Tune In Turn-On? Drop Out
In which I meet my white whale, which turns out to be an iffy leftover tuna melt
My father passed on to me his love for useless pop culture information. He had a master’s in history but would much rather have discussed Ellery Queen novels or old TV shows or horrible cars.
He also passed on his near-fatal love of remaindered books, used book stores, and especially remaindered books at used book stores. One of his many purchases was this book, which I leafed through many a time in my adolescent years.
One show in that book stuck with me over the years, a sketch comedy program that aired only once, on ABC, in February 1969. The name of that show was Turn-On, it was created by George Schlatter (the creator of Laugh-In), and according to legend it was canceled during its first episode.
The guide book made it seem like it was the only show ever to be canceled after a single episode, which wasn’t even true when it happened in 1969. (As you scroll through that list, it’s kind of amazing how some of those series even got to the first episode, but I digress.)
Turn-On’s conceit was that it was the first television series ever produced by a computer. (This was, of course, a lie.) It eschewed fancy sets for plain white backgrounds. The sketches were short. A lot of them were about sex or other controversial topics. It seemed that, even by the standards of the Swinging Sixties, it must have just been a bridge too far for dull, square Middle America.
Still, have you ever had the experience of hearing about something that sounds so bad you just have to check it out? That was my experience with Turn-On. First I refused to believe it actually existed. Then I found reference to it in other places besides that book. So over the years I grew more and more curious about it. Not to the point of disrupting my life or anything, but roughly once a year or so something would make me think of it. Wanting to actually see it was never far behind.
But the show ended badly. Some ABC affiliates refused to air it at all, some would only air it late at night, and a couple stopped airing it after the first commercial break. Tim Conway, the guest star on the first episode, joked that the premiere party and the cancellation party turned out to be the same party. (The show was an old shame for him but he had a sense of humor about it.)
Given these circumstances I had always assumed that I would never, ever actually get to see Turn-On. I had visions of ABC executives burning the tapes and mailing the ashes to Gabookistan, frantically trying to memory-hole its existence like George Lucas tried to do with The Star Wars Holiday Special. I satisfied myself one day when I found a description of all the sketches from the one episode. Some of them sounded pretty funny to me. Stupid Middle America.
I eventually learned that there was a museum somewhere that had a copy of the show, so there was a non-zero chance that I could see it, in the unlikely event I ever learned which museum and was actually able to travel there. So I did what the contemporary person must do under such circumstances: I put the show’s Wikipedia page on my watchlist. Maybe someday someone would post the name of the museum and whether the recording of Turn-On was publicly accessible to weirdos like me, or reserved for scholars of television.
Then, one day last week, it happened.
No, I still don’t know which museum had or has it. This was something bigger.
Someone had embedded a video of the entire episode into the Wikipedia page.
Reader, please understand: I’d been looking for this for forty years. So it’s a complete mystery why I waited another three days to watch it. But watch it I did, on Fathers Day. And how was it?
It was bloody horrible. The worst show I’ve ever seen, and I’ve watched I Married Dora.
If you’ve ever seen Laugh-In, imagine watching it on 2.5x speed with a production budget of $1.86 and with all the humor removed. It’s like being beaten over the head with a sack of Doritos. It’s like trying to hail a taxi in rural North Dakota. It’s like putting spackle on a turkey sandwich because you’re out of Miracle Whip.
The average sketch lasts about fifteen seconds. There are Moog synthesizers making noise throughout. The credits air at random at the end or beginning of sketches. There are jump cuts. There are scantily clad women, because Laugh-In had them. But there’s no audience. There may have been a laugh track, but the show was so profoundly unfunny that even a tape recording wouldn’t laugh at it. The longest sketch featured the disembodied heads of Tim Conway and a woman I unfortunately didn’t recognize making faces at each other while the word SEX was displayed on the screen. Sometimes the word changed colors. Sometimes they added punctuation to it. There must have been a story, but doggone if I could figure out what it was. I do know there wasn’t a point. The stuff I thought sounded funny, wasn’t. The rest of the show was almost physically painful.
I guess part of this whole collection of weirdness was meant to simulate the experience of what television might look like if it lost the human touch. Indeed, it does seem like something ChatGPT would spit out for us plebes. Maybe that proves how unnecessary artificial intelligence is, if we were able to accurately simulate its effects over fifty years ago. It could be a warning to pay the writers rather than let AI pump out an endless flow of crap entertainment, but humans wrote this show.
The writer Joe Queenan, in his excellent book Red Lobster, White Trash, and The Blue Lagoon, found himself in need of a word for an experience that sucked but wasn’t as bad as one feared/hoped it might be. He came up with the faux-German word Scheissenbedauern, literally “s**t regret,” and applied to a few things he desperately wanted to hate but couldn’t. I need a word for a long-sought experience that turns out to be even worse than you’d been led to believe it would be. Until I find that word, I’ll call it a Turn-On. The masses, it turns out, are not always wrong.