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Anyone Seen A White Hat Lately?

By Rand Bishop

Back in the innocent Eisenhauer ’50s, we kids had no trouble choosing which character to root for. It was always the cowboy in the white hat: The Lone Ranger, Kit Carson, or squeaky-clean, gosh-and-golly Roy Rogers. Then, in 1957, a pockmarked dude named Paladin rode into town to obliterate the line between TV hero and villain. Flashing his “Have Gun. Will Travel” business card, this high-priced, Western mercenary became an instant hit for CBS. That’s when, for me, things got a whole lot more interesting.

I’d already developed a fascination for the film-noir gumshoes of the ’40s. Those inhabitants of a mysterious, urban underbelly were not devout churchgoers. Sam Spade and Mike Hammer drank hard liquor, chain smoked, and womanized. But, to this kid, an edgy private eye personified manhood, with his bent-rimmed fedora, cig dangling from a permanent snarl, and two fingers of straight whiskey in a chimney glass. Still, even with their devilish ways, these cats usually ended up on the side of right. In this day and age, right is not quite so clear-cut.

Episodic comedy, too, has featured its share of scoundrels. Ralph Cramden is the first TV cad I recall. Self-absorbed, short-sided, even abusive, this blowhard blustered his weekly threat to wallop Alice “to the moon!” Yet, at the end of the day, the endearing brute always embraced his tolerant, supportive spouse, with a contrite, “Baby, you’re the best.”

Nowadays, sitcom characters don’t learn their lessons in a tidy half hour. Seinfeld sidekick George Costanza set the bar for hilarious egocentrics. Ricky Gervais took Costanza four steps further by creating the bizarrely self-involved Michael Scott and Dwight Shrute of The Office plus Andy Millman and Maggie Jacobs in Extras.

Now, cable dramas make the black-Stetsoned Paladin look like an Eagle Scout. My newest favorite TV hero, Dexter Morgan, is a meticulous serial killer. Go figure. The critically acclaimed Breaking Bad features a fatally ill meth dealer. Edie Falco portrays cheating, drug-addicted Nurse Jackie, and in Weeds, Mary-Louise Parker brings a pot-peddling housewife onto our 50-inch flat screens. The list of sociopathic TV leads could fill an entire page. What it boils down to is this: with literally hundreds of channels and a plethora of programming to choose from, it’s pretty much impossible to find a white hat anywhere. And, I have to admit, that’s part of what keeps me switching on the tube.

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Rand Bishop is a Grammy Nominated, BMI Award-winning songwriter, and the author of Grand Pop, a darkly comic novel/mock-memoir penned from the point of view a modern anti-hero (Eloquent Books, 2010, ISBN 978-1-60860-629-0). Other Bishop books include Makin’ Stuff Up, “a songwriting course wrapped in a memoir” (Weightless Cargo Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-61523-165-5) and the forthcoming Absolute Essentials of Songwriting Success (Alfred Publishing, 2010). For information go to: http://www.randbishop.com