Tedium - Turn-On’s Turning Point 📺

Today in Tedium: There will likely never be a show quite like Turn-On ever again. It was built at the peak of a willfully weird era, and it was willfully weird and designed to upset the existing systems of television. When it recently appeared on YouTube 54 years after its auspicious premiere—including the rarely seen second episode—it was a big deal in some circles, the ultimate lost media discovery had resurfaced once again. It doesn’t matter whether or not it’s good (it’s not, but it’s better than you’d expect), but its cultural precedent is fascinating and it honestly teaches us something about the world we live in today. So, with all that in mind, let’s consider Turn-On, one of the great examples of a noble failure in the history of television. Even if you don’t like it, you have to appreciate what it represents. — Ernie @ Tedium

Understanding the context that brought us a show as weird as Turn-On

Broadcast television in the 1960s reflected something of a culture war, with many hugely popular shows targeting a rural audience, because that’s where many of the viewers were—despite the fact that, well, that’s not where the creators were. By the early 1970s, in a hunt for better demographics for marketing purposes, the big TV networks would remove these shows from their lineups.

Peyton Place, a 30-minute prime-time soap opera that aired multiple times per week, was a great example of a show built around a small-town setting.

It was one of the few truly big hits of the hit-starved ABC. Built around an ensemble cast that included future film stars like Ryan O’Neal and Mia Farrow, it wasn’t a true target of the Rural Purge—it declined the more traditional way, with many of its original cast members leaving and being replaced, and the show struggling to keep pace with the quickly changing times. It had already been cancelled by the time CBS and NBC started ditching “everything with a tree in it,” as the 2016 social science book Culture War put it.

But the decision to cut back on Peyton Place and to attempt to replace it with Turn-On, was clearly a preview of what’s coming—a more traditional show getting replaced by something experimental. ABC, an also-ran network during this period, wanted a hip equivalent to Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, a variety show that premiered in 1968 and was known for its quick-cut jokes. The network signed on for a copycat of sorts by that show’s original producers, George Schlatter and Ed Friendly.

“The whole idea was to arrest the viewer’s attention without really having them comfortable in a place,” Schlatter said in a 2010 YouTube interview. “They were just there.”

The show they built was effectively an avant-garde version of Laugh-In, which eschewed the laugh track and sets in favor of basically nothing, in both cases.

The show was so avant-garde that, rather than airing the standard credits at the start and end of the show, said credits are peppered throughout.

It did share some similarities with its predecessor, however. Dancing was a key feature of the show, the show aimed to surface emerging comedic actors, and there was some political commentary in the mix.

But in many ways, Turn-On went further. While Laugh-In was one of the earliest shows to feature diversity in its ensemble cast (notably introducing audiences to Flip Wilson), Turn On attempted to push the envelope a bit further on the front, including Asian-American and Hispanic actors as well as multiple black cast members.

Despite his appearance, Bob Staats did not make it into the new Barbie movie.

While Laugh-In had jokes about sex, Turn-On turned it into something of a pet topic, approaching it from multiple directions. (One of the most infamous sketches, starring the very cartoonish character actor Robert Staats in his E. Eddie Edwards persona, features the character talking foot fetishes.)

Laugh-In touched on political humor, at one point bringing Richard Nixon on the air in a way not dissimilar to how Saturday Night Live allowed Donald Trump to hit its stage. Turn-On seemed to push the political jokes a little further—in one case, guest host Tim Conway (who feels very at home in this) plays the governor of New Jersey talking about how he’s fighting corruption, only to have a gangster-like figure come up to him and kiss his forehead.

And the framing of the show seemed to go a lot further, too. The whole concept of the show was framed as a show programmed by computer, with all the weirdness that came with that framing. And the music—it was one of the first to embrace the synthesizer, coming just four months after Wendy Carlos’ Switched-On Bach created a popular context for electronic music—was destined to turn people off. It was so early to the synth that electronic-music weirdos like Silver Apples had barely even made an imprint on popular culture.

It’s to be argued that Schlatter and Friendly, given full creative control over their work, went to the outer reaches of what Hollywood would allow out of television production at the time.

“Actually, ‘Turn-On’ is closer to the original concept for ‘Laugh-In’ than ‘Laugh-In’ is now, but e couldn’t do what we’re doing if we hadn’t learned so much from ‘Laugh-In,’” Schlatter said in an interview just before the show aired in 1969.

Despite the edginess, some critics absolutely got what Schlatter and Friendly were going for—it was a sharp commentary on an increasingly direct and impersonal culture, one that didn’t even have time to offer pleasantries. A UPI critic reviewing the show around the period of its release had this to say:

If “Turn-On” fails, it will be, I think, because it is so honest in its attempt to comment on the way we live: I don’t mean just the individual sight gags and topical humor, but the the adherence to the impersonality it is driving at as an essence of our time. In order to make this overall comment. “Turn-On” is ironically, yet pointedly, using some of the weapons that have contributed to our impersonality: The computer, film, animation, a lack of human hosts.

Thus we can see where “Turn-On” and “Laugh-In” really differ sharply in certain key areas. The presence of Rowan and Martin as the “Laugh-In” hosts lends an air of traditional warmth and even middle-age respectability—despite the biting humor. There is not even this cushion of tradition on “Turn-On.” As a further example, the so-called musical track that normally accompanies such a show is rebelled against: It sounds like a steady sequence of electronic impulses and garbled tape.

Now, if there was a home for this kind of content to live—say, if something like Adult Swim existed in 1969—it could have found its home. I mean, similarly edge-pushing shows to this, like Monty Python’s Flying Circus, successfully emerged during this period. The problem was, those shows were more obviously funny. Turn-On’s jokes, whether by design or circumstance, didn’t land. They were designed to make you ponder or challenge your beliefs, not make you laugh, which is not a lane a lot of mainstream humor worked in around 1969.

The fact that this was the show replacing one of the airings of Peyton Place sent a message—ABC is pulling your TV set into the future, whether you liked it or not.

And many, of course, did not.

The Turn-On ensemble cast, looking up.

Was the response to Turn-On an early example of the monoculture losing?

If I was a TV producer who got away with something really edgy, odds are I would see if I could do it again, and see how far I could push it.

Laugh-In was a great example of television edginess that went beyond accepted norms in the industry at the time. Reliant on quick edits and off-the-wall zaniness, it felt like a show without precedent, or at least without precedent few were familiar with. (The groundbreaking work of Ernie Kovacs might be the closest example.)

Turn-On, though, pushed the Laugh-In approach to its absolute extremes, removing all the rudders. And that meant that, at times, it went too far. In the second episode, for example, there is a crude joke that could be read today as antisemitic, which I won’t repeat here.

The era of the edgy variety show would ultimately be short-lived. ‌The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour, a show that premiered before Laugh-In but carried much of the same spirit, was cancelled midseason because the show’s creators, Tom and Dick Smothers, were all too willing to dive into social commentary in ways that both the network and local affiliates were unwilling to accept.

This led to contentious relations that came to a head in the middle of 1969, just a few months after Turn-On went off the air.

The Smothers Brothers got replaced by, of all shows, Hee-Haw.

CBS chose to breach contract with the brothers rather than let the show continue.

While ABC got plenty of complaints about Turn-On (336, according to some estimates), the problem was really the local affiliates. They were the ones who ultimately pulled the plug, and enough of them did that it no longer made it viable to present future episodes.

This headline did not age well. (The Liverpool Daily Post)

It was so sudden that newspaper features about the show ran despite the show getting axed. In England, The Liverpool Daily Post ran an article with the headline “The Sock-it-to-Me Style is Here to Stay,” in a piece discussing “the most talked-about show of the week.”

In comments to The San Francisco Examiner he made closer to the cancellation, in April of 1969, Schlatter laid the blame at the feet of affiliates who didn’t like the loss of Peyton Place:

I don’t blame ABC or Elton Rule, its president. They did try it. Three completed shows were accepted. Four more scripts were read Nine shows were in production The show really was killed by the station managers in Cleveland and Denver, strongholds for “Peyton Place.” They hit the phones and rallied other affiliates. Each affiliate is like a company store. ABC started to lose its stores A panic was on. We were canceled.

He did admit in the same interview, however, that they might have pulled people into the experimental new show, replacing a very conservative format, a bit cold: “At the top of the show in a normal setting I should have explained it was highly experimental, with new style, new concept—a disturbing show with built-in irritants designed to stimulate you.”

(If Schlatter seems blasé about the whole thing, it might be because he got paid for the whole season despite only producing a couple of episodes.)

In many ways, the stations that complained about Turn-On were pushing back against the idea that the networks could just do whatever, and they would accept it. It doesn’t happen very often—the last example I can think of is NBC trying to shove Jay Leno in the 10pm slot—but when it does, it can leave a mark.