How TV Of The New Golden Age Laid Bare The Lies The First Golden Age Sold To America, Introduction

 

 

In an episode of Homicide Tim Bayliss (Kyle Secor) and Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher)  are discussing how many times they have delivered the news to the relatives of the recently murdered. Bayliss tells Frank that it didn’t used to be like this. The always skeptical Pembleton asks what he means. Bayliss says: “Back in the 1950s. You know, I Love Lucy, Leave it to Beaver. These kind of things didn’t happen back then.” Pembleton doesn’t even take a breath: “Any of these shows show a bunch of men in white robes burning a cross on a lawn?” Bayliss, deadpan, says: “I don’t remember that episode.”

So much of the conservative movement power is built in the nostalgia factor. I don’t deny the racist undertones, but much of it also based on the idea that change is scary and that in the past things were better. Recent sociological studies show that this is a belief held by many people the concept that no matter how much evidence there is things are better and safer now, they were better before. Many of these people surveyed consistently believe it was better before they were born.

I don’t pretend the world today is perfect or even very good. But I find it impossible to believe that, voluntarily, any American would want to live thirty or forty years ago. That so many conservative politicians in their twenties and thirties seem to long for an era that ‘perished before they were even born’ is particularly ironic considering how much of their rise to prominence would not have happened without social media. Yet across the globe so many politicians who have lived their entire lives before the 1950s constantly seem to argue that their countries would be better if they could return to ‘the values’ of the 1950s.

Anyone who does even a cursory history of America alone in the 1950s knows what a turbulent time it was. There was the Red Scare, the looming threat of the Cold War, the battle over civil rights in the South in the 1950s which increasingly were violent, the repression of women to domestic live and the denial of the existence of homosexuals. So why do we have this belief that the 1950s were a halcyon time? Because of Hollywood. The fact that during same period the blacklist was in full force and destroying the careers and lives of hundreds of people was no doubt a partial reason that so much of the product we got, particularly on television in the 1950s was that of wholesomeness and with no controversy at all. That so many of the writers in that medium chafed at the restrictions put on them by the censors apparently never made it public knowledge either: Rod Serling essentially wrote The Twilight Zone because in a sci-fi universe he could tell the stories he couldn’t in the real world.

So much of the controversy against Hollywood by the right – basically as long as I have been alive and even before – has been based on their certainty that everything was good in the world until Hollywood started putting sex and violence in the movies and TV. They always wanted to put them in their films and TV, they just weren’t allowed to for a very long time. Hollywood couldn’t do it until the ratings system was created in 1969; TV couldn’t really do it until cable TV became a force in the 1990s. But the right believes correlation equals causation as much as the left does which is why whenever they look back to the past, they always start with the 1950s. That’s the America they believe existed even though it was just TV. They are counting on the nostalgia factor and the belief the past was better to win over the public – and it has worked more than Democrats want to admit.

One of the more interesting things about Peak TV has been that it has been poking holes in the idea of institutions. This started with HBO, of course and while it’s clear in all of the three classics that started the era, it applies the most to The Sopranos.

There are quite a few things you notice about The Sopranos. Perhaps the clearest tragedy of Tony Soprano – aside from, of course, being a psychotic killer – is that he’s a dinosaur trapped in an institution that is dying. Tony knows this even at the start of the show: “I feel like I came in at the end,” he tells Melfi in the Pilot and that’s true.

Always underlying The Sopranos is the fact that the Mafia as it was in the past is coming to an end as a force in organized crime. David Chase makes it clear on multiple occasions how small the world Tony and his crew live in is compared to reality: the first time in the second episode when Paulie and Silvio visit a coffee shop and its clear how out of touch they are. The more critical story is something we don’t note but is very apparent even on the first viewing of the show. It’s not just that all of the people in Tony’s world are white males; it’s that none of them are very young.

This is a truth that plays out throughout the entire show. Most of the ‘new faces’ are in fact former gangsters who have gotten out of jail after long stretches and themselves are out of touch with the world, much less that of how organized crimes work. The entire series takes place either in New Jersey and New York, which is the extent of the Mafia empire by the late 1990s. The Italians no longer have the control they once did and they no longer have the reach they once did. They are clinging desperately to a way of life that is going to expire.

And its telling how often in the series how much the characters quote The Godfather and its other movies. You wonder sometimes how many of them ended up becoming gangsters as much because the movies made it look glamorous as well as the fact it was in their families. It’s also telling how much time Christopher (Michael Imperioli) spends in the series yearning for Hollywood, wanting to be a screenwriter and eventually helping make a low-budget film with a TV writer (Tim Daly) he met in AA.

Christopher, it’s worth noting, is the outlier on The Sopranos in which he’s the youngest member of the Soprano inner circle. Most of the younger characters on the show, beginning with Chris’ friend Brendan in Season 1 and ending with Jackie Aprile, Jr in Season 3 are among the most notable casualties in the series. The message, which the show makes very clear, is that the Mafia is a dying institution because the younger generation, trying to find their own way, can never please their elders of which Tony is the most prominent.

Tony is a dinosaur because he can’t understand any part of the world he lives in. He constantly references old Hollywood when he needs to find a way through life. “Whatever happened to the strong, silent type?” he tells Melfi at one point. “Like Gary Cooper.” It’s telling that Tony keeps longing for an actor to find his model for reality. He constantly quotes films from the golden age of Hollywood and seems constantly disillusioned by everything. Tony is running Jersey, but he is the head of a pond that will just keep shrinking. He reacts like so many other white men, lashing out at any change, stuck in the past and constantly making sexist and racist tropes and unwilling to let even his family have any freedom beyond what they want. You wonder if the sole reason he leans so much on Christopher is because of his disappointment with his son, who he never seems to truly understand and is always harder on then Meadow. A.J. is a disappointment to both parents but Tony is far more brutal to him, particularly when he begins to read philosophy and poetry. He is just as brutal to Christopher, who never does anything to please him.

Even before he betrays Adriana to Tony, Christopher has been shot and laid near death and developed a heroine addiction. At one point he tells Adriana that his Uncle Tony is ‘the man I’m going to hell for.’  Christopher had a chance at one point to become part of the film industry in Season 2, but Tony’s utter disapproval and disdain for it essentially stomp it down. Tony believes in a way of life that is going to destroy everyone around him but as far as he’s concerned his nephew is not entitled to take his own path. When he finally kills Christopher near the end of the series, the only real shock is that he chose to dirty his hands with it: at every opportunity, Tony has chosen a dying institution over anyone else’s free will.

That the final episode of The Sopranos is called ‘Made in America’ is a great irony. Tony Soprano was made in America, but he has devoted his entire life based on an outmoded version of it rather than the one that exists. Whether or not he dies in the aftermath of the finale doesn’t matter he never really lived in the real world.

I must say, even with that, I can’t see Tony ever becoming a Trump supporter. It’s not just his whole attitude (“The mouth on this guy” he’d say) but Tony’s from Jersey and he got firsthand exposure to how Trump did ‘legitimate business’. If Tony had ever spent thirty seconds with 45 on a deal at anytime during the series run (or before given Trump’s early career) the Donald might have ended up in concrete under the ‘other’ Four Seasons even before he hosted The Apprentice.

Much of the best TV in the 21^st Century has been when it exposes the past as to show that the sepia toned way we looked at it was not only never real but worse than we imagined. There are any number of series that could illustrate this but for the purposes of this series, I intend to focus on four shows that have aired mostly in the last decade and that take a deep look at parts of the 20^th century that the nostalgia factor is highest for. All of these shows won multiple Emmys, two of them won Best Drama multiple times, one has won Best Comedy and one of them is an underrated masterpiece that I consider one of the greatest shows of the 2010s.

The series that will be the most familiar to readers are Mad Men, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and The Crown, specifically the first two seasons. The less familiar one will be Masters of Sex, Showtime’s fictionalized drama about the lives of groundbreaking sex researchers William Masters and Virginia Johnson.

If you know these series you are no doubt aware that all of them focus primarily on Caucasian white people and mostly wealthy and middle class ones. This is a deliberate decision. While there have been many brilliant recent series that have shown the reality of minorities in this era – most prominently Lovecraft Country -   the stories I want to focus on the stories of those in the world that has been reflected in the ‘50s and 60s comedies and drama of that era and reveal the darker truths beneath them.

Mad Men will look at the turbulent 1960s from the perspective of the so-called ‘silent majority’ and shows that even there the revolution was affecting the privileged and the dissatisfaction was evident even among the privileged. Masters of Sex looks at two people who were blamed by many prominent people for turning America prurient and making most Americans sexual deviant when the show makes it clear that all of these practices  - particularly homosexuality prostitution, and all the different sexual positions people take – were always there and all they did was report it. The Crown shows by looking at England through its most cherished institution – the monarchy – shows not only how broken the system but it how corrupts the people within in and shows the rot at the center of Great Britain even when it ruled the waves. And The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel looks at the sea change of the entertainment industry in the 1950s and 1960s to show the flaws within the family unit post-World War II and whether professional success is ever worth the cost of personal relationships.

So many people believe in the idea of devoting their lives to, if I may quote Elaine May, ‘a way of life that perished long before they were ever born.” By looking at these shows, we will take a look into that era and reveal that even the people who lived that life were not only not celebrating it but were looking back even then to a previous era.