Michael Z. Newman
Quality TV as Liberal TV
Alongside so many changes in American television over its years as a mass medium there have also been continuities. These are easily obscured by the presentist “Golden Age” rhetoric of popular critics in the early twenty-first century.1 One such continuity, spanning several aesthetic and industrial eras, is a tradition of quality in scripted prime-time series, which is intertwined with a tradition of liberal politics in elite urban American culture.2 More than thirty years ago, Jane Feuer argued that “quality TV is liberal TV.”3 She was talking about programs like The Mary Tyler Moore Show and WKRP in Cincinnati, and using “quality” not simply to judge relative value but to mark off a group of programs recognizable by producers and audiences alike as having prestige.4 If Quality TV of the last three decades is comparably and enduringly liberal in its politics, despite variations in genre, style, tone, and theme (and with obvious exceptions and qualifications), this suggests an enduring tradition that spans multiple phases of American TV history.5 It also overlaps significantly with films, plays, novels, and other cultural productions similarly blessed with prestige. This essay will sketch a historical outline of this tradition of Quality TV as liberal TV, identifying its sources and examining its expressions of an ideology.
In doing so I am choosing a handful of examples of emblematic or influential texts over this timespan rather than canvassing all of the televisual representations one might associate with liberalism. There will necessarily be a provisional character to my discussion, as the topic is big enough for a much longer work. Numerous details remain to be filled in, but I hope that the connections will at least seem apposite, and the liberalism of American Quality TV worthy of further critical elaboration.
Unlike more established, older art forms, television has struggled to be accepted as legitimate culture worth discussing in aesthetic terms in the first place. As Elana Levine and I have argued, American television has been an object of efforts at cultural legitimation throughout its history, though this has intensified since around the year 2000.6 In order to be deemed worthy, in order to be seen as having aesthetics worth discussing, television programs have been sorted into good and bad objects, the latter of which tend to be identified with audiences of lesser status. The assertion of good taste in television often works by negation of the forms of TV reaffirmed as trash: exploitative reality competitions, hackneyed laugh-track sitcoms, sensationalist local news, emotionally excessive daytime soap operas. The history of Quality TV is one of rescuing the exceptional good object from a vast wasteland of televisual detritus. Often this has worked by negation and analogy: the exceptional text is not really television—it’s theater, it’s literature, it’s cinema, it’s HBO, it’s Netflix or Amazon.
Such rhetorical oppositions do the cultural work of confirming the medium’s inadequacy. And such oppositions also stand in for social oppositions, as the audiences associated with “not TV” are generally more masculine, adult, and upscale by comparison with those associated with ordinary television, conceived as feminized mass culture addressed at a lowest common denominator.
Quality TV is thus a concept that combines two forms of judgment: one textual, and the other social. It is also a concept that the television producers and networks have used to position their products in the marketplace just as much as it is a concept that critics and audiences have used in making sense of TV. This goes back at least to the late 1960s, though it probably was always part of broadcasting.7 By many accounts, the television networks along with their sponsors recognized in the later 1960s that they could profit from changing strategies.8 Rather than air programs to appeal as broadly as possible to the largest number of viewers, television networks would address narrower demographic segments, in particular, affluent urbanites in the age range of 18 to 49. If this strategy appealed more to sponsors eager to reach these consumers with their 30-second spots, the television industry would profit more from the segmentation of their market. In doing so, it effected a “tilt toward liberalism” in prime-time programming.9
The content and the audience have to match well for Quality TV to work both commercially and aesthetically. One television executive closely associated with this strategy was Paul Klein, who worked as a vice-president for audience measurement at NBC in the 1960s and 70s. Klein coined the condescending phrase “least objectionable programming” or “LOP” as a way of validating his effort at market segmentation. He believed that the audience for television, faced with three options on the networks, would choose the one that pleased them sufficiently without giving offense or causing upset.10 This was an era when network executives, wealthy businessmen in New York, looked down on their audiences as lacking sophistication. It was also an era when television was in such disrepute as a commercial mass medium for a mass audience in a mass society that powerful men in the TV industry would publicly disavow their own product. The move toward Quality TV was premised on offering an alternative to LOP that would not only appeal to upscale urban consumers but also to the network executives’ own sensibilities. This would align the taste of the profitable demographic with that of the culture industries’ powerful programmers. In 1977, having returned to NBC as a programming executive after a period pursuing entrepreneurial ventures in pay TV, Klein explained to a reporter: “‘I don’t want to pick up The National Tattler audience,’ he says. ‘I’d rather have the Washington Post, New York Times, L.A. Times, Newsday audience. I think the advertiser will pay more money for my shows at a 31 share than [ABC’s] shows at a 38-share level.’”11 The programming trend first identified with this move to Quality TV was the “turn to relevance,” epitomized by CBS’s 1970 lineup that replaced aging “hayseed” shows that had been quite popular in the 1960s but with mainly rural audiences, including Hee Haw, Petticoat Junction, and Green Acres. In their place, CBS programmed All in the Family, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and eventually a whole cycle of spinoffs of these from the two independent studios most essential to this wave of “relevant” comedies: Tandem and MTM. These spinoffs included The Jeffersons and Maude spun off from Family (Tandem), and Rhoda and Lou Grant spun off from The MTM Show (MTM). Tandem was the independent production studio run by Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin, while MTM was the independent production studio run by Grant Tinker. Their success as shops strongly identified with a Quality TV brand is partly a product of the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules prohibiting networks from owning the rights to their own shows for sale into syndication. This regulatory measure aimed at increasing competition functioned to facilitate a Quality TV niche within the network television schedule, a form of product differentiation that pioneered the segmentation of the audience.
The turn to relevance had its origins in late 1960s shows that were less successful than Family and The MTM Show, but no less (or actually more) engaged in the issues of the day, including Room 222, set in a high school history class, and Storefront Lawyers, about idealistic urban do-gooders. Quickly the “relevance” branding turned into a cliché, and in the industry and the critical parlance of the time people spoke instead of “topical” shows. Michael Schudson identifies Family with a wider trend of the era that he calls the “newsification of popular culture,” which would include many types of engagement with politics and social issues in genres of media thought to be pure entertainment, politics- free, such as sitcoms and comic strips.12 Television programs made with the upscale 18-49 urban audience in mind turned out to be big hits, but their topicality was a function of their address to a narrower market than the mass audience, and they did so by having, to varying degrees, a combination of liberal themes and intelligent humor. Their creators were by and large Hollywood Jews including Lear, the most famous Quality TV author-producer figure of the 1970s (if not ever), and their audience might be assumed to share many of the creators’ sensibilities. The television of the 1960s other than news and documentary was perceived to be disengaged from the turmoil of the era; Quality TV reversed that trend by exploiting “now” themes, particularly issues with everyday relevance to practically all viewers, particularly women’s liberation, which was a touchpoint in Family, The MTM Show, and Maude. Like the women’s movement, the liberal politics of the topical wave of Quality TV was marked by the race and class identities of its influential contributors. It was largely a politics of well-to-do whites.
In taking a view of Quality TV as liberal TV, I hope to convey a touch of the condescension of 1960s radicals who bemoaned the complacency of establishment politics. Particularly at the moment of Quality TV’s emergence as a viable industrial strategy, liberalism was a mainstream ideology in distinction not only to the “silent majority” or “hardhats” aligned with post-civil-rights Republican politics of the Nixon era, but to the left movements represented in mass media as outside of the mainstream. Liberalism was for individual rights, for tolerance and equality of opportunity. But it was also reform-minded rather than agitating for radical change and countercultural upheaval or revolution. Liberals were for working within established systems, including party politics and capitalist free enterprise. In particular they were in favor of individual equal rights for oppressed or marginalized groups such as African Americans and women, and were also likely to oppose the Vietnam War.
Jewish Americans have been strongly associated with liberalism at least since the New Deal years as the meritocratic ideals of liberalism, privileging the individual’s equality of opportunity, meshed well with a marginal community’s striving for acceptance as full-fledged Americans with the same access to prosperity and achievement as (white) gentiles. As the historian Mark Dollinger writes, for Jews, liberalism has “offered a vision of pluralist democracy” in which they would find “social, economic, and political inclusion in the larger non-Jewish society.”13 Liberalism was part of postwar Jewish American striving for class mobility through education, and the meritocratic ideal that helped Jews gain access to elite institutions and professions helped the community measurably. The virtues of tolerance of difference and social justice as well appealed to a small religious and cultural minority with a history of persecution and official marginalization, and not only in Europe. While liberal Quality TV of the 1970s and 80s rarely has explicitly Jewish themes (this changes later on), and any details too ethnic, too Jewish, were routinely whitewashed from network television, the identities of the creators, writers, producers, and stars of many Quality TV series as Jews can hardly be incidental to the politics of liberalism that runs throughout this tradition of television. It is a piece of a larger discourse of Jewish liberal politics in American culture and entertainment that includes the Hollywood prestige pictures of Stanley Kramer, Sidney Lumet, and Steven Spielberg, along with many similar examples in drama and fiction.14 David Desser and Lester D. Friedman point out the “cry for social justice” tradition in Jewish American cinema that comes out of the dramatic and literary art of such figures as Arthur Miller, Clifford Odets, and Abraham Cahan who hail from the political left.15 Quality TV has also sometimes cried for social justice, or at least earnestly or humorously raised the issue.
Liberalism is one of two dominant mainstream political ideologies in a post-1960s American society that has assumed politics to be a contest of two and only two sides, and since the realignment of the dominant parties after the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act in 1965, the rise of a new right has often been premised on the construction of a liberal caricature of lifestyle-defined identity. The urban liberal is associated at various times with Brie and Chablis, with ugly but safe Volvos, or with lattes and arugula.16 This conception of the liberal functions as code for wealthy coastal and metropolitan elites who look sneeringly upon the “real America.” But it is also of a piece with the racialized fantasy of American identity that makes little room for non-white subjectivity in either camp. Liberal and conservative identity stereotypes are similar in their normative whiteness.
The new right’s construction of the liberal has also been a white identity that aligns too much with the interests of blacks and other racial and ethnic minorities to the perceived detriment of working-class whites. The epithet “limousine liberal,” made famous in a New York mayoral race in the late 1960s, figured the white liberal as a rich do-gooder out of touch with the everyday struggles of working-class whites who felt threatened by civil rights progress and the presence of blacks in their communities.17 To the extent that liberalism can be defined by its detractors, and also by lifestyle and consumer preferences as well as traditional politics, it has also been a cultural identity of elites in big cities like New York and Los Angeles. The television series considered here might be just another cultural signifier of liberalism broadly conceived as both a political ideology and a lifestyle, another product for signaling habitus, though many of these shows were too popular to have appealed principally to one narrow audience. The right wing of American politics often decry a “liberal media,” which is an obviously tendentious and self-serving bogeyman as they project it, a paranoid fantasy. But to shrink from identifying the liberalism of much American popular media and popular culture for fear of following this often deluded script is to miss a significant thread that runs through many genres and periods of television, among other media. This version of liberalism often functions to relegate more progressive or radical politics to a status beyond the boundaries of mainstream discourse, and to reaffirm a politics capable of making peace with middle-class white privilege and hostile to radical social and political change. Thus the characters, like the creators or offscreen alter egos, of the Quality TV tradition I am tracing here often inhabit the subject position of the post-1960s American liberal type: like Maude and Norman Lear, like Lou Grant and Ed Asner, and like Michael and Elliott of thirtysomething and their creators Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, the liberal is a white upper-middle-class urban or suburban surrogate for the ideal viewer, intelligent and quick-witted. This tradition continues in many permutations of Quality TV, such as Aaron Sorkin’s idealistic political and media professionals and the tireless public servant Leslie Knope of Parks and Recreation, all of whom spar against liberal fantasies of conservatives, like Leslie’s boss in her municipal government agency, Ron Swanson.
The first Quality TV author strongly associated with liberal politics was Norman Lear, the prototype of what would later come to be called a showrunner: a writer-creator-producer whose public identity is closely identified with the reputation of his or her programs. After creating a series of television hits in the 1970s, Lear went on to found the advocacy group People for the American Way to push back against the Christian right. Lear’s performance of “conspicuous authorship” is itself a mark of distinction for Quality TV, as we argue in Legitimating Television.18 For Lear and his partner Yorkin, their biographical legends as Hollywood Jewish liberals were part of the interpretive frame applied to All in the Family and its spinoffs, particularly among the Quality TV audience likely to encounter New York Times Magazine profiles and other promotional discourses. A 1975 New Yorker piece on Lear’s shows identified him as the main source of programming for a mass audience that engages with “serious contemporary social subjects,” also referenced as his style of “jokey topicality.”19
Family, Tandem’s biggest hit, was famously based on two forms of source material: the British sitcom, Till Death Us Do Part, from which it was adapted, and Lear’s own father, a patriarchal authority figure who loomed large in the creator’s life, and who shared some of Archie Bunker’s bluster and prejudice. In Americanizing the British series, Tandem set the show in a working-class Queens, New York neighborhood, and removed the ethnic and religious specificity of Lear’s Jewish family, as was typical of network television series of the time. But Lear’s identity was well-known. Family epitomizes the topical Quality TV series of the time in its dramatization of the generation gap between the World War II generation and the 1960s youth counterculture. Its provocations along ethnic and gender lines and its representation of Archie’s bigotry and his liberal daughter and son-in-law’s exasperation with him were all forms of engagement with contemporary social issues, and widely regarded as such. Bunker was famous for being bigoted but also for engaging many audiences in politics, offering a polysemy to diverse viewers who might either laugh with or at Archie, recognizing their prejudices confirmed or ridiculing his backwardness. As a sociologist told Time magazine for a cover story about television’s social engagement, Family was “a cheap way for tolerant upper-middle-class liberals to escape their own prejudices while the bigots get their views reinforced.”20
Several typical elements of liberal Quality TV are evident in Family, such as the identification of liberalism with enlightened white strivers for social justice (Mike and Gloria) and the virtues of tolerance and equality, particularly along ethnic, racial, and gender lines. (As Maude explains in one episode of her show, the opposite of a liberal is a bigot.) Archie’s offensive opinions and attitudes conveyed through malapropisms, embarrassing slurs, and comical rages ridicule him in the eyes of the target demographic, allowing for insider superiority from the sophisticated audience while keeping open a more sympathetic response from the rest of CBS’s viewers. Archie was emblematic of the “hardhat” ethnic or working-class white identity supportive of Nixon. Audiences could read this admiringly or satirically. But either way, they would encounter second-wave feminism, the civil rights and gay rights movements, anti-war activism, and other contemporary flashpoints treated comically but also seriously as matters of real social concern.
Women’s liberation is one of the key liberal agendas that unites many of the Quality TV series of the early 1970s and endures long past that period. Family has a patriarchal figure at the center of its story, and he butts up against the feminism of his daughter and others. In the episode “Archie’s Helping Hand,” Edith’s liberal friend Irene Lorenzo learns that she is earning less than a male co-worker doing the same job operating a forklift at Archie’s workplace, raising the issue of equal pay for equal work.21 But Archie earns this hourly wage as well, which makes him irate. This sets him off on one of his rants: “Equality is unfair! What’s the point of a man working hard all his life trying to get someplace if all he’s gonna do is wind up equal!” While the scenario here is one of working-class labor, the middle-class trappings of domesticity and the normative whiteness of the characters make this representation easily identifiable to the mainstream audience but also the liberal upscale demographic whose sensibilities were flattered by the social justice theme.
This is even more evident in Maude, the spinoff from Family in which Beatrice Arthur plays a more well-do-to cousin of the Bunkers who is the female, suburban, liberal inverse of Archie Bunker. Maude is a loudmouth, feminist grandmother whose feisty advocacy was based on Lear’s wife Frances. She told a newspaper reporter, “A great deal of Maude comes from my consciousness being raised by the movement . . . and from Norman’s consciousness being raised by mine.”22 Maude spoofs liberals but from a perspective of generous sympathy, a gentle caricature. Like Family, the show takes a white, liberal point of view. Lear had been profiled as a personality with some of Maude’s sensibility, having “the frustrated, crusading spirit of an old-line N.A.A.C.P and A.C.L.U. liberal 1 and a commercial craftsman’s eye for what will make a TV audience laugh [also a description of a characteristically Jewish role].” TV Guide previewed Maude as an All in the Family spinoff from that show’s “godfather, Norman Lear.”23
In one second-season episode, “Maude Takes a Job,” the theme of women’s work outside the home and the frustrations of the mother and wife role work within the liberal paradigm of social issues of equality.24 Maude starts to work as a realtor, and her husband Walter gets upset that she is prioritizing paid work ahead of the work of caring from him and their home. In many episodes, she expresses her feelings about the circumscribed role of the wife and mother, and how it gives her no identify of her own, no sense of self. But this is always in contrast with Florida, the African-American maid who takes pride in earning a living and whose labor is essential to the maintenance of Walter and Maude’s lifestyle. The show points out the hypocrisy of liberals, but it does so from a position of sympathy with them, and by addressing an audience presumed to be like the main characters rather than their domestic help.
Another second-season episode, “Maude’s Guest,” lampoons earnest white liberal investment in interracial harmony.25 In this story, Maude invites in Frankie, a “black teenage girl from the ghetto,” as she is described in the episode’s dialog, for a week of her school break. This is supposed to be an opportunity for Maude to advertise her social justice ideals. But the comedy is at Maude’s expense. She tries to be hip by adopting street speech (“stop jiving!” “right on!”) and decorating Frankie’s room with stereotypically black decor. Frankie has a chip on her shoulder about rich white liberals using her in an effort to make themselves feel better about benefiting from an unequal society. The last time she spent a week with a white family, she complains, “ it took eight days of my vacation to get rid of 200 years of their guilt.” Maude replies that they must have been “some poor, misguided liberals, you know, who are trying too hard.” The audience recognizes that she is talking about herself, that the episode is spoofing Maude. Then she delivers the kicker, a Bunker-style malapropism: “We are not trying to rip you on!” While the humor is at Maude’s expense, the perspective is still very much hers as the well-meaning do-gooder who simply goes too far. She is, after all, the title character, the one whose lines get the laughs, and the one whose identity matches that of the Quality audience. While Tandem shows were typically centered around brash, egotistical characters who hurl and take comical insults, the ensembles of the MTM studio were focused more, according to Jane Feuer’s admiring take, on a gentler, more empathetic humor of recognition.26 This was certainly true of the workplace-family ensemble of The MTM Show and its spinoffs such as Rhoda. Lou Grant was its most successful spinoff, transplanting the gruff but lovable editor played by Ed Asner from a television newsroom in Minneapolis to the city desk at a Los Angeles newspaper. Lou Grant also shifted the emphasis in Quality TV from comedy to drama, while carrying on many of the liberal preoccupations of earlier shows. These include topical engagement with social justice issues and, carrying on from The MTM Show, a concern with showing the work of media producers as one of well-meaning, ethically grounded professionals pursuing a noble calling in the service of American democracy. Even setting a television show in a media workplace at the moment when Nixon and Agnew had taken to singling out media as an institution to be blamed for the country’s woes and failures would be taken as a badge of liberalism.
The MTM Show’s most prominent element of hitting “now” issues was its heroine’s being a single woman living alone. This meshed with the women’s movement’s goals of pushing for equality of the sexes, a straightforwardly liberal agenda. The Jewish liberal identity of the show’s creator, James L. Brooks, was less visible and conspicuous than Lear’s presence in publicity for All in the Family, but it still appeared in the press. (His co- creator Gary Burns was a Christian Scientist.) In one famous anecdote told by Brooks, an executive at CBS who was not warm to the concept of the program supposedly said that “there are four things America can’t stand: Jews, men with mustaches, New Yorkers, and divorced women.”27 They made Mary unmarried (her engagement broken) rather than divorced, and set the show in the Midwest, but the liberal quality of what the TV networks were so carefully avoiding is unmistakable in this quip.
Lou Grant began in 1977 and ran for five seasons on CBS. It is a pivotal show in the history of Quality TV for being a one-hour drama (spun off of a half-hour comedy) with a strong social justice agenda, though its messages tend to be understated and the storytelling relies as much on ensemble character humor and workplace politics as it does on issues of the week. After the influence of Dallas and prime-time soap operas led to the 1980s crop of MTM “prime-time novels” like Hill Street Blues and St. Elsewhere, Lou Grant’s episodic storytelling built around guest stars, a standard convention of 1970s dramas, gave way to more serialized narrative integrating larger character ensembles into an expanded canvas. This makes Lou Grant look somewhat dated by comparison, not quite there yet in terms of the Quality TV formula of subsequent years which is strongly identified with serialization. But taking it on its own terms and in the context of the later 1970s, we can recognize Lou Grant as the key exponent of Quality TV in the years between the breakout successes of Tandem and MTM in the early 1970s, and the rise of NBC’s prestige cop/doc serials in the 1980s.
Lou Grant was Ed Asner’s show, and as is sometimes the case in television, the authorial agency of an actor/star can come to represent the text as much as that of the creator, producer, or writers. Asner was a prominent Hollywood liberal in the late 1970s and early 1980s, speaking publicly about many causes and serving as the president of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG). It was widely assumed by industry workers and the Quality TV audience that the politics of Asner the actor were continuous with those of Grant the newspaper editor, and the identity of the two personae blurred together in popular press discourse. Lou Grant was not exactly a crusading muckraker or even an investigative reporter, but the show consistently represents the fictional Tribune advocating for good causes, acting as a check on power, and exposing wrongdoing. The representation of news work lives up to the adage that the press’s role is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted. As the critic Edwin Diamond noted in 1980, the values of the Tribune staff were those Herbert Gans identifies in Discovering the News, which also happen to align with liberal values: moderation, reform, independence, enlightened democracy, and responsible capitalism.28 In the post-Watergate era, when All the President’s Men was a frequent touchstone and inspiration glorifying the journalist as a hero, the news editor functioned as a kind of ethical guidepost. Asner was more outspoken than Grant, and he was an advocate for causes (including stances on foreign policy, electoral politics, and abortion), but the similarities were notable. In Todd Gitlin’s admiring description, Lou Grant “discoursed amiably, seriously and influentially—if at times sonorously and predictably—about unemployment, dog fighting, cattle poisoning, illegal aliens, chemical dumping, blacklisting and even the start of nuclear war.”29
When the show was canceled after five seasons, there was widespread news that political censorship was involved, with the executives of CBS deciding behind closed doors to avoid further trouble with sponsors and conservative activists by ending its run. The program’s ratings were not high, but as a prestige product this might not have led to its demise if not for Asner’s outspokenness. This made both the actor and the fictional representation into a martyr for free speech at the hands of a commercialized television business too beholden to sponsors. But it was the authority of playing Lou Grant, the idealized principled journalist, that gave Asner much of his platform in the first place and that added gravity to his pronouncements.
The politics of Lou Grant was precisely what made it seem distinct and worthwhile as a television series in the late 1970s. Many journalists praised its representations of journalism as a noble trade, but also singled it out in relation to the rest of the television schedule with statements like: “Now in its fifth year, Lou Grant is one of the few shows on television that don’t insult an average intelligence . . . the scripts are literate, intelligent, and by the standards of television, unafraid.”30 Upon its cancellation, the New York Times television critic John J. O’Connor praised Lou Grant for bringing “a distinctive element of substance to the television schedule.”31 But if anything, Asner’s political activities were to the left of the character, demonstrating the limits of liberalism within American commercial mainstream media in the 1980s. Asner was seen to have crossed the line by raising money to support victims of the ruling military junta in El Salvador at a time of American anticommunist fervor around Central America. For this he was called a communist swine, and it fed into guild politics as Charlton Heston denounced Asner and campaigned against him for refusing to honor Ronald Reagan with a SAG award. The cancellation was regarded by left-leaning observers as a form of chilling speech, of Hollywood’s blacklisting Asner for being too radical. Asner’s Jewishness revived associations between Jews and the Old Left (the American Communist Party) and with the anti-Semitism of the HUAC blacklist era. In some circles, the perception of Lou Grant’s cancellation was that gentile defenders of American values (Heston, Reagan, Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority) reined in the ideological excesses of liberal Jewish Hollywood and network television.
Michael Schudson’s assessment of Lou Grant, written before the semi-scandal of its cancellation in 1982, places it squarely in the tradition of Quality TV by contrasting it against the vast majority of the broadcast schedule and by identifying the show’s political perspective, noting how unusual it was in the late 1970s for a fictional dramatic television series to have a political perspective. “Occasionally the show feels like an adult ‘Sesame Street,’” Schudson observes, “with informative lessons in current events being rescued from documentary dreariness by a modest plotline and a familiar cast of attractive characters.” Lou Grant’s perspective is described as liberal and reforming, and invoking the sociological theory of C. Wright Mills, Schudson notes the program’s efforts to connect public issues and private troubles. But as a one-hour weekly episodic drama, it’s not surprising that Schudson found Lou Grant to be better at dealing with the troubles than with the issues, which can hardly ever be solved in an hour-long episode of a TV series. As a consequence of what may just be its form, Schudson concludes that Lou Grant’s political failure is one that shows well-meaning liberals ultimately helpless to affect large social problems even while they battle effectively with private troubles. I think that is a failure. But the failure of Lou Grant is also the failure of American journalism and American liberalism.32
Similar to many American TV shows that take on social justice issues and engage with politics, the perspective is of well-meaning white middle-class people of strong ethical character. They are represented grappling with difficult social problems, but ultimately the impact of the representation is to show how they are affected and what it forces them to recognize. This offers a vision of social issues that may be more invested in understanding them than imagining another society, another politics.
Perhaps no American television show has ever been more characteristic of this inward focus than thirtysomething, the most prominent example of liberal Quality TV of the 1980s. A family and workplace drama created and produced by Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, thirtysomething ran on ABC for four seasons from 1987-1991 While never earning huge ratings, thirtysomething was prominently identified with a “quality demographic” of the same type as the characters represented in the story world: young urban professionals of a creative bent. It was the “yuppie show,” a term generally used with some degree of condescension or mockery. thirtysomething was the paramount example from its time of network television aiming narrowly at affluent consumers whose attention would be of greater value to advertisers than larger numbers of “mass audience” consumers. The press typically presented the thirtysomething aesthetic as one of low-key realism and introspective whining, leading to a love/hate reputation.33 Entertainment Weekly observed in 1990 that even people claiming to hate the show “are already acknowledging that the show works on them in ways ordinary television does not… love it or disdain it, thirtysomething forces your engagement.”34 The show was seen to capture something real about “the way we live now” while also giving ammunition to many yuppie-haters who recognized the characters as members of a dissatisfied privileged elite suffering from nice problems to have.
The central characters of thirtysomething are Michael and Elliot, friends and partners in an advertising agency in Philadelphia; their wives, Hope and Nancy, who both juggle child-care responsibilities with other kinds of work (Hope as a writer and Nancy as an artist/illustrator); Michael’s friend Gary, an English professor who fails to get tenure, and his cousin Melissa, a photographer; and Hope’s friend Ellyn, who works in municipal government. The central tensions in the series are all about liberal values in the lives of well-off white urbanites struggling to reconcile the countercultural idealism of their formative years with the demands of work and family. As Jane Feuer argues, the show “creates an aesthetic out of yuppie guilt.”35 The characters live in a world shaped by second-wave feminism, but the wives and mothers still perform traditional care work. They are generally sensitive, creative souls but their professional lives require earning money in the debased commercial media industry, where Michael and Elliot exploit their talents for profit by producing advertising campaigns.
Many thirtysomething episodes engage explicitly with social justice themes, such as the second season episode “Politics,” which weaves in flashbacks of the male characters in their school days with a present-day plot about a college friend who hires Michael and Elliot to work for the campaign of a right-wing political candidate.36 Whether at home or at work, the underlying compromise required for the good life is framed as “selling out,” meaning giving up on values formerly central to one’s identity. The women in the thirtysomething world in particular express their contempt for this conservative political Senate candidate, who adheres to a “family values” platform inimical to feminism. Meanwhile, Gary’s girlfriend Susannah, who works for an urban nonprofit agency dedicated to helping African Americans called Race Street, comes to Michael and Hope’s house for dinner and Michael and Susannah argue about gentrification (Michael defending it to a point). As the central character in the ensemble, and the showrunners’ main surrogate as the creative, Jewish, baby-boomer husband and father, Michael’s concerns are most prominent in the episode and all other perspectives are focalized through him. He has an obligation to earn a living to support his family, and this is a counterbalance to the putative virtue of refusing work on a campaign unfriendly to his own political values even if it means less income and security. Everything comes back to Michael, the professional man whose individual needs and responsibilities are in competition with a broader vision of social justice.
Another second-season thirtysomething poses a similar conflict. In “Best of Enemies,” Hope is assigned to write about Race Street and other community social action agencies for the newspaper, which is the setup for a further dramatics between Susannah and Michael.37 Hope learns that Race Street has spent grant funds intended for one purpose on something else, a potential scandal, and she has to decide whether to report this and potentially compromise the good works done by the agency. At this point in the series, Gary and Susannah are expecting a baby, and Michael helps Gary look for a new apartment big enough for their new family. Gary tries to prevail on Hope not to report the details about Race Street to protect Susannah. This leads them into deeper conflicts about Hope and Michael’s choices, their bourgeois lifestyle in particular. Hope asks Michael during one intimate scene between the two of them: “Have we lost it? I mean, are we the totally compromised sellouts that Gary and Susannah think we are?” Michael answers yes and says, “We’re working on a family here. Maybe that is selfish. Maybe we should spend more time thinking about what surrounds our family.” As in Lou Grant, and episodic television in general, private troubles are easier and ultimately more likely to find resolution than public issues.
The characters and situations of thirtysomething, while generationally and generically different from those of Maude and Lou Grant, are in their own ways presented for their audience’s identification. Similar to Maude and many liberal shows, the role of (professional, white, straight) women is a central preoccupation, but this is represented as a limited vision of equality for those of privilege. Similar to The MTM Show and Lou Grant, the media workplace aspect of thirtysomething compliments the audience for its insider understanding of how media function institutionally, in this instance flattering viewers for getting the compromised nature of the advertising industry and the people who work in it. The demystification of media work, part of the “self-reflexive” charge of much Quality TV as Feuer and Robert J. Thompson have recognized, fits well within the idealistic reformist politics of liberal elites.38 The tensions between sixties ideals and eighties realities made for themes that capture much of the late Reagan era’s sensibility in elite American culture. The identity of the show’s creative team as alter egos for the main characters, and the presence of Zwick and Herskovitz’s spouses among the show’s writers, added conspicuous authorship typical of Quality TV, making the mixed marriage of Michael (Jewish) and Hope (Protestant) into a fictionalized version of the Jewish creators’ own relationships to women who also wrote episodes of the series. Their public personae invited this association, as evidenced by their contributions to the volume Thirtysomething Stories, which includes episode scripts and essayistic reflections by their various authors.39
Despite their differences of setting and theme, and despite coming from quite disparate moments in American television history, thirtysomething and Mad Men (AMC, 2007-2015) have much in common. Both are set in the world of advertising, both explore the tension between creative and commercial values, and both focus on the sixties as a key moment of change in American society. These themes are all represented in both programs through the viewpoint of characters who are, typical for Quality TV, white and middle-class. By concluding here with some observations on Mad Men, I want to carry forward elements of the Quality TV tradition that might seem specific to the 1970s and 80s, to appreciate their continuity. Like Lou Grant and thirtysomething, Mad Men functioned as a prestige loss leader for its network, satisfied with small but upscale audiences as a way of burnishing AMC’s reputation and making over its brand identity.40 Also like earlier shows set in the media workplace, Mad Men flatters its audience for recognizing the mystifications of media, pulling back the curtain to reveal the true inner workings of the institution. The savvy consumer is inoculated in this way from the ill effects of mass media.
Mad Men’s historical setting is rather different from the examples considered so far, and the “we know better now” effect of scenes of pregnant women drinking and smoking, of babies riding in cars unrestrained, of casual racism and sexism, produces an ambivalent nostalgia alongside the stylishness of the period decor and fashion. This ambivalence can be plotted directly onto the show’s politics: it’s an ambivalence within liberalism, from a liberal’s point of view. thirtysomething’s tension between sixties and eighties values is not so different. Mad Men’s contemplation of women’s roles in work and family, which comes from comparing the three principal female characters, Betty, Joan, and Peggy, invites viewers to recognize both the gains and the frustrations of the women’s movement. Equality and respect are harder to come by than anyone would have hoped; the educated, cultivated viewer may compare past and present and ask how much progress really has been made. But the gains or failures are those of white, middle-class or rich women within a professional urban milieu or a suburban family ideal.
The character in Mad Men who best exemplifies its politics, and who comes closest to being the author Matthew Weiner’s surrogate, is Peggy Olson. Peggy is the Bay Ridge, Brooklyn girl who appears in the first episode as a new secretary in the advertising agency and works her way out of that role and into a creative position by virtue of her intelligence, talent, and striving to accomplish her goals. Much of the series’ ongoing, unfolding story is Peggy’s trajectory toward professional achievement, which comes at great personal cost (she gives up a baby conceived with a coworker who remains unaware of its existence; she has a frustrating experience of trying to gain the respect of men in a sexist industry). Her boss Don Draper relies on her to do strong work, but he takes the credit and stands in the way of her career progress. Her colleagues exclude her from the boys’ club or else marginalize her because she doesn’t conform to their ideals of femininity. In all, the advertising world of the 1960s is represented as a sham of a meritocracy where the best ideas are supposed to prevail, while it’s actually structured to favor masculinity, whiteness, wealth, and status, and patriarchal norms of professional behavior govern the workplace. Against this backdrop, the parade of history passes by: President Kennedy’s election, the Cuban Missile crisis, and his assassination; the civil rights and student protest movements; the war; the killings of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy, and the political and social unrest of 1968; the moon landing. Over seven seasons, Peggy has a number of triumphs and setbacks personally and professionally, and she is able to accomplish far more than any black secretary who comes to work at the agency, and more than some of the men as well. The historical backdrop is not just a reliving of the era’s traumas and upheavals but a reminder of the progress of liberal politics and the emergence of a society shaped by new notions of equal rights and opportunity, though limited by traditions and customs of the older generations hesitant to change. In all, however, the experiences of the time are always filtered through the experiences of the individual, and typically for Quality TV, it is the identity most likely to be shared by the idealized target market: white, upscale, urban, creative. As in many Quality TV representations, a combination of sophistication about media itself, flattering the audience as savvy, and a preoccupation with individual equal and fair treatment among the privileged few do much of the ideological work.
The point here is not to argue that the dense, allusive narrative of Mad Man, the topical, brash humor of Maude, the episodic newspaper investigations of Lou Grant, and the intimate domestic drama of thirtysomething, can all be reduced to a common message or narrowly defined market segment. These are but a handful of brief examples, and their variation and diversity is as apparent as their shared aesthetics or politics, a product of their authorship and audience address, as well as an enduring current not only in television but in American arts more generally. As much as they advocate for any stance in particular, these television representations also set limits for political discourse in mainstream American popular culture. Their liberalism forecloses on a more radical or disruptive politics of challenge to the prevailing social structure.This isn’t to say that a more critical, a more avant-garde television aesthetics and ideological agenda is not possible within the systems of broadcast or cable media. But selling prestige television to several iterations of the Quality audience has been a business model at least since All in the Family, a strategy that has accomplished much in the way of securing and furthering the cultural legitimacy of the medium. In a commercial cultural form, flattering a desirable audience’s sensibilities will likely be more feasible and productive for creative artists and executives alike than challenging them too aggressively. In this way, following Jane Feuer, we can see that liberal TV is also conservative TV, not just in the ways it plays differently to different audiences. (In the manner of Family, which could be regarded as sympathetic to bigotry, thirtysomething could be similarly (mis)read as a critique of yuppie self-absorption, while Mad Men could be a meditation on liberalism’s failures).41 Quality TV is also conservative in the sense that television itself has been conservative: commercially constrained, incremental in its willingness to innovate socially and culturally, helping audiences adapt to change rather than ushering it in. This may be no less true of much Quality TV today, in an age of rapidly multiplying and diversifying commercial options, than it ever was.
1. Brett Martin, Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Revolution (New York: Penguin, 2013); Emily Nussbaum, “When TV Became Art,” New York, Dec. 4, 2009; Alan Sepinwall, The Revolution Was Televised (New York: Touchstone, 2013).
2. The “tradition of quality” may be a familiar phrase for those acquainted with film history: it was a derisive name Cahiersdu Cinéma critic Francois Truffaut gave to French films of the 1940s and 50s that addressed a cultivated audience whose aesthetic standards were literary and theatrical in contrast to the specifically cinematic and often downmarket appeals admired by the auteurists of Cahiers (e.g., in the examples of Hollywood genre films that they often preferred to literary or stage adaptations highly regarded within elite French culture of the time).
3. Jane Feuer, “The MTM Syle,” in MTM Quality Television, edited by Jane Feuer, Paul Kerr, and Tise Vhimagi (London: BFI, 1984), 56.
4. Robert J. Thompson, Television’s Second Golden Age: From Hill Street Blues to ER (Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1997), considers Quality TV to be a genre.
5. I am capitalizing Quality TV to identify it thus, as a category somewhat independent of judgments of value. This follows the same usage in Michael Z. Newman and Elana Levine, Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status (New York: Routledge, 2011).
6. Newman and Levine, Legitimating Television.
7. Philip Sewell, Television in the Age of Radio: Modernity, Imagination, and the Making of a Medium (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2014).
8. Erik Barnouw, The Sponsor: Notes on a Modern Potentate (New York: Oxford UP, 1978), 68-75; Sally Bedell, Up the Tube: Prime-Time TV and the Silverman Years (New York: Viking, 1981), 34-39; Feuer et al., 3-4.
9. Ed Papazian, Medium Rare: The Evolution, Workings and Impact of Commercial Television, rev. ed. (New York: Media Dynamics, 1991), 74.
10. Paul L. Klein, “Why You Watch What You Watch When You Watch,” TV Guide, July 24, 1971, 6-9.
11. Tom Shales, “A Programmer’s Maxims,” Washington Post, Dec. 7, 1977.
12. Michael Schudson, “National News Culture and the Informational Citizen,” in The Power of News (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996), 169-188.
13. Marc Dollinger, Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America (Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000), 4.
14. Sarah Kozloff, “Notes on Sontag and ‘Jewish Moral Seriousness’ in American Movies,” in Hollywood’s Chosen People: The Jewish Experience in American Cinema, by Daniel Bernardi, Murray Pomerance, and Hava Tirosh-Samuelson (Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2012), 111-123.
15. David Desser and Lester D. Friedman, American Jewish Filmmakers 2nd edition (Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois Press, 2004), 14-16.
16. On the language of naming the liberal lifestyle, see Geoffrey Nunberg, Talking Right: How Conservatives Turned Liberalism into a Tax-Raising, Latte- Drinking, Sushi-Eating, Volvo-Driving, New York Times-Reading, Body-Piercing, Hollywood-Loving, Left-Wing Freak Show (New York: Public Affairs, 2006).
17. Steve Fraser, The Limousine Liberal: How an Incendiary Image United the Right and Fractured America (New York: Basic Books, 2016).
18. Newman and Levine, Legitimating Television, 40.
19. Michael J. Arlen, “The Media Dramas of Norman Lear,” The New Yorker, May 10, 1975. A counterpoint to this take, and a much fuller appreciation of Lear’s 1970s work, is Horace Newcomb, “The Television Artistry of Norman Lear,” Prospects 2 (1976), edited by Jack Salzman, 109-125.
20. “The Team Behind Archie Bunker & Co.,” Time, Sept. 25, 1972.
21. Originally aired October 19, 1974.
22. Martin Kasindorf, “Archie and Maude and Fred and Norman and Alan,” New York Times Magazine, June 24, 1973.
23. TV Guide, 11, 1971.
24. Originally aired October 23, 1973
25. Originally aired January 8, 1974
26. Feuer et al., MTM Quality Television, 40-41.
27. Feuer et al., MTM Quality Television, 6. As Jennifer Keishin Armstrong tells this story in her book about the making of The MTM Show, it was a man from CBS’s research department who argued that “American audiences won’t tolerate divorce in a lead of a series any more than they will tolerate Jews, people with mustaches, and people who live in New York.” Armstrong, Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted and All the Brilliant Minds Who Made The Mary Tyler Moore Show (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 36.
28. Edwin Diamond, “Lou Grant—Too Good, Too True?” American Film 5 (July-Aug.1980), 20-24.
29. Todd Gitlin, “The Screening Out of ‘Lou Grant,’” The Nation, June 26, 1982.
30. Pete Hamill, “What Does Lou Grant Know About El Salvador?” New York, March 15, 1982, 24-30; see also Edwin Diamond, “Lou Grant—Too Good, Too True?” American Film 5 (July-August 1980), 20-24.
31. John J. O’Connor, “TV: A Characteristic Finale from ‘Lou Grant,’” New York Times, 13, 1982.
32. Michael Schudson, “The Politics of Lou Grant,” in Television: The Critical View, 4th ed., ed. Horace Newcomb (New York: Oxford UP, 1987), 101-105.
33. Mary Murphy’s “Working with his real-life wife on thirtysomething, Ken Olin worries about the strains on their relationship” (TV Guide, June 11, 1988, 27-32) was one of many popular press items asserting that the show is either loved or hated. It also publicized the cast as living similar lives to the characters they play, and asserted that Michael Steadman, the central male character on the show, was an extension of the creators and writers and an expression of their personal experiences and feelings.
34. Ken Tucker, “Why We’re Still Watching and Arguing About ‘thirtysomething,’” Entertainment Weekly, May 4, 1990, 78-87.
35. Jane Feuer, Seeing Through the Eighties: Television and Reaganism (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995), 68.
36. Originally aired January 17, 1989.
37. Originally aired May 16, 1989.
38. Feuer et al., MTM Quality Television; Thompson, Television’s Second Golden Age.
39. Writers of Thirtysomething, Thirtysomething Stories (New York: Pocket Books, 1991).
40. Deborah Jaramillo, “AMC: Stumbling toward a New Television Canon,” Television & New Media 14 (2013), 167-183; Jon Lafayette, “The ‘Mad Men’ Lesson: Buzz Lights Up a Network,” Broadcasting & Cable, July 19, 2010; Anthony N. Smith, “Putting the Premium into Basic: Slow-Burn Narratives and the Loss-Leader Function of AMC’s Original Drama Series,” Television & New Media 14 (2013), 150-166; Brian Steinberg, “Mad Men is Great Art, Not Such Great TV Business,” Advertising Age, March 27, 2012.
41. Feuer et al., MTM Quality Television, 57-59.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Arlen, Michael J. “The Media Dramas of Norman Lear.” The New Yorker, May 10, 1975.
Armstrong, Jennifer Keishin. Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted and All the Brilliant Minds Who Made The Mary Tyler Moore Show. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013.
Barnouw, Erik. The Sponsor: Notes on a Modern Potentate. New York: Oxford UP, 1978.
Bedell, Sally. Up the Tube: Prime-Time TV and the Silverman Years. New York: Viking, 1981.
Desser, David and Lester D. Friedman. American Jewish Filmmakers, 2nd edition. Urbana and Chicago: U of Illinois Press, 2004.
Diamond, Edwin. “Lou Grant—Too Good, Too True?” American Film 5 (July-Aug. 1980): 20-24.
Dollinger, Marc. Quest for Inclusion: Jews and Liberalism in Modern America. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000.
Feuer, Jane. Seeing Through the Eighties: Television and Reaganism. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1995.
–. “The MTM Syle.” In MTM Quality Television, edited by Jane Feuer, Paul Kerr, and Tise Vhimagi, 56. London: BFI, 1984.
Fraser, Steve. The Limousine Liberal: How an Incendiary Image United the Right and Fractured America. New York: Basic Books, 2016.
Gitlin, Todd. “The Screening Out of ‘Lou Grant.’” The Nation, June 26, 1982.
Hamill, Pete. “What Does Lou Grant Know About El Salvador?” New York, March 15, 1982. Jaramillo, Deborah. “AMC: Stumbling toward a New Television Canon.” Television & New Media 14 (2013): 167-183.
Kasindorf, Martin. “Archie and Maude and Fred and Norman and Alan.” New York Times Magazine, June 24, 1973.
Klein, Paul L. “Why You Watch What You Watch When You Watch.” TV Guide. July 24, 1971.
Kozloff, Sarah. “Notes on Sontag and ‘Jewish Moral Seriousness’ in American Movies.” In Hollywood’s Chosen People: The Jewish Experience in American Cinema, ed. by Daniel Bernardi, Murray Pomerance, and Hava Tirosh- Samuelson. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 2012.
Lafayette, Jon. “The ‘Mad Men’ Lesson: Buzz Lights Up a Network.” Broadcasting & Cable, July 19, 2010.
Martin, Brett. Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Revolution. New York: Penguin, 2013.
Newman, Michael Z. and Elana Levine. Legitimating Television: Media Convergence and Cultural Status. New York: Routledge, 2011.
Nussbaum, Emily. “When TV Became Art,” New York, Dec. 4, 2009.
O’Connor, John J. “TV: A Characteristic Finale from ‘Lou Grant.’” New York Times, Sept. 13, 1982.
Papazian, Ed. Medium Rare: The Evolution, Workings and Impact of Commercial Television, rev. ed. New York: Media Dynamics, 1991.
Schudson, Michael. “National News Culture and the Informational Citizen.” In The Power of News. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1996.
–. “The Politics of Lou Grant.” In Television: The Critical View, 4th ed., edited by Horace Newcomb, 101-105. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.
Sepinwall, Alan. The Revolution Was Televised. New York: Touchstone, 2013.
Sewell, Philip. Television in the Age of Radio: Modernity, Imagination, and the Making of a Medium. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2014.
Shales, Tom. “A Programmer’s Maxims.” Washington Post, Dec. 7, 1977.
Smith, Anthony N. “Putting the Premium into Basic: Slow-Burn Narratives and the Loss-Leader Function of AMC’s Original Drama Series.” Television & New Media 14 (2013): 150-166.
Steinberg, Brian. “Mad Men is Great Art, Not Such Great TV Business.” Advertising Age, March 27, 2012.
“The Team Behind Archie Bunker & Co.” Time, Sept. 25, 1972.
Tucker, Ken. “Why We’re Still Watching and Arguing About ‘thirtysomething.’” Entertainment Weekly, May 4, 1990.
TV Guide, Sept. 11, 1971.
Writers of Thirtysomething. Thirtysomething Stories. New York: Pocket Books, 1991.