Word: tv
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...TV teen-ager used to be that nice adolescent next door, witness Sheila James in the Stu Erwin Show, Billy Gray in Father Knows Best, and Tony Dow in Leave It to Beaver. The neo-Penrod type was stereotyped by Ricky Nelson, who grew into and out of adolescence before the entire nation on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet...
...despite a few holdouts (My Three Sons, Family Affair), kids on TV are pretty rotten. To Officer Pete Malloy of Adam-12, for example, a youth is the bearded hippie who shot Methedrine with his teen-age girl and accidentally gave her hepatitis with a dirty needle. The Hawaii Five-O vice squad chased down a sinister guru who was freaking out vacuous young blondes on LSD. The Name of the Game recently had Gene Barry playing a magazine publisher kidnaped by a group of young radicals who planned to kill themselves at an Army chemical-warfare test site...
...Three kids working for the cops like that, it's not what you'd call realistic," says Williams, 28, who was among the first actors to adopt Afro-style hair and dress. "It's just entertainment. Every time you set out to say something significant on TV, it gets chopped down. I don't say 'Hey, man, this is what's happening, baby; you gotta write it this way.' I'm just a lowly actor doing his job." Cole, whose first leading role was on the show, agrees: "If we can have...
...Line. Though they do not lug revolvers and they frequently debate quitting the force, the Mod Squadders are in fact good TV cops. When they catch a criminal, usually after a long chase, they beat him up as thoroughly as do the toughest TV heroes. Nor is the series always soft on hippies. In one episode, the Modders go to the aid of an underground paper only to discover that the scheming hippie editor had bombed and wrecked the paper himself to attract publicity and expose "police indifference." Still, the actors try for a modicum of realism. When one script...
...TV's rage for relevance often seems to induce the opposite effect: the more programs strive to be with it, the farther they veer from recognizable life. The view of youth as a vast criminal conspiracy relieved only by Mod Squad's undercover trio is hardly building bridges over the generation gap. Yet TV seems content to maintain the myth-until a new one comes along...