Posted on 10/17/2015 9:49:59 AM PDT by PJ-Comix
The other day I was watching a rerun of a popular TV show from the past. Suddenly it occurred to me that this was the most CONSERVATIVE TV show ever despite the fact that it wasn't specifically a political show.
Okay, I'll give you the name: DRAGNET. I was watching the color version that came back to the airwaves in 1967. Detective Joe Friday didn't fool around. He was all business with NO apologies in enforcing the law. Also notable was how he sneered at hippies, drug addicts, or (in the case of the episode I was watching) idiotic teenyboppers who shoplifted strictly to be members of a dopey club.
Some pretty good stuff in “The Walking Dead”.
Fifties TV shows just reflect the way the country was back in the 1950s.
To do anything remotely conservative in later decades took an effort.
FYI my dad was foreman of a ranch in AZ and one day he took me to our barn that “Have Gun Will Travel” was filming at. I met Richard Boone and he gave me a “Have Gun Will Travel” autographed card after he did a fight scene.
Webb later gave his ex-wife a tv series, “Emergency!”, and was also on friendly terms with the man she married, as he popped up on Dragnet 1967 episodes and would co-star with London on the aforementioned series. If he was as creepy as all that, it’s unlikely either she or the new husband would have had anything to do with him.
There was one syndicated series from around 1958, entitled “Official Detective.” It was a crime anthology series, hosted by Everett Sloane. I recall an episode in which ended with the typical criminal, a youthful mug that held some people hostage in a restaurant, felled by police gunfire. Then, at the end, when we return to host Sloane, he comments, dripping with utter contempt for the criminal, words to the effect that “the thug died from his wounds, thankfully saving the state the expense for his execution.” Then the end credits.
Beautifully cold, like a slap to the face to a liberal.
But almost all filmed series from the 1950s/1960s exudes a relative conservatism (with the exception of a few lib shows like “The Defenders” or “East Side West Side”). Even watching “Dr. Kildare,” with homo Richard Chamberlain, I’m amazed at how staunchly conservative and unwaveringly pro-morality its messaging is.
All this changes drastically in the 1970s. Not that everything becomes blatant propaganda, and there was still a fair amount of family-friendly fare. And it seems amazingly so, compared to the sick drek we have now. But in the 1970s, even a series that seemed to totally avoid politics and perhaps even lean conservative, like “Cannon” would sometimes serve up a discordant note. For example, there was an episode of that series in which guest Fritz Weaver played a sad-sack nut who worked at a munitions lab for the government, and in his crazed mind, plants a bomb at an amusement park to send some kind of anti-war message. He’s caught at the end, and the police and even “Cannon” seem to just treat him like some poor, sick, misguided dude worthy of sympathy. Had the same plotline appeared in a police/detective show ten years earlier, the main characters would slap the snot out of the villain, and yell at him for endangering the lives of dozens of innocent women and children at the amusement park, and basically look upon the guy as a loathesome piece of human scum.
Jack Wrather who owned Chris Craft Boats and owned the rights to Lassie, encouraged his friend Ronald Reagan to run for public office in CA.
“Freedom” with Holt McCallany..short-lived tv series on the air around 2000/2001. IIRC they were fighting a military coup after the President’s plane is shot down and he is presumed dead.
Not sure if this was a pilot or a miniseries, but “Shadow on the Land”, late 60s, with Marc Strange, Jackie Cooper, and Gene Hackman fighting a fascist government.
oops, I didn’t see the part about a tv show that was non-political, my mistake!!!
Going back, Firing Line with William F. Buckley said it all.
Can’t get much more conservative than “Duck Dynasty”
Capt. Lou Richey: "What it boils down to is the new morality, doesn't it, a new set of values. God is dead. Drug addiction is mind expanding. Promiscuity is glamorous. Even homosexuality is praiseworthy. How you gonna fight that?"
They cut the line on homosexuality, thought it still appeared on the close-captioning. My mouth dropped open. The Gaystapo can't be offended.
Not only that....people would try to sneak Crawford liquor on the set. Too bad they couldn't have Broderick do a public service announcement about drunk driving. He could have done it in character speaking in his Dan Matthews rapid-fire delivery. 10-4.
Perry Mason perhaps?
Wagon Train was good, Death Valley days was more conservative. You lived or died by your own efforts.
I seem to remember that was Betty Lynn who played Barney’s girlfriend Thelma Lou. She got mugged in Mt Airy shortly after moving there.
Aunt Bea didn’t retire to Mt. Airy, she retired to Siler City.
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