THE WALTONS

I liked The Waltons back in the '70s, but today I realize I had terrible taste. It's the one about a large family--including Maw, Paw, Grandma, Grandpa and seven red-headed kids enduring the Great Depression in the backwoods of western Virginia. The oldest kid, John-Boy (Richard Thomas) is an aspiring writer. The show was sentimental American cheese, shrewd to the point of cynicism. Every episode would begin with a title in a "The _____" format (but no titles like "The Feminist" or "The Rapper" or "The Mastectomy"), and end with the family saying good night to each other followed by harmonica music. If the walls of their big house were so thin that they could do that, does that mean that the kids could hear Maw and Paw procreating? You don't come up with seven kids by being chaste...

The Waltons were never poor poor. Paw had his sawmill, and the Great Depression was a minor inconvenience for them. (If they'd been on relief, that would have made them look unsympathetic to millions of suburbanites.) A few Negro characters turned up, but no Klansmen. Nobody got rickets.

My favourite episode was the one where John-Boy was about to take an exam for a college scholarship but he'd got a head injury in the sawmill which required emergency brain surgery. A dilemma: Will he take the test anyway and risk brain damage? Three possibilities:

1. He takes the test and suffers brain damage, and the show turns into The Sound and the Fury.

2. He doesn't take the test, gets stuck in the working class and spends the rest of his life wondering "What if..."

3. He takes the test, passes the exam, and doesn't suffer brain damage.

You don't suppose the writers will chose Number 3, do you?

I also remember this episode where Ben has this girlfriend who hasn't seen her mother since she left her father and wants Ben to drive her to the city for a reunion on the sly, because she's afraid what her father will do if he finds out she's gone to see her mother. So Ben borrows John-Boy's car, drives her to the reunion and swears not to tell, but he leaves his keys in the car and a joy-rider commits a hit & run in it and the license number gets taken down, so John-Boy gets in trouble, then Ben confesses he took the car out and refuses to say why, leading to trouble. But John-Boy figures out the truth and they all go to the girl's house and the father finds out the truth and is about to give his daughter a beating...

In the actual show, Paw restrains her father, who's reduced to tears and the problem gets sort of solved. But I was thinking about the ending I'd like to see:

The girl's father gives Paw a knockout punch that causes his head to fall on a sharp rock, leaving him blind. Then he falls on the girl and strangles her to death in five seconds. (The girls last words are "I'll never forgive you, Ben!") The father goes to the chair for killing his daughter, and his last words are "I'd do it again!" Her mother has to testify at his trial, and the local Ku Klux Klan blames the whole mess on her, so she gets lynched. Meanwhile, Paw can't work the sawmill any more and becomes an alcoholic. John-Boy tries to take his place, but is no good at it and ends up getting cut in half. Ben blames himself and becomes a drug addict. But Maw saves the family fortunes by turning the Walton house into The Best Little Whorehouse in Virginia. The hit & run driver later gets elected president, and John-Boy's car gets used to smuggle drugs for the CIA.

As you can see, shows like this make me rather cynical.