The sub‐text: Unspoken communication

Abstract

During the Fall of 1962, that graduate student who was Business Manager of this, magazine came to work one morning each week exhibiting an unusual impatient enthusiasm. “Did you see it?” he asked. When the editor gave his usual negative response, the student would turn to the telephone, and spend the next half hour discussing a television program called “It's a Man's World.” That this program was capable of appealing strongly to the young in mind and spirit (as well as age) can be attested to. It was able to say a great deal to those who remembered their own student days, and their own internal struggles that marked the pathway to full adulthood if not full maturity. Perhaps not enough people were able to truly empathize with the trials of the characters in “It's a Man's World” because the program left the air at the end of one season—to the tune of one of the most vigorous campaigns ever waged against the approaching demise of a program by actors and audience alike.

However, only a portion of credit for the impact of this program rests with the characters and plots. In a very real sesnse, “It's a Man's World” was an experiment into the potentialities of the semantics and grammar of television. Starting with the dictum that people rarely if ever mean precisely what they say, the producers of this program tried to show the audience what the characters meant to communicate—something that can't be done through dialogue alone.