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By Root 930 0

he had had a planet-fissuring falling-out); SCTV, the comedy ensemble whose satirical genius flickers intermittently today in the mockumentaries of Christopher Guest, absent the sketch revue; and Uncle Floyd, the New Jersey kiddie-show host with a puppet sidekick whose magicianship with minimalist stagecraft made him the Ernie Kovacs of the punk-decade mutant brigade (when the Ramones were guests on the program, they felt right at decrepit home). Writing about certain shows week after week (to the point where a few Voice editors got fed up with my recurring favorites) was like writing about your friends, the latest chapter of what they were up to. When I flick back at the book reviews I did in the seventies, I sometimes wince at the nasty incisions I inflicted on writers when I crossed the line between cutup and cutthroat (I won’t quote examples—no need to re-inflict wounds). But what really retrospectively bugs me was when I got prescriptive, telling writers what they should have done, where their true gifts lie, the road they should take to get onto I-95 to reach Delaware by dawn. I recoil when I see reviewers doing it today, acting like talent management agents for some literary Almighty.

TV defied such dispensing morning-after pills to those involved. It was a collaborative push following its own set of tracks, and nothing a critic said was likely to lodge and peck inside its creators’ brains for years after, building a nest. Even the sharpest dig didn’t have the palpable impact of being spat at by a stranger in the street, to use one of Sheed’s analogies for how a novelist feels having his latest work speared in print. In the seventies, before HBO, Showtime, AMC, and the networks built supertanker series with multichambered Godfather novelistic character bibles (The Sopranos, Deadwood, Mad Men, The Wire, The X-Files, Buffy the Vampire Slayer), television was more antihierarchical, prestige-resistant, and alien to putzy pretension. It didn’t have any of the auteurist mystique and pantheon aura of film criticism, and to this day no collection of TV criticism swings the clout of Kael’s I Lost It at the Movies and Deeper into Movies, James Agee’s Agee on Film, Andrew Sarris’s American Cinema, Manny Farber’s Negative Space, or the roundups of Otis Ferguson’s reviews for the New Republic. This was freeing for me, this acceptance of transience. It kept me balanced and responsive, not having a canon to lean on. I remember getting a report from a friend about a conversation he had with one of the Voice’s top theater critics who nosed up at the sound of my name as if it might trigger his hay fever. “Wolcott can be funny,” he conceded, “but it’s easy being funny about television. It’s not a medium that makes many demands.” “How dare he call me facile!” I fumed with the pretend ire I so enjoyed in P. G. Wodehouse’s Bertie Wooster novels when this was related to me. I would have gotten more upset if it weren’t for the fact that he had a point about TV requiring less deep-sea drilling and rock quarrying than theater-opera-dance reviewing. I couldn’t pretend I was propping up any of the pillars of Western Civ when I descanted on The Ropers, the spin-off series from Three’s Company that co-starred Audra Lindley in a succession of misguided muumuus and Norman Fell, whose lips were caulked with a chalky white substance, no one quite knew why: a sitcom that I always mention when I feel my friend Elvis Mitchell could use a laugh. But being facile is harder than it looks, no one survives long as a chuckle bunny in print, and it wasn’t all party tricks. I had to ladder up to a higher diving board to do justice to Paul Winfield’s magnificent Martin Luther King in King, Dennis Potter’s breakthrough lip-sync musical Pennies from Heaven, and the epochal miniseries Holocaust, because that was part of the job, being able to work at different altitudes.

My model was the Australian multi-talent Clive James (poet, novelist, literary critic, celebrity profiler, TV host), whose television column for the London Observer was as hilarious and high-wire