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The Other Glass Teat: Essays
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About this ebook
The late, multi-award-winning author of The Glass Teat continues his critical assault on television in this second collection of classic criticism.
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were only three major television networks broadcasting original programs and news. And there was only one Harlan Ellison taking them all to task in a series of weekly essays he wrote for the countercultural, underground newspaper, the Los Angeles Free Press, a.k.a. “The Freep.” For nearly four years, he channel surfed through the mire of ABC, CBS, and NBC, finding little of value but much to critique. No one offered a more astute analysis of the idiot box’s influence on American culture, or its effects on the intelligence and psyche of viewers.
The Other Glass Teat: Further Essays of Opinion on the Subject of Television collects Ellison’s final fifty columns, presenting his thoughts on everything from dramas and sitcoms to game shows and roundtable discussions, unleashing his fury against sponsors, the nightly news, and the broadcasts of President Nixon—warning readers about the commander-in-chief’s war against the media long before the Watergate scandal broke.
As television has evolved into wireless streaming services and digital interactions on portable devices, Ellison’s timeless rage against the machine has become prophecy. His plea to unplug is an even more necessary call to action in the face of the twenty-first century’s media onslaught.
Also available: The Glass Teat: Essays of Opinion on the Subject of Television
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were only three major television networks broadcasting original programs and news. And there was only one Harlan Ellison taking them all to task in a series of weekly essays he wrote for the countercultural, underground newspaper, the Los Angeles Free Press, a.k.a. “The Freep.” For nearly four years, he channel surfed through the mire of ABC, CBS, and NBC, finding little of value but much to critique. No one offered a more astute analysis of the idiot box’s influence on American culture, or its effects on the intelligence and psyche of viewers.
The Other Glass Teat: Further Essays of Opinion on the Subject of Television collects Ellison’s final fifty columns, presenting his thoughts on everything from dramas and sitcoms to game shows and roundtable discussions, unleashing his fury against sponsors, the nightly news, and the broadcasts of President Nixon—warning readers about the commander-in-chief’s war against the media long before the Watergate scandal broke.
As television has evolved into wireless streaming services and digital interactions on portable devices, Ellison’s timeless rage against the machine has become prophecy. His plea to unplug is an even more necessary call to action in the face of the twenty-first century’s media onslaught.
Also available: The Glass Teat: Essays of Opinion on the Subject of Television
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Reviews for The Other Glass Teat
Rating: 4.25 out of 5 stars
4.5/5
4 ratings3 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Harlan Ellison had written successful TV Scripts and Magazine articles before doing this stint as a TV critic. Be prepared for the 1969-70 TV broadcast television series and ethos being slashed and burnt by a very severe critic and competent artist. For the social historian: this is what the demonstrators went home and watched.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Television: the Big Babysitter, both shaper of reality and reality itself, give us this day our daily bread and Rock on!
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I tend to prefer Ellison's essays to his fiction, and some of his better ones are on display here; at this remove TOGT is chiefly of historical interest, but it's remarkable (and depressing...) how many of his complaints with the "vast wasteland" ring as true today as they did in the early '70s. (Truer, even: he didn't have to contend with the excrescence known as "reality television.") There are some moments of high comedy perpetrated by that merriest of pranksters, Father Time, as when Ellison lavishes praise upon a then up-and-coming actor named -- Zalman King, better known these days as a writer and producer of several feckless soft-core titillation extravaganzas (chiefly the Red Shoe Diaries and Chromium Blue.com series). One of Ellison's scripts -- this one for The Young Lawyers, an episode titled "The Whimper of Whipped Dogs" -- is reproduced in its entirety; and, as anyone with even a nodding acquaintance with Ellison's oeuvre might expect, his script was not shot as he'd written it, and boy, was he ever pissed off about it. Pity that Ellison didn't reveal why his "Glass Teat" column only lasted two issues at Rolling Stone (whose motto is -- or was, at any rate -- "All the news that fits") in his introduction; maybe he had one of his famous blow-outs with Jann Wenner.