The F.B.I. – ‘Dark Christmas’ (1972)

               I spent a number of my formative years drinking from a modest firehouse of pop-culture references I had no knowledge of or context about courtesy of Mystery Science Theater 3000. This was before the internet and the show certainly didn’t pause to explain itself, so for every reference to The Hobbit or ‘Blade Runner’ I did get there were three or four I didn’t. Many of them were about the cultural detritus of the thirty or so years preceding the show, anything from the mid-fifties on, and it’s been surprising how often I’ll still run across a theme song or a line of dialogue and get a brief burst of recognition. That’s already happened a few times this month, especially during the “Dragnet” and “Adam-12” episodes (I finally get the Mark VII references during “The Day the Earth Froze,” for example) and normally I don’t see them coming, but when I was putting the original list together for this month I noticed during my research that this show was a Quinn Martin joint, a name that came up constantly while Frank Conniff was on the show, so I was already anticipating that little dopamine rush of recognition.

You're damn right it's a Quinn Martin Production!

              Not everything MSTK ever talked about was exactly to my tastes (don’t think I’m ever going to warm to ‘7 Faces of Dr. Lao’) but I could at least understand the appeal, so I was really looking forward to seeing why just about everything was referred to by the puppets as ‘a Quinn Martin production’ And now that I have I’m more than a little disappointed because it turns out that, judged by this episode, he made really bad television.

              Quinn Martin was genuinely quite a big deal in his heyday. What Jack Webb was attempting with his production company Martin actually achieved. He got his big break at Desilu Productions as an executive producer on the original tv movie pilot of “The Untouchables” and branched out from there. He set up his own shop in 1960 and had an early hit with “The Fugitive,” which ran from September of 1963 to January of 1967. Other series that were high-profile at the time but have largely been forgotten included “The Invaders,” “Cannon,” “The Streets of San Francisco,” and “Barnaby Jones.” For a comparison think of Stephen J. Cannell or Dick Wolf. He had a network television series running every year from 1961 through 1979, almost all of which were crime dramas in one way or another. They all had a common format, including an announcer who would invoke the title at the beginning of the show and title cards breaking the episodes into acts after each commercial break. That same announcer would also intone at the beginning of every episode of every show he made that it was “a Quinn Martin production,” answering that question from my childhood.

              With a title as generic as “The F.B.I.” you wouldn’t think this show would be an adaptation of an existing property, but that’s exactly what it was. In 1959 Warner Bros. released the movie ‘The FBI Story,’ itself an adaption of the 1956 non-fiction book of the same name by journalist Don Whitehead. The film, starring Jimmy Stewart, was heavily overseen by the agency itself, with J. Edgar Hoover acting as an uncredited producer. Several scenes were reshot at Hoover’s direction in order to paint their operatives in as positive a light as possible. Two agents were assigned to oversee the entire production and the final film had to earn Hoover’s personal approval.

Um, thanks?

              This tight control over production was extended to the television version as well. An agent by the name of Clyde Tolson was assigned to oversee the show, a person that’s going to ring a bell with anyone even passingly family with the agency’s history. He was second in command of the FBI from 1930 to 1972 and rumors have long swirled about his relationship with Hoover. He was not a particular fan of the show and often attempted to get it cancelled over its inclusion of violence. He exerted control over every plotline and characterization, which included casting. To quote from the Wiki: “Actors playing F.B.I. agents, and other participants, were given background checks to guarantee that no "criminals, subversives, or Communists" were associated with the show.” This didn’t seem to impact it’s popularity as it ran for nine seasons between September of 1965 and April of 1974 and was in the top 30 shows in the ratings for seven of those years. Their one and only Christmas episode was during its eighth season, so its entirely possible that for the first seven it was a different, better show, but I somehow doubt it.

              This is very much a show of two distinct halves. One follows our main characters and the other follows the bad guys they’re after. This is an utterly standard variation on crime shows. So far this month we’ve only looked at shows that stick to their main characters as they either solves mysteries or respond to alerts, but having a guest star of the week that we watch perform nefarious actions as our good guys slowly close in on him is perfectly familiar to fans of the genre. What’s slightly different in this episode is that I couldn’t find a single interesting thing on either side of the conflict.

              Let’s get the side with the stars of the show over with first because I have no time for them. Despite having just watched the show I couldn’t tell you the name or position of a single character or even one distinguishing feature or personality trait between them other than federal agent. The FBI side of “The F.B.I.” is, as far as I can tell, a rotating cast of largely indistinguishable middle-aged white men who mill around desks and pass pieces of paper between each other before the scene cuts to awkward action, often but not always related to what they were talking about. People are forever explaining plot points to each other and thus the audience with no clear method established for how any of that information was obtained. They’re constantly handing over reports or getting anonymous tips from informants or departments about the things happening on the other side of the episode with no explanation on how they know any of it. Our bad guys will have a meeting and the FBI will be hot on their heels … somehow. At one point an assassin buys a gun from a guy in the middle of a random field and the agents have both arrived at the scene and set up a cordon around the area in the time it takes for a guy to eat a sandwich. The cordon doesn’t even work that well as the assassin needs to get away since we already saw him menace the target’s wife in a flash-forward during the cold open and that hasn’t happened yet.

They do not let you forget it's Christmas time.

              According to IMDB the main characters of the show were Lewis Erskine, played by Efrem Zimbalist Jr., Arthur Ward, played by Philip Abbott, and Tom Colby, played by William Reynolds. I’m sure that’s true. There’s an entire section of the opening credits that flashes both the names and faces of the actors and if I did a split screen of the episode and some headshots I’m sure I could even tell which was which, but as someone completely unfamiliar with the show before this episode the scripts and actors did absolutely nothing to distinguish one character from another. Some of them were in offices more often than some of the others, presumably the ones sitting behind desks issuing orders were in charge of the others but that’s just a guess.

              While it completely fails to work dramatically I guess I can understand the point of all of this from Clyde Tolson’s point of view. His job wasn’t to make the show more interesting or more dramatic, it was to make the public think a certain way about their agents: that they were smart and powerful, all knowing and all seeing. The idea that the agency had avenues of information everywhere, tendrils in every plot and informants around every corner, is a good image to get out there if you want to be thought of as an impressive and dependable arm of the federal government. Their agents are everywhere, know everything, and always get their man. What this does to a tv show is make it completely impossible to care about any of the characters because they don’t seem human. They don’t have failings, don’t have foibles, don’t have personality traits as far as I can tell. I’m sure there are episodes where the interchangeable men mention their homes lives, complain about their wives, do something other than discuss the case in front of them, but they certainly didn’t in this episode.

              If none of the main characters can be human because they’re too busy being crime-fighting machines you’d think they could beef up the bad guys and make them interesting, but they either couldn’t or were prevented from doing so by the cold hand of Clyde Tolson. If the heroes have to be good guys to the point of boredom, the bad guys have to be actually bad guys, or instead broken beyond repair. They can’t be attractive in any way. The main character that the feds are after, a professional killer by the name of Stuart Tilden (played by character actor Don Gordon, who’s vaguely familiar), ends up being slightly interesting seemingly by accident but in the end is revealed to be a small, empty man easily taken down by the super agents. He’s even fiercely told off by a housewife at the climax and then captured without a shot being fired.

What the fuck am I supposed to make of Sandra Locke with a blowtorch?

              The actual plot of the episode is genuinely hard to follow. As near as I can tell there’s a criminal based out of Puerto Rico who’s been smuggling gambling machinery into the United States. A high-level employee of the legitimate side of his business quit some time before the start of the episode and the bad guy is now worried, apparently for no actual reason, that he’s an unacceptable risk and hires Tilden to get rid of him. This involves the assassin tracking down and investigating known associates from city to city despite the fact that the employee’s not hiding, he just moved. I think my confusion about this part of the plot is mostly my fault as it didn’t occur to me for some time that it was genuinely hard to find someone in 1972 if you didn’t already know where they lived. The employee in question isn’t hiding and since he had no idea of the illegitimate side of his former employer’s business he doesn’t have the faintest idea that his life is in danger. Most of the episode is the killer slowly tracking down this guy while the FBI creeps up behind him while he and his family are blissfully ignorant.

              The episode spends a lot of time with Tilden and in a normal television show you’d think we’d explore his character. What makes a hired killer, how does he operate, what secrets does he know, that sort of thing. Turns out he had a sucky childhood which made him a loner and an asshole and there’s not a whole lot more to him than that. For a decent chunk of the episode he rents an apartment while he’s waiting for information and starts a very awkward flirtation with one of his new neighbors, played by a distractingly young Sandra Locke. They have what’s meant to be a meet-cute in the hallways that’s probably supposed to distract us from their eighteen-year age difference. He’s rude and borderline offensive to her and she just eats it up. There are a couple of scenes where she invites him over to her apartment where they spend some awkward time together under the distrustful eye of her mother. They make very fractured small talk while she uses a blowtorch to make glass decorations. In a later scene while Tilden is on his way to commit the murder it’s revealed that the mother has been faking her disability and just as Sandra is declaring her independence the FBI show up and tell her that the man she’s been crushing on is a killer and then leave. The two characters reconcile, the mom is now supportive, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with any of this.

The thrilling climax!

              Occasionally the show checks in on the target’s wife and kids, usually emphasizing that they’re waiting for daddy to get home for Christmas, and the final few scenes take place after Tilden has shown up and enveigled his way inside. Eventually the wife figures out what’s going on through the clever method of listening as he simply tells her. They send the kids to bed to wait for the target to show up, and while Tilden and the wife are arguing in the living room the feds show up, sneak the kids out the back, send a guy inside to pretend to be a stranged motorist, and easily apprehend the professional assassin. The episode ends with a happy little celebration as dad gets home and the feds smugly head out.

              I did not like this episode of television. One of the supposed advantages of a show about federal agents is that it can be set anywhere and the antagonists can be followed across state lines, but generally speaking you don’t want to fracture an episode by setting scenes in seemingly random places one after another. The show moves from New York to DC to Denver to Puerto Rico and from one office to another in such a sloppy way that I was completely confused about what specifically was happening at any given time. I understood generally what was happening and what the stakes are, but a lot of my notes are simply questions like: who the hell is Guido? How did they know where this house was? Why is the assassin happy to show his face to the wife and kids when he could just hang out in a car outside? Was it really this hard to get a gun in 1972? Between the disconnects between the two halves of the show and the inability to follow actions between scene transition I was utterly disconnected from everything that happened. If the show ran for nine seasons it was presumably popular for a reason but I find myself completely confused as to why.