tangents

news & views

by sal mcintire

TV BEEVES PEEVE OR ALL THAT MEAT AND NO POTATOES:

Roles for actresses on TV are very small potatoes these days and getting smaller and smaller-such is the gripe of an actress in an article in The Phoenix Gazette. She counted roles for women in night-time shows on one network and found that of 38 important parts only 6 were for women. The theory that TV viewers prefer watching handsome males rather than females "has been repeated so often it has assumed status as a basic television truth."

Any gay TV viewer knows she's not exaggerating one whit. Sometimes it is even delightfully spoofed, as when that Cheyenne star was shown making a complete change of clothes-behind one of those antique bedroom screens that only let

one

you see the bare shoulders, a la Theda Bara.

The wonder is that the very ailing movie business hasn't caught on that the public is tired of all that cloying female adoration to the exclusion of everything else. They could take a lesson from old moneymaker Cecil B. DeMille. If you saw his movies, you know he sure didn't limit himself to presenting just females sexily.

It isn't that the TV industry is so gay nor that TV's beefcake boys are gay nor that TV is going after the gay audience (though you'll probably hear a lotta bull to that effect). Straight men like to identify with handsome heroes, straight women like to watch them, and it is the straight homeloving families to whom TV is the cheapest and most convenient form of entertainment. The young TV industry needed a safe moneymaking formula and found it. Probably in time the formula will wear thin and females will

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