The New Entrepreneurs: An Institutional History of Television Anthology Writers

CHAPTER 2. Between the Television and Theater Industries: Representations of Race in Rod Serling's "Noon on Doomsday"

BETWEEN THE TELEVISION AND THEATER INDUSTRIES: REPRESENTATIONS OF RACE IN ROD SERLING’S “NOON ON DOOMSDAY” Working within the centralized power structure of the broadcasting industry made it impossible for anthology writers to represent race in their scripts. The broadcasting industry had official policies and unofficial assumptions that strictly prohibited dramas about race on anthology series and that gave control of this representation to television’s gatekeepers : networks, sponsors, and advertising agencies . These players censored anthology scripts that explicitly addressed segregation or racial violence. In 1953, nbc vice president Edward D. Madden declared the network would represent “integration without identification.” African Americans could be in programs with whites, as long as scripts avoided issues of civil rights and racial inequality. The networks and their business partners felt that these topics would harm a sponsor’s sales because the subject matter might offend white viewers who opposed the civil rights movement in specific parts of the United States.1 By 1953, the television audience was national in scope. When television began broadcasting extensively in 1947, stations existed in large numbers on the East Coast and in cities in other areas of the country. The fcc put a freeze on station allocations from 1948 until 1952, because new stations interfered with the reception of preexisting ones. This postponed the industry’s ability to reachanationalaudience.Butsoonafterthefreeze, 2 stations proliferated and television became a national medium.2 At that point, sponsors, agencies, and networks became aware that their various geographic markets had diverse values. Although racism certainly existed throughout the country, the television industry feared that the South would be more sensitive to the topic since many national protests concerning racial issues had occurred in response to specific conditions of segregation in the South. Paddy Chayefsky bemoaned the effects that this caution on the part of the television industry had on his scripts. He claimed that “you can’t write the Little Rock thing [racial protests] because they [the sponsors] can’t sell sets down south . . . or you can’t sell aluminum paper down south.”3 This situation posed major problems for any writer who wanted to address civil rights in a television script. Reginald Rose became a victim of the television industry’s centralized power structure when he attempted to write about racial discrimination in his 1954 Studio One drama “Thunder on Sycamore Street.” Rose based the script on a real-life event in which the residents of a white Chicago suburb drove away a black family that had moved in. As Rose recounts in The Box, an oral history of television, several people who heard about his upcoming script accused him of Communist sympathies and threatened to boycott Westinghouse products. Westinghouse eliminated all references to race so that when the play aired, the black family struggling against racial prejudice had become the family of a white ex-convict.4 Rose admitted that he “felt a compromise would weaken the play but [he] decided to make one anyway.”5 When Rod Serling chose in 1956 to write a fictionalized account of the Emmett Till murder titled “Noon on Doomsday,” he put together his strategies for representing race as a new entrepreneur who understood that other industries would let him address issues banned in the television industry . Having witnessed Rose’s struggles, Serling decided that his best opportunity to address African American civil rights would come about by moving between the television and theater industries. Serling simultaneously wrote a television version of “Noon on Doomsday,” in which he transformed the Till character into an elderly Jewish pawnbroker, and a Broadway adaptation in which he restored Till as an African American teenager. Serling tailored his social commentary in each version to fit the types of stories that were acceptable to his patrons in television and in theater . He examined two issues raised by the Till murder, the act of witnessing and the location of racism in the United States, in order to speak to important concerns of post–World War II African Americans and Jews. between telev is ion and theater | 51 52 | the new entrepreneurs This was a complex plan by which Serling planted thematic seeds about discrimination in the television version and grew them into maturity in the Broadway version. Serling’s main goal was to write about African Americans and lynching; however, both versions of the script mattered deeply to him. And as a Jew...