Right before the COVID sent us all into hibernation I was contacted by Bill Carter, who is now over at CNN after a long and illustrious run as TV writer for the New York Times. Bill and I have known each other for over 30 years. I was featured in his book DESPERATE NETWORKS and have been quoted in countless articles of his over the years. Bill wrote two excellent books about the late night wars and he was finishing up a multi-part CNN documentary on that day part.
Bill was starting his next project which was going to cover the history of the sitcom and he asked if I would come to downtown LA and be interviewed for the project. I spent 25 years in network scheduling including a run at NBC where I was head of scheduling during the Must-See-TV era. He was looking for a network suit. I obliged and sat down for a four or five hour interview.
Bill's documentary on late night TV dropped in May. It was quite interesting and informative. I lived through the Letterman/Leno part of the story and knew the actors who botched the Conan/Leno debacle. I was expecting Jeff Zucker to get a bit of a pass (he did) given that the documentary was on his CNN and I don't know if Jeff Gaspin refused to be interviewed. Those were the two dudes who bungled that transition. Overall it was a solid overview and I was looking forward to Bill's opus on the sitcom.
The Story of Late Night must have been a success because the Sitcom doc appeared earlier than I was led to believe given my conversations with Bill. When I heard it was coming I was excited. Given the amount of time I was interviewed I was looking forward to see what they would use. I watched the whole thing. Over the eight hours I appeared for maybe six seconds.....to describe a scene from the legendary Chuckles the Clown episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.....six seconds......I may be overstating the time.
I'm telling you all this because what follows may be perceived as sour grapes and if you feel that way so be it. They were never going to use my interview because somewhere in the process of making this documentary someone decided that this was not going to be about "The History of the Sitcom" but rather a lecture series on "The Social Evolution of the Half Hour".
This show had an agenda and the agenda was not to celebrate a form of comedy but rather to critique the sitcom for perpetuating myths and stereotypes about marginalized people i.e. people who were not heterosexual powerful white men.
Now those of you who know me and follow me on Twitter know that my political and social beliefs are pretty far to the left. My point isn't that a lot of what was being said here isn't correctly reflecting the culture at various points in time, but rather it was done in a rather heavy handed and, honestly, incompetent way.
Putting on my PhD cap for a second, there is a term in labelling theory called "retrospective interpretation" where the past is filtered through a point of view in the here and now to validate that point of view. The show runner (not Bill) had an agenda and, rather than giving us eight episodes on the history of the sitcom we were offered eight hours of how corporate media perpetuated racist, misogynist, homophobic, xenophobic and transphobic myths and IT IS ONLY NOW THAT THIS SAME CORPORATE MEDIA IS GETTING IT RIGHT. A lot of this story was being told by people too young to have been around for most of the history of the sitcom which was pretty fucking hilarious. They didn't live what they are critiquing.
Let me be very clear. Even for what it was attempting to communicate it was awful. Each hour was supposed to be a different way of letting us know how sitcoms perpetuated capitalist myths of the family, outsiders, various sexual orientations etc. but they were repetitive. they used the same comedies to make different points, They used dramas and said they were comedies. They focused on several niche shows that were not viewed by large numbers of people but were darlings among the TV intelligencia. I don't think they ever even described what a sitcom was other than it was generally a half hour. Certain observers were used over and over and over and over again.
All I'm saying here is that this was not the history of the sitcom. Without breaking a sweat I could have laid out eight episodes which would have told the story in a much more entertaining and informative way and.....oh yeah even addressed the issues that this series did in such a ham handed way.
Leave it to the immortal Mel Brooks to blow this whole thing up. When "Get Smart" was finally discussed in last night's final episode, and was again being put in some historical context, Brooks looked into the camera and said "We were spoofing the James Bond movies" That's all he was doing. That was all he ever did.....look at his movies. It was no more simple than that.
The irony for me is that in, 40 years when the next history of the sitcom is told, I guarantee you that most of the "sitcoms" celebrated as socially and culturally woke will be critiqued by a new generation of observers
Anyway, if Bill does the History of Reality TV I will be happy to sit down for an interview. I hope he does because I have a lot to share.....at least I thought I did.
