Cult Television

1. ENGL 6650/7650: Special Topics in Popular Culture Cult Television Spring 2011 Room: PH 308 Day/Time: Tuesday, 600-900 pm Cult Television

2. 3/15/10 | Week 9 Cult TV Series of the Week: American Cult Comedy [Arrested Development, Big Bang Theory, The Comeback, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, Freaks and Geeks, The Larry Sanders Show, Mystery Science Theater 3000, Seinfeld, South Park, The Simpsons, Wonderfalls] Required Reading: Beeler, ECTVR 322; Ford, ECTVR 77; Gray, ECTVR 120 & 221; Holtzclaw, ECTVR 181; Morreale, ECTVR 68 Recommended Reading: TBA Special Topics/Readings: The Cult of Cult TV?—Fiddy (225) Cult Television

3. I Love Lucy • The Honeymooners • All in the Family • The Dick Van Dyke Show • The Mary Tyler Moore • Golden Girls • Roseanne • The Wonder Years • Leave It to Beaver • The Odd Couple • The Andy Griffith Show • The Bob Newhart Show • Bewitched • The Cosby Show • Family Ties • Taxi • Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman • Sanford and Son • The Jeffersons • The Cosby Show Cult Television

4. Everybody Loves Raymond Friends Cheers Cult Television Frasier

5. TV Guide’s Fifty Greatest Shows of All Time 1. Seinfeld 2. I Love Lucy 3. The Honeymooners 4. All in the Family 8. The Simpsons 9. The Andy Griffith Show 11. The Mary Tyler Moore Show 13. The Dick Van Dyke Show 18. Cheers 21. Friends 25. M*A*S*H 28. The Cosby Show 34. Frasier 35. Roseanne 38. The Larry Sanders Show 44. The Bob Newhart Show 48. Taxi 50. Bewitched 18 out of 50--sitcoms Cult Television

6. Prehistory (So 20th Century) Cult Television

7. American Cult Comedy The Beverly Hillbillies (CBS, 1962-1971) Cult Television

8. Television Creators: Small Screen Auteurs davidlavery.net Paul Henning (US, Green Acres (with Jay Sommers), Beverly Hillbillies, Petticoat Junction) Cult Television

9. American Cult Comedy Cast of Beverly Hillbillies J.D. "Jed" Clampett (Buddy Ebsen) Granny (Irene Ryan) Elly May Clampett (Donna Douglas) Jethro Bodine (Max Baer, Jr.) Milburn Drysdale (Raymond Bailey) Jane Hathaway (Nancy Kulp) Cult Television

10. American Cult Comedy Freaks and Geeks (NBC, 1999-2000) Cult Television

11. Television Creators: Small Screen Auteurs davidlavery.net Judd Apatow (L) and Paul Feig (R) (US, Freaks and Geeks) Cult Television

12. American Cult Comedy Green Acres (CBS, 1965-1971) Cult Television

13. American Cult Comedy Cast of Green Acres Oliver Wendell Douglas (Eddie Albert) Lisa Douglas (Eva Gabor) Mr. Eustace Haney (Pat Buttram) Eb Dawson (Tom Lester) Fred Ziffel (Hank Patterson) Doris Ziffel (Barbara Pepper, 1965–1968) Doris Ziffel (Fran Ryan, 1969–71) Arnold Ziffel (Original pig came from the town of Union Star, Missouri) Hank Kimball (Alvy Moore) Sam Drucker (Frank Cady) Cult Television

14. American Cult Comedy The Larry Sanders Show (HBO, 1992-1998) Cult Television

15. Television Creators: Small Screen Auteurs davidlavery.net Garry Shandling (US, It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, The Larry Sanders Show) Cult Television

16. American Cult Comedy Mystery Science Theater 3000 (KTMA, 1988-89; Comedy Central, 1989-91; Comedy Central, 1991-96; Sci-Fi Channel, 1997-1999) Cult Television

17. Mike Nelson Gypsy Crow T. Robot Joel Robinson Gypsy Tom Servo Cult Television

18. American Cult Comedy Northern Exposure (ABC, 1990-1995) Cult Television

19. American Cult Comedy Northern Exposure (ABC, 1990-1995) Cult Television

20. Television Creators: Small Screen Auteurs davidlavery.net Joshua Brand (pictured) and John Falsey (US, St. Elsewhere, Northern Exposure)

21. American Cult Comedy Northern Exposure (ABC, 1990-1995) • Deconstruction at Bat: Baseball vs. Critical Theory in Northern Exposure’s ‘The Graduate’ • David Lavery • How can you hit and think at the same time? • Yogi Berra • I thought you were beyond authorial reference. • Professor Martin in ‘The Graduate’ Cult Television

22. American Cult Comedy Northern Exposure (ABC, 1990-1995) • In December 2004 an admired colleague and I crossed paths on campus. We had not seen each other in weeks, and as we caught up on personal and professional news, the subject turned to the then recently deceased Jacques Derrida. Everyone who knows me is aware, or so I thought, that I was not a fan. Had I not given a talk several years ago entitled ‘The French Disease: European Memes and the Infection of Western Thought’? Was I not fond of quoting (as I do again) David Lehman’s query in Sign of the Times: Deconstruction and the Fall of Paul De Man, • How to explain the cachet of deconstruction, the way it has infiltrated public discourse? At the crudest level of its appeal, the word announces the writer’s knowingness: I’m hip to what’s hip. I know what’s happening in the world of big ideas. A Los Angeles-based screenwriter named Mark Horowitz, trying to explain the current French enthusiasm for movies starring Mickey Rourke, places the deconstruction craze in the perspective of ‘a constant war between the U.S. and France.’ In Horowitz’s words, ‘We sent them Jerry Lewis, so they retaliated by sending us deconstruction and Jacques Derrida. . . . Deconstruction conforms to an American preconception of the cerebral French in the same way that Jerry Lewis in The Nutty Professor represents a Frenchman’s impression of an American type. Cult Television

23. American Cult Comedy Northern Exposure (ABC, 1990-1995) So when my colleague proceeded to mourn the loss of the late ‘Boa Deconstructor’ as the passing of one of the great ‘public intellectuals’ of our time, I did, I will admit, almost lose it. ‘Public’ intellectual? How could such a world class promulgator of the indecipherable be deemed a ‘public’ intellectual? Horns locked, both of us a bit shocked at the animosity we had conjured, we backed away and changed the subject. No doubt you are wondering what all this has to do with Northern Exposure. I began here because I wanted you to know, up front, that I have a dog in this fight— and by fight I mean a sixth season episode of Northern Exposure entitled ‘The Graduate.’ Cult Television

24. American Cult Comedy Northern Exposure (ABC, 1990-1995) Northern Exposure (1900-1995) was always a supremely literary television series. In the Season Three episode ‘Cicely’ (3:23), for example, we learn that Franz Kafka once visited the small Alaskan town, where he was first inspired to write ‘Metamorphosis.’ In Season Five’s ‘Una Volta in L'Inverno’ (5:17), septuagenarian store owner Ruth Anne Miller sets out to learn Italian so she can read Dante’s Divine Comedy in the original. Season Six’s ‘Up River’ (6:8) evokes Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (not to mention its cinematic reimagining in Apocalypse Now), with Ed Chigliak playing Harry Marlow/Benjamin Willard and Joel Fleischman as Kurtz. And from first episode to last, morning DJ Chris Stevens’ radio monologues are full of references to great writers and thinkers. As Robert J. Thompson has observed, Cult Television

25. American Cult Comedy Northern Exposure (ABC, 1990-1995) • Sometimes Northern Exposure wasn't just like reading a good book, it actually presented people reading good books. Throughout one entire episode [Season Two’s ‘War and Peace’], for example . . . Chris Stevens . . . reads passages from War and Peace. In the meantime, according to the producers' plot synopsis, the residents of Cicely ‘experience Tolstoyesque nightmares and Dostoyevskian passions.’ Chris, an intellectual dilettante who seemed to be taking all of his on air rambling patter from a college syllabus, went a long way in giving the show its cerebral if somewhat self-important veneer. At one time or another during the course of the series, Chris made references to works by Hegel, Kierkegaard, Kant, Nietzsche, de Tocqueville, Jefferson, Whitman, Baudelaire, Melville, Shakespeare, Jung, Jack London, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and many other authors. No nerd, Chris was just as fluent with Raymond Chandler or Def Leppard, but it was his perpetual name-dropping and passage citing from the Great Books that seemed to announce, as [John] Falsey and [Joshua] Brand [the series’ creators] had often boasted, that Northern Exposure wasn't written for the ‘mass audience.’ Chris Stevens Cult Television

26. American Cult Comedy Northern Exposure (ABC, 1990-1995) No single installment of Northern Exposureseemed less directed to a mass audience than ‘The Graduate,’ written by Sam Egan and directed by James Hayman, an episode, very near the end of the series’ run, concerned with Chris’ defense of his thesis, in partial fulfilment of an M.A. in a University of Alaska extension program. Indeed, the intended audience for ‘The Graduate’ would seem to be not someone with a Nielsen box but the faculty of an English department. Chris has, it seems, penned a deconstructionist/post-colonial reading of the Ernest Lawrence Thayer classic ‘Casey at the Bat’ and finds himself forced to navigate the Scylla and Charybdis of his openly adversarial committee members. Professor Dick Schuster, a traditional literary scholar who (in his own words) wants to treat ‘a poem as a poem and not just a code,’ dislikes reading presentist political implications into a poem from 1888, and refuses to grant a ‘diploma for glibness, nor even erudition.’ Prof. Aaron Martin, on the other hand, an advocate for ‘interpretive freedom’ and ‘hermeneutic license,’ is a young Turk, impressed by the candidate’s outlaw status (a high school drop-out, Chris had once done hard time back in West Virginia) and predisposed to the thesis’ understanding of the big guy at the plate as a combination Nietzschean übbermensch and emblem of American manifest destiny. As Chris’ orals begin, we get a taste of the opposing forces. Cult Television

27. American Cult Comedy Northern Exposure (ABC, 1990-1995) At the outset, Professor Schuster reminds Chris that ‘brevity is the soul of wit,’ and Martin counters his senior colleague’s quotation of Alexander Pope by evoking Dorothy Parker’s ‘Brevity is the soul of lingerie.’ In response to Schuster’s question, Chris successfully defines ‘objective correlative,’ identifies T. S. Eliot as the source of the term, and recites William Carlos Williams’ ‘Red Wheelbarrow’ as an example. Then Martin asks a question that would seem like a parody if it weren’t frighteningly representative: ‘In what way does the relativism embodied in Melville’s duality of evil presage the moral ambiguities of twentieth century colonialism?’ ‘Heaven help us,’ Schuster groans, but Chris answers in the spirit of the question, proclaiming radical notions about the ‘whole paradox of colonialism, the benevolent imperialist, the hubris of the first world, the marine corporal with a Zippo in Nam who had to burn down the village in order to save it.’ Though I cannot be absolutely certain, I would venture to say that this may have been the first, and perhaps the only, time ‘objective correlative’ was ever discussed in prime-time. It may also have been the network television debut of the word ‘presage.’ At this point, however, tensions are only simmering. No one is taking Chris to task for his mangled metaphors—how precisely does one bring a ‘great white whale to its knees’?—or his ideas. Prof. Martin is pleased, deeming Chris’ rant ‘right on,’ and Professor Schuster bites his tongue, not yet ready to go to war. Cult Television

28. American Cult Comedy Northern Exposure (ABC, 1990-1995) When Schuster scolds Martin that ‘You and your carjacking protégé . . .have put 2000 years of accumulated knowledge into a rhetorical Osterizer and grinded it all into oblivion.’ he characterizes Schuster’s old- fashioned mindset as ‘bigotry with panache.’ As Chris looks on in wonder, they go for each other’s throats but are separated by the powerful Minnifield (on the right), who angrily (and hilariously) reminds them ‘Gentleman, it’s only literature.’ Cult Television

29. American Cult Comedy Northern Exposure (ABC, 1990-1995) Northern Exposure was, of course, an ensemble dramedy, and ‘The Graduate,’ like every episode, explores multiple story lines, one of which serves to counterpoint Chris’ thesis defense. Maggie O’Connell outbids Maurice and becomes owner and proprietor of the town’s only movie theatre and immediately hires Cicely’s cinephile Ed Chigliak as ‘in house film consultant.’ Drooling over movie catalogs, captivated by the prospect of screening Diabolique, Last Year at Marienbad, The Italian Straw Hat, Mr. Hulot’s Holiday, Blue Angel, and Eyes without a Face, but clueless about the actual movie tastes of his fellow citizens, Ed’s programming choices prove unpopular, and Maggie must finally put her foot down, overruling Ed’s taste for ‘obscure classics and cult films.’ Dumb and Dumber is ordered, and in the final movie theatre scene Forrest Gump is packing them in. In the episode’s titular story line, something quite similar transpires as Chris Stevens abandons his elitist deconstructionist inclinations—Denis Donoghue, after all, once described deconstruction as a sad attempt by the academy to develop its own avant-garde—in favour of more traditional critical assumptions. His conversion begins at a dinner party, hosted by the always pompous plutocrat Maurice Minnifield, at which the culture war erupts and Chris’ committee members come to blows. Cult Television

30. American Cult Comedy Northern Exposure (ABC, 1990-1995) After Martin and Schuster hit up Maurice for endowing a chair (clearly an ongoing discussion), talk turns to Derrida and Barthes, and the death of the author (a moment in literary history praised by Martin as a releaser of all the hidden meanings buried in a text), and Chris expresses for the first time misgivings about his poststructuralist way of approaching literature, wondering what happens to ‘beauty is truth, truth beauty’ (Keats—from ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’) under such an episteme. Banter between Martin and Schuster becomes increasingly confrontational, and this time it’s personal. To the former’s accusation that his senior colleague clings to old ideas in order to remain department chair, Schuster responds with sarcastic glee ‘You better get used to those faculty apartments.’ . . . Cult Television

31. American Cult Comedy Northern Exposure (ABC, 1990-1995) Earlier Chris had offered a toast to academia: ‘in a world of ever more compromise and pettiness, the last refuge for ideas and idealism for their own sake.’ At Maurice’s Chris begins to realize his naiveté and sees for the first time that the hostility critical theory has spawned may be a sublimation of such non-intellectual petty matters as who holds the department chair, or secures the office with a window, or gets the best housing. As the cliché we all know has it, the competition is so fierce because the rewards are so small. Not surprisingly, bearing witness to such a spectacle, even if it’s only about literature, causes Chris to have bad dreams.He finds himself in a war zone, leading a platoon that include soldiers named Beethoven, Van Gogh, a ‘Nevermore’ uttering Poe, and Shakespeare, under fire from a sniper. The radio brings news that the sniper has taken out the entire ‘Transcendental 45th,’ including Emerson, Thoreau, and Fuller. A too-brave Shakespeare, distraught over the death of Poe, is himself gunned down and dies uttering the famous last words ‘It is a far, far more better thing I do.’ An angry Chris goes after the sniper, only to come face-to-face with himself. Cult Television

32. American Cult Comedy Northern Exposure (ABC, 1990-1995) Television doesn’t get any better, or any more literary, than this. Shakespeare, of course, gets all the best lines—his ‘They got Eddie!’ lament upon the death of Poe, his anachronistically fatal quotation of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. But it is Chris who comes away terrified but enlightened by his dream-shattering ouroboric recognition that the canon-terminating sniper—and take note how well the metaphor works—is really himself. The next day, ‘Chris in the Morning’ is all about his doubts. As Ray Charles wails the appropriately titled ‘Tell me What I Say’ in the background, Chris acquaints all of Cicely (and the television audience as well) with his growing methodological concerns. ‘You analyse something too much you just grind it into dust,’ he has come to think, wondering if his whole pursuit of a degree may have been a misguided venture: ‘I should never have opened that matchbook. ‘We are looking for people who like to think.’’ But such musings are, in fact, rhetorical, for Chris has concocted a new plan for his thesis defense. Cult Television

33. American Cult Comedy Northern Exposure (ABC, 1990-1995) Anyone who has been around universities for a time has probably heard Academic Legends about theses and dissertation defences—the one making the rounds when I was working on my M.A., for example, about the doctoral candidate at the University of Minnesota who lost his lunch all over the conference table. Thesis and dissertations have even found their way into films. In Irvin Kershner’s The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978), for example, released the year I finished my own dissertation, a serial killer is revealed to be a detective (played by Tommy Lee Jones) driven to psychopathy by his inability to even finish his treatise. Earlier in the decade, in Richard Rush’s forgotten semi-classic Getting Straight (1970), Elliott Gould plays a deeply confused graduate student named Harry Bailey who inadvertently brings to his thesis defense at Berkeley a hollowed-out book filled with pot and then, as riots erupt outside and his committee becomes embroiled in a debate over Leslie Fiedler-esque ideas about the homoerotic subtext of The Great Gatsby, goes nuts. After insisting that the major verse form in English is, in fact, the limerick (and reciting a particularly profane one), Bailey jumps up on the conference table and brings the defense to an end by planting a sloppy kiss on the lips of his committee chair. Cult Television

34. American Cult Comedy Northern Exposure (ABC, 1990-1995) Getting Straight is clearly one of ‘The Graduate’s’ ancestor texts. Airing as it did in March 1995, it is not, however, ‘come back to the raft, Huck, honey’ ideas that are its antagonist but deconstruction and poststructuralism, and Chris Stevens is no Harry Bailey. For there is method in his madness. As Professors Martin and Stevens await the candidate’s arrival, about to declare him a no-show, they are summoned to a snow-covered baseball diamond for a field test, if you will, of his new, much less esoteric, understanding of ‘Casey.’ ‘What’s the meaning of this?’ Schuster asks, appropriately enough, as they arrive at Minnifield Field, and Chris, punning, replies that he wants to ‘take another swing’ at Thayer’s meaning. To Martin’s surprised rejoinder, ‘I thought you were beyond authorial reference,’ Chris asks him to take a bat and go to the plate. As Chris recites the poem from memory, Martin goes down on strikes three snow-covered pitches later, the last two whiffs, just like the Mighty Casey. Striding toward his vanquished examiner, Chris intones Thayer’s final lines: Cult Television

35. American Cult Comedy Northern Exposure (ABC, 1990-1995) Cult Television • Oh, somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright, • The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light; • And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout, • But there is no joy in Mudville—mighty Casey has struck out. • Pointing to Martin’s stomach, he explains ‘That’s what Casey at the bat is about—that feeling in your gut.’ • ‘I thought you were beyond authorial reference,’ It’s one of those meta-media moments that make a proselytiser for television, especially what I have been calling of late ‘television creativity,’ squirm with joy on my couch potato couch. Mirroring in its development its antecedent media literature and the movies, both slow to discover the author/auteur and then surprisingly anxious to finish him off, television, you see, is supposed to be made in anonymity. Only now, as we speak, are TV auteurs emerging. Only now are we beginning to recognize the creative human beings who make television, a medium, nearly everyone agrees, supremely friendly to the writers who produce such brilliant fare as ‘The Graduate’ while toiling largely in obscurity. I know next-to-nothing about Sam Egan, its author, which doesn’t seem quite fair, since he seems know a lot about me—about us. But I do know this: like me he believes that deconstruction has had its turn at bat, its innings even, and has now struck out.

36. American Cult Comedy Pee-Wee’s Playhouse (CBS, 1986-1990) Cult Television

37. American Cult Comedy Ren and Stimpy (Nicelodeon, 1991-1996) Cult Television

38. American Cult Comedy The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show (ABC, 1959-61; NBC, 1961-64) Cult Television

39. Television Creators: Small Screen Auteurs davidlavery.net Jay Ward (US, Rocky and Bullwinkle, George of the Jungle) Cult Television

40. American Cult Comedy The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show (ABC, 1959-61; NBC, 1961-64) Cult Television

41. American Cult Comedy The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show (ABC, 1959-61; NBC, 1961-64) Cult Television

42. American Cult Comedy The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show (ABC, 1959-61; NBC, 1961-64) Cult Television

43. American Cult Comedy The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show (ABC, 1959-61; NBC, 1961-64) Cult Television

44. American Cult Comedy Saturday Night Live (NBC, 1975- ) Cult Television

45. Television Creators: Small Screen Auteurs davidlavery.net Lorne Michaels (US, Saturday Night Live) Cult Television

46. American Cult Comedy Seinfeld (NBC, 1989-1998) Cult Television

47. Seinfeld and the Sitcom • Originally rejected by NBC chief Brandon Tartikoff as “too New York, too Jewish” • A show about nothing • Sought to always override normal sitcom conventions • Governed by the motto: “no hugging, no learning” Cult Television

48. Cult Television

49. “Seinfeld is the rarest commodity in the entertainment business—a sure thing. The show’s strategic importance to NBC reaches far beyond just the network’s profit on the show. NBC has leveraged Seinfeld and its prime-time strength in such a way as to put considerable distance between it and other broadcast and cable networks. Indeed, by delivering the key demographics advertisers seek, NBC last year was nearly seven times as profitable as ABC, the only other network to make money in 1996. . . .” Elizabeth Lesly, with Ronald Grover and I. Jeanne Dugan. “Seinfeld: The Economics of a TV Supershow and What It Means for NBC and the Industry.” Business Week, issue 2, June 1997: 116 –22. Cult Television

50. “It is the first TV series to command more than $1 million a minute for advertising—a mark previously attained only by the Super Bowl. Its growing strength has helped a smart network dominate prime time—and news, mornings, and late nights, too. It has shattered the ceiling of what a network will pay to keep a show and even its supporting actors. It effortlessly creates cultural artifacts and major tourist attractions out of the quotidian things of its characters. It has so permeated popular consciousness that the august New York Times op-ed page warned recently that the show was contributing to the coarsening of American life. It will cost NBC about $120 million to bring it back for its ninth season. That’s more than 10 percent of NBC’s entire prime-time budget for 26 shows. But it probably is worth every penny, even before you start counting the $180 million or so the network will get from advertising alone. . . .” Elizabeth Lesly, with Ronald Grover and I. Jeanne Dugan. “Seinfeld: The Economics of a TV Supershow and What It Means for NBC and the Industry.” Business Week, issue 2, June 1997: 116 –22. Cult Television