Wild Wild West
by Bruce Shawkey
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(We don’t know how our man, Dick Hobson, in Hollywood came by this “confidential memorandum,” and we'd just as soon never find out. We do know, however, that he was born with his tongue in his cheek and he’s perfectly capable of making the whole thing up.—Ed.)
To: Wild Wild West Producer
Bruce Lansbury.
From: Program Dept.
Bruce, you’ll never believe this but the critics here have been hollering their heads off. They say there’s something slightly “unsavory,” slightly “nasty,” slightly “kinky,” slightly “perverse,” slightly “odious,” slightly “repellent” about Wild Wild West.
They're accusing us of the very thing we've been trying so hard to achieve!
I say, keep up that stream of evil Iagos! Let them be cheerfully and happily bad! Nobody will ever remember Ironside’s sniveling baddies with their “human” failings, their “psychology.” Nobody savors High Chaparral’s boring badmen. Keep our villains flamboyant! Maniacal! Nietzchean!
Give us more of those mad assassins, those crazed medicine men leading packs of wolves, those demented geologists setting off earthquakes to conquer the world. They’re just “villainous” enough not to scare off the viewers.
As for the critics’ charge of “exotic and excruciatingly painful forms of violence”: Granted, WWW has dynamited more interior and exterior sets in three years than in the whole previous history of the image-orthicon tube. Granted, Bob Conrad is the only TV hero who fistfights 46 adversaries in 46 minutes (not counting commercials and station breaks). Granted, we indulge in more tumultuous mayhem than all other TV Westerns combined.
But to show how demoniacal our villains are, we have to depict them at their best -- correction, “worst.” And if the story lines get snarled, we have to “eliminate” some human obstacles. Just keep knocking ’em off, buster. The Front Office is right behind you.
Dr. Fredric Wertham claims that 5-year-olds have actually shot at the video tube with their fathers’ guns. That an adolescent girl strangled a 6-year-old with a stocking “after watching a TV mystery program.” That boys have broken kids’ arms and legs with wrestling holds they “learned from rough television shows.”
Don’t listen to the scare-mongers. The Nielsen families may be opposed to violence, but they are nonetheless eager to see all the harmless details. Show them your bottomless pit. Swing open your Iron Maiden. Let them see your swinging knife-edged pendulum while your torturer symbolically peels a peach in the foreground. Then set up a cliff-hanger escape, nobody gets hurt, and you have altruistically provided Nielsen’s 1150 frustrated families with a socially harmless outlet for their murderous inner impulses.
Go Gothic! Be baroque! Hang crystal chandeliers in your eerie caves. Put stained-glass portholes in your flying saucers. And thank your Stars for 1870. How would you like to be stuck with U.N.C.L.E.’s tiresome electronics?
Gimmick it up with your steam-powered wheel chairs with their quaint little boilers and pistons. Your puppet-show marionettes firing guns at Supreme Court justices. Your underwater “dragons” shooting off torpedoes. Give it the old surface-credibility.
Keep ’em off balance! Do the unexpected! Titillate! Surprise! Plunge on! Pure escapism—beautiful!
But please don’t strain our viewers with “problems of life.” Don’t tax them with those Matt-Dillon-style seminars around the coffee cups with the whys, wherefores, and whereases. Did you catch our time slot opposition trying to “humanize” Tarzan?—that’s a laugh. And none of that cloying Pa-Cartwright-Ma-Barkley familial gush. Human beings are black or white; ours are.
Just keep Jim West simple and uncomplicated, his face a mask. It takes a great many muscles to make a smile; make sure Conrad doesn’t use more than two or three. Obviously, West is never to fall in love, nor even to show compassion (Napoleon Solo to the contrary notwithstanding). If his best friend should die, let him mutter, “What a waste!” and forge straight ahead.
In the fourth act we want a bangbang-you’re-dead climax. No crocodile tears when the legless maniac gets his. Don’t bother to ease the viewers back into their comfortable sentimentality.
Cleanse West of personal idiosyncrasies, making it easy for viewers to project their own psyches. His big fights should always be against a multiplicity of villains. Incidentally, I know you won’t forget how great Bobby looks with his shirt off. Strip him to the waist at least once per episode.
Should any of us ever stop to question the significance of all this in the larger scale of human values, we can just remind ourselves that we are depicting the forces of Good in a world of Evil, and everything will be all right.
Sponsors want to reach consumers. Consumers are square. Squares like their action-adventure straight. Never
alienate that vast underbelly of viewers by playing for cheap laughs or trying to kid your own thing. Batman with its corny put-ons cut back to one show a week. I Spy with its cutesy-boos is slipping (grown men are not “cute”). Remember what happened to one of our WWW ex-producers, Collier Young, when he couldn’t resist camping it up? Three of his spoof-type episodes and he was out on his can.
Object lesson number two: Remember our battles with WWW’s flamboyant originator, the late Mike Garrison! How we had to send in eight producers in one year—more than any television series before or since—to help us clamp a brake on Garrison’s outrageous excesses! Here was a show supposedly set in U.S. Grant’s Administration coming on with plastic explosives, canisters of radioactive materials and computer dating! All this concurrent with the Franco-Prussian War! Like wow, man, that’s why we had to put a solid Joe like you in this spot.
Admittedly, we here at Management were so obfuscated at the beginning of the current season we goofed but good. But you came through with exactly what we ordered, Bruce — a return to the Old West. Well, we looked at our first six “Westerns” — Mexican bandits, ghost towns, Indian massacres—the tepees, the cactus, the dust. Forget we opened our mouth. We'll slip those six dogs in with the season’s output. Maybe nobody will notice.
Despite everything, we’ve managed to win our time slot this year. Congratulations. And we’re grooving in the Nielsen “demographics.” The statistics show they dig us in practically all categories: males, females, the 12-17’s, the 18-34’s, the over 50’s. We knew you had it in you, Bruce. All you had to do, tiger, was let it come out.
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My favorite episode is "The Night of the Surreal McCoy," in which Dr. Loveless uses a painting as part of his scheme, ultimately disappearing into it. The episode aired Season two, episode 23. Loveless has invented a way of entering and leaving paintings via the use of sound waves. The device was a prop used by The Who band. Very typical of the show's blending of science fiction with classic Western.
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