A Very Special Television Event, Boob Tubery

The Hat Squad

We don’t usually talk about flops in television. Unsuccessful movies can achieve a perverse kind of immortality (Ishtar! Gigli!), but their boob tube equivalents are soon forgotten. During the first several decades of TV and film’s coexistence as media, this has been due to a vast difference in the stakes involved. In days of yore, if a projected blockbuster with a star-studded cast and huge budget fell on its face, that failure would inspire withering takedowns from the Siskel & Ebert critical class and months (if not years) of snide jokes on late night talk shows. Meanwhile over in TV Land, if a new show failed to find an audience the network would simply pull the plug and air reruns of a more successful program in its place. Such developments would barely make news in the industry trades, let alone in the public consciousness, because television was considered mere popular entertainment and thus not capital-I Important.

This can be difficult to remember now that the concept of Prestige Television is almost 30 years old, but for a very long time the notion that television could produce anything worthy of serious critical acclaim, or should be academically assessed beyond a broad McLuhanite study of mass media, was laughable. Television was seen as a disposable artform with a low ceiling for quality, and very few people argued otherwise. In contrast to film critics, TV critics were seen less as serious cultural thinkers and more like providers of viewers’ guides. Granted, there were a few TV bombs that lived on in infamy, but these were exceptions that proved the rule, usually shows with crackpot premises so bizarre they begged the question of how they were greenlit in the first place. The classic example of this is Cop Rock, the infamous 1990 Stephen Bochco crime procedural/musical whose brief existence still puzzles people. For the most part, though, a show that was mercifully cancelled after weeks of terrible ratings would go unmourned, not even remembered as a source of mockery.

Or at least these shows wouldn’t be remembered by anyone normal. As a non-normal person, I was recently reminded of The Hat Squad, a cop procedural that debuted on CBS in 1992 and ran for 11 episodes before dying the lonely death fated for television’s failures. When I saw the opening credits for this show in a collection of TV intros from that season, I felt my Failed Show Spidey Sense tingling. The premise of The Hat Squad, as expressed during those credits, almost had me falling out of my chair with laughter: a foster dad tells his squabbling orphan charges that they have to grow up to be like the famed Hat Squad of police legend, “who wore hats and dusters as a symbol of that difference and no criminal would mess with them.”

I have memories of this show being mocked upon its release, though these memories are vague in the extreme. I can’t recall a specific person or outlet razzing The Hat Squad, only a general vibe of mockery that accompanied its brief lifespan. Jesse Hawken of Junk Filter suggested to me that David Letterman ragged on the show without mercy when it debuted. I was an avid Letterman watcher back then, so if he did set his sights on The Hat Squad that would explain why its poor reception rang a bell to me, however ephemerally. What I do know for sure is that The Hat Squad is the platonic ideal of something that David Letterman would love to make fun of, a perfect mixture of unearned self-importance, neo-fascist manichean worldview, and platinum-grade stupidity.

An anecdote to demonstrate just how dumb The Hat Squad is: When I showed the opening credits to my college-aged kid, she stood agape for a few moments before asking me, in all earnestness, “Was this show made for adults?” Having watched the entirety of the show’s brief run, I can confidently say: no, it was not.

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Cinematics, Coattail Tarantino

Love and a .45

When doing research for my lengthy look at the post-Tarantino film world, I often wondered what was the first movie to be labeled as a Tarantino imitator. There were a flurry of attempts at carbon copying his style following Pulp Fiction, though Tarantino had produced enough buzz with his first feature Reservoir Dogs to inspire imitation even earlier. I don’t know if the true First Tarantino Baby can be determined with any certainty, but there is a very strong candidate for the first film to be received as one by both the public and critics: Love and a .45. Released in the waning weeks of 1994, not long after the massive success of Pulp Fiction and the hysterical controversy around the QT-penned Natural Born Killers, it was largely dismissed as a cheap ploy to capitalize on both films.

One big reason to give this movie the distinction of first Tarantino ripoff is because Tarantino himself has distinguished it in that manner. He has labeled Love and a .45 the best of his imitators, repeating this contention many times over the years and as recently as 2015. It is extremely on brand of him to not only acknowledge his copycats but to also proclaim his favorite is a virtually forgotten movie; whenever Tarantino makes a recommendation of any kind, it’s to let people know he is deeply familar with the obscure thing he is recommending. The film’s creator seems ambivalent about the imitator label; screenwriter and director C.M. Talkington has both resisted this characterization and accepted Tarantino’s award as a compliment, likely as a way to make people aware of his work.

Given the timeline of when Talkington wrote the screenplay and when the movie was produced, he is almost surely telling the truth when he says he was not inspired by Tarantino. However, I believe examining the film is worthwhile, as it tells us what both Tarantino himself and contemporary audiences saw that they perceived as pale imitations of the recently crowned master.

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A Very Special Television Event, Boob Tubery

The Electric Grandmother

There is a popular idea that our minds are like computer hard drives, continuously storing information from the moment we first draw breath, which would mean a person could conceivably remember any and every moment of their life. I don’t subscribe to this theory, as it assumes memory is a flawless, unblemished record when in truth memory is an odd, unreliable thing that is easy to warp, both by others and ourselves.

The computer brain theory also supposes that there is an objective reality that all “normal” beings perceive in the exact same way, another citation needed notion as far as I’m concerned. I’m more partial to the notion that consciousness is formed over time, and that in some way we reconstruct it at the dawn of every day. Think about the groggy strangeness you experience when you first wake up, how you need a few moments to remember where you are—a sensation that could be interpreted as your brain reforming the world as you have come to know it.

If consciousness is in fact a construct developed over a lifetime, the reason why our earliest memories are inaccessible is because our perception of the world as adults is so radically different than that of a baby. Infants haven’t yet formed their personal consciousness, and don’t understand there is a difference between themselves and the rest of the world. If we could recollect infancy it would likely be as basic sensory perceptions rather than the more complex visual/verbal nature of memories formed later. These “memories” would feel so bare and so strange to us they would seem almost alien.

For this reason, I’ve long been fascinated by memories I have of what I’ll call the Liminal Time of my earthly existence—preschool age, when I was learning language, learning what things outside myself were called, learning how to tell others what I was thinking, learning to recognize the very act of thinking and differentiate it from external actions like talking and walking. I have many memories of this time but they have an odd flavor, rich in surface detail yet with an undercurrent of strangeness as 3-to-4-year-old me struggled to understand where I was and what I was doing. The indoor playground at my preschool. A carpet store where I was dragged for one Saturday afternoon that felt like it was 9 years long. A promo for a local news story that scared me. A family party where aunts and uncles laughed at things I didn’t think were funny. I was just enough of the Me I would become to perceive and retain these sensations to this day, but I was also just enough Not Me for the memories to feel uncanny now.

Being who I am, television comprises a large number of these Liminal Time memories—usually not kids shows, but brief glimpses of grown-up programming that confounded me. Among these some of the most enduring are hazy recollections of a TV movie called The Electric Grandmother. The tale of a grieving family gifted the titular “relative,” it debuted in January of 1982, when I would have been firmly in my preschool era. I don’t know if I watched it then or was made to watch it later, perhaps in school. Though this would have been the Filmstrip Era (not yet supplanted by the TV With VCR On Wheels Era) I absolutely was made to watch afterschool specials and other TV offerings in the classroom.

Regardless, I was definitely aware of The Electric Grandmother‘s existence because I have distinct memories of certain scenes from it that both frightened and compelled Little Kid Me. In particular: a scene of the robotic grandmother siting in a rocking chair while she was plugged into a wall to recharge, and another scene where she is delivered to the family in some kind of shiny coffin. In pre-internet days, when these images would flit across my mind, I would wonder if The Electric Grandmother was an actual movie or something I’d only dreamt. I wanted to confirm the scenes that would poke my brain late at night or early in the morning were things I’d actually seen, but the feeling these images gave me were so unsettling I also feared encountering it again.

When I decided to do this TV project, The Electric Grandmother was high on my list of films to visit—or maybe revisit, I wasn’t quite sure. Yet I also had trepidations about watching it for the first time as an adult. I knew it would be an odd experience, and one I’d have trouble capturing in words due to the dreamlike nature of my memories. Having now watched it, I can definitively say yes, that experience was weird, on multiple levels and for multiple reasons.

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A potentially explosive collection of verbal irritants