This weekend, I began a rewatch of the 60s action series "The Rat Patrol." For the uninitiated, the series detailed the adventures of a quartet of World War II combatants making desert life miserable for the Nazis in the African desert. Probably the biggest "star" of the series was Eric Braeden, under his real name Hans Gudegast, who continues his decades-old portrayal of Victor Newman three or four times a week on "The Young and the Restless."
"The Rat Patrol" tells its tales in 25 minutes, leaving precious little time for character development, and is pretty much wall-to-wall action. It got me thinking about television's landscape today. We are constantly being told that we have miniscule attention spans, yet network and online TV continues to use an hour ... well, forty minutes plus advertising, anyway ... to lay out its tales. And online services like Amazon Prime and Netflix often go even longer. And us numskulls with ADD actually binge watch "Yellowstone" a season at a time in an afternoon. Back in the day, a thirty minute slot was plenty to service not only sitcoms, soaps and game shows, but detective thrillers, anthology dramas and even the occasional science fiction parable.
The most famous and enduring example remains "The Twilight Zone." Rod Serling's brilliant anthology series continues to be a cable staple on holiday weekends, and deservedly so. Many episodes are as iconic as a Grimm fairy tale and worthy of the adulation accorded to it.
Last weekend, the cable channel Decades treated us to a weekend of a 60s drama series called "N.Y.P.D." It starred Jack Warden, Robert Hooks and Ron Harper as cops in a crime ridden precinct. While the series reeked authenticity, along with the obligatory thanks to the real N.Y.P.D. for its cooperation in the closing credits, it was far more action-packed than an episode of "Dragnet." Decades later, Steven Bochco would add "Blue" and a half hour to the show, and most of that extra stuff was soap opera.
In the 90s, David Lynch briefly took over the world with a cheerleader's body wrapped in plastic on "Twin Peaks." He couldn't maintain the weirdness AND an audience, however, so "Peaks" faded as quickly as it arrived. In 1957, Blake Edwards brought us brilliant detective noir, with informants every bit as quirky as in Twin Peaks, on "Peter Gunn." Edwards followed it up with a single season wonder, "Mr. Lucky," an action-adventure series, again 30 minutes, only slightly resembling the Cary Grant film of the same name, and co-starring Ross Martin, a half dozen years before he boarded the train for "The Wild Wild West." Both shows are tight, entertaining, and lean on exposition.
There have been minor flirtations with the thirty-minute drama series since. In the 90s, the late John Ritter starred in Bochco's quirky "Hooperman," which was followed on ABC by Dabney Coleman in the criminally overlooked "The Slap Maxwell Story." It could be argued that both were just filmed sitcoms (particularly "Slap"), but there were dramatic overtones on both shows. Denis Leary's "The Job" was a thirty minute cop dramedy as well, with a seriously flawed lead hero. When that didn't take, Leary translated it into an hour and into a fire house and "Rescue Me" was a much bigger hit.
A decade or so ago, syndication tried to take on "Hercules," "Xena" and "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine" with an action-adventure hour that was actually two individual thirty minute programs. "Cleopatra 2525" was an inspid futuristic "Charlie's Angels," but I loved Bruce Campbell's Scarlet Pimpernel pastiche, "Jack of All Trades," a hybrid of "The Three Musketeers" and his lamented "The Adventures of Brisco County, Jr." Both lasted scarcely a year.
I admit that I perhaps DO suffer a bit from ADD when it comes to television. I prefer thirty minute programs to hour long dramas, which sadly has me relegated to the aforementioned game shows and sitcoms. I'm working on this, however. This fall, I'm also starting "Blue Bloods" from the very beginning. There may be hope for me after all. But wouldn't it be great if Tom Selleck could catch the bad guys in half the time? Then for the second half hour, he can go back to promoting reverse mortgages.
