Above: The Alfred Hitchcock Hour: Murder Case starring John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands
Television was always for suckers, but there was a time when we were all suckers, happily. Hef remembers. He was born in 1953, though his wear and tear and rock quarry voice initially made me guess 1945. His roommate and best buddy, Kid, is the same age but looks ten years younger. He remembers when TV was good and true, too. They are both living in the quiet afterlife that follows (if one survives) decades of dope and jail time. Plenty of time to conjure up the good-and-true era via the DVD player. The boys generally go for crime and punishment: Perry Mason, Daniel Boone, Annie Oakley, Superman, The Fugitive. What stands out in my eyes: Even the mediocre shows had a scintillating cinematic quality. The basic dynamism and construction Perry Mason is indistinguishable from its big screen counterparts–the serialized movie adventures of Mr. Moto, Roy Rogers, Charlie Chan and Sherlock Holmes. Those gems we watch on dollar store double feature discs with labels like “Saturday Matinee.” (Holmes and Watson show up in both their black-and-white big screen incarnations and their later color British television guises.)
John Cassavetes appears, like a comet, in his “Brilliant but Cancelled” beatnik detective show Johnny Staccato. And there he is again, as a desperate fugitive in an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. His gaze and the edge in his whispered threats to the young woman he’s holding hostage are XXX-rated. Indeed, this guy was too brilliant, too keen to realities that 50’s television could only sample in small doses, to be anything but cancelled. Another genius, Robert Altman, turns up as director of a heartstopping, hilarious Hitchcock episode in which we bite our nails over whether Joseph Cotten will escape the office he’s accidentally locked himself in– the same office where’s he’s just killed a woman. It’s Shadow of a Doubt crashing into Psycho.
On various shows, we call out the character actors who pop up as if spotting relatives at a reunion. “That’s my man from those John Wayne flicks!” “Ain’t that Peter Lorre? He got fat.” Indelible mugs from Anthony Mann noirs turn up in their TV counterparts, and vice versa. Raymond Burr materializes in Raw Deal as a babyfaced, bitchslapping mob kingpin. “Perry Mason’s an asshole in this one!” Hef cries.
Whether cheese or caviar, there was something handmade and approachable about crime shows in the 1950’s and ’60s. I wonder if Hef and Kid, my Baby Boom elders, sense it, too. Hard to tell, since they go for the new shows with just as much enthusiasm. Whole seasons of CSI, Boston Legal, Law and Order, Criminal Minds pass through the player. I hate that stuff. If the old shows display the hardboiled influence of the great pulp novels and noir filmmakers, the new shows seem to have retained only the cynicism and smug sense of duty, adding the aesthetic sensibility of an Excedrin commercial. These shows are crude and ghoulish, in love with the autopsy and forensic technology, the genius of the system.
The worst of these shows is Alias, a Homeland Security-era C.I.A. recruitment special that aired on ABC from 2001 to 2006. The show throws various films into its visual blender, starting with Run Lola Run and La Femme Nikita but, as it progresses, leans more toward John “Buttman” Stagliano’s porn epic Fashionistas. Stone cold C.I.A. killers dress up as Vegas whores, school girls, leather freaks, whatever titillating wig/pumps/gun combo the producers come up with each week. Our heroes seduce, kill, maim, torture and terrorize heaps of random people in the course of an average Alias episode, but, as the main character played by Jennifer Garner assures her newborn baby in one episode, she does it all to ensure the kid’s future in a world where there are “a lot of very bad people out there who want to hurt us.”
The boys love the show for its tits and ass and Mission Impossible intrigues. I hate it because it epitomizes the worst of what television, movies and pop culture have become, a dispiriting, sentimental and murderous lie.
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