Ask anybody. The best thing about so-called "drama" on television is not deeply touching stories (there aren't any), hotshot acting (none of that either), or auteur-type direction (where?). The best thing is Bad Guys. And now Bad Girls. Heavies. You know, low-ball cutthroats and cheats, swindlers and crazed maniacs. They're almost always preferable to good guys in terms of pure entertainment and, at least over the last thirty years on the best cop shows - where they're oversimplified and often overacted with a finesse approaching pure art - they get the coolest lines.
Think of it. J.R. on Dallas throwing on that smug, happy face when he tells the cartel boys those stock certificates he's sold them aren't worth a liter of gasohol. Or those menacing pinstripe punks on Cannon or Mannix who catch their extortion victim daddy as he's leaving for work and tell him "Real nice family you got there, mister. Sure be a shame if anything were to ... happen to them." Heh heh heh. The sniggers echo way back to the ghoulish Cryptkeeper and all those horror comic hosts. Face it: He's not blond, but Snidely Whiplash has more fun than you'll ever have. Believe it.
Where did it all start? The Fifties, probably. Richard Boone's Paladin character on Have Gun Will Travel ("a knight without armor in a savage land") was a black-dressed avenging angel, a bounty hunter with a boss business card and a tendency to let his pearlhandle do his talking. This was back from '57 to '63. Even before that, TV's first cop and detective series ran with stock baddies - lots of goons with five o'clock shadow, pencil moustaches, and light ties on dark suits crimed it up on programs like Boston Blackie.
But it wasn't until '57 or '58 that the first significant trend in tele-villainy popped up. We're talking about the juvenile delinquent. He was a convention borrowed, as were most of the rest, from the movies (Blackboard Jungle, The Cool and the Crazy, High School Confidential), and from '57 through about '60, he was hurriedly written into every cop show script that required thoroughly repugnant antisocial behavior and a touch of relevance. "Hey maan, " the Vic Morrow clone sneers as he flicks open his switchblade, "you goin' someplace?"
With its usual style, television softened even these hard guys in the name of family interest. If the widescreen version was puff-faced John Chandler Davis and pals swaggering down the sidewalk casually kicking over a baby carriage in The Young Savages (people scream and flee; the buggy cradled only a doll), TV was Edd "Kookie" Byrnes hot-wiring a T-bird and skating for the malt shop. It's not widely known, but Byrnes, Mr. Cool to millions in '59 and '60, began his 77 Sunset Strip career as a JD. In the pilot episode, he played a psychopathic teen killer who watched color cartoons in between mayhem sprees. Even as a heavy, Kookie was such a hit that the show's producers were forced to bring him back as a regular - a reformed hood who parked cars rather than stole them.
From there, it was only a matter of ten years before the Fonz blew into town, proving that, just because a guy wore a ducktail, engineer boots, and ratty black leather, there was no reason he couldn't counsel teens and patch up domestic discord like some free-lance Danny Thomas. Heeyyyy...
Real JD villains vanished from the air as the Sixties dawned. A final few were located idling outside rural greasepits along Route 66 or harassing surfers in The Aquanauts and Malibu Run. They were politely ushered out with a wave of the hand when the fall '59-spring '60 season arrived, bringing with it a little Desilu number, a period piece on organized crime fronting the greatest wooden actor of all space and time, Robert Stack. Stack was Eliot Ness, Ness was the tough talking Federal Prohibition agent, and The Untouchables became the first Sixties cop show smash. In its favor, the program made more creative use of petrol-powered vehicles crashing through doors, walls, and abandoned warehouses in a single episode than Dukes of Hazzard has in umpteen seasons. And its heavies - great thundering bad-asses such as Bruce Gordon (as Frank Nitti), Neville Brand (as "Scarface" Capone), and Nehemiah Persott (as the slimy Jake "Greasy Thumb" Guzik) - were tops, real mad dogs among mad dogs.
But wait! They all wore suits! Suits?! Right. Double-breasted, vested, tailored two-hundred-buck jobs. Regular guys they were, oiled crumbs just up from the rackets, and - granted, Greasy Thumb and Bugs and Big Al were now well off, but suits? - they looked downright respectable.
And, unlike the sadismo hoods of '57-60, these guys weren't kids. Pretty soon, every cop series was full of natty mobsters, manicured, pedigreed punks, dapper middle-aged cats who looked as if they'd just as soon buy a new Eldorado and move wife and kids into that big split-level down the block as slit your throat. Call Welcome Wagon; here they come - right next door to you. Like, what's happening?
What happened was inevitable. In no time, the cop shows themselves mutated into lawyer shows, and the criminal element moved further uptown, into courtrooms on The Defenders and its imitators. Upscale thugs ruled. Increasingly, their wrong-doing became more genteel, less violent. It wouldn't be long before Bracken's World (1969) and subsequently Executive Suite (1976) replaced knife-wielding scumbags with white-collar crooks, setting up audiences for J.R. Ewing's dastardly but graciously performed deeds.
The late Sixties did make one invaluable contribution to tube villainy, when they momentarily reversed the gentleman gangster trend in a single stroke and created a monstrous generic meanie, a character type I call the California Windbreaker Hood. He was surely a cousin to the juvie, and his emergence was certainly a nod to the westward tilt of the world. He might be a psycho Viet vet trafficking joy pills, a small-time con running a harmless fatcat fleece, or some pimp engineering May-December marriages and accidental deaths for quick policy payoffs. But one thing's sure: He trashed the threepiece heavies with what has got to be the coolest, most casual style to ever stalk the scanlines.
The California Windbreaker Hood!
No ones knows the exact point where he first appeared, mind you, but there are clues. Like that '67 or '68 Mannix episode "A Step in Time." A young woman is abducted by two thugs on the Malibu sand. Mannix and Peggy drive out to a seedy coffee pad (the Freak Out) to check leads. Peg: "Joe, this is where all the weirdos up and down the beach come to groove." Then it happens. Joe and Peg locate a witness who cops: "I saw them. One of them had on a longish black leather jacket. And the other had on a ... a ... a windbreaker!"
You bet he did. The navy MacGregor model, 100 percent cotton, with the midnight-blue knit collar and the twobutton neck strap, the narrowed knit cuffs and alloy Talon Claw zipper. Like Ike wore battling the Nazis, but civvie, lightweight, and cool blue. And the creep would invariably have on the rest of the ensemble - white chinos, immaculate crew neck t-shirt (white), five-eyelet Ked deck shoes in blue, and impenetrable Balorama shades. And he'd have short hair. Neat. Cut clean. Like a block of ice. Suburban.
Looked like the kind of guy you'd meet Saturday morning buying lawn seed or polishing the Evinrude on his power boat. But no. The ranchwagon exterior concealed an evil so insidious, so unpredictably malevolent, he was the closest image match TV has yet devised to Tony Perkins' tidy little Norman Bates in Psycho. Eventually, these sunburnt California bully boys took over televillainy, cropping up on Cannon, Barnaby Jones, every other Mannix, and most Quinn Martin shows.
In fact, the all-time Windbreaker Hood performance was given by the late Steve Inhat on Q-M's The F.B.I. Inhat, a pioneering character heavy who played a chilling game of wits with detective Richard Widmark in the movie Madigan, buttoned up his Mac for dozens of CWH parts in the late Sixties. But here he leads a pack of leering jacket-boys into the Mojave Desert to hold all twelve inhabitants of a touristy ghost town hostage in a decrepit old house. Efrem Zimbalist, Jr., and company get the scent, so Inhat's gang plays a waiting game. They unzip their windbreakers to half mast, keep their pistols trained on their sweating hostages. When a distraught young woman begs Inhat to let her take one hostage, an infirm old geezer, to the nearest hospital, Inhat growls "Nobody leaves!"
The woman decides to go for it and breaks for the door with the dying geezer. Inhat catches them, the old man stumbles then falls to the floor, conked out. "You killed him!" screams the woman. "It's your fault! He's dead!" Tight shot on Inhat's face. He breaks into a grin, looks at the hysterical gal. "People die," he says.
From there, it's all downhill. The last Windbreakers broke out on Starsky & Hutch and occasionally on Vegas. Nowadays the action has moved else where - to Sunbelt power corridors where J.R. Ewing wheels and deals, to Denver where Blake Carrington's books, not his hands, run red with heinous deeds. Over on Flamingo Road, the maniacal Michael Tyron dabbled in voodoo, home-wrecking, and senator buying, while Howard Duff's Sheriff Titus Semple bugged whorehouse bedrooms, framed innocent victims, and waved his cigar in the air while referring to all males as "Bub." Mild stuff.
If the Eighties have vanquished the great goons, they've at least provided equal opportunities for women.
The past two or three seasons have witnessed the overdue arrival of a strong breed of female cutthroats - scheming sex kittens like Dynasty's Fallon Carrington and Knots Landing's Abby Cunningham, and the doddering gothic matriarch Angela Channing of Falcon Crest. But, above all the rest: Morgan Fairchild as Constance Carlyle on Flamingo Road, whose moist lips speak lust and larceny, and Joan Collins' satanic Alexis Carrington (Dynasty).
Collins' treachery knows no bounds; she's carefully plotted the ruin of exhusband Blake's marriage and his business career, successfully caused Blake's new wife to abort, and, in the spring '82 season closer, literally loved Blake's archrival to death. In a steamy bedroom scene just this side of hard X, Collins bedded the obsequious Cecil Colby inside Blake's on-premises guest house. The lovemaking grew too intense for middle-aged Cecil, who expired in the sack after a heart seizure. "You can't die on me now!" shouted Collins. "You've got to help me get back at Blake!"
Good stuff. And, hopefully, there'll be more to come, if low Nielsens and Moral Majoritarians don't intervene. Like some infernal bad seed, evil grows on in television land. Viva villainy.