The New People

After Gilligan’s Island, before Lost, there was…The New People.

This is another case where, like Turn-On!, it’s necessary to understand the pop culture gestalt to fully appreciate the show.

Once again, a 1969 ABC-TV show, this time launched in September at the regular start of the season.

As mentioned previously, by 1969 the bloom came off the flower children.  In August prior to the launch of The New People, the Charles Manson Family committed horrific back-to-back mass murders in Los Angeles.  While the connection to the Manson Family wouldn’t be established until December of that year, the nature of the crimes created an obvious link in the minds of the public to hippie counterculture.

Student protests against the war and for civil rights grew increasingly more confrontational.  While the Kent State massacre and SDS bombings wouldn’t occur until 1970, a sour attitude towards the youth movement already began swelling with Nixon’s infamous “silent majority” reactionary policies.

American television responded in a typical contradictory manner.  On the one hand there were several shows featuring young characters such as ABC-TV’s Room 222, a 1969 school drama that lasted five season, and The Mod Squad, a 1968 crime series about three young people coerced into being narcs for the LAPD (which also lasted five seasons); on the other hand CBS-TV abruptly canceled The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour when they refused to back down on political and social content.

Meanwhile, low-brow skit comedy ala Rowan And Martin’s Laugh-In created the impression of social commentary while actually adhering pretty closely to societal norms of the era.  It proved a huge juggernaut for NBC-TV and to counterprogram against it, ABC-TV came up with the idea of two 45-minute shows running back-to-back, the thought being young audiences would tune in to The Music Scene at 7:30pm to see rock and soul stars singing their latest hits, then instead of switching to Laugh-In at 8pm would stay with ABC-TV at 8:15pm for The New People.

An interesting gamble.  Failed, but interesting…

The New People was a Rod Serling developed series (he wrote the pilot under the name “John Philips”) about a State Department goodwill tour of American college students through Southeast Asia being recalled to the U.S. after several embarrassing incidents.  The charter airplane flying them back to the Philippines from Southeast Asia encounters a tropical storm that blows them miles off course.

They crash land on a remote island in the South Pacific that had been set up for a nuclear bomb test:  There are buildings, food, vehicles, and other necessities left to test the effects of the bomb.  The lone surviving adult in the group, the State Department official sent to bring them home, reveals it’s a now abandoned test site that the U.S. simple left in place rather than dismantle when they canceled the test.

The young people, now left to their own devices once the State Department official dies, have the chance to create a brand new social order, and the challenge they face is that they represent a broad spectrum of then current American attitudes and values.

It is, ultimately, a story of hope.  Those familiar with Serling’s non-Twilight Zone live TV dramas such as A Town Has Turned To Dust will instantly see a kinship with what he wrote here.  It’s a good, solid premise.

The problem is Laugh-In steamrollered it.

Only 17 episodes were shot and aired.  Like almost all one season shows, it’s long been forgotten.

But you can see the premiere episode here.

© Buzz Dixon