Failed Souths: Race, Gender, and Region in Bourbon Street Beat

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Acknowledgments

I thank my advisor Carol Stabile for all her help and support on this article. Also, thanks to my dissertation committee—Courtney Thorsson, Priscilla Ovalle, and Melissa Stuckey—who helped me shape, revise, and re-think the ideas in this essay. Lastly, thanks to Carol Ladewig, Sarah Todd, and my writing partner Justin Rawlins, who read and edited many drafts of this piece.

Notes

1. Csida, “Sponsor Backstage,” in Sponsor (1960), 14. The series also appears to have had no trouble picking up a sponsor: Libbey-Owens-Ford Glass Company (a manufacturer of safety glass) was already signed to sponsor BSB before it aired in 112 of the 140 markets (Csida, “Sponsor Backstage,” in Sponsor [1959], 35.

2. Baughman, Same Time, Same Station: Creating American Television, 1948—1961, 289. Rex Randolph's (Richard Long) character moved to 77 Sunset Strip (1958–1964) after BSB's cancellation and Kenny (Van Williams) moved to the little-more successful Surfside 6 (1960–1962). Both police procedurals featured similar private detective agencies and crime-of-the-week storylines in Los Angeles and Miami, respectively.

3. “I hate ratings!” in Broadcasting 64 (1963), 11. This advertisement also ran in the ad industry trade publication Sponsor at that same year.

4. In May 1962, Warner Bros. set up its first syndication unit headed by Joseph Kotler, according to a report in Sponsor. BSB was among the first four of their shows shown in syndication (“Warner Sets Up Own Syndication Unit,” in Sponsor, 12).

5. McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined South, 3.

6. The all-white Heartland shows, as Victoria Johnson shows, “actively [rewrote] the physical and imagined borders of the region through the elision of urbanity, people of color, and non-agrarian industry” (Johnson, Heartland TV: Prime Time Television and the Struggle for U.S. Identity, 19).

7. Torres, Black, White, and in Color: Television and Black Civil Rights, 21.

8. Graham, “Remapping Dogpatch: Northern Media on the Southern Circuit,” in Arkansas Historical Quarterly, 337.

9. Barnouw, Tube of Plenty, 164.

10. Ibid., 165.

11. Graham and Monteith, “Southern Media Cultures,” in New Encyclopedia of Southern Cultures, 17.

12. Ibid.

13. “Passing in Review,” in Motion Picture Daily, 26.

14. Here, I am drawing from Graham and Monteith's argument that magazines, novels, and newspapers—long before television—circulated tropes of a racist South and the figures that embodied that racism like the redneck or Harold Strider lookalikes. They suggest that television newscasts “tended to follow the rhetorical trail blazed by print journalists” embracing and employing these same tropes (Graham and Monteith, “Southern Media Cultures,” 18). Further, these tropes have provided “durable cinematic image[s]” of a racist South, still visible in film and television shows (Ibid.).

15. Ibid.

16. Mittell, Genre and Television: From Cop Shows to Cartoons in American Television, 141.

17. Ibid., 143.

18. Ibid.

19. Bodroghkozy, Equal Time: Television and the Civil Rights Movement, 52–53.

20. Watts, White Masculinity in the Recent South, 4

21. “Knock on Any Tombstone,” Bourbon Street Beat, Season 1, Episode 17 (1960).

22. Brooks and Marsh also point to Yancy's outsider status: Yancy and Pahoo together formed a “team that was not the police, not detective, and not secret agent, but a little bit of all three.” Brooks and Marsh, The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows, 1946-Present, 1550.

23. “Taste of Ashes,” Bourbon Street Beat, Season 1, Episode 1. This trend of police becoming detectives becomes more popular in the 1970s with dramas such as Rockford Files (1974–1980), Columbo (1971–2003), and McMillan and Wife (1971–1977).

24. “The Mourning Cloak,” Bourbon Street Beat, Season 1, Episode 2.

25. Hall, “Whites of Their Eyes: Racist Ideologies and the Media,” in Gender, Race, and Class in Media, A Text-Reader, 91.

26. Courtney, “Picturizing Race: On Visibility, Racial Knowledge and Cinematic Belief,” in Hollywood Fantasies of Miscegenation: Spectacular Narratives of Gender and Race, 1903–1967, 186.

27. Graham, Framing the South: Hollywood, Television, and Race during the Civil Rights Struggle, 146.

28. “Torch Song for Trumpet,” Bourbon Street Beat, Season 1, Episode 3.

29. Tara McPherson writes that this trope is lodged in the culture of the post-bellum era: “the plantation mythologies of the early twentieth century were almost always populated by the requisite ‘happy darkies,’ content to labor in the cotton fields and big houses of dear ‘ole’ Dixie… Slaves were figured as natural (and content) elements of the landscape, key props in the production of Southern mise-en-scene” (McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie, 45).

30. Ibid., 39/

31. Quoted in Graham, Framing the South, 19.

32. Ibid.

33. McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie, 54.

34. Barker and McKee, American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary, p. 9.

35. McPherson, Reconstructing Dixie, 19.

36. “The Tiger Moth,” Bourbon Street Beat, Season 1, Episode 6.

37. The pilot for Bourbon Street Beat, “Taste of Ashes,” also deals with a fallen Southern belle plotline as an old and overbearing matriarch is blackmailed because her daughter is a “beauty but willful and wanton.” Later episodes also take up the concern of the plantation and the tragic belle Della like “The Mourning Cloak” wherein the decrepit plantation, full of cracks and overgrown vines reflects Della's disturbed state. In all these episodes, the problems of a decrepit South are resolved in a crime-of-the-week fashion, where whatever ails the region is contained within an episode.

38. “Melody in Diamonds,” Bourbon Street Beat, Season 1, Episode 20.

39. I am borrowing the tile of this section and the notion of the South as the “nation's region” from Leigh Anne Duck's book, The Nation's Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism.

40. The absence of the South becomes even more apparent given the onslaught of Westerns from Gunsmoke (1955–1975) to Cheyenne (1955–1963) and Have Gun, Will Travel (1957–1963) all set in an ambiguous Wild West. Meanwhile, urban locations were featured on the occasional cop dramas such as Dragnet (1951–1959) in Los Angeles and The Lineup (1954–1960) in San Francisco and on sitcoms such as I Love Lucy (1951–9157) set in Los Angeles or The Goldbergs (1949–1956) set in New York.

41. Spigel, Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America, 2–3.