They called it a “rural purge”. It was in the fall of ’71 when the network suits at all three major broadcasters – NBC, ABC, CBS – made it clear they were cutting the cord on the flyover states. Especially in the South. Especially Tennessee. That same fall season, the execs in corner offices summarily jettisoned all things countrified, the same shows that had been their bread and butter since the golden age of television. Serialized Westerns, heartland dramas, and rural-themed comedies and variety series were the hardest hit. Viewers had grown weary, they thought, of wholesome entertainment and longed for the more provocative and gritty urban content – for series that allowed them to protract the same violence and human misery they watched on the evening news into their living rooms every night as prime-time entertainment. In a sense they were right. The world had changed, and television had failed to keep pace. Americas now more Streets of San Francisco than it was Green Acres.
But the rural purge was more than just a cabal of studio honchos in LA redrawing lines on the national television map. The choice to permanently pull the plug on nostalgic and good-natured television content – America’s proverbial window into the modern world – was symbolic of a larger change, a new revolution on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. It was a seismic shift in the nation’s collective mood and awareness, a tilt towards the belief among cynics of the day that an era of innocence had ended, or perhaps never even existed in the first place. For the most part the cynics were right.
The City of Nashville, as the Tennessee state capital and America’s beloved Music City, at once bore the brunt of the rural purge and the perceived end of this a same innocence. Many variety shows as well as country-and-western-themed series had been shot on location there from time immemorial. The then still popular Johnny Cash Show, filmed at the iconic Grand Ole Opry, as among the first musical variety series to meet the axe. Others soon followed, including the intentionally campy and always tedious Hee Haw, which defied the odds and later managed to hobble along in the endless purgatory of syndication for another two decades. It would be nearly two decades before TNN- The Nashville Network- rode the wave of mainstream popularity that was ‘new” country and put the city back on the television map. In the meantime Music City was doing some purging of its own. It was the beginning of the end.
What no one had bothered to notice at the time was that the network television cycle for 1971-2 had also kick-started another trend. Beginning with a slow burn that would last for the next two decades and beyond, Nashville’s annual murder rate would eventually creep up by over 60%. It would prove to be a staggering increase for what had historically been a safe, stable, and predictably low-crime city, at least by the standards of the South, where crime has always been higher than the national average. The city had long been a tourist trap where unwieldy mechanical bulls and the price of drinks at the honkytonks off Lower Broadway had been the greatest perils that locals and visitors alike were apt to face. But the seventies brought forth change. At first the change was subtle and insidious. Soon, however, there was a noticeable spike, coinciding with televisions rural-theme purge, in overall violent crime across the whole city. Although it was an increase also seen in other American municipalities, Nashville’;s rise was surpassed only by traditionally and notoriously notable locales such as Miami, Chicago, and New York, the later at that time a drug infested dystopia with over ten times the population of Music City . . .
[The book is about detective Pat Postiglione, way out ahead of the FBI criminal mind profiling unit, untiring investigator before the creation of all the national crime data bases now available, unsurpassed solver of cold cases]
No comments:
Post a Comment