This Day in Television History (‘The Flintstones’ Premieres)

Sept. 30, 1960— The Flintstones, the first animated cartoon to run on primetime network television, premiered on ABC.

William Hanna and Joseph Barbera, annoyed that critics labeled as “children’s entertainment” their first two TV cartoons, Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound, conceived of this show as a way to attract adult audiences as well.

The creators were originally inspired by a 1955 Tex Avery animated short, The First Bad Man, on the history of Texas 1 million years ago.

But Hanna—much to the irritation of his partner—openly admitted that Fred Flintstone bore many than a passing resemblance to Ralph Kramden, another loud, burly guy with an endlessly understanding wife and with a neighbor and sidekick, from The Honeymooners.

If Honeymooners’ star and creator Jackie Gleason ever felt like suing for plagiarism, he soon got over it, realizing that millions of youngsters would have blamed him for driving their favorite show off the air. (Such fears did not prevent the creators of the comic strip “Hi and Lois” from squawking that the original name of the series, “The Flagstones,” was all too reminiscent of their own couple, the Flagstons.)

For adults, there were winking references, throughout the series’ six-season run, to celebrities (often guest-starring as themselves) such as “Stony Curtis,” “Gary Granite,” “Ann-Margrock,” “Liberocki, “Arnold Palmtree,” and “Wednesday Tuesday.”

The prototype set by The Flintstones—a jerk of a dad with a more level-headed wife—wasn’t irretrievably lost when the show went off the air. More than two decades later, it would be revived by The Simpsons.

The quartet who created Fred and Wilma Flintstones and neighbors Barney and Betty Rubble had extensive acting experience, especially of the voice kind:

*Alan Reed, who preferred radio to film work, was the voice of “Boris” in Disney’s Lady and the Tramp before taking on the role of Fred—a character whose ample physical dimensions were modeled on his.

*Jean Vander Pyl played not only Wilma but Pebbles, before going on to The Jetsons, Top Hat, The Secret Squirrel Show, and The Magilla Gorilla Show.

*Bea Benaderet, the voice of many female characters in Warner Brothers Looney Tunes, had to withdraw from her role as Betty Rubble because of scheduling conflicts with a new series, Petticoat Junction.

*Mel Blanc, my favorite of the group—nicknamed “The Man of a Thousand Voices” for his long and versatile career in animation—not only gave vocal form to Barney and Flintstone pet Dino, but also to more than 40 other characters on the show. So integral was he to the show that, after he was involved in a near-fatal accident several months into the show’s run, his colleagues gathered at his hospital bedside so he could participate in episodes as he recovered.

A close relative, hearing that I’d be creating this post, said, “You can’t write about the show without discussing the theme song.”

True enough. I readily confess to being more than a little hazy about some episodes and characters after all these years, but “Meet the Flintstones” is engraved in my memory, as it is, I suspect, for more than a few baby boomers.

That catchy tune, with lyrics by Hanna and Barbera and an irresistible melody by composer Hoyt Curtin, wasn’t heard until Season 3. But it’s the way that everyone has recalled ever since.

Central to the appeal of The Flintstones are its cheerful anachronisms.  Start with that “Meet the Flintstones” line about the “modern Stone Age family. Think also of “The Barney Copter,” an experiment in flight that Fred promptly takes control of (and dooms) as “The Flintstone Flyer”: Dino (dinosaurs, scientists say, had disappeared well before homo sapiens came along); and Christmas (the Stone Age was, of course, centuries before Christ).

Oh, one more thing you might wonder: Where did Fred’s catchphrase, “Yabba Dabba Doo!", come from? Reed improvised it, improving on the script’s “Yahoo!”, inspired by the Brylcreem slogan, "A little dab'll do ya."

This Day in TV History (Georgia Engel, Ted’s Sweet-Voiced Wife on ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ Dies)

 

Apr. 12, 2019— Georgia Engel, an actress who achieved the greatest fame of her five-decade career in her mid-20s, as wide-eyed, sweet-voiced innocent Georgette on The Mary Tyler Moore Show, died at age 70 in Princeton, NJ.

The cause of death was undetermined, because Ms. Engel, a Christian Scientist, had not sought medical for any ailment.

I have had a longstanding fascination in Ms. Engel, and not just because she became a delightful addition to The Mary Tyler Moore Show in its third season.

I find that one takes an extra interest in a well-known person if a relative has encountered that person somewhere. It gives you a sense, though sometimes illusory, that you might know more about this individual than the public does.

That was the case with me, as a favorite uncle of mine, a doorman in Ms. Engel’s New York apartment building, told me once, with a smile, that she was like her character on the great sitcom: “just as nice…and just as dumb.”

For a long time, I accepted that judgment unquestioningly. Now, I am not only uncertain that Ms. Engel was like this, but I tend to doubt it. The dumb part, that is.

It’s not just because actors are often more complicated than the rest of us—able to play multiple character types—but also because many people mistakenly think that individuals with soft, often childlike voices are not smart.

It took a while, but by early adulthood I had learned from familiarity with people with these voices that this was a gross misreading of their brain power.

Ms. Engel’s high-pitched voice was not a trick, the way that Melissa Rauch’s was when playing Bernadette on The Big Bang Theory. It was hers, and it often led to being stereotyped as a dumb blonde.

But those who thought that way in Hollywood did her an injustice. As paradoxical as it may seem, it takes intelligence to play naivete convincingly. In this respect, Ms. Engel was following the path taken by the Oscar-winning Judy Holliday in films like Adam’s Rib and Born Yesterday.

When Ms. Engel joined the cast of MTM, she ended up filling voids left by Valerie Harper and Cloris Leachman when they departed for the spinoffs Rhoda and Phyllis, respectively. She provided a perspective outside the walls of WJM that went missing without Rhoda and Phyllis.

Georgette’s presence as the girlfriend (and later, wife) of Ted Baxter allowed viewers to see the stentorian anchorman not merely as egotistical, but as needy and vulnerable—more human, in other words. 

As Alexis Gunderson's fine tribute to the character (and actress) from Paste back in February 2022 notes, her "apparent obliviousness to the rotten parts of life ends up being her superpower."

Moreover, dedication, self-discipline, and adaptability enabled Ms. Engel to maintain a viable long-term career long after MTM ended its seven-season run in 1977. 

I was thrilled, decades later, to see her appearances on Everybody Loves Raymond, and New York-area theater fans grew to cherish her in musicals like The Drowsy Chaperone and Half Time.

This Day in Television History (‘Sopranos’ Debut Overturns Convention—and Ideas About New Jersey)

Jan. 10, 1999—HBO hated the title, believing that potential viewers would mistakenly believe it was about opera. 

But with the airing of the pilot for The Sopranos, listeners found themselves amid something far more unusual, even stranger: the physical and emotional landscape of New Jersey mobster Tony Soprano, who, after a family of ducks flies away from the swimming pool they have made their home, has an anxiety attack, sending him to a psychiatrist.

American audiences confirmed what the HBO suits couldn’t grasp: that it was possible to distinguish the TV sopranos from those found in Milan’s La Scala.

It helped that six seasons gave viewers time to absorb multiple plotlines; voters awarded it 21 Emmys; and critics hailed it as among the most significant dramas in TV history, inaugurating an era when showrunners used the greater creative freedom of cable TV to present a series of complicated anti-heroes seldom seen in such abundance on the small screen.

In addition, though, the series share some elements with opera as a venerable form of musical theater: figures whose names frequently ended with vowels; very specific locations; and characters erupting volcanically, ranging from silliness to tragedy.

Let’s discuss those locations. The HBOs suits would also have preferred that the series be shot in Los Angeles or New York (cities not only glamorous, but also convenient for them to visit and interfere with).

But series creator David Chase (who, incidentally, modeled mob boss Tony Soprano’s mother Livia on his own mom) knew what he was doing in shooting off the beaten track. 

Though interior locations were generally at Silvercup Studios in New York City, most exterior shots took place, as noted in Nathan Miranda’s post on the “Screen Rant” blog, in Northern New Jersey.

It was, admittedly, cheaper to shoot the latter, as the show’s crews would have had to pay not just the New York establishments they wanted but other businesses on the street who’d object to all the customers they’d lose during shooting, and parking would not be as ample as in the Garden State.

More important, the exteriors of shops, diners, and other establishments lent the feeling of authenticity for which Chase was striving. 

He knew these Northern New Jersey streets intimately, having grown up there. In the oral history he compiled with Michael Imperioli, Woke Up This Morning, Steve Schirrippa recalled Chase saying that New Jersey “was like another cast member.”

In the pilot episode, for instance, Centanni's Meat Market was named after an establishment in Elizabeth, but was actually shot in Kearny. 

New Jersey also provided for a variety of locations crucial for the series' ambiance.

Longtime viewers are most familiar, of course, with the Soprano family's home, featured at the end of the title sequence. 

The roughly 5,600-sq.-ft. estate in North Caldwell came to symbolize the American Dream to which Tony and his associates aspired, and whose creature comforts Tony's wife Carmela craved, despite her gnawing doubts about his "profession."

At the other extreme were locations that placed a premium on grittiness: 

*the real-life strip joint on Route 17 that served as the mobsters' "Bada Bing" hangout (itself a winking reference to a James Caan ad-libbed line from The Godfather); 

*bakeries and diners in North Arlington and Kearny, respectively, where killings took place; and, 

*abandoned buildings in Newark that remind Tony's crew of unwanted depths, even as they continue to exploit the current residents of these mean streets.

Over the years, entire tours have been created centering around these and other locations. 

I have a feeling that they will continue to be popular, because, for all the atrocities committed by its characters (including, joltingly, in the "College" episode, in which viewers saw the protagonist of a series actually murder someone), The Sopranos reminds us, again and again, that they can be found in our neighborhoods, our schools, our eateries, and our stores. 

They are, in other words, all too human and like us, despite our wish that it was otherwise.

During much of its original run, I groaned a little inside when people outside New Jersey would refer to it as "The Sopranos State." I wish they had not crowded out another, more  positive state association dating back to my high school days: to Bruce Springsteen.

But at least those outsiders did not associate New Jersey with vapidity, as so many would do with reality shows like "Jersey Shore" and "Real Housewives of New Jersey."

Instead, the show highlighted for millions the creative talent in the state, including, from my own Bergen County, actors James Gandolfini (from Park Ridge), playing Tony, and Vincent Curatola (Englewood), playing Johnny Sack.

This Day in Television History (‘ABC Movie of the Week’ Kicks TV Films Into High Gear)

Sept. 23, 1969—Mired in last among the then-three TV networks, ABC, figuring it had little if anything to lose, experimented by going all-in on a new TV format. The ABC Movie of the Week premiered with a 90-minute episode, the first of nearly 270 that would air for the next six years, proving the popularity—and sometimes, the value—of the made-for-television movie.

The plane-crash drama “Seven in Darkness,” which kicked off the series, was not, technically, the “first TV movie.” That honor belonged to “See How They Run,” a John Forsythe that aired in 1964. Through the next five years, however, attempts to expand on that footprint were fitful.

But the young ABC exec Barry Diller pushed hard for running a 90-minute TV movie in the same time slot every week. Each new film would be billed as an event, a “world premiere,” and Diller was careful to promote the series as "the most costly series in network history."

Even so, the decision was not as big a gamble as he suggested. At worst, ABC might win points with critics for its sense of innovation; at best, it could it could go nowhere but up in the ratings. There was not enough product to feed the demand for films on the networks. 

Moreover, in a 1989 Los Angeles Times article on the made-for-TV phenomenon, Grant Tinker—head of NBC’s West Coast programming department in the Sixties, then later the network’s chairman—recalled, “In those days, feature movies were not stopping on cable first, and so they did well (in the ratings),” said Tinker, who later became chairman of NBC and now heads up his own production company, GTG Entertainment. “And these television movies, which we made and cast with theatrical movies in mind, did comparably well.”

Finally, Diller figured out how to produce TV movies more cheaply than some in the industry anticipated. When Universal boss Lew Wasserman said he couldn’t make them for less than $400,000 a picture, Diller got ABC to establish its own production unit and team up with various producers such as Aaron Spelling and David L. Wolper, keeping them on a tight budget throughout.

During its first season, I was, at age 10, still a bit too young to stay up till its closing credits at 10 am. Moreover, several films that season—“Daughter of the Mind,” “Along Came a Spider,” “How Awful About Allan”—looked creepy enough to give me nightmares had I been bold enough to watch.

But even then, I was curious and lured to the show by its beguiling theme, “Nikki,” composed three years earlier by Burt Bacharach for his daughter and arranged by Harry Betts as musical background to the computer-style opening graphics.

From the first, The ABC Movie of the Week succeeded through five means:

*Offering new, often offbeat, roles to stars of Hollywood’s “Golden Era.” “Seven in Darkness” offered a good example, with this innovative form of TV starring “Mr. Television” himself, Milton Berle. The former comedy star won plaudits for a change-of-pace dramatic role as one of seven blind survivors of a plane crash. Similar roles outside their wheelbarrow were accepted by Edward G. Robinson in “The Old Man Who Cried Wolf” and Bing Crosby in “Dr. Cook’s Garden,” while Ray Milland, Walter Brennan, Myrna Loy and Gene Tierney also appeared in the series.

*Creating opportunities for rising talents. Before making an impact on the silver screen in, respectively, The Godfather and Lady Sings the Blues, James Caan and Billy Dee Williams scored as NFL teammates and friends in the tearjerker “Brian’s Song.” And, four years before Jaws, Steven Spielberg demonstrated that he knew how to amp up suspense with “Duel,’ starring Dennis Weaver as a businessman on a road who realizes that a diesel-truck driver is out for his blood.

*Using TV movies to test-run series. Several series got their start as highly rated episodes of the ABC Movie of the Week: “The Six Million Dollar Man,” “The Night Stalker,” “Kung Fu,” “Wonder Woman” and “Starsky and Hutch.” 

*Offering a variety of genres. From one week to the next, viewers might find a different genre: horror (“Don’t Be Afraid of the Dark”), film noir “Goodbye, My Love”), rom-com (“The Feminist and the Fuzz”), or family drama (“Go Ask Alice”).

*Highlighting subject matter still too sensitive to make it to the big screen. Even as the rising youth culture and the decline of the film industry’s longtime censorship codes led to groundbreaking new works on the silver screen, some topics were still too sensitive or even controversial to be dealt with. With so much money on the line, many executives preferred to play it safe. TV had no such constraints because the expenses of a TV movie were lower to begin with. ABC capitalized on this freedom with such fare as “The Ballad of Andy Crocker,” starring Lee Majors as a Vietnam vet experiencing trouble readjusting to civilian life, and “That Certain Summer,” with Hal Holbrook and Martin Sheen in a pioneering study of homosexuality.

For several seasons, the ABC Movie of the Week scored well in the ratings and often with critics (notably with “Brian’s Song” and “That Certain Summer”). The bottom finally dropped out in 1975, after the network had set aside yet a second night for TV movies and quality consequently suffered. But by this time, the genre had been well established, with the other networks—as well as the fledgling HBO—also taking to the format. 

I am sure there are many others besides me who remember this series and wish, like me, that the networks could offer something like this again, rather than so many hours of reality TV.

This Day in Television History (Birth of France Nuyen, ‘Star Trek’ Vixen)

July 31, 1939—France Nuyen, whose exotic Eurasian looks enabled her to carve out a small but precious niche in Hollywood from the Fifties to Seventies, was born in Marseille, France, to a French mother and Vietnamese father.

The striking actress-model came to my attention in a show I recall from my impressionable youth: Star Trek.  Several years ago, when I rediscovered this particular episode, “Elaan of Troyius,” from the sci-fi series’ third and final season, what struck me were its seriocomic allusions to Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew and Antony and Cleopatra, Shaw’s Pygmalion, and, of course, in its title (a sound-alike of Helen of Troy, the world’s most beautiful woman), The Iliad.

In the series’ characteristic way, its depiction of the title character looks backward (to the above literary sources that dramatize a young woman, often a foreign princess, intent on getting her way against an older male from outside her environment) and forward (it would provide a major theme of spinoffs The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager—the crew tasked to transport foreign dignitaries amid intergalactic peril). 

But what struck me as a youngster was not any of this literary or pop-culture analysis, but the way that Elaan turned square-jawed, resolute, brave Capt. James T. Kirk into a hopeless puddle of passion through the drop of a tear.

“Oh, oh, here we go again. The old juice...stronger than any acid,” Spencer Tracy snorted at wailing wife Katharine Hepburn in Adam’s Rib. But ol’ Spence might have reacted differently in the presence of Ms. Nuyen’s hot-tempered but comely alien.

Several Internet sites (notably, the Internet Movie Data Base) suggest that Ms. Nuyen might have been the first person of Vietnamese descent to appear on American television. I am unable to prove or disprove that assertion. But I think it would certainly be correct to say that she was the first actress with such ancestry to make her mark on the big screen and TV. 

She came along during a post-WWII atmosphere in which Americans thought back to their recent encounters with Asians—with a strong undercurrent of male wish fulfillment about females of this race, in particular.

In an interview for a TCM film festival discussion on “Race and Hollywood,” a now-middle-aged Nuyen reflected, “I think those films are popular because the American people like to feel that they have overcome their racism, that they have overcome their blind, cruel prejudices, and that they are no longer of that society.”

Indicative of that would certainly be the 1958 movie adaptation of South Pacific, in which Ms. Nuyen played Liat, or I Spy, the popular series of the mid-to-late Sixties, where she acted and fell in love with her eventual second husband, Robert Culp.

But she made a more enduring impression through her Star Trek appearance—not only because the series has played somewhere all the time all over Earth in the half-century since NBC canceled it, but also because sci-fi fans—and especially aficionados of this show—are so obsessive. 

It’s indisputable that, amid the murky, fight-for-survival vibes of the show’s last season, “Elaan of Troyius” cannot be ignored. In a post on “The Movie Blog,” “Darren” speaks for a not-inconsiderable portion of the show’s fan base offended by the perceived sexist and racist teleplay by John Meredyth Lucas.

But if you look at many comments on a YouTube segment from this episode, there is an equally large component of the fan base who could care less about any of that. Elaan’s alien tears might have been the functional equivalent of the love potion from Tristan and Isolde. 

But the (overwhelmingly male) YouTube commentators I read thought that was an unnecessary plot device. Captain Kirk was so randy, they figured, that, once he got a good luck at Elaan’s skimpy outfit, he’d be a goner for her, anyway. 

(In an interview for StarTrek.com four years ago, Ms. Nuyen remembered that her costumes only finished being sewed on her just before she went on camera, and her heavy Cleopatra-style wig, because it didn't turn at the same speed as her head, could end up with half of it on the wrong side of her face.)

Unconsciously but certainly, I absorbed one overwhelming lesson from this episode even at this early age: When in the presence of an attractive woman, a male authority figure is unlikely to think with his brain.

All the pushing, grabbing, throwing around, and—oh yes, passionate clinches—between Kirk and Elaan must have required a certain level of comfort between William Shatner and Ms. Nuyen. Indeed, they had acted together a decade before filming this show, during the Broadway run of The World of Susie Wong, and they would appear together again as a sea captain and his wife in a 1974 episode of Kung Fu, and in The Horror at 37,000 Feet. 

I wonder, over the years, if Ms. Nuyen ever had occasion to share thoughts with another person of Asian descent associated with Star Trek, George Takei, on the trials and tribulations of landing acting jobs and fighting racial stereotypes at that point in Hollywood history? The whole struggle may have gotten to Ms. Nuyen, who, aside from a role in the 1993 film The Joy Luck Club, has not been as prominent onscreen in the last 40 years.

The actress has certainly accomplished much in her second career, in family practice counseling, working mostly with abused children, abused and battered women and women in prison. Even so, I can’t help but wonder how many more prominent roles that someone with her looks, vibrancy and talent might have enjoyed in today’s embarrassed “Oscars So White” environment in Hollywood.

This Day in TV History (Jack Paar Signs Off ‘Tonight Show’)

March 29, 1962—Exhausted from his high-wire broadcast act, talk-show host Jack Paar, who had walked off The Tonight Show in a huff two years before when a joke was censored, stepped down for good after five seasons, having utterly transformed his last-night perch.

Providing taped farewell messages that night were Richard Nixon, Robert Kennedy, Billy Graham, Bob Hope and Jack Benny—famous figures of their time, now legendary. But the on-air guests, for the most part, were more of a time capsule: comics Jack E. Leonard and Buddy Hackett, opera star Robert Merrill, and Alexander King, a journalist-press agent-memoirist-raconteur who practically became a fixture for Paar.

The DNA of Paar runs through every host who does a monologue. But it’s a safe bet that most Americans who remember his successor, Johnny Carson, will have a tougher time calling to mind the man who turned a variety-show format inherited from Steve Allen into the gabfest we know today.

Paar established some essentials of the late-night format—notably, the monologue, the guest host and the sidekick (in Paar’s case, first, briefly, Franklin Pangborn, then Hugh Downs)—but the form was far looser, the hours longer, and the host far, far more unpredictable. 

Today, a host might tend toward schtick (Leno), edginess (Letterman), or the class clown who can’t believe his good luck in landing this particular gig (Fallon). Paar was of another order entirely: by his own admission, “complicated, sentimental, lovable, honest, loyal, decent, generous, likable, and lonely. My personality is not split, it’s shredded.”

So, what was his show like? From what I’ve read, the blogger Showbiz David gives a pretty adept summation: 

“Paar was like no one else I had ever seen. Brilliant and witty, raw and restless and unpredictable. Daring to take risks born of his open-minded political views. His guests did not venture onto the set to pitch records or movies. Or more TV shows. They came on to talk because they had the gift of witty gab.”

Viewers really did not know what they would get with Paar:

·         * He might be chatting with Nixon—or to that young, bearded revolutionary in Cuba, Fidel Castro.

·         * He might talk to saintly humanitarian Albert Schweitzer—or allow free rein to a wickedly funny Judy Garland, as in the following YouTube clip.

·         * He might invite Mickey Rooney to leave his show after the multiply-married actor made an erratic, drunken appearance, then make up with him later—or engage in enduring feuds with columnists Dorothy Kilgallen and Walter Winchell.

·        *  He might delight the audience with a slightly off-color joke about “water closets”—then make their jaws drop when he walked off the air after discovering network censors had deleted the material without telling him beforehand. (He stayed off the show for several weeks.)

Late-night TV, particularly as Paar practiced it, can be punishing. Coping mechanisms are many and various: hobbies (Leno’s motorcycles), sessions with psychiatrists (Letterman), plenty of time off (Carson). But Paar seemed to have fewer of these, and he decided to call it quits in early 1962.

Paar was still only in his mid-40s when he gave up the host’s seat, but he never reached the same heights again. NBC obliged his wish for more normal, family-friendly hours with a weekly variety show, but it was gone in three years, without making the same cultural impact as his talk show. 

In 1975, ABC convinced Paar to come out of retirement to take up battle against Johnny Carson. It’s true that no challenger was really ever able to take on “The King of the Night” in his 30-year supremacy of The Tonight Show, but Paar’s, because of his history, was particularly anti-climactic.  Carson’s stranglehold on Hollywood guests was particularly strong, and some of Paar’s targets—marijuana, long-haired kids, and gays—were off-putting in those times. Paar seemed like a show-biz Rip Van Winkle--asleep for a decade, then awoken to find a world changed completely in his absence. The show was gone within a year. The host who seemed impossible to replace in 1962 was all but forgotten by the time of his death, at age 85, in 2004. Though segments of his show survive on YouTube, entire episodes are far, far harder to come by, as NBC made it a practice to erase old shows so the tapes could be re-used--a practice they continued with Carson.)

And yet, it seems unfair to leave him sad and diminished. Paar couldn’t sing, dance or act, but he had a feeling for the intimate communication fostered on the small screen. Several years after going off the air, he gave a writer on his show, Dick Cavett, a sense both of his possibilities and those of the “boob tube.” At first, Cavett, remembering the call in his recent essay collection, Talk Show, was astonished by what he heard from his old boss: “Kid, I’ve only got one piece of counseling for you. Don’t do interviews.”

As Cavett started to ponder how he could retain his new job if this advice were taken, Paar elaborated, with words that would be taken to heart by his listener, but by not many others in the current talk-show environment:

“I mean don’t just do interviews, pal. You know. ‘Interview’ smacks of Q-and-A and David Frost and his clipboard and ‘What’s your favorite color?’ and crap like ‘most embarrassing moments.’ Don’t do any of that. Make it a conversation.”

This Day in Television History (Space-Age Western “Star Trek” Premieres)

September 8, 1966—The show came from the Desilu production company, but Star Trek, which premiered on NBC on this date, was as far as network TV could get from the adventures of Lucille Ball.

Forty-five years before Cowboys and Aliens, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry made his pitch for his cult sci-fi series by using the same premise as this summer’s Harrison Ford-Daniel Craig flop, only in a metaphorical rather than literal sense.

In Hollywood, then as now, you promote a series with a new concept on the basis of what is widely known already. Roddenberry’s description of his creation, “Wagon Train in Space,” might not mean anything to anyone born after, say, 1960, but those at the receiving end of his pitch would have understood it perfectly at the time.

Ever since The Great Train Robbery in 1903, audiences had made the Western the quintessential genre of the big and small screens. You couldn’t make so many of them over so many decades without finding it an unbelievably adaptable genre. You could have Westerns as rousing shoot-‘em-ups (most of the bunch), Westerns as explorations of psychology (Gregory Peck’s The Gunfighter), Westerns as historical pageants (the 1931 Best Picture Oscar-winner, Cimarron), or, increasingly, the Western as conveyor of coded contemporary messages (High Noon).

In 1964, when Roddenberry created the first Star Trek pilot, “The Cage,” Westerns were only slightly off their peak from 1959, when 29 of them dotted the prime-time schedule and eight of the top 10 series belonged to the form. Nobody had to be told about the conventions of the genre—and, in particular, everyone knew about Wagon Train.

Wagon Train was a TV Western inspired by the 1950 movie Wagonmaster by the grand cinema master, John Ford. For its first couple of seasons, it even starred a frequent Ford cast member, Ward Bond (until, that is, Bond died on the set of the series). The show, near the end of its eight-year run when Roddenberry created Kirk, Spock, McCoy and Co., involved a leader—the wagonmaster—who led a small group across the frontier.

The self-contained episodes allowed for special guest stars playing those following the wagonmaster’s intrepid lead.

Now, focus on the underlying theme of the show for a second: America in the mid-1860s, having just concluded a war in which democratic ideals triumphed, was now following its doctrine of Manifest Destiny well past the edge of civilization, into dangerous, unknown, alien territory. What could be more parallel to that situation than John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier, and especially the space program?

You might think of the crew of the Enterprise, in fact, as a literal representation of JFK’s wish, stated in his landmark American University address calling for a limited nuclear-test ban treaty, for a “world made safe for diversity.” You have a Midwesterner, an “old country doctor,” an African-American woman, an Asian-American, a half-human, half-Vulcan exemplar of logic—and even, beginning with Season 2, a young Russian ensign who bears the last name of his country’s short story and theater master, but who looks like a more exotic version of the Monkees’ Davy Jones.

As his first choice to play the commander of the Enterprise, Roddenberry, who had written for a TV western himself (Have Gun, Will Travel), offered the role to an actor quite accustomed to the genre. After performances in the John Ford classics The Searchers and Sergeant Rutledge, Jeffrey Hunter had increasingly taken to TV, including guest appearances on the long-running western series Death Valley Days and Daniel Boone.

Before long, however, Hunter, heeding the objections of his wife that a sci-fi show would be beneath his dignity as an actor, had effectively taken himself out of further participation in the show following his work on the pilot, "The Cage."

This spurred Roddenberry into rethinking the show, something that had been urged on him anyway by TV execs. So, for the second pilot, “Where No Man Has Gone Before,” he not only got a more toned-down interpretation of Spock from Leonard Nimoy (who had played the pointy-eared one in “The Cage” as less cerebral than tight and shouting, as if he’d just graduated from the Vulcan Military Academy), but also replaced Hunter’s intense, taciturn Captain Christopher Pike with William Shatner’s brash Capt. James Tiberius Kirk.

If Captain Pike was a reluctant hero in the mode of Gary Cooper’s High Noon sheriff, then Kirk was more like Davy Crockett: “half horse, half alligator, a little touched with the snapping turtle,” and not above proving it, whether battling evil outside life forms from the bridge of his ship or by romancing interplanetary babes.

(Several years ago, there was a hilarious YouTube clip showing Kirk’s various women. This being YouTube, it was a very abbreviated clip, you understand--less than 10 minutes. If you wanted the complete, unexpurgated annals of the Worlds According to Jim, you’d need a whole CD.)

As more than one person has noticed, there’s more than a bit of ham in Shatner. For the first several years after Star Trek was canceled, this led him to act a bit put out about being identified with one of the great cult series of all time, until—like Kirk faced with one of those doe-eyed, lissome females out in distant galaxies--he decided: Oh, hell, why fight it?

I witnessed one of those moments when Shatner realized that resistance was futile.

It occurred at, of all things, a convention of high-school journalists held at Columbia University in the mid-’70s.

Now what, you are undoubtedly asking, did Shatner have to do with journalism? Nada--certainly a thousand times less than another convention speaker, critic Judith Crist. But Shatner was a draw who could put fannies in the seats. For the actor’s part, perhaps his agent thought this could be a useful forum to promote his latest, low-profile project: a series of educational films.

So here was Shatner, dutifully going on for 20 or 30 minutes about this project most of his audience would forget within a week, finally opening the floor to questions. After a couple of people politely asked about his latest venture, one person posed what was surely on everyone’s mind: Could he recite the opening lines of Star Trek?

Shatner grinned wanly. “Sorry, I can’t do it,” he said. “You see, I’ve forgotten the lines…”

That last sentence was met with the same amused disbelief that a number of Americans had when Bill Clinton claimed he didn’t inhale (or when Mitch McConnell said that Capitol Hill Republicans would listen “politely” to President Obama’s economic ideas, even if they disagreed with them).

“…No, really,” Shatner protested. He then went into this spiel about how, with every new role, he expunged from his memory what he had previously learned, the better to recollect whole new chunks of dialogue.

This part of the talk was getting long--almost as sustained a projection of himself as the earlier part of Shatner’s talk--and many in the audience were as restless as they were skeptical.

All except for one young man, scribbling furiously in one of the front rows in the packed auditorium.

I thought the guy was transcribing Shatner’s remarks. Little did I know. Suddenly, when Shatner was able to catch his breath, the young man was thrusting his sheet of paper at him.

The puzzled actor reached down and began to read, “Space, the final frontier…”

A wave of laughter and applause swept from one side of the hall to the other.

Shatner stopped, shook his head and chuckled slightly: “Okay, you win,” he said, before launching into the preamble he could be heard intoning in nearly 80 episodes of the show over three seasons.

When at last he came to the lines, “to boldly go where no man has gone before,” the cheers might have been twice as loud as for anything else he had said since he walked into the auditorium.

I knew positively then that Shatner would never really leave Captain Kirk behind, and I’m sure he knew it, too. Four years later, he was talked into doing the first Star Trek film for the big screen.

Gene Roddenberry’s “Wagon Train in space” had set out again, this time leading a virtual caravan of spinoffs, novelizations, games, etc. that has not stopped since.

This Day in Television History (Inger Stevens Attempts Suicide)

January 1, 1960—Returning from a New Year’s Eve party, a despondent Inger Stevens tried to take her own life. The desperate act would have surprised many fans (myself included) of the sunny TV rom-com that would make her a star in a few years, The Farmer’s Daughter. But it foreshadowed another attempt, a decade later, that ended with the Swedish-born actress’ death.

(Note: Variations exist on the Internet concerning when the early unsuccessful attempt took place, ranging from 1959 to 1960, with the confusion undoubtedly occurring because of the turn in the year. I’ve chosen 1960 because that comes from the Stevens' Web site above, which seems most authoritative.)

Suicide during the holidays has gripped the popular imagination for a long time, undoubtedly spurred by classic movies such as Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe and Billy Wilder’s The Apartment. Snopes.com reports, however, that this supposed seasonal upturn is, in fact, an urban legend.

The case of Inger Stevens, however, is one real-life incident that buttresses the myth.

Why do people commit suicide? Novels and movies, because of their interest in narrative, convince us that there’s an ultimate, knowable cause. From people in my life who have attempted it, however, I’m not sure that there is such a neat cause-and-effect.

If you want a symbol for the mystery involving the taking of one’s own life, look to what is commonly if incorrectly known as Grief, the memorial statue executed by Augustus St. Gaudens for Henry Adams, whose wife Marion (nicknamed Clover) committed suicide. Though the figure's facial features can be seen, the eyes are shut, as if there's a point beyond which sight cannot comprehend.

Stevens’ act is an example of someone whose motives in these two attempts to take her life remain ambiguous. But before we get to the circumstances surrounding her case, it’s probably necessary that we consider who Inger Stevens was. Her early death, before she could establish a lengthier, more certain film and TV legacy, makes this an unfortunate necessity.

Is there anyone under the age of 45 who remembers The Farmer’s Daughter? Anyone under the age of 50? That’s how old I am, and I only caught the show in syndicated reruns in the late Sixties. The series ran from 1963 through 1966, and had already ceased its first runs by the time I caught up with it. In the years since, it’s been extremely difficult, even in the age of cable, to find it anywhere on the tube.

I’m too young to remember particular episodes, but all these years later I can still recall the theme song (and no wonder—the songwriters were Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil, more famous for Sixties hits such as “We Gotta Get Out of This Place” and “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling”), the show’s gentle style, and the warm beauty of Stevens. The last two were, to no small degree, related.

Stevens was nothing like the frosty Scandinavian stereotype. You can sense her appeal in this YouTube video, an extended scene from The Farmer’s Daughter that establishes the central situation of the sitcom.

The series, about a young Swedish woman who becomes governess to a widower Congressman’s two children, only to fall in love with her employer, was a TV spinoff of the 1947 film. The very capable TV actor William Windom assumed the role of the Congressman that Joseph Cotton had on film.

Loretta Young won her Best Actress Oscar for her role in the movie, but Stevens had a major advantage over her: She did not have to act Scandinavian; she was. That accent was real.

Her blond good looks reminded many of Grace Kelly, but there was nothing of the Irish-American actress’ regal reserve in Stevens. She seemed to give of herself in her roles—to the children, in this series, and to her leading men on screen.

All too often, life imitated art in the latter case, as, like Kelly, she embarked on affairs with a number of her male co-stars. The emotional complications only compounded a childhood and youth of more than the usual emotional turmoil.

Stevens’ parents divorced when she was six. After several years of living with an aunt and uncle, she rejoined her father, who by this time had emigrated to the U.S., where he was teaching in a university, and had remarried. Constant bickering with her stepmother led the teenaged Stevens to run away from home and become a burlesque dancer.

Once she reached adulthood, Stevens became a model, then an actress. An early marriage to an agent quickly foundered, not helped by her rumored affairs with co-stars on film such as Bing Crosby, James Mason, Anthony Quinn, and Harry Belafonte.

These affairs led nowhere, and perhaps the emotional fallout exacerbated the pain she felt growing up. Stevens gave no other explanation later for what she did next except that it was a “stupid” act.

A former talent agent and (at the time) NBC VP in charge of talent, David Tebet, took her home early from a New Year’s Eve party. A couple of days later, concerned that he hadn’t heard from her again, he phoned her Gramercy Park apartment. Still no answer.

Police then found her unconscious, and determined she had taken sleeping pills and ammonia. The attempt left her with blood clots in her legs (which had swollen to twice their normal size) and temporary blindness. Miraculously, though, within a few weeks, she had recovered and returned to work.

Her role in The Farmer’s Daughter came four years later. The sitcom reflected a publicly more innocent time, but it was certainly not embodied in the actress’ own life. Two years before it premiered in 1963, she had married an African-American musician named Isaac (Ike) Jones.

At the time, interracial marriage was illegal in a number of states, and socially frowned upon. (Sammy Davis Jr. had been asked by Jack Kennedy not to bring along his wife, the Swedish actress Mai Britt, to the inauguration, and singers Darlene Love and Bill Medley of the Righteous Brothers concealed their love affair for years.)

In this environment, Stevens and Jones chose to conceal their marriage. This must have caused tensions, which were not helped by the usual problems in show business, such as long absences from each other and attractive work colleagues who posed temptations.

Stevens attempted to make the leap from TV back to film after The Farmer’s Daughter left the airways. Though she harbored some doubts about the ultimate value of acting as an artistic pursuit and had just had another affair (this time with Burt Reynolds, her co-star on the TV movie Run, Simon, Run), her career still appeared to be going solidly. She had just accepted an offer from producer Aaron Spelling to return to TV when she was found dead on April 30, 1970. Barbiturates were found in her bloodstream and her death was ruled a suicide.

Stevens’ death was a double tragedy: it not only shortened her life and legacy, and any chance that she would find the happiness she had sought relentlessly and sometimes recklessly, but it also left no clues about what led her back to despondency. With greater objectivity about her troubles, the actress might have reflected on the void that this inability to articulate her despair left. She had, after all, been a prominent advocate of mental-health issues, especially on behalf of special-needs children. Suicide is such a harrowing experience for those who try to grasp its aftermath that we need desperately to understand why.