TELEVISION / HOWARD ROSENBERG
When the networks tried to smother controversy
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A new documentary on the Smothers Brothers recalls just how lock-
jawed much of television was years in advance of today's wildly
careening speedway of instantaneous blather. The Who Brothers?

A brief history: More than three decades before late-nighter Bill
Maher was zinged for his hot-button comments about Sept. 11
terrorists on ABC, and long before the U.S. was wired for cable, folk-
singing comedians Tommy and Dick Smothers were in weekly prime-time
combat with censors at CBS.

Speaking of Thanksgiving, much is owed the Smotherses for their fight
last century on behalf of popping off in prime time.

As Maureen Muldaur notes in "Smothered," her film Wednesday on
cable's Bravo channel, these guys were hardly anarchists Sacco and
Vanzetti. Nor were they itching to tell dirty jokes, shout
obscenities, parade nude across the screen and flash for the camera.

At issue instead was social comment and satire in "The Smothers
Brothers Comedy Hour" ranging from biting anti-Vietnam War digs to
David Steinberg's wittily irreverent sermonettes about God and
Scripture that were benign by today's standards (think "South Park").
The Smothers' story is always relevant, but especially now when war
looms with Iraq. The stakes and environment are much different, of
course. But would scripts voicing skepticism about that possible war
meet resistance like that encountered over Vietnam by the Smotherses?
Surely not, one would hope.

The squelching of "objectionable" material in the 1960s did not occur
in a vacuum. TV's own scripture had been censorship in its infancy,
which many now recall generously as the medium's golden age. Instead
it was largely television's Golden Age of Blahs, a time when sponsors
dictated much of program content, and blacklisted topics and talent
were unreasonably excluded from the airwaves in deference to the
nation's whipped-up Cold War frenzy.

It's one thing for a network to responsibly oversee what it beams to
the public, another for it to suppress legitimate speech for
questionable reasons.

And extending that tradition of keeping TV pastel is the blipping of
opinion that "Smothered" reprises with ample clips from the late
1960s, along with comments by the brothers themselves, their show's
writers and performers and CBS programmers of that era.

"We were trying to get through as much as we could," says Tommy.

His few years on this hot-seat with his brother overlapped the Lyndon
B. Johnson and Richard M. Nixon presidencies, and also the Vietnam
conflict their show sought relentlessly to protest under an umbrella
of entertainment. As it turned out, though, "The Smothers Brothers
Comedy Hour" would be canceled before the war was.

This was not a pretty time for television in general.

How paradoxical that a medium so energized by advances in technology
was guided at the very top mainly by executives who shrank
regressively from using public airwaves to present ideas that rippled
the waters even slightly.

And how quaint this all seems today when prime time welcomes just
about anything raunchy short of bestiality, when cable's all-news
channels give knee-jerk live access to one talking head case after
another, when public figures and their policies are drilled
repeatedly in the monologues of Leno, Letterman and others.

Is some of it witless, even repulsive? Yes. Better that, however,
than more gutlessness and repression.

With cable as a major player, the industry today views its audience
as not one faceless mass, as it did in the 1960s, but as splintered
into individual groups whose interests are shaped by age and
background. One result is more diversity in programming.

Restraints are still in place, naturally, and even moderate
insurgency often unable to elude blue pencils and fight through the
blubber of TV's programming bureaucracy. Yet the contrast between
eras is striking.

In tumultuous 1968, when Robert F. Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther
King Jr. were murdered, and U.S. boasts of triumph in Vietnam were
contradicted by the Tet offensive, CBS was trying to keep a lid on an
hour of TV with the contours of a mainstream variety show. It had big
production numbers. It had resident dancers and singers. It had
Nelson Riddle and his orchestra. It had establishment guests like
Kate Smith and Jimmy Durante.

But guests, also, whose controversial politics must have made CBS big
shots shudder.

CBS allowed Joan Baez to dedicate a song to her husband, David
Harris, for example, but edited out her explanation that he was being
imprisoned for resisting the draft.

It vetoed folk singer Pete Seeger's appearance to sing his anti-war
song, "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy," moreover, with only an ensuing
public outcry causing the network to relent and let him sing it on
the show later that season.

Although the Smothers Brothers were their decade's boldest TV
renegades, their show was not the medium's only comedy venue for
political material in the 1960s. Arriving on NBC several years
earlier, and patterned after a British series, was a tepid prime-time
news satire titled "That Was the Week That Was." And later that
decade came NBC's hit "Rowan and Martin's Laugh-in" and the Fickle
Finger of Fate it wagged at assorted targets.

The difference, Dan Rowan once noted, was that his show used politics
to launch comedy, the Smotherses used comedy to launch politics, as
in stony Pat Paulsen's editorials. "And what are the arguments
against the draft?" he began one of them. "We hear it is unfair,
immoral, discourages young men from studying, ruins their careers and
their lives." Pause. "Picky, picky, picky."

The program even launched Paulsen as a mock presidential candidate,
and at one point used a split screen to depict him speaking out of
both sides of his mouth.

As for Steinberg, here he is in Muldaur's film speaking about Moses
famously getting an earful from the Burning Bush: " 'Moses, take off
your shoes from off of your feet,' God said in his redundant way."
When Moses obeyed and then approached the bush, Steinberg added, "he
burned his feet."

When protests streamed in, CBS forbade the Smotherses from airing
more of Steinberg's religious material. But in fact, a subsequent
taping of a Steinberg sermonette spoofing Jonah and the New Testament
("And to this day the New Testament doesn't sell ... ") would be the
whale that broke the camel's back. Even though it didn't air, it
contributed mightily to CBS closing down "The Smothers Brothers
Comedy Hour" in 1969.

By that time, the show's once-solid ratings had sagged, and Tommy,
who was hardly the dolt he played on camera, had become so obsessed
with telling viewers about his problems with CBS that he had ceased
being funny.

The Smotherses won a breach of contract suit against CBS, and had
several more shots on TV, none close to being as momentous as their
original comedy-variety hour on CBS.

Which was succeeded in its Sunday night time slot by "Hee Haw."

"Smothered" will be shown at 8 and 11 p.m. Wednesday on Bravo, with
encore airings on Thursday and Dec. 14.