A Tale Told By An Idiot Box

By James Poniewozik

It's fitting that the two most popular sweeps-TV topics today are mythology (Jason and the Argonauts, Arabian Nights) and classic television. For TV is the closest thing to our own mythology, a tradition of shared tales reflecting our values. Yea, just as chaos doth follow when gods lie with mortals, so doth woe betide the Bradys when Marcia gets a crush on Davy Jones!

At least that's what you'd think reading the news--perennial pop-quiz failure George W. Bush was embarrassed when he couldn't identify Sex and the City to Glamour magazine--and today's TV listings. In a season that's already seen two Partridge Family movies, this month's sweeps movies revisit The Brady Bunch (twice), The Dukes of Hazzard and Diff'rent Strokes, the latter a production even Gary Coleman has refused to be associated with. (Fox hasn't made it available for screening, so this critic can only assume it's a tour de force of storytelling magic!) In part, this nostalgia vogue is a demographic no-brainer. The only thing you can say about all of today's niche-ified TV viewers is, well, they like to watch TV. But it says even more about TV's frustrating tendency to flatter and belittle itself at the same time.

Take NBC's Growing Up Brady (May 21, 9 p.m. E.T.). Based on the memoir by Barry ("Greg") Williams, it's a dishy, winking candy valentine that focuses on how much action Williams got from his screen sister, Maureen ("Marcia") McCormick. But at heart it's really about how darn much you love the Bradys and, by extension, TV. In one scene the Brady boys explore the Paramount lot, racing a cart through a gangster shootout and playing with phasers on the set of Star Trek. It's a big, slobbery kiss to TV past, and an ironic one coming from the network that vaporized the original Trek.

It's narcissism, sure, but there's more to it. These TV 101 lessons remind an elusive audience how big a part of our lives TV is. But by celebrating TV's most harmlessly numskull shows, they also offer absolution to a medium under attack as violent, sex-crazed and dangerous. TV is our cultural dowry, they say. But then again--hey!--it's just TV!

So in celebrating TV history, these revivals tend to smooth it over. CBS's The Dukes of Hazzard: Hazzard in Hollywood (May 19, 8 p.m. E.T.), which brings the Duke boys' story up to date, is the same Southern-fried minstrelsy that makes the series a hoot to remember but excruciating to relive. But worse, by making Bo and Luke allies with Sheriff Roscoe P. Coltrane and deputies Enos and Cletus, the movie guts the one aspect of the show that made it more than a cornpone car chase--two good ole boys "fightin' the system like two modern-day Robin Hoods," as the theme song (which the movie has jettisoned) said. The Dukes' eight-cylinder jousts with the corrupt Boss Hogg and his henchmen showed how antiestablishmentarianism had percolated, post-Watergate, into America's most conservative precincts, prefiguring the antigovernment politics of the coming decades (whereas the movie just shows that John Schneider and Tom Wopat need to fire their agents). Look at the Dukes' hot rod, the General Lee, with the Stars and Bars flying, and you can see Tom DeLay pulling up in the rearview mirror.

In other words, TV is history. It may even be--gasp!--worth taking seriously. But those who fail to learn from TV history are doomed to make bad repeats.