Judge Harold Green: The Golden Age of Television

Judge Harold Green

Honeysuckle Weeks (That's really her name)

We are living now in the golden age of television.  Watching Breaking Bad and now, Foyle's War, and having gone through The Killing, The Fall, House of Cards, The Sopranos, Downton Abbey, Game of Thrones, Treme and, of course, most of all, The Wire, the Phantom can only give thanks to the profusion of art now available on television. 

The Phantom recalls his distress when, during the War in Vietnam, the only news on television was from the big three networks and he thought the war would never end until something changed the stranglehold those networks had on the carotid blood flow to the American mind.

In fact, he was wrong:  Walter Cronkite, at CBS, simply played night after night of images from Vietnam, without comment, and it became obvious what a debacle it was. The notion of America as the Lone Ranger fell apart every night on the Evening News.

But eventually, the unthinkable did happen:  A monopoly in America was defeated, broken up and real competition occurred.  The monopoly was AT&T, Ma Bell, which had total control over telephones.  Ma Bell not only controlled local calls, but long distance calls and all the hardware in each citizen's home.  Ma Bell was so powerful, nobody could imagine this giant would ever fall. There was much trepidation about what would happen if it did fall--you might not be able to call Aunt Minnie in Providence if the company was smashed into little bits.

But then a judge named Harold Green got the case, and it became clear he was going to break that giant down.  Harold Green lived up the street from the Phantom, in a modest house, built in 1956 as one of  a tract of homes. There were four models to choose from and they cost about $21,000. The builders, the Becker brothers, lived in the development, as did government workers, a doctor, an airline pilot and an under secretary of Interior and the head of the SEC. 

Harold Green had a pretty blonde German wife, which was something of a curiosity in a neighborhood in which about a quarter of the families were Jewish. But it was said Harold Green was okay, and in fact may have been Jewish, so his choice of a German was forgiven. In fact, Harold Green was born Heinz Grunhaus, in Frankfort, Germany in 1923, and Jewish or not, he got out of Germany as Hitler came to power and moved to America, where he joined the U.S. Army and served as an interpreter during WWII. After that, he went to college and law school in Washington, DC and the rest is history.

He fought in the big war and then he fought another big war against AT&T and he brought down a giant.

So what does that have to do with the golden age of television? You may argue, the demise of AT&T and the emergence of cable TV are unrelated, but the Phantom sees connections where others see only empty space. They may be right, but the Phantom believes once Ma Bell was brought down, the flood gates were opened.  Cries of the end of Western Civilization arose when the final settlement occurred in 1982--every time you had trouble making a call, the AT&T customer service man would tell you it was all from the break up. Things could not work well without the great paternalistic monopoly which provided service in every state to every state, which provided you your black telephone with the rotary dial and even gave you extensions for different parts of your house.

The same was said about television. All the conservatives who hated to see change, who thought we were doing just fine with three networks,  intoned ominously about the chaos which would occur if the big three networks had to descend into a morass of competition from multiple networks. 

And the rest is history. Real competition meant creative stallions were unleashed and we see the evidence every night, on television.

Watch Breaking Bad, with all its overcharged intensity, its meticulous writing and you know you are seeing superb craftsmanship. Follow that with Foyle's War, an understated, deliberately paced, elegantly crafted show, starring--of all things--a fifty something, balding police detective on a beat in Hasting, England, along the southern coast, just across the channel from France, during early part of WWII, before America entered it. 
His driver, is a 22 year old freckled blonde, no beauty, but spunky. The cast of characters, includes a detective who had his leg blown off during the fiasco which was the English invasion of Norway.  (You are not told much about the fiasco, but if you have read about it you know it was one of many examples of British military incompetence--this one included landing British soldiers who were supposed to ski behind the German lines but the skis had no bindings and the Brits were slaughtered.)  This is one detail not covered in Folye's War, but many other details are, and they are fascinating. After houses were bombed, local wardens were supposed to clear the smouldering premises of bodies and rescue people, but they sometimes pilfered the premises, stealing whatever valuables they could. Policemen stole rings from the fingers of unconscious women in these bombed out flats.  The series opens a whole new page on the history of the valiant British enduring the blitz with a stiff upper lip and sometimes light fingers. 

Thank Heaven for cable television, Netflix, HBO and the profusion of choices offered by the demise of the giants. Long live real competition, and thank Heinz Grunhaus while you're at it.