no longer grudgingly tolerated but publicly endorsed (culminating in the so-called Second Emancipation Proclamation or Kennedy Manifesto), and Keynesian-styled economic policies spurred the solicitation of an engaged citizenry by word (Ask not what your country can do for you . . . ) and deed (the Peace Corps, Vista). As for television, the new administration began with a firm belief that government should also play a proactive role in the development of the country's cultural life (Watson 38). As August Heckscher, President Kennedy's special consultant on the arts, wrote: At the very least our society should make sure that the citizen has a real choice among qualities and types of programming and that the standard of excellence is somewhere maintained. . . . Government, moreover, has an ultimate responsibility for maintaining the constructive use of a resource so valuable and so scarce as the TV channels (qtd in Watson 38).2 Kennedy's political fortunes had been crucially influenced by the first televised presidential debates, and he took a personal interest in the mass media. Having been the prime subject (with Hubert Humphrey) of the breakthrough direct-cinema documentary Primary (1960), the president held the documentary form in particular esteem. According Erik Barnouw, He felt that the motion picture camera could help keep citizens informed about activities of government and should be allowed do so. …
Publication Year: 1998
Publication Date: 1998-10-01
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 1
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