What A Bonanza!
TV Guide~September 8, 1962

     An Earnest Attempt To Assay The Content of TV's Fabulous Lode

     In Reno, the chamber of commerce reported a problem with tourists traveling to nearby Virginia City.  They insist there really is a Ponderosa--the vast fictional domain of the TV Cartwrights--and demand to be told exactly where it is.

     In Hollywood, 'Bonanza's' producers were getting 5000 letters a week from everyone from schoolchildren to college professors eager to explain why the show is the greatest thing since the hula hoop.  And James Arness, the hero of a rival Western was exclaiming privately to his producer, "Dammit, I like those fellows!".

     In nearby Burbank, Cal., a few weeks ago, Lorne Greene, who plays the father of the all-male clan that inhabits the Ponderosa, arose to accept the TV Guide award for "favorite series" winning a clear-cut victory over those pesky newcomers, "Ben Casey" and "Dr. Kildare".  In accepting the prize, Greene adhered to the character.  "My three sons and I thank you".

     In other U.S. cities and towns, citizens were performing related activities.  Architects were pondering requests for plans of the Ponderosa ranch house--and the studio was seriously considering making them available.  Librarians were reporting a marked increase of interest in the history of the Comstock Lode, the celebrated Virginia City silver strike in 1859, in which, theoretically at least, the TV show is rooted.  Rank-and-file membership of the 450-odd Bonanza Booster Clubs were glued to their TV sets every Sunday night in rigid observance of the club rules:

      1...Members must arrive half an hour before showtime.

      2...No talking after the NBC Peacock.

      3...No potato chips to be consumed before 10 P.M.

     And Mad magazine, ever sensitive to trends, paid its respects to the show by broadly burlesquing it.  "The family that battles together", crowed Mad under the drawing showing the Cartwrights en famille in a giant bathtub, "stays together".

     'Togetherness--plus seasoning'

     These phenomena are familiar by-products of any huge, popular TV success.  But in the case of 'Bonanza', the magnitude of it is hard to understand.  The show is largely a giant compendium of cliches.  It is a Western in which, to quote the producer of a less romantic one, "No wish ever goes unfulfilled".  It is a "family situation" show of such cloying "togetherness" that it once moved one of its principal actors, Pernell Roberts to remark, "Togetherness--who needs it?  It usually just gets in the way of all the good stories crying to be told".  Finally, its characters were consciously calculated to appeal to all segments of the audience: the patriarchal Ben Cartwright (Greene) to the senior group; the earnest number-one son Adam (Roberts), to the young marrieds; the hot-blood and cut-up Little Joe (Michael Landon), to the teenagers; and the jolly giant, Hoss (Dan Blocker), to children of all ages.  Commenting on this, Frank Pierson, producer of the new fall series Empire'--which might be called Bonanza Updated--says he frankly admires it.  "It's awfully comfortable--like an old shoe--because you always know for certain that everything will be alright".

     To spice up this flat-seeming stew, the producer and creator of 'Bonanza', David Dortort, added some seasoning.  Taking a tip from a pretty fair country storyteller named Alexandre Dumas, he made the Cartwrights in to the Virginia City equivalent of The Three Muskateers--with a dash of Philip Wylie thrown in.  The Cartwrights just do not ride home; they ride home to a feudal barony with more then a little suggestion of Middle Ages.

     "The Ponderosa", explains Dortort, "is not just a dusty, down-at-the-heels ranch.  There's power, wealth, and performance there, and as such, it is the most important home in TV.  The Great House is the castle of the old; its occupants kings, princes, knights.  Fairy tale? I dislike the term but--well, yes, an honest fairy tale, if you must".

     Moreover, the Ponderosa, all thousand square miles of it, is peopled exclusively by males, an exigency which never fails to stir in the female, whenever she is ostracized from the domestic scene, maternal concern for how the boys will make out without her.  "We're all anti-Momism", Dortort said shortly after the show made its hit three seasons ago.  "We have no brats who talk like Leonard Bernstein.  We are against the phony West.  Our man-swear allegiance not to the silver but to the land".

     That's fine with the average male, too, for whom the Ponderosa is as privileged as the men's locker room.  The Cartwright's live in a man's world, and fanciful or not, our man frankly enjoys the idea.  As one enthusiastic Bonanza fan wrote in: "It's the only Western I know where the girl rides off into the sunset".

     Dortort admits, while making much of his "realistic" treatment of the West, that he is a romantic, that the show constitutes a return to old-fashioned Romanticism.  "Entertainment must not be entirely a mirror of life", he says.  "Our Westerns are not just drinking, fighting, carousing, shiftless cowboys.  They have other values of faith, hope, and morality".

     While bringing cheers from the home viewers, this handy duality has produced some horse laughs in the profession.  Yet oddly enough, there is hardly a dissenter who does not also admire the show--even the outspoken Charles Marquis Warren, who once described his own invention, the TV version of 'Gunsmoke', as being mainly composed of "folksy persiflage and get-nowhere dialog".  "Let's face it, 'Bonanza' is pretty good".

     "But--it's mythological!", says Dan Ullman, associate producer of "Laramie", the only other folksy family Western on the air.  "Just change the knights to cowboys and you're in!" "With a fat cowboy--how can you miss?", asks Fritz Goodwin, producer emeritus of 'Death Valley Days'.  "At times", says Norman MacDonnell, producer of 'Gunsmoke', "it's almost a burlesque of the West".

     'We Have Made People Cry'

     These specifics of these charges are that the Cartwrights never work their ranch or they work it so little as to be laughable; that its characters, though likable, are do-gooders who deal with life on an overemotionalized and at times an absurdly sentimental plane.  Dortort says: "We are not afraid to show our feelings.  A father grieves for an injured son; brothers are happy at being reunited; a son is grateful to an understanding father.  We have made more people cry than anybody else in the business".

     The typical 'Bonanza' story nowdays will more than likey take place off the Ponderosa, yet the massive ranch somehow looms even large when unseen.  More than likely, too, it will deal with a fringe problem having nothing to do with silver mining or Virginia City.  Little Joe no longer regularly carries an epee--shades--of Douglas Fairbanks!--in his saddle holster, and the deep purple of the prose has given way to a lighter tone.  The original NBC prospectus described Ben Cartwright as "a devout, Bible-quoting man filled with righteous ferver, staring down at the sprawling city, and pronouncing in terrible tones that it is the veritable reincarnation of Sodom".  How Ben has changed!

     But the treatment is still several degrees larger than life.  When 'Bonanza' tells the oft-told tale of the gunman who takes refuge on the ranch of a lonely, affection-starved widow, we needn't worry.  We immediately know what will happen.  As in the ordinary West, the widow will fall in love, despite her best intentions, and there will be the touching final scene in which she sends him into the night ahead of the onrushing posse.

     For 'Bonanza' this is not a satisfactory ending.  A 'Bonanza' script calls for the gunman to return and deliver a line like, "How would you like to wait five years for a reformed bank robber?" Clinch.  Posse's hoof-beats in the background.  Fadeout.  Only 'Bonanza' could get away with it--partly due to Paul Richard's superb playing of the gunman and partly due to the care Dortort takes with scripts.  And it is the only kind of ending 'Bonanza buffs' will tolerate.  "I can depend on 'Bonanza", says one.  "It doesn't mix me up".

     Thus his rivals are forced to concede that Dortort has managed the marvel of the century--a renaissance of good, old-fashioned yarn-spinning for its own sake, uncluttered with hoopla, much less with any pretentions af art.  The result is not only what passes for a refreshing idea on TV; it's a juggernaut.  As the representative of 'G.E. Theater' (one of the shows that the juggernaut ran roughshod over last season), said sadly a few weeks ago: "We were able always to hold our own with Dinah, but 'Bonanza' beat our brains out".


     ~Dwight Whitney