Movies stay with us; they’re great historic documents, but television is intimate, and when it’s good, television is us.
My own early understanding of injustice and race and poverty and social change came from television. For example:
- The child of a black couple in Harlem in the early 60’s was bitten by a rat in the tenement where they lived and no cab driver would stop pick them up to take them to the hospital ( East Side, West Side (1963-64) ( George C. Scott (Patton, Dr. Strangelove) and Cicely Tyson (The Autobiography of Miss Jane PIttman, The Help) as a social worker and his secretary.) It was cancelled after one season because no Southern stations would carry a show featuring interracial colleagues.
- A tragic battle over the insanity defense in a death penalty case: a two-episode story on The Defenders* (1961-65) , starring Robert Reed, later the dad in The Brady Bunch.
There are plenty of others but this is #microblogmonday so I’m about done: consider though the WWI episodes of Upstairs, Downstairs, and Route 66.
* The Museum of Broadcast Communications called it “perhaps the most socially conscious series the medium has ever seen”, a show”singularly resonant with New Frontier liberalism.”