I’ve got a few things on my mind today but nothing that adds up to a whole post, so here’s the odds and ends.

The news that the Who (or what passes for it these days as long as Keith Moon and John Entwistle remain dead) might be playing at the Super Bowl halftime this year is baffling. (The NFL isn’t confirming it, yet.) The NFL has been going with safe classic rockers ever since Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction, but at least people like Tom Petty and Bruce Springsteen have scored hit singles within the last decade or so, and the Rolling Stones are recognizable to fans under 40. The Who, not so much. How much do you want to bet they got the gig because Aerosmith wasn’t available?

The Mrs. and I watched Saturday Night Live over the weekend for the first time in a while because Mad Men star January Jones was hosting. We don’t expect much from SNL anymore, but we were surprised at how dreadful this episode was. Throughout its history, SNL has frequently been juvenile, but last weekend’s episode was aimed almost solely at 11-year-old boys who think that fart jokes and gay panic represent the height of humor. Jones was awful, too—she seemed scared to death at the start, while in succeeding sketches, she plastered an inappropriate smile on her face and just stood there looking pretty. Afterward, we needed to watch a couple of episodes from the first-season DVD collection to hose out the taste.

Rosanne Cash has announced a handful of tour dates in support of her album The List, including a February 10 show in my much-missed former hangout, Iowa City. And so there’s a road trip in my future.

After I mentioned Elvis Costello’s racist slur on Ray Charles here last week, a couple of readers noted that it wasn’t a case of a punk looking for publicity, which is how I remembered it. So for this week’s Rock 101 at WNEW.com, I looked into it.

The Daily Mirror is a feature on the Los Angeles Times‘ website that looks back at vintage stories and columns from the paper. Here’s a spin around the LA radio dial from November 1969. Key line: “Most FM announcers sound as if they’re bored—and underpaid, which is true. People covering a funeral display more verve.”

Also worth reading is another commentary on an American Top 40 countdown, this one from November 1972, at SHH/Peaceful. Apart from being mighty entertaining, these chart reviews are always a good reminder that my taste isn’t the same as everyone else’s. But seriously, dude, how can you not like this?

It’s 50 years this week since Charles Schulz introduced the Great Pumpkin in his Peanuts comic strip, and it’s 43 years tonight since It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was first broadcast on CBS. Every time I watch the show, I wonder how much of it goes sailing over the heads not merely of today’s kids, but of their parents’, too.

“I don’t see how a pumpkin patch can be more sincere than this one. You can look around and there’s not a sign of hypocrisy. Nothing but sincerity as far as the eye can see.” Never mind the vocabulary itself; today, placing such high stakes on sincerity versus hypocrisy seems about as quaint as worrying about the commercialization of Christmas, which is the point around which A Charlie Brown Christmas revolves.

There’s a lot to love about The Great Pumpkin—the early scenes featuring golden fall leaves are gorgeous, and all throughout the show the backgrounds are rich with shades of gray and purple. And of course, there’s the music. Like A Charlie Brown Christmas, the soundtrack features of Vince Guaraldi’s cool, contemporary jazz. The choice to score the Christmas special with jazz hadn’t pleased CBS when that special was first delivered, but its success ensured that all future specials would feature the same sort of thing.

It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was the third animated Peanuts special, following A Charlie Brown Christmas and the little-seen Charlie Brown’s All Stars, and like its two predecessors, it was among the highest-rated programs on television the week it aired—nearly 50 percent of the viewing audience watched the show that night. It won’t draw that kind of numbers when it’s rebroadcast on ABC tonightWednesday night, although it does well enough. If you plan to watch tonight, keep in mind that when the show was originally produced in 1966, it ran 25 minutes. The standard for commercial TV today is 21 or 22, and sometimes less in “children’s” programming, so you won’t be seeing the whole thing. According to Wikipedia, ABC once cut out the scene in which Lucy tries to get Charlie Brown to kick the football, one of the classic bits in the history of the Peanuts strip. That’s like trying to shorten “Stairway to Heaven” by taking out the guitar solo.

Recommended Reading: Speaking of holiday perennials, on Halloween night 1968, WKBW Radio in Buffalo broadcast a version of The War of the Worlds updated for the Top-4o era. They thought nobody would panic—but they were wrong. Also, at WNEW.com: This Week in Rock History.

“The Great Pumpkin Waltz”/Vince Guaraldi (buy it here; buy It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown here)

I’ve often said of my father than he’s a fan of the Green Bay Packers the same way he’s a Methodist—not flashy, not demonstrative, but in the pew every Sunday. And when I was a kid, sports fandom was acquired in the same way religious affiliation was acquired—it was a family thing. And so we’d hustle home from the Methodist church on autumn Sundays at noon to attend services of a different sort, from Lambeau Field or Soldier Field (or Wrigley Field) or wherever they might be taking place.

My first season of full-scale Packer fandom was 1969, the first second year of the post-Lombardi era, when the team retained a few names from the glory years of the 1960s, but the results weren’t the same. Throughout the 1970s, the teams were generally mediocre, but there was never a question of abandoning them to root for another. And I’m guessing that most other fans of mediocre teams in those years felt the same way. Today, the ubiquity of televised games make it possible for anyone anywhere to root for a winner (which explains the proliferation of Yankees, Red Sox, and Duke basketball fans across the country). Not so back then. We had our teams, and we watched them, even on their bad days, even when bad days were many.

At 3:00, the second game of the day kicked off. Then as now, the late game usually involved two of the better teams in the league. In the 1970s, that was generally the Dallas Cowboys, Pittsburgh Steelers, or Oakland Raiders. Thinking back on those games, the image that returns is of late autumn, when it starts getting dark just after 4:00 in Wisconsin, the darkness falling over the house I grew up in, the TV glowing with sunlight from a game in Oakland or Denver or San Diego. I have written before of the way I remember that house as an oasis of light in the darkness, and this memory is another example.

We grow up, we move away from home, we live in new places, we acquire new rituals. The Sunday doubleheader game isn’t what it used to be. (For one thing, it’s no longer the last game of the day since the dubious innovation of the nationally televised Sunday night game, and for another it sometimes features the Packers, as it will this coming Sunday, as it rarely did back then.) But an autumn Sunday rarely passes that I don’t think about how I used to watch the games.

Recommended, If You Dare: At Kliph Nesteroff’s Classic Television Showbiz, check out The Paul Lynde Halloween Special, broadcast October 29, 1976. It stars Margaret Hamilton (the Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz), Betty White, Florence Henderson, Tim Conway, Donny and Marie Osmond, and KISS. In the fourth segment of the show, they lip-synch their then-current hit, “Beth” and “King of the Nighttime World,” which is appropriately bad-ass, complete with Gene spitting fire. KISS also performed “Detroit Rock City,” but it’s been edited from the YouTube version—KISS enters at the end of segment three, but that’s all we see. (A separate video of the performance exists at YouTube, but the audio has been removed.) The excruciating finale, featuring Lynde’s vocal on “Disco Lady,” is indescribable 70s kitsch. That’s actually an apt description of the whole show, which is available on DVD nevertheless. How did KISS ever remain cool after this? (Much more about the show and the DVD is here.)

Like many Monty Python addicts, I’m also a fan of Fawlty Towers, John Cleese’s series set at a small hotel in Torquay, on the coast of Britain. Cleese played innkeeper Basil Fawlty, basing the character on a “marvelously rude” innkeeper he had met when the Pythons were filming in Torquay years before. Other main characters included Fawlty’s patient and practical wife Sybil (Prunella Scales), a confused Spanish waiter, Manuel (Andrew Sachs), and a waitress, Polly (played by Connie Booth, Cleese’s wife at the time, and the show’s co-creator with him). A typical Fawlty Towers episode involved Basil’s attempts to impress his guests while at the same time hating most of them, and being perpetually annoyed by his wife and the hotel staff. In 2000, the show topped the British Film Institute’s list of 100 Greatest British Television Programmes, ahead of such series as Doctor Who and Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Only a dozen Fawlty Towers episodes were produced and aired on the BBC—six in 1975 and six more in 1979. Each one often took months to write, which accounts for the delay between series. Cleese refused to do a third series because he was concerned about running out of material, a concern that had caused him to leave Monty Python’s Flying Circus before the end of that show’s run. (He actually had to be talked into staying with Python after the first series of 13 episodes.)

The first series of Fawlty Towers began playing in the United States on PBS in 1977. On several occasions since then, American producers have tried to modify the formula for network viewers, but without success. Harvey Korman and Betty White starred in a 1978 pilot called Chateau Snavely that never saw air. Bea Arthur played the Basil role in Amanda’s by the Sea, which ran briefly in 1983. Most recently, John Larroquette produced and starred in Payne, which lasted eight episodes in 1999, and which borrowed liberally from the plots of Fawlty Towers episodes. The casting of Arthur and Larroquette, both capable of playing lovably nasty characters, seems right enough on the surface—but in Fawlty Towers, Cleese is not just lovably nasty.  He plays Basil as a man who often has murder in his heart but who could never follow through, largely because he’s terrified of other people, especially his wife. That’s a subtle characterization, and American sitcoms don’t do subtlety well. In addition, much of the humor in Fawlty Towers comes from Basil’s attempts to impress people of higher social classes—a dimension that’s largely incomprehensible to Americans, although Payne attempted to finesse the issue by making its Basil character (rather obviously named Royal Payne) obsessed with a second, fancier hotel located nearby. 

Fawlty Towers got three VHS releases in the 80s and 90s, and it first came out on DVD in 2001. This week, a newly remastered 30th anniversary DVD set is being released. The set features all-new commentaries by Cleese on every episode plus new cast interviews and documentary material. The Facebook page for the new set is here. There’s also information about the set here. It’s a good excuse to watch the series again, or to discover it for the first time.

Recommended Reading: An entirely predictable edition of One Day in Your Life is up at Popdose. Also, check out the autumn playlist at My hmphs. I would have discovered few of these songs on my own, but I’m glad to know about them now.

The trend of pop stars hosting TV variety shows didn’t really start with Sonny and Cher, but theirs was the first to become a Top-10 Nielsen hit. The duo’s 1971 summer replacement series, which took over the time slot of The Ed Sullivan Show after it left the air, was so successful that it led to a regular series beginning in December. It lasted until Sonny and Cher’s marriage broke up in 1974, although each of them had their own solo variety show afterward, and they reunited briefly, on TV at least, a couple of years later.

The Glen Campbell Goodtime Hour had been a summer replacement for The Smothers Brothers Show in 1968 on CBS and gained a regular slot in January 1969. This Is Tom Jones was imported from the UK and began running on ABC, also in 1969. But it took Sonny and Cher to clear the way for several other best-selling pop artists to host TV shows in the mid 1970s. Here are a few of the other pop-star variety shows (list lifted mostly from the book TV Rock by Mark Bego). Most were limited-run series intended to fill a time slot normally occupied by something else that was off the air for the summer.

The Jerry Reed When You’re Hot You’re Hot Hour (CBS, June-July 1972). One regular cast member was, according to The Complete Directory to Prime Time TV Shows, “John Twomey, a Chicago attorney who made music with his bare hands.” I don’t know either.

The Helen Reddy Show (NBC, June-August 1973). Summer replacement for The Flip Wilson Show, co-produced by Wilson. Featured the Nelson Riddle Orchestra, and ended each week with Reddy answering audience questions like Carol Burnett did.

The Mac Davis Show (NBC, three different periods, 1974-1976). If at first you don’t succeed, fail to succeed two more times.

Tony Orlando and Dawn (CBS, July 1974, December 1974-December 1976). Took over The Sonny and Cher Comedy Hour time slot in the summer before becoming a regular series and a hit, at least for a while. George Carlin was a regular.

The Hudson Brothers Show (CBS, August 1974). Produced by Chris Bearde and Allan Blye, who produced Sonny and Cher’s show. Eventually morphed into a Saturday-morning kids show.

The Gladys Knight and the Pips Show (NBC, July 1975). Music, sketches, yada yada yada.

The Manhattan Transfer (CBS, August 1975). Featured production numbers spotlighting different musical eras, and managed to land Bob Marley and the Wailers for its final episode. Laraine Newman was a regular, only months before joining the original cast of Saturday Night Live.

Donny and Marie (ABC, January 1976-January 1979). The biggest TV variety hit this side of Sonny and Cher.

The Jacksons (CBS, June-July 1976, January-May 1977). After leaving Motown, the Jacksons signed with Epic, a label owned by CBS, so the TV crossover was inevitable. It featured five of the six Jackson brothers (Jermaine, who was married to Berry Gordy’s daughter, stayed with Motown) and three of the sisters, including Janet and LaToya. Michael Jackson is said to have hated the whole idea.

The Captain and Tennille (ABC, September 1976-March 1977). Executive-produced by Dick Clark, this show premiered at the Captain and Tennille’s peak moment of fame. Its belly-flop down the ratings ladder mirrored the duo’s fall from the record charts. Featured one of the most awesomely bad television moments of all time, previously showcased here.

The Marilyn McCoo and Billy Davis Jr. Show (CBS, June-July 1977). That unwieldy name didn’t help this show succeed, although it featured Jay Leno and Tim Reid (later of WKRP in Cincinnati) in its cast. There’s almost certainly a joke to be made based on the title of the duo’s most famous song, “You Don’t Have to Be a Star (To Be in My Show),” but I can’t get the bat off my shoulder.

The Starland Vocal Band Show (CBS, July-September 1977). One of the oddest summer variety series of all time, featuring a musical group with no recognizable stars but a high-powered lineup of comedy regulars, including the ex-Firesign Theater team of Proctor and Bergman, a young David Letterman, and political satirist Mark Russell. The show featured a great deal of political humor, and according to Bego, was aimed at a college-aged audience. According to the website TV Party, it was the last summer replacement variety show to air until the Smothers Brothers’ brief return in the summer of 1988.

Pink Lady and Jeff (NBC, March-April 1980). One of the more notorious failures in TV history, featuring a Japanese duo who had scored a minor disco hit called “Kiss in the Dark.” Comedian Jeff Altman, who had been a cast member on The Starland Vocal Band Show, was on board to provide, well, English.

The last pop star to attempt a network variety show was Dolly Parton, whose splashy variety hour started out a smash in 1987 but pancaked within a few weeks of its premiere. The fragmenting of the audience, thanks to a wide universe of choices, made variety shows and their all-things-to-all-people ethos a tough sell. Every now and then, somebody tries one again. Usually, they bomb.

It’s a grand coincidence that the 2007 documentary film In the Shadow of the Moon, which has been in our Netflix queue for months, should have shown up last Thursday—the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11. The film features interviews with 10 of the 24 astronauts who orbited or walked on the moon between 1969 and 1972, along with historic film and TV footage, some of it rare or unseen. I recommend it to you highly if you remember the Apollo missions, but especially if you don’t.

Before I was obsessed by music or baseball (an obsession I have since lost), I was wild about space, and Apollo 11 marked the climax of three years’ geekery. The mission launched at 8:32 on a Wednesday morning, July 16, 1969, but I would have been watching Walter Cronkite long before that. But when the lunar module Eagle touched down on the surface of the moon at 3:17 on the afternoon of Sunday July 20, I wasn’t watching. We’d gone to a family picnic, and I spent the afternoon playing in the yard with my cousins. The TV was on inside the house, however, and some of the adults were watching, and at some point late in the afternoon, I learned that Eagle had landed.

It was just before 10:00—well past my bedtime 40 years ago tonight—when Neil Armstrong emerged from Eagle to take his first step. The TV pictures were hard to make out, but CBS helpfully added the graphic, “Live from the surface of the moon.”

(NASA, which actually destroyed its own original footage of the landings at some point in the 1970s or 1980s, has restored the landing video from other sources, and it’s a vast improvement over what we watched back then. Also, the CBS news clips at YouTube prove that the Apollo 11 mission was the apex of the late Walter Cronkite’s career. He was as big a space fan as any nine-year-old boy, and didn’t hesitate to appropriately express excitement and wonder as he guided his viewers through what they were seeing.)

The astronauts walked on the moon until well after midnight, and I can see myself there in the living room with the family, rarely taking my eyes off of the hazy pictures on the console TV. The next afternoon we were there again to watch Eagle lift off from the surface of the moon. I was excited and relieved when the liftoff was successful, because while we were waiting Mom had said, “Wouldn’t it be awful if their rocket didn’t work?”

I can remember going outside and looking up at the moon that summer—perhaps during the voyage of Apollo 11—and trying to understand that people could go there. It was more than my nine-year-old brain could process. And 40 years later, it seems even more extraordinary then it did then. In 1969, we could never have imagined that the Apollo missions would be the high point of our space explorations. Everyone assumed we’d shoot for Mars next; the week of the moon mission, Vice President Spiro Agnew stated that the country’s goal should be to reach Mars by the end of the century, and he repeated his assertion in an TV interview just after Eagle landed.

But we abandoned the moon and deeper explorations of space, and now, it’s hard even to imagine how we might return to the moon or go to Mars. Our problems on Earth are too great, our finances too fubar’d—and perhaps our imaginations are too cramped and limited now. We also lack the great national motivation that the Cold War provided, which was even greater than the inborn human desire to see what’s over the next hill. As a result, 60 years from today, I’d be willing to bet that when we celebrate the centennial of Apollo 11, Americans won’t have been back to the moon. Another country, maybe. Not us, sadly.

Moon and space references were already widespread in popular culture by the summer of 1969 (remember, for example, Space Food Sticks?), and it didn’t take Dickie Goodman very long to get involved. He’d pioneered the break-in record during the 1950s with the space-themed “The Flying Saucer,” so “Luna Trip” was a natural. As a snapshot of the biggest radio hits of that summer, you can’t do better. But “Luna Trip” was not one of them. It charted briefly on WLS and made the top 10 at KFXM in San Bernardino at the end of August, but it reached only Number 95 in two weeks on the Hot 100, directly between the flights of Apollo 11 and Apollo 12.

“Luna Trip”/Dickie Goodman & Friends (buy Dickie Goodman stuff and/or find a link to iTunes here)

Isn’t it odd that Walter Cronkite passed during the 40th anniversary of his career’s highlight—covering the Apollo 11 mission?

Because my father was a dairy farmer, suppertime at our house was 5:00, so Dad could go out and milk the cows afterward. At 5:30, I usually turned on somebody’s network newscast. I watched the other networks occasionally while growing up, but when big news went down, the story could come only from Uncle Walter. Assassinations, space missions, political conventions and election nights, Nixon’s resignation—could it really have happened if Cronkite didn’t report it? It didn’t seem possible.

After Cronkite retired in 1981, the CBS Evening News was never the same, despite the fact that Dan Rather had been a fixture on the network since the middle of the 1960s. I soon switched over to Peter Jennings on ABC and never looked back. Perhaps the 1980s would have seemed different if Cronkite had been there to report on them every night. It’s not that he vanished entirely after 1981, however. He wrote a book, he made documentaries, he opined on the state of journalism, he filed reports for NPR.

And as time went by, we came to understand that even though he ended each broadcast with “and that’s the way it is,” his broadcast was not “the way it is”—not when fallible humans had to make choices about what to include and what to exclude. But even if the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite didn’t contain all the news there was to report, we believed it had all the news that mattered most. If Cronkite really was the most trusted man in America, that title wasn’t a marketing slogan. He was a tireless, fair-minded reporter; he had learned his craft during World War II as a wire-service reporter, just as broadcast journalism was being invented. He went on television in the 1950s, and when Edward R. Murrow left CBS for a post in the Kennedy Administration, Cronkite became the public face of the “Tiffany Network,” at a time when news divisions were the jewels in a television network’s crown.

Could Walter Cronkite have survived and thrived in the modern journalistic world, reporting celebrity scandal, political gossip, and endless ratings-driven speculation about everything under the sun?

Would you want to be the producer who had to ask him to do it?

On the night of Cronkite’s last broadcast in 1981, several friends and I watched together at my apartment. When he signed off for the last time with “That’s the way it is,” we raised a toast to him. This weekend, we raise a toast to him once more.

Last night’s superb CBS special report on Cronkite’s death is here. (The network is planning a one-hour special for the 60 Minutes time slot Sunday night at 6PM US Central.) There’s a fine tribute here, with links to lots of video clips.

I’ll have more about Apollo 11 on Monday.

“I Got the News” (live in 2006)/Steely Dan (bootleg)

(There’s nothing about music in this post. Sorry.)

Every once in a while, you’ll find a vintage network news broadcast at YouTube or somewhere else online, and the experience of watching it is enlightening. The pace is what jumps out first—how slow it seems. Often, for several uninterrupted minutes, it’s a guy reading with a slide over his shoulder. If a correspondent files a story, it might run three to five minutes, and if it contains sound bites from a newsmaker, those sound bites sometimes go on for a minute or more—an eternity by contemporary standards. There are no graphics swooshing across the screen—in fact, apart from graphs, maps, or still photos, there may be no graphics at all other than the one at the beginning with the name of the show. Often, there’s no theme music.

What you’ll notice next is the amount of hard news in a 30-minute broadcast. Back in the day, network newscasts tended to deal with serious subjects—war and peace, politics, the economy, crime and other societal problems, and natural disasters—to the exclusion of everything else. (Not for nothing did news consumers sometimes clamor to hear “good news.”) The last few minutes of a broadcast, sometimes only the very last story, might be devoted to “the lighter side”—a feature, a celebrity item, a sports note, or a peculiarity of some kind: a calf born with two heads, a woman who gave birth to quadruplets, that sort of thing. The story at the end was known in the business as a “kicker.”  A kicker is the kind of story that has no direct impact on the life of viewers or listeners—it has no meaning to them beyond being entertaining for a moment. The kicker gave Walter Cronkite something to smile about before he signed off with, “And that’s the way it is.”

The standards of TV news began to change in the 1980s. Over the years, network news divisions frequently lost money, but the prestige they brought to their corporate owners was worth the red ink. But with cable fragmenting the network audience at a time when everything was costing more to operate, network news divisions came under pressure to start making money. And that had an impact on editorial choices. Certain “difficult” subjects, such as economics and foreign affairs, ran the risk of making viewers tune away, and that meant lower ratings, which meant less ad revenue. Too many long stories, on any subject, also risked boring the audience. (When the remote control became standard equipment with TV sets, and viewers no longer had to get up to change the channel, the threshold for boredom dropped even lower.) Net effect: News stories got shorter and their tone got lighter. But the audience shrank nevertheless—not just the audience for particular news broadcasts, but the audience for news in general. By the late 80s, syndicated reruns of shows like Roseanne started beating network news broadcasts in markets across the country. Local news operations fought their own battles against viewer boredom, often through sensationalized crime reporting—in the 80s, you started hearing the phrase “if it bleeds, it leads.”

If you wanted to pick a date on which TV news lost its soul—a date on which it finally exorcised the ghost of Edward R. Murrow and embraced the ghost of P. T. Barnum—you couldn’t do much better than June 17, 1994, 15 years ago yesterday. For that was the night all of the networks and CNN pre-empted regular programming to show O. J Simpson’s slow-speed Bronco chase, and to analyze and replay it endlessly. It was the night they went all-in on the ultimate kicker, a story with no real importance to anyone beyond the perpetrator, his victims, their families, and the cops involved in the pursuit. The chase was the perfect storm of crime and celebrity, and coverage of it erased the line between hard news and kicker story, thus changing the very definition of news—with drastic consequences for our society ever since.

Like any half-baked idea you might read at this blog, it’s just my opinion, and I could be wrong. But I don’t think I am. Like O. J. himself, we crossed a line with the Bronco chase, and once across, we could never go back.

For the purpose of making this post fit the general subject matter of this blog, let me state first that Bea Arthur, who died over the weekend at age 86, once made a record. Bea Arthur on Broadway: Just Between Friends was recorded in December 2001 at her one-woman Broadway show. Arthur was an old Broadway hand, having appeared in the original productions of Fiddler on the Roof and Mame, and her album features songs and stories from across her lengthy career. But it’s a mere footnote to her years as a television actress, on The Golden Girls (1985-1992) and Maude (1972-1978).

Maude aired for a short time on TV Land in the 90s, but it had vanished into the vaults before the first season came out on DVD last year. I recently rewatched the whole thing, and it occurs to me that historians who attempt to discuss the cultural history of the 1970s without mentioning it are missing an important touchstone. For the last 20 or 25 years, conservative cultural critics have been on guard, looking to expose the liberalism inherent in Hollywood productions and sometimes finding it where nobody else seems to notice it. Maude would have blasted them off of their couches and into orbit.

Maude Findlay’s liberalism was writ large and on display in every episode, and it dated back to the character’s December 1971 appearances on All in the Family, when she sparred with Archie Bunker over Franklin D. Roosevelt. Maude’s characters discussed political, racial, gender, and sexual issues with an openness that’s simply not permissible today. Yet the program didn’t present Maude as an unabashed heroine; occasionally, she came off as what we’d have called a “limousine liberal” back then—somebody who talks the talk without walking the walk.

The single episode of Maude most remembered today is one in which the political melded with the personal. Maude, on her fourth marriage and 47 years old, gets pregnant, and decides to have an abortion. The episode aired in November 1972, two months before the Roe v. Wade decision, but after abortion had been legalized in New York State, where the show was set. The subject is handled euphemistically—the word “abortion” is mentioned but once:

The episode didn’t become profoundly controversial until it was rerun in August 1973, when a couple dozen CBS affiliates refused to carry it. “Maude’s Dilemma” would not be the only time Maude courted controversy, or dealt with subjects that were no laughing matter. Throughout its run, Maude frequently visited the dark side, with stories about domestic violence, marital infidelity, alcoholism, bankruptcy, and suicide.

The program’s topicality isn’t the only reason it disappeared from syndication, however. The show is brightly, almost harshly, lit. The costumes and set design, while typical of upper-middle-class life in the 1970s, often feature colors not found in nature, and they look badly dated today. Neither Maude nor her husband Walter (played by Bill Macy) is particularly attractive, although the show doesn’t use that as an excuse to ignore their sexual relationship—which is another way in which Maude is marked as a unique document of its moment in history. On TV today, unattractive people don’t get to have sex, and if they do, it’s seen as perverse, or an excuse for humor. (Of course, the show also featured Adrienne Barbeau as Maude’s daughter Carol, and Barbeau became one of the 1970s most famous pinup girls.)

Sony apparently has no plans to release Season 2 on DVD as yet, although Season 1 remains in print. Few artifacts of our favorite decade will take you back to the social and political maelstrom of the Nixon era better than Maude. Plus, it had one of the funkiest theme songs in TV history, sung by Donny Hathaway. It doesn’t appear as though he ever officially released a version of it, but you can hear it here.

I am collecting the early seasons of Saturday Night Live on DVD, and I’m currently working my way through season 4 (1978-1979). Apart from showcasing classic comedy bits and musical performances by some of the most important stars of the age, these old episodes of SNL are cultural artifacts that illuminate their times, and they can also illuminate ours.

The episode of January 27, 1979, does this in several ways. A sketch based on Christina Crawford’s then-newly published memoir Mommie Dearest features Jane Curtin as Joan Crawford and Gilda Radner as Christina, although Gilda makes Christina into a clumsy, vacantly staring target for verbal and physical abuse. The character is the same one Gilda played occasionally in other sketches, and today, we’d recognize her as someone who is mentally retarded. As a result, the abuse she takes comes across as cruel. Similarly, a “Weekend Update” bit has Bill Murray interviewing Ohio State football coach Woody Hayes (John Belushi) and his wife (Gilda), just after Hayes was dismissed for punching an opposing player during a game. As they talk, the couple plays checkers and tells Murray how much they are enjoying Woody’s retirement—until Mrs. Hayes wins the game. Woody promptly smacks her in the face and throws her over the table, then continues to whale on her as Murray ends the interview. Saturday Night Live was famed for being a boys’ club, although characters played by Curtin and Laraine Newman were never subject to the sort of abuse Gilda’s characters frequently suffered (and somebody could probably get a master’s degree explaining why). It might have seemed funny in the late 70s, but today, it just doesn’t.

But the biggest indicator of how times have changed involves the show’s musical guest, reggae star Peter Tosh. At the moment of his apperance, Tosh was enjoying his biggest success in the States with the hit single “(You Gotta Walk and) Don’t Look Back,” featuring Mick Jagger, who makes a cameo to sing it with him. Later in the show, Tosh returns to sing “Bush Doctor,” which features the following lyrics:

Legalize marijuana
Down here in Jamaica
It can build up your failing economy
Eliminate the slavish mentality
There’ll be no more illegal humiliation
And no more police interrogation

“Bush Doctor,” while not as explicit as Tosh’s better-known song “Legalize It,” makes an argument for the medical and social benefits of marijuana in clear, understandable (albeit Jamaican-accented) English.

Nothing in our culture is more dead or further gone than the explicit depictions—celebrations—of drug use that were so frequent on SNL back in the day. (Another sketch on the episode features Belushi as Studio 54 owner Steve Rubell, his face covered in white powder after a cocaine bust. At the end of the sketch, he’s seen eating a powdered-sugar donut, but by then, the joke’s already been made.) Something like “Bush Doctor” could maybe get on a cable music video show today, but never on a cultural institution like SNL. Here’s Tosh performing it at the Montreux Jazz Festival about six months after his appearance on Saturday Night Live:

We think of television in bygone days as a medium on which expression was restricted, and that today’s TV is much more open. But the differences between 1979 and today are not exclusively in the degree of expression permitted; they often involve what’s permitted at all. Today, we’re more circumspect about how we portray the mentally retarded, and we don’t tolerate the depictions of violence against women that used to get big laffs on TV. Our attitudes toward drug use have become downright puritanical. You’ll see jokes about the retarded and about spousal abuse before you’ll see somebody singing for the legalization of ganjaweed on network TV anytime soon.

“(You Got to Walk and) Don’t Look Back”/Peter Tosh with Mick Jagger (buy it here)