Turn-On! Turned Off (part 2)

Riding high on the success of Laugh-In, Schlatter and Friendly were approached by Bristol-Meyers to create a similar show for them.  Schlatter and Friendly, feeling their original concept for Laugh-In became too diluted by the time it hit the air, took a second swing at it with Turn-On!.

The premise of Turn-On! is that it’s a TV skit comedy show created by a computer.  At the beginning of each episode two technicians walk to computer terminal sitting in a white featureless void.  They start the computer and it begins generating short skits, none longer than a minute in length, most only ten seconds or less.  Frequently weird animations or puppets would intrude into the frame completely independent of the actual skit being performed.  And while there were a few recurring characters and skits, many of them seemed derivative of Laugh-In performers.

No music, no laugh track, just weird blips and bloops from a Moog synthesizer (the first use of a Moog on American TV).

And to add to the confusion, the credits ran after commercials, not at either the beginning or end of the show.  Bristol-Meyer shot all tbeir commercials in a similar comic sensibility to the show itself, so it became even more confusing to viewers as to whether they were watching a real commercial or a parody of one.

The thing is, none of this is explained to the audience, Schlatter and Friendly and co-producer Digby Wolfe simply assumed you’d either get it or not.  Without someway of making sense of the show, audiences of the era were left rudderless.

Remember, this is 1969.  Go take a look at that list up there for an idea of what America was going through, if you think the current MAGA vs progressives contretempts is bad, you’ve got no idea what the country went through with Norman Rockwell America vs sex & drugs & rock & roll (plus radical politics & civil rights & feminism & anti-war).

Some viewers complained of being physically ill by all the fast cutting and non-sequiturs, but fast cutting and non-sequiturs are de rigueur in video now.  Comedy against a featureless background is a TikTok aesthetic (and, lordy, there are some brilliantly funny comics and comedians out there).

What really pissed ‘em off was the open for the day commentaries on sex and race, with a good dollop of politics thrown in.

Please do not think this was all high brow enlightened material rejected by the hoi polloi. 

Quite the contrary.

One of their female performers appeared as “The Body Politic” reclining on a divan in sleepwear, making Playboy-quality jokes on sex.  The attractive female members of the cast were expected to do go-go dances, same as on Laugh-In, only Laugh-In’s dancers usually had some sort of funny graffiti painted on them, Turn-On!’s…just danced.

There were holocaust jokes, demeaning gay jokes, racial stereotypes, sexual stereotypes, and references to all sorts of kinks that people today think got invented in the 21st century.

Schlatter and Friendly set out to be deliberately offensive, and they succeeded.  While we can acknowledge they intended their offence to be in service of exposing hypocrisy, a lot of it remains pointlessly offensive today, and in more than a few cases their Playboy-era masculine attitudes have added brand new levels of offensiveness.

So why not ignore Turn-On! if it’s so awful?

Because it isn’t awful.

There are terrible parts, to be sure, and they spoil appreciation of what Schlatter and Friendly and co. actually wrought, bust this proved to be really groundbreaking material.  They weren’t the first to do this sort of surrealist comedy (try 1964’s Help, My Snowman's Burning Down on for size, or the earliest film experiments of Jim Henson) but they were the first to try to deliver it unfiltered and undiluted to the American public.

This show seems almost quaint and passe now, but every technique used in it is now being employed across the Internet with striking effect.

And while they made many of their points in an offensive manner, their points are typically spot on.

The show did not sit well with the American public.  According to Schlatter, there was an effort by one station owner to cancel the show before it began because it took over one of three (!) weeknight slots set aside for the prime-time soap opera Peyton Place (one of those shallow properties that makes a meteoric arc across the pop culture sphere only to vanish without a trace).  When the premiere episode aired, a couple of stations simply didn’t come back to the show after the first commercial break but aired local programming until the next program started (one just played twenty minutes of recorded organ music!).

Public and critical reaction appeared uniformly negative.  Even Harlan Ellison, while refusing to call it bad, acknowledged it as “awkward” in The Glass Teat.  ABC-TV preempted the second episode in order to start their movie The Oscar a half hour earlier (and if you know anything about Harlan and this movie, you can appreciate the irony).

After that the series was quietly shelved, with Schlatter reporting ABC-TV paid him the full series production budget on the promise he never show it again to anyone.
Well, all involved are long out of position to do anything about enforcing such a contract, so the first two episodes -- the premiere hosted by Tim Conway –--and the second –--hosted by Robert Culp and his then-wife France Nuyen -- finally surfaced, allowing us to see for ourselves what caused all the fuss.

As Harlan said, awkward but not bad.  As I said, a brilliant misfire.  It really appears to be a show several years ahead of its time, something better suited for late night TV than prime-time.  Could it have made a cultural impact the way Laugh-In did?  Maybe, given enough exposure.  Many of the mini-segments were shot by film students Schlatter recruited; as a showcase for new talent it might have proved interesting.

Since it was shot on film, I’m surprised Schlatter and Friendly didn’t try re-editing it for theatrical release.

© Buzz Dixon

Turn-On! episode one with Tim Conway

Turn-On! episode two with Robert Culp and France Nuyen