Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1962)

Viewers who turned their television dials to CBS on the evening of October 2, 1955, were greeted with Charles Gounod's "Funeral March for a Marionette" played against a simple caricature of a rotund man in profile. After a beat or two, a silhouette appeared, a man also in profile, walking toward the drawing until becoming aligned with it. The silhouette lingered, Gounod's music twiddling away with the silhouette, forever linking the two. Then:

Good evening, I am Alfred Hitchcock. Tonight I'm presenting the first in a series of stories of suspense and mystery called, oddly enough, Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I shall not act in these stories, but will only make appearances, something in the nature of an accessory before and after the fact, to give the title to those of you who can't read and to tidy up afterwards for those who don't understand the endings.

And so began the director's foray into television, a medium which, in his words, "brought back murder into the home – where it belongs."

The 1950s are generally remembered as docile years — picket fences and two-and-a-half kids and gin-and-tonics served under the sunny and grandfatherly smile of Dwight Eisenhower. When we think of 1950s television we tend to think of wholesomeness, sitcom fare like Leave It To Beaver. But lingering right underneath that serene illusion of the decade are darker elements, witch-hunts and duck-and-cover exercises done in the fear of nuclear annihilation. The darkness of the decade, or at least its moral ambivalence, is embodied wonderfully by Alfred Hitchcock Presents, one of the most sinister shows to run on network television. And that's all the more surprising when you consider that it debuted a full two years before Leave It To Beaver.

Lew Wasserman, a personal friend of Hitchcock as well as his agent, is credited with the idea of putting Hitchcock on television. And why not? It would be a clear opportunity for Hitchcock to cash in on the name he had spent years connecting with mystery and suspense. The director tried to launch a national radio series during the 1940s but never had much luck, and television was the new mass-media machine of the 1950s. Hitchcock was well known and generally liked (artistic respect, we now know, would have to wait a few years, and it would require this television show to reach the masses completely). Shrinking his popular aesthetic in scope and length to easily digestible episodes on home televisions seemed to have success written all over it. His contract was financially pleasing, and the rights to the episodes would revert to him after they ran.

Hitchcock's bank account benefited wildly from his television show, and he became more popular than ever, reaching a wider audience than merely his films, and for once, he was part of the show, not just a mind behind a lens. But what is not given much credit is how seriously Hitchcock took the television project. He was a savvy marketer — often heading up the publicity projects for his own films — and could have simply lent his name and image to the series, turned over the reins to any random person, and let the money come in. But no doubt part of the show's tremendous success comes from the fact that Hitchcock also lent his mind.

The first four seasons of Alfred Hitchcock Presents total 268 episodes, each thirty minutes. The final three seasons, totaling 93 episodes, were expanded to sixty-minutes and the program was retitled The Alfred Hitchcock Hour. It would be disingenuous of me to say I've seen all of the episodes; but I have seen many, enough to discuss the show at large, including the eighteen total directed by Hitchcock. This essay, an installment in my retrospective on the director, will primarily be about those episodes and the show's historical effect and reach.

Alfred Hitchcock Presents is another argument in the ongoing case that Hitchcock — the man and the mind — was like a lightning bolt, the likes of which we may never see again. Biographer Patrick McGilligan says the television series was "an enterprise that might have consumed a full year's attention for a man less well organized, less brimming with ideas and energy." The 1950s were Hitchcock's prime film-making years, and he had a similar drive in launching the show. Less than six months after the idea for the show was hatched, it premiered. Varying accounts exist of how intensely Hitchcock was involved in the show; obviously we know he wasn't ghost-directing in his free time, or participating in extensive re-writes or re-edits as he did with his films, but the extent to which he participated in the show's development was often undersold, primarily by Hitchcock himself, who preferred to defer credit to his long-time assistant Joan Harrison. (This was characteristic of the man whose films hardly bore his name as a contributing writer.)

Harrison produced more than 250 episodes of Presents, and without question was the chief ringleader behind the scenes. But with Hitchcock's name attached, he also put in grueling hours to make sure it reached success, particularly during the first two seasons. McGilligan notes that the director was involved in story and personnel choices and served as a liaison between the show and the network. As the series continued past the first two seasons, he delegated more authority and responsibility, but through to the end he was still working weekends to approve stories and writers and screening final episodes for any post-production suggestions. "A television show, like a souffle, reflects the taste of the person who selects and mixes the ingredients," Hitchcock once said. "It matters a great deal, for example, whether onions or garlic are used and when arsenic is added."

The television show gave Hitchcock, who had a penchant for short fiction, an outlet for hundreds of story ideas that couldn't be adapted into films. He preferred the simple, single-engine driven plot that keeps a short story pushing forward, and relished the twists that often came at the end. If stretched too far and unsupported with more details, Hitchcock believed short fiction could become tedious for a two-hour film; not so with thirty minutes. Since the launch of his directing career, he had been collecting favorite tales and stories. Much of what appears on Alfred Hitchcock Presents came from published works — the likes of H.G. Wells, A.A. Milne, Rebecca West, Julian Symons, V.S. Pritchett, Eric Ambler, John Moritmor, Roald Dahl, Stanley Ellin, Belloc Lowndes, Ray Bradbury, and Cornell Woolrich. Even with films, the director preferred the published world to the original world; adapting a published work required less story development, thus allowing the director to focus more exclusively on the cinematic rendering of the material. The show also gave opportunities to emerging and established directors, like Robert Stevenson, Ida Lupino, Robert Altman, George Stevens Jr., William Friedkin, and Robert Stevens.

At the end of the show's first season, the New York Herald Tribute wrote that "the best thing about Alfred Hitchcock Presents is Alfred Hitchcock presenting," a sentiment which I think holds up nicely even today. It's a remarkable feat that, as he was in the midst of directing his masterpieces, Hitchcock appears in every single episode of the series as its host. We hear stories of the director as a jokester and huckster on the sets of his films, and his films are often morbidly funny, but if you want to see Hitchcock pushing the boundaries of humor, you needn't look any further than any random episode of Presents. His droll wit, often self-inflicted and regularly cruel toward his network and his advertisers ("Crime does not pay, not even on television — you must have a sponsor," is one of his best lines), is utilized to great success. An actor he is not, but a performer — ah, yes, he is a performer. The man who fed him his words was James Allardice, a former journalist, television writer and playwright, who ghost-wrote most of Hitchcock's lines during the openings and conclusions of the show. It was a fruitful and productive relationship; Hitchcock loved a particular anecdote about a high school play Allardice wrote, in which an electric chair set under a sign that read: "You can be sure if it's a Westinghouse." (Not too difficult to understand why they got along so swimmingly.)

What of the show itself? It is great fun, with episodes often coming across like pressurized Hitchcock films. The hand of the director can be sensed behind nearly every aspect of the series, and the themes and motifs that recur throughout the show are Hitchcockian to the nth degree: murder, suspicion, betrayal, guilt, voyeurism, doppelgangers, crime. The plots are curved and twisted; although Presents predates The Twilight Zone by four years, the two are often connected simply by the skewed angle on humanity and the frequent moralistic twist endings. Presents is hardly political and rarely as fantastical, but no doubt it was a great inspiration for Rod Serling, whose show would also run on CBS. Hitchcock himself introduced to the show's attitude in the first episode as "striv[ing] to teach a lesson or point a little moral, advice like mother used to give – you know, walk softly but carry a big stick, strike first and ask questions later, that sort of thing."

The pilot episode, called "Revenge," has the Hitchcock sensibility in the plot and construction. A woman (Vera Miles, who's ravishing in an over-large white button-up draped across her swimsuit-clad boy) has suffered a mental breakdown and her protective husband moves her to a trailer park adjacent to the California coast. When she claims to have been attacked in their home, he seeks revenge, attacking the man she identifies as her assailant. All is well until she ... identifies another man as her assailant. The episode is a stylish debut, with close-ups and selected lighting, the camera positioned at oblique angles, and a great murder scene partially obscured and partially reflected in a mirror.

The rest of the first season's episodes (of which Hitchcock directed four) play out the same way. One Hitchcock-directed episode, "Back for Christmas," has a murderous husband undone by his wife's kindness. Joseph Cotton appears in the episode "Breakdown," a heavily stylistic episode where a man experiences a car crash and is completely paralyzed except for his single little finger. The story relies on many point-of-view shots — a rarity in television — and a haunting internal monologue to achieve an eerie feeling of inescapability and doom. But the crème de la crème of Hitchcock's work in the first season has to be "The Case of Mr. Pelham," which actually is the sort of thing Serling could have worked into The Twilight Zone. Starring Tom Ewell, the "case" is actually of doppelgangers. Pelham is an aloof and distant man of wealth who grows anxious and paranoid as he begins to suspect someone is impersonating him, not merely at certain moments of importance but in the mundane moments in life.

Throughout the series, Hitchcock ran afoul with the ambiguity of the episode endings — namely whether characters who committed crimes were receiving proper punishment for their deeds. Untethered with the Production Code, Hitchcock was still stuck with nervous advertisers that didn't want to run commercials along successful murders. Where an early episode like "Revenge," the series pilot, would directly imply punishment for the characters in the stageplay, later episodes had to state explicitly what was coming. In "One More Mile To Go," a country man who murders his wife is antagonized by a police officer on a motorcycle who is determined to have the man fix a broken taillight. Normally it'd be as easy as popping open the trunk — except, of course, the dead wife's body is in the trunk. "One More Mile To Go," a Hitchcock-directed gem from the second season, pushes boundaries; after the man murders his wife, he cleans off the weapon and burns a blood-stained handkerchief and decides how he's going to load the body into the car, all while the orchestra swells and sighs with music of unbridled romance. In the end, as the officer escorts the man to the police station where the resident mechanic "will have that trunk open in no time," Hitchcock zooms the camera in on the broken taillight, oval-shaped and flashing on and off to look like a blinking eye. And there the episode ends: a vague impression that the man is caught, but he's alone on a country road and already murdered once, so who knows?

In many instances, the story within the episode would literally take away all possibility of punishment and let the perpetrators get away with the crimes. Hitchcock, as you might expect, would need to toss something onto the ending, but would deflate the safety of punishment with bad jokes. In "The Perfect Crime," from the show's third season (tied with the first season as the best), Charles Courtney (played by Vincent Price) gets away with murdering a lawyer named John Gregory (James Gregory) and using the remains to make a vase out of "special clay." Except, as Hitchcock explains in self-consciously pathetic narration:

I regret to inform you that Courtney did not retain his last trophy very long. He was caught. A charwoman knocked over the precious vase breaking it into pieces, a few of them identifiable as, uh, bits of Mr. Gregory. You see, the gold fillings in his teeth had resisted the heat of the kiln. But all the good doctors and all the good police couldn't put Mr. Gregory together again.

He might as well be rolling his eyes, and by the time we arrive at the lame pun, Hitchcock understands no one except the advertisers really care. The same sense of safety in the ending is elusive in what might be the show's most famous episode, "Lamb to the Slaughter," directed by Hitchcock and adapted from a Roald Dahl short story where a pregnant woman (Barbara Bel Geddes), upon hearing the news that her husband is leaving her, kills him with a frozen leg of lamb. If it's not the best example of the show, it's certainly among the most perverse. The woman deceives the police from start to finish, and even though the lead detective essentially solves the mystery, he can't pinpoint the murder weapon. "For all we know it could be right under our noses," he says as he and his crew sit down to dinner — a perfectly cooked leg of lamb, as a matter of fact. The ending here, with the woman cackling at her masterwork, is blunted by criticism with another Hitchcock tacked-on anecdote: "she would have gone scot-free if she hadn't tried to do in her second-husband in the exact same way." It's a wonder anyone who had trouble with the on-screen murder ever found that excuse satisfying.

These are only a few of the hundreds of episodes in a series that is quite worth your time, and, as the cliche goes, still better than most of the stuff on television right now. As I said above, the first and third seasons are probably the show's strongest — the strongest episodes directed by Hitchcock and the strongest episodes not directed Hitchcock, which still carry the hallmarks of the director. The series is a curious and rewarding departure from his longer, more nuanced cinematic artwork, but because he never let the show venture too far away from his watchful eyes and ever-spinning mind, you know it has the quality the Hitchcock name is known for.

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Late Night with Conan O'Brien (1993-2009)

In the hubbub of last week, as the film community geared up for the Oscars, I failed to pause and say goodbye to one of the television staples of my adolescence and young adulthood. After fifteen-and-a-half years, Conan O'Brien signed off at Late Night, where he hopped and spun and jumped and yelled gibberish and ran and attacked the camera weeknights at 12:30 a.m. In college, my roommate and I had the best nighttime lineup two dry-witted, satire-loving, pop-culture-consuming cynics could hope for: Jon Stewart at 11, Dave Letterman at 11:30, Conan O'Brien at 12:30. By 1:30 a.m., fully put down in a hazy stupor, it was lights off.

It was somehow fitting it was these three men — New Yorkers, dead-panners, re-inventors, trailblazers all — could come sequentially. Their career paths have overlapped considerably: When Letterman left Late Night in 1993, after yucking it up with watermelons thrown from rooftops and stupid pet tricks galore, both Stewart and O'Brien were considered as replacements (and both continually give reverence to Dave whenever possible); then when O'Brien was announced as the new host of The Tonight Show (which Letterman never got), Stewart was bandied as a possible replacement for O'Brien. Their paths crossed numerous times, and sometimes in my mind their gags and jokes would become misidentified. But there they always were: the political eviscerator, the self-deprecating boomer, the frantic fool.

When it was announced in 2004 that O'Brien would join the The Tonight Show after Jay Leno's retirement, it was never a concern of mine that they would be a bad match. I'd watch O'Brien do a morning show, an afternoon show, a radio show, whatever — the success of a host-oriented program is based more in the personality of the host than anything else, otherwise Letterman, whose Top Ten Lists ceased to be funny more than a decade ago, would have fallen off the radar by now. What disappointed in the moment was that an O'Brien move would be the dissolution of the Stewart-Letterman-O'Brien trinity, which had already begun falling apart when Comedy Central debuted the genius Stephen Colbert in his own show at 11:30, and that became a more frequent destination for me than Letterman.

It's said that O'Brien's humor appeals to a younger demographic, but I'd venture a guess that the youth of his audience had more to do with his time-slot than any inherent comedy stylings. O'Brien, after all, was a Harvard graduate, a veteran of the Harvard Lampoon satire magazine, and a former writer for The Simpsons and Saturday Night Live — nothing, I'd say, that immediately disqualifies him from being able to induce chuckling in a boomer. It was easier in college to watch O'Brien knowing I didn't have to wake up until 10:30 in the morning; once I entered the workforce (but before the introduction of DVR), it became substantially more difficult to watch him.

Still, it would be naive to discount how a specific time-slot and the evolution of humor possess a symbiotic relationship. Comedy tailors itself, whether consciously or unconsciously, to its audience, and an audience seeks out, whether consciously or unconsciously, a specific brand of comedy. After nearly sixteen years in the Late Night hour (where Letterman had previously flourished before making a big move to opposite The Tonight Show), it's difficult not to think of Conan's audience as a certain demographic and Conan's humor as a particular brand, but it would be equally naive to think that an entertainer can't evolve to the conditions around himself and not change the core of his being. I have faith in him based solely on his intelligence, which during the run of Late Night skewed his show to riskier recurring (and some might say more ridiculous skits, such as If They Mated, The Walker Texas Ranger Lever, the talking lips screens, and The Year 2000, which continued long after the new millennium began. Who else could hone in on the irony in a person's image and exploit it to such great laughs, as in Apple-Picking with Mr. T? Who else would broadcast a rerun of a show but done entirely in claymation?

Letterman's stint as Late Night host, before being dissed by NBC for The Tonight Show, holds a place in the hearts of many in the generation immediately preceding mine. Time magazine's list of the 100 greatest televisions in the history of the blinking-tubes-in-a-box includes Late Night with David Letterman (at 12:30) but not The Late Show with Daivd Letterman (at 11:30). Why? "Letterman at his best gives you the feeling of being lucky enough to watch him play with this awesome toy he's been given." That's how I feel with Conan; his Late Night means to me what Letterman's Late Night meant to others. But it strikes me as if Conan, plucked from obscurity when Lorne Michaels pushed heavily for him to take over Late Night, will always be a boy with an awesome toy, and yes, The Tonight Show will be different, but in as long as I've been actively watching television, I've never liked The Tonight Show. His transition into host comes at the right time for me, as I transition.

It's strange how that happens, how our everyday and individual lives can become connected to the world and charted through certain technologies. Perhaps it's a strange way to think of it, but O'Brien leaving Late Night informs me more on the subject of my age than it does anything else. Individuals and societies can trace their growth through their art (in this case, late night comedy), which must reinvent and rearrange itself regularly to stay alive. Something that was always a mainstay for my college years — Stewart, Letterman, then O'Brien, in that order, Mondays through Thursdays — isn't anymore. More than my own new jobs, my wonderful marriage, my relocation and a jumbling of where I call home, more than anything, it's when something that was always there, something you took for granted, begins to unravel that you realize the past is really in the past. It was fun while it lasted, but who's to say new fun isn't around the next corner?

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How the Grinch Stole Christmas (1966)

d. Chuck Jones / USA / 26 mins.


Theodore Geisel and Charles Martin Jones – today better known respectively as Dr. Seuss and Chuck – were a wicked force in combination. Theirs was not a long-standing partnership, like other illustrators and animators, but their work together bears the best hallmarks of each. None is more popular or more widely known than their 1966 collaboration on the half-hour television special of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, which the two adapted from Seuss's book of the same name.

In many respects, The Grinch is the yang to the yin of A Charlie Brown Christmas. The latter, adapted by Bill Melendez and Charles Schulz from Schulz's Peanuts comic strip, premiered only one year earlier. Both are about characters who discover the holidays are more valuable than commercialism and mere presents and decorations. Both brought together a popular illustrator with a popular animator, but they take decidedly different routes to acquiring their hearts. Charlie Brown embraces the literal and biblical meaning of Christmas and disinfects the commercialism away while reaching a satisfying middle ground of reason-for-the-season happiness and kindness. The Grinch is bathed in a surreal and mythical world of Whos and Grinches (or rather, one Grinch and a dog). The Whos are the townspeople in a valley below a mountaintop where the Grinch lives, and all we need to know for the special to have any resonance is that the Whos love Christmas and Grinch can't stand it. He is so anti-Christmas that he plots to steal it from them and spoil their morning joy, until his plan is rendered obsolete by their joy in spite of his thievery. The plot is absent any religiosity whatsoever but not missing an iota of the purity in kindness and heart that Christmas is meant to inspire. In many ways, the Whos gathering around the town tree – joining hands, and singing "Fahoo Foray" – is as arresting to the senses in its wondrous simplicity as Linus's tender and earnest rendition of the Gospel of Luke.

Both specials are great, but The Grinch is better. In addition to the remarkable poetry of Seuss's language and the incomparable voice-over by Boris Karloff, each frame brims with the endless possibilities of Jones's imagination. Like Seuss's writing, which contains no extraneous lines, the art produced and supervised by Jones is equally secure in its exact place. No matter how arbitrary something may seem, time and time again The Grinch proves itself to be an entire feast for the eyes. Perhaps it would not be fair to say Jones is the most influential animator of the twentieth century (the competition is wondrous and large), but he is certainly among the best, and this special – today as widely seen, circulated, and parodied as his contributions to the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies shorts at Warner Bros. – is a golden testament to his skill as a director. The still drawings are as finely crafted as the animation (the "stealing" of Christmas is the most pleasurable aspect of the special), and it's in the seamless hybrid of the Grinch as both a sort-of animal and a sort-of human that brings him to life. He is unseemly but elegant, slithering and disgustingly green but with impeccable posture.

Only three voices get spotlight treatment, and the most prominent of those is Karloff, who earned his immortality in the Universal horror films of the 1930s. His textured baritone voice is the perfect as both the narrator and the Grinch. It is not widely known that Karloff didn't sing the famous song "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch," which was actually performed by Thurl Ravenscroft (known better as the voice of Tony the Tiger in Kellogg's television commercials). Bizarrely, Ravenscroft received no on-screen credit for his singing, so it was as unknown then as it is today, which led to Seuss personally sending letters to newspaper columnists so Ravenscroft would get his due. June Foray, a veteran voice artist who would contribute to Hanna-Barbara cartoons among others, has a small part as the voice of Cindy Lou Who.

Seuss's 1957 book and the 1966 special with Jones are both mainstays in our culture, certainly popular around Christmastime as a holiday tradition but entertaining as twisted parables any day of the year, much like Frank Capra's timeless (and season-less) classic It's a Wonderful Life. His literary output totaled more than 60 books, which collectively have sold more than 220 million copies worldwide. As far as English-speaking peoples are concerned, I'd wager a vast majority of men, women, and children are familiar with the man's works, even if inadvertently so. The word grinch, as any dictionary will tell you, is defined as "one who spoils the pleasure of others" and its etymology can be traced directly back to its first usage, in Seuss's 1957 book, where he made-up the word that has become so popular it is now wholly generic.

I referred above to Seuss's writing as poetry, which might make a few of my poet friends cringe, but as a writer, he employed the rigorous mechanics and tools of poetry as skillfully and as lyrically as anyone else writing in the twentieth century. His work is ostensibly for children, but perhaps those who reap the most intellectual pleasure from it are adults. Seuss made-up words left and right, but his work can be scanned for precise meter and rhythm, and heaven knows he receives much more circulation than most American poets outside Robert Frost. Seuss's writing is concise and compact, and like most poetry, doesn't withstand the addition of more words or ideas than it already contains; this is why Seuss's works translate the best in the short-film format and explains why so many feature-length adaptations of his work fail so miserably. How the Grinch Stole Christmas is a rare treasure because it is such a lively and brilliant adaptation of material that was already so lively and brilliant. As simple as that sounds, it's damn near impossible to pull off. But then again, Seuss and Jones together are like lightning striking twice.

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A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965)

d. Bill Melendez / USA / 25 mins.


This holiday season is the first airing of the Americana masterwork A Charlie Brown Christmas since the death of its animator and director, Bill Melendez, who passed away in September at age 91. Melendez was the only animator trusted by Charles Schulz, the creator of the Peanuts comic strip, and he worked in collaboration with Schulz on bringing Charlie Brown, Linus, Lucy, Snoopy, and all the rest to life starting from 1959 through the cartoonist's death in 2000.

Aimed primarily at children (at least that's what it'd have you except), the story is deceptively straightforward. Charlie Brown, in a holiday malaise, confides in his friend Linus that he doesn't understand the cheerfulness of the season. After he finds himself appointed the director of the school Christmas pageant – and selects a weak, barren and natural tree instead of a neon-pink industrial-strength aluminum decoration – his cynicism at the commercialization of the holiday spills over the edge. Christmas seems without a point until Linus volunteers to explain the meaning of the holiday with a verbatim quotation from the Gospel of Luke to show "what Christmas is all about."

Reportedly Melendez thought Linus's reading of the New Testament was too strong. America was still in the middle of the Warren Court's broadly sweeping proclamations of equal rights and liberalism (which was absolutely correct, in my opinion), and school-sponsored prayer and Bible study had just been found unconstitutional in the three years before A Charlie Brown Christmas aired. Schulz's famous response to Melendez's concern was: "Bill, if we don't do it, then who will?" And it's difficult not to be swayed by Schulz's gentle logic. A Charlie Brown Christmas, as its title suggests, is an unabashed Christmas special; there isn't anything all-inclusive about the holidays here, and to a degree there's a fair amount of joy in that. The special doesn't try to be anything other than a clear and honest explanation of Christmas, referring to the source material requisitely and unblinkingly. Yet, the religion aspect doesn't drown anything out; if anything, it evens the playing field. Schulz wasn't looking for any converts to a particular creed, only converts to a particular attitude: commercialization changes things, often in the direction that we lose sight of the intended meaning. (The idea can be extended to almost any federal holiday in the United States, whether religious in origin or not.)

With the knowledge of Melendez's death upfront on my mind, I watched A Charlie Brown Christmas with an abiding respect for how something so technically simple and straightforward can become something so extraordinary. The sapling Christmas tree Charlie Brown selects is like a metaphor for the special painted into itself; the show is unadorned and on-point with its astute pillory of the commercialization of the holidays, and let's not forget this is perhaps the most definitive statement on that fact. (Although to be fair, the special has an ironically checkered relationship to commercialization, including brief sections that have since been removed that prominently featured the logo of its corporate sponsor, Coca-Cola.)

Melendez's career was devoted to animation, from his initial hiring into Walt Disney's team in 1938, where he contributed to Pinocchio, Fantasia, Bambi, and Dumbo. After he parted ways with Disney over a union dispute, he joined Leon Schlesinger's animation team at Warner Bros., where he produced Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies. A Charlie Brown Christmas was the first full-length Peanuts special and Melendez's first animated film as a director (it spawned dozens of other Peanuts programs). Schulz wrote the script with his characteristic austerity and optimism, and the program won an Emmy Award and the George Foster Peabody Award.

The score, composed and jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi and performed by his trio, is almost as famous as the special itself and should be appreciated separate from the animation. The soundtrack album is a mainstay at my house around the holidays, and it's one of the only holiday albums I can bear to hear repeated. (Tracks include renditions of "O Tannenbaum," "What Child Is This?" and "Hark! The Herald Angels Sing." Guaraldi's composition "Linus and Lucy," which would become known widely as the theme song to the Peanuts animated specials, is one of the only non-holiday related songs on the album.) Having not seen A Charlie Brown Christmas for many years, I was struck on a recent viewing at how cropped and short the score is within the half-hour running length. It seems to shuffle from incomplete song to incomplete song like an iPod fresh from the bathtub.

Given its immense cultural status and tremendous success, it almost goes without saying that CBS network executives believed in 1965 it was going to be a flop. (These sorts of great things are always "doomed to fail.") I don't think anyone at CBS programming would have predicted we'd still be watching a simple half-hour special more than forty years after its initial airing. I enjoy A Charlie Brown Christmas now as an adult more than I ever did as a child; the awe is still there, the silly humor of Snoopy and the advanced sophistication of holiday burnout and the gentle reminder that it should instead be a time for peace. It's enough to make you believe there's something powerful at play here, something at least more powerful than mere nostalgia.

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"Small Screen" Savour: Mad Men Season 1 (2007)

Created by Matthew Weiner / Channel: AMC / 13 episodes, 616 mins.


Although the focus of this blog is film criticism, with the Emmy Awards this weekend I couldn't resist discussing the AMC original series Mad Men, one of the most cinematic television shows I've seen in a long time. (And besides, the differences between film and television sometimes can feel like the differences of name and medium only; when a television channel devotes itself to the production of a well-crafted and intelligent series, the result is certainly worth its weight in savour and can be considerably more entertaining than most of the fare hitting theaters. )

Perhaps the connection between Mad Men and the movies is drawn most clearly by the series' creator, Matthew Weiner, who has openly acknowledged the visual style of the show was influenced by the work of Alfred Hitchcock. The opening sequence of the series is certainly inspired by the Saul Bass title sequences in Hitchcock's works of the late 1950s, particularly Vertigo and North by Northwest. The cinematography emulates Robert Dirks's glossy Technicolor work, and the show's theme song – "A Beautiful Mine" by RJD2 – is oddly reminiscent of Bernard Herrmann wrapped in electronica.

But more than its mere visual elements however, Mad Men is also concerned with many of Hitchcock's favorite themes: manhood (particularly cowardice versus bravery), mistaken identities, manipulation, guilt, betrayal, and objectification. Office politics are bloody, brutal, and highly sexual. In fact, setting the series at an advertising agency almost begs of the question: Is this what would have happened to Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest if he had just stayed in his office instead of running cross country?

Set in early 1960 when the series opens, the show centers around Sterling Cooper, a fictional advertising agency on Madison Avenue in New York (thus one of the many interpretations of "Mad" in Mad Men). The cast is mostly unknown and mostly spectacular, letting the show pulse as a compelling character-based drama. The protagonist, if you can call him such, is Don Draper (an amazing Jon Hamm), the creative director at Sterling Cooper. Draper faces conflicts at his office, particularly from an ambitious sycophant named Pete (Vincent Kartheiser), and at his home, where his passive wife Betty (January Jones) is raising his kids while remaining oblivious to his extra-marital affairs. Other characters in the supporting cast include a woman who goes from secretary to copywriter (Elizabeth Moss), the numerous men in the office, and the agency's namesakes, Roger Sterling (the silver-haired John Slattery) and Bertram Cooper (the timeless Robert Morse).

Weiner drafted the pilot episode in 1999, but the production of the series was sidetracked by his involvement with The Sopranos (hired there by David Chase, who had read the pilot script). Much of the show's success depends on the adherence of irony to its plots. It's no secret (and hardly an original conceit) that the 1950s and early 1960s – the years in the last century of U.S. history most closely associated with traditionalism and family values – was just as dirty as any other time in history: adultery, murder, lies, blackmail, substance abuse, misogyny and sexism, homophobia, and racism. We grin and grimace as the irony weaves its way through nearly every element of the show, including excessive smoking (in one episode a young child says, "My eyes are burning, mommy," and as she waves her cigarette she replies in a snotty tone, "That's impossible"). The series is rich in satire and dark elements; many of the plotlines grow and deepen as if they had been given film noir as a fertilizer. At their strongest, the plots of Mad Men allow developed themes to transcend every layer of the story, but at their weakest they have a tendency to be as neatly ordered, and predictable, as the well-oiled hair on Don Draper's head.

In the last year Mad Men has been honored with a Golden Globe for Best Drama and a Peabody Award, as well as numerous honors from the Television Critics Association, the Writers and Directors Guilds, and the American Film Institute. It is set to make history this weekend as the first basic cable television show to win an Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama, and indeed, it should win. In 2007 it was one of the best shows I watched on television (but, granted, I don't watch much television). The second season, which began in July, has unfortunately been less engaging and more lethargic due the "complicating" all second-season plots seem to require; but this doesn't diminish the power of the first season.

What it evident now more than ever is that we are ready to click over into another era, as each post-war decade in U.S. history has demonstrated. The stiff-lipped men who returned from World War II in '40s became adults in '50s, which begat the loose rebellion of the '60s, which then begat a pessimistic and drug-filled '70s, which then begat the clean optimism of the Reagan '80s, which then begat the rinse-cycle tech-liberalism of the '90s, which has culminated in the shaky, truth-splintered, terror-filled reactionary tension of the 2000s. Entertainment of the last few years has focused us on varying degrees of this post-WWII America nostalgia – most prominently through VH1's I Love The ... series – and even current events seem to expose our desire to fill empty holes (Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama draws endless comparisons to that great shepherd of the sixties, John F. Kennedy).

But the best television shows and films that look back on bygone eras do so while poking us in the ribs. Good Night, and Good Luck, the canceled comedy Freaks and Geeks, and now Mad Men are complex enough to evoke our nostalgia and courageous enough to ask, "What was it exactly that you liked about this time period?" Their respective creators draw our eyes backward through the illusion of comfort and irony, and once we're there, the subject matter is all too relevant to our contemporary culture. We're doing what humans have done since history began to be recorded: looking into the past to see the direction of the future. And any form of entertainment that can accomplish this deserves to be commended.

(Mad Men: Season 1 is available on DVD.)

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