Reality Television

(A history of the media Tinker)

            In 1976 Anne Tyler published a novel, The Tinker, about a young man who traveled around the Baltimore suburbs as an itinerant handyman, making two or three day visits with families he encountered by sitting outside strip mall stores next to a sandwich board sign advertising his services.  The novel combined picaresque elements with the middle class domestic comedy for which Tyler is famous.  At one point in the story a character suggested that there should be “tinkers” like him in every city, or traveling all over the country, with a national organization to support them.

            In the course of the novel Michael, the self-styled troubadour or mendicant, sojourned with five different families.  A reviewer wrote that the tinker seemed to be moving from one prospective novel to another, as if he were an author considering his next project.  Another said each visit was like an episode in a TV series, with the tinker as the continuing star, theme and premise, like the Michael Parks character who motorcycles from one week’s story to the next in “Then Came Bronson”, or Cain, the itinerant philosopher-hero of the martial arts series “Kung Fu”.  Several reviewers noted the literary ancestors of the tinker: the medieval knight who sojourns with the lord of the manor, the traveling salesman of “farmer’s daughter” jokes, and the hobo of the Depression.  With its changing cast of characters and short story structure, The Tinker didn’t work too well as a novel, but Tyler soon put the family wanderer idea to better use in The Accidental Tourist. 

            While no real-life or literary successor to Tyler’s “tinker” emerged, during the 1980s the character began to appear occasionally as a “visitor” on television, in both sit-coms and dramatic series.  The parking lot sandwich board, tool kit, late model car, post-graduate earnestness, and hospitality contract of work for a couple of day’s room and board, were a convenient way to introduce conflict or a guest star into a residential setting.  The first such visit occurred in an episode of “Maude” in 1978.  The tinker was a female house-painter cum Feng Shui consultant (basically liberal, progressive, idealistic and chaste, as was the original Tyler character), and at one point she “phoned in” to “headquarters” to record the hospitality contract.  She helped Maude paint a room, and was gone in three days.

            The first television series based on the idea, “The Tinker”, aired from 1990 to 1996.  It began with a “retro” premise, set about 15 years back, in the mid-‘70s, when (presumably inspired by the Anne Tyler novel) a fictional national organization referred to as “Control” began to recruit and send out Tinkers around the country.  Played in alternate weeks during the first three seasons by James Spade and Anne Hecht, the serial hospitality seeker was a post-college, pre-graduate school autodidact, vaguely counter-cultural, liberal, nerdy-hippie, an avid reader and straight arrow, working with mentors at Control on “credentials” and a “portfolio” for “certification“.  The first series sponsors included Scott Lumber, True Value Hardware, and K-Mart, in whose parking lots the Tinkers often made their contacts.

            Early episodes resembled a cross between “This Old House” and “Touched by an Angel”.  The focus was on the interaction between the Tinker and the host family, and the hospitality expressed literary, psychological and political themes—Oedipal, Marxist, Existential, Religious—involving gender and generational conflicts.  The writers combined literary visit motifs from Odysseus and Beowulf to Hamlet and Jane Eyre with television’s first two generations of peripatetic picaresque, putting the alpha male hero and girl next door archetypes into situations of domestic dependency and stoned Christian sanctuary, exploring age, race and gender relations, economic and ecological issues, each episode a celebration, satire and microcosm of American “family values”. 

            Beyond the mostly middle class suburban neighborhoods the Tinker visited, the regional setting was vague at first, but episodes increasingly showcased specific cities, with aerial views, interstate exit signs, and real mall pick-up locations.  By the third season the writers began to exploit the liberal utopian premise of the series (no guns, no drugs, no gangs or police rousting of Tinkers), describing imaginary civic innovations in places the Tinker visited.   For example,  in one segment (“Wichita Lineman”) the Tinker helped convert a tractor-trailer rig into a “bunk bus” that took citizens of Wichita, Kansas on free weekend trips to “sister cities” an overnight drive away.  In another episode a Tinker visiting Des Moines, Iowa, did a night as a “volunteer camera” at a “panopticon” for the homeless, a gymnasium filled with waist-high family partitions, cots, a soup kitchen and 24 hour roving TV surveillance that was cabled to the city on a public service channel.  In Wheeling, WV a Tinker helped set up a hospitality program resembling his own, where area high school and community college youth visited local married couples to talk about specific classic short stories that they and their hosts had read. 

            In its last couple of seasons “The Tinker” had a larger rotating cast of younger, relatively unknown stars, and became more utopian, moving forward to the present day and glibly creating a parallel fantasy nation, transformed evidently by 20 years of growing Tinker popularity. The mentors, agents and archivers at “Control” (modeled on the writers of the series) recruited as Tinkers English, Psychology and Religion majors who were disaffected intellectuals like themselves, tired of academic theories and political fashions, refugees from the Ivy League in flight from talking-head classrooms, deconstruction, cognitive science, generative grammar, affirmative action, political correctness and social biology. 

            The shows got a bit preachy at times.  Tinkering was touted as the ultimate heuristic pedagogy.  The Tinker promulgated gender and generational parity, individualism, respect for marriage and the nuclear family. He created personal “algorithms” of hospitality: manners, activities and narratives that solved the problem (and constituted the story) of each episode. In his visit the Tinker intimated and imitated critical thinking regarding the series, echoed viewer reactions (shown by polls) to its actors, setting and writing, talked to the family as though they “were a TV series” (“we’re on the air right now, to God…”), and dropped nuggets of a growing “tetrahedral” philosophy of hospitality:  each of us is simultaneously the center of the universe and an extraterrestrial visitor (created in His image); every married couple is transparent visitor to each other and their children, Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden; hospitality to one’s spouse and guest is the engine of consumer confidence and personal freedom; do unto others as if your Neilson rating depended on it.

            The Tinker was like Charles Kuralt, on the road, bringing Warholian moments of “fame” to those he visited, and by implication to the TV audience in its living rooms.  That is, he embodied the fruits of fame: he sought you out in your hideaway to report to the world how and what you were doing these days.  He tracked you down in spite of your reluctance to be pestered, your Salingeresque desire for privacy, your willingness to renounce your renown, get out of the limelight.  And he interviewed you while honoring your placid, genteel, complacent retirement, tongue-in-cheek, with the gentle irony and nostalgia appropriate for the once-famous, the dimly remembered, the curiously eccentric, the roadside attraction, the illustrious has-been or also-ran we all eventually become― even (because each of us is the center of the universe) if we never were. He “patronized” you, as you did him.  That is, hospitality is amateur patronage, courtship, sport, entertainment, instruction and broadcast to God; it is cargo cult and potlatch; it is “advanced” humanity: sentiment, noblesse obligé, egalité and fraternité: power and evil are converted by the marital sanctuary into truth and beauty.

            By the end of the ’96 season, thanks to “20” years of grass roots support and community activism by household Tinkers, the imaginary setting of the series was ridiculously utopian.  In this brave new world cars got 80 miles to the ($6) gallon, migrant workers sent back home an average of $20,000 a year, and battery chickens by law had 144 square inches of roosting space. 50% of all schooling was home or neighborhood based, many towns had evening and overnight adolescent exchange programs, and communities promoted themselves as “hospitality colleges” for Tinkers passing through.  On the national level male and female political parties elected candidates of both genders who mixed and matched the old liberal-conservative polarities.  Each co-residential married couple had three votes in national elections, and the federal voting age had fallen to 14 (with a literacy requirement until age 21).

Tinkers came in all ages and there were as many on the road as there were students in colleges and universities. Every neighborhood had at least one established pick-up spot.  Tinkers were visiting folks they’d met years before, and Control had put on the internet their nationwide network and data base of hosts, skills, literature and activities.  The capstone episode of the series was one in which a Tinker played by Eddie Murphy convinced O. J. Simpson (playing himself, exiled in Florida) to captain a crew of death row volunteers on a one-way manned NASA expedition to Mars.

            In 1997, when the old series wasn’t renewed, the Tinker went international in a CBS series called “Foreign Legion”.  The “back-story”:  in the late ‘70s the Pentagon, working with the CIA and the Peace Corps, had begun to recruit, train and send unarmed Tinkers overseas.  These solo hospitality agents, fluent in the language of their host countries, were embedded in hot spots around the globe for a year or more, with the same liberal agenda as in the first series:  gender and generational equality, individualism, democratic transparency, and respect for marriage and the nuclear family.  The pilot, set in 1986, involved a successful plan concocted by a troupe of Tinkers in Israel and the occupied territories to have Jews and Palestinians trade teenage children with each other (as neighboring lords had done in the European middle ages), hostages for peace who (it was suggested) would become Tinkers themselves when they grew up. 

             Other early episodes were set in Ireland, Rwanda, Yugoslavia and the Sudan, and explored the utopian potential of Tinkers as grass roots brokers of basic services, domestic manners and social change. The American TV audience’s ignorance of world history and foreign mores enabled it to accept Tinker scenarios, encounters and episode outcomes that were more congenial and ameliorative (or sentimental, tragic, comic― whatever worked) than anyone knowing real third world settings and psychology would credit.  At the same time, these altruistic fantasies were no less plausible than the melodramatic sex and violence of the contemporary police and spy series that catered to viewer prurience and xenophobia.  When “Foreign Legion” caught up to the present, of course, none of these trouble spots was as bad as it had become in the real world, thanks to the infiltration of Tinkers. 

             These were optimistic “what if?” scenarios, a kind of time travel or science fiction in reverse.  The TV audience had no problem with (or apparently even much interest in) the differences between what had really happened abroad and the social progress achieved by Tinkers in their host countries.  Viewers accepted the positive fiction of “Foreign Legion” just as they did the absurdly paranoid premises of series like “Alias”, “La Femme Nikita” and “The X-Files”.  Indeed, in various episodes fictional versions of real players in the international aid community such as Aryeh Neir, Orville Schell and Fred Cuny made cameo appearances with Tinkers, bringing the work of real-life NGOs like Human Rights Watch, The Red Cross and The George Soros Foundation to the attention of viewers around the world.

            From the beginning the global Tinkers made anachronous use (á lá James Bond) of cutting edge technology: cell phones, global positioning devices, camcorders, satellite uplinks. There was more communication with “Home Base” than there had been with “Control” in the previous series, and Pentagon segments showed “documentary” records being assembled, edited and broadcast (by a decidedly non-hierarchical corps of “officers”) on a dedicated satellite/cable channel.  A standard episode coda was a communiqué, nicknamed “Mork to Orc”, in which the Tinker passed back “Home” whatever record he had made of that week’s visit.  “Real” foreign correspondents encountered Tinkers accidentally or on purpose in various episodes, and occasionally complained of the competition they got from this “amateur” reportage.

            Having the Pentagon behind her gave the foreign Tinker a frisson of imperial militancy, but most in-country support (vitamins, medical treatment) came from NGOs, particularly religious groups.  The Tinker was seen by the religious right to embody (or incarnate) the idea that hospitality was Virgin plus Trinity, and one continuing motif was the generational paradox that in our thirties we “outlive God”, with Tinker and host usually on opposite sides of that life event (whether comic apogee or tragic nadir).   Her ritual visits embodied and explicated the Christian roots of Marx and Freud,  psychology and technocracy, the family roots of armies, companies and governments, the tragic roots of professionalism, the ironic roots of wealth, the comic uses of religion, the romantic roots of hospitality. Rarely, and controversially, a Tinker would fall afoul of some intractable domestic conflict or native zealot and be killed, a sacrifice to schadenfreude, a “martyr” to the human family in ironic counterpoint to the suicide bombers of the real world.           

            The Tinker was a global villager, beyond the state and beneath the radar of the World Bank and the IMF.  Wherever he went the family he visited (like the ones who watched) was the world-nation, the shared marital Eden was the “blood and soil”, and the spouse was the “other” as both God and Christ, taking turns as oppressor and victim, occupying invader and native, government and opposition party.  Always the Tinker read and talked about books, and an effort was made to put him into situations that were characteristic of the literature, culture and politics of the country in which he traveled.  Various episodes mocked the socio-political dichotomies of “second-level” or “professional” reality: the religious and national “differences” formulated and fomented by old male power seekers, the so-called “evil otherness” exploited by demagogues and thugs, the patriotic cant that replaces marital loyalty, the sanctimony that parodies marital fidelity, the territorial ambitions that traduce the hospitable Edenic microcosm..

            In the 2000 season “Foreign Legion” introduced the reducto ad absurdum of the theme.  An ex-Tinker (played by Jimmy Smits) got elected President of the United States in part by promising three 24 hour cable channels of fictional, live and documentary Tinker visits from around the nation and the world, and a fourth channel with round-the-clock television coverage of his life in the White House.  This complete “on the air” transparency made the President the ultimate Tinker, a guest (when they wanted him) in the living rooms of America and the rest of the world, and they in his. 

            The 24/7 President lived with his fictional country and the series viewers as if they were one audience, outflanking the political flacks, money men, gurus and pundits that had hitherto run the system.   His was the ultimate populism, person to person; he claimed that his relinquishment of privacy was fitting for a political leader in an age of increasing technological surveillance.  In the first episode he asked, “What is privacy, after all?  Louis the Sun King had lords of bath and towel and razor and tub ring, attendants at his sleep and play.  His power was measured by his lack of privacy, like that of an infant with many loving mothers who take turns attending to his needs.”  The government President Riley shared with his country via media probed the enigma of erotic species hospitality, particularly marriage and parenting, from which are derived all civil and political service, all the good and bad of power and authority.

            One message of “Foreign Legion”, as it had been of all Tinker travel, was that Americans had to lead the species into its electronic, computerized future.  This required a whole-earth, whole-man philosophy, altruism beyond personal career, family ideology or national interests.  And whole-man meant 24 hour-a-day man.  Previous altruistic idealisms like Christian brotherhood, international communism or civil service were based on the written word, a highly selective and abstract form of ego or power display that over the centuries (as religion, commerce and politics) separated self from other, past from present, male from female, and work from leisure.

            To move beyond this historical masculine polarization of public and private, marketplace and family, ideology and flesh, production and consumption (writing and reading, gardening and prayer) was to truly take the measure of a man, to truly reveal him to women and children (and them to him), to transcend the vicious circle of motives and appetites by which his 9-to-5 and evening-weekend personalities had preyed on each other.  At the same time, rituals of hospitality demonstrated to the species the conflicts and paradoxes of free enterprise: property is both theft and inventory, privacy is both sin and sentiment.

            President Riley (who had also been an English teacher) embraced the medium of television in order to control its message the way kings long ago learned to read and write to outflank their wily literate ministers.  True leadership, he said, is forensic closure in the culture’s dominant medium: situational exposition, cause-­and-effect analysis, comparison of options, damage estimates, process narratives, character sketches, assignments, consensus decisions, and songs.  The chief executive had to now perform these quests for clarity, direction and motivation on rather than in camera, because traditional public oratory and debate, electronically magnified and distorted into ghostly shadows of human grace and conflict, could not contain the complexity of modern issues, could not attain the sublime, and gave neither pleasure to the performer nor participation cachet to the audience.

            The writers were careful to make the president no more powerless in his transparent tinkering than previous (real) presidents had been in their politics of secrecy.  Bills got passed, judges appointed, programs funded.  Several episodes described utopian social progress here and abroad brokered by Tinkers with whom the president communicated as their “commander in chief”.  And in his family life he proved the wisdom of having Tinkers only visit married couples; he showed that marriage is like fraternity hazing: an extended trial by abuse of one's loyalty and commitment, one's virtue and forbearance.  The cross of marital hospitality tests one's willingness to provoke and endure harassment for the sake of devoted companionship ―to be one's brother's keeper.

            In the last year of “Foreign Legion” the writers started playing reality games that ultimately killed the series.  In one episode the President invited Martin Sheen to the White House to compare notes on their presidencies, and the following week himself appeared (as the actor Jimmy Smits) in a cameo on “The West Wing” to give “Jed Bartlett” his turn to “be President”. 

            This breach of the “reality” of his 24 hour presidential exposure became the wedge issue for the opposition party in the reelection campaign that was a motif in that year’s episodes. The opposition was pictured as reactionaries inspired by the “old fashioned” world of “The West Wing” (which was in fact getting better viewer ratings at that point). CEOs were tired of their salaries being capped at ten times what their workers averaged; barons of agriculture were tired of supporting third world countries through their migrant workers; academics, pundits and political hacks were tired of being upstaged by amateurs; news organizations and money men were tired of having no insider status; generals and lobbyists thirsted for a return to authority, hierarchy and personal power. 

            These representatives of once powerful but now marginalized and irrelevant “leadership” roles wanted to turn back the clock, and sought the help of others, professional teachers and hospitality providers who had seen their cultural influence and income eroded by 25 years of Tinker activity.  In an episode redolent of sorcery and paranoid science they hatched a plot to secretly irradiate the planet with a digital/genetic X-ray virus that would remove all species memory of the Tinker back to the seminal Anne Tyler novel in 1976, and replace it with a collective global history (based on what they’d seen on “The West Wing”) of powerful male leaders, wars, factional quarrels, jealousy, religious and social strife, a destroyed middle east and Yugoslavia, terrorism, billionaire international moguls and so forth, a world in which they would once more be in demand and in control.

            The writers of “Foreign Legion” had every intention of foiling this conservative plot in the season finale (the virus was to be spread by and during the 24 hour national TV coverage to which the opposition candidate was entitled during the run-up to the election), in order to give President Riley a second term (and another season), but in a fine twist of fate the virus or spell escaped the electronic medium and infected the real world instead of the fictional one.   The episode aired as written, and the President’s final words were uttered in serene ignorance of the fact that they would immediately be forgotten: 

            “Americans can understand the reality of my leadership exposure, for to the extent that we are truly a God-fearing people, we have all always been ‘on the air’ to Him.  A visiting Tinker is on a psychoanalyst’s couch, or in a Catholic confessional.  He is “on the air” to his parents, practicing the sport and art that will one day enable him to take a spouse. 

            “And now God is not only listening, He is watching, as we watch our tubes, our wives, our children.  Watching and being watched are the new power and glory, the new taste and boredom, beyond reading and writing, beyond the word and the book, beyond the old art forms and religious rituals.  In this brave new world, when we’re married or President, reading and sleep must be privacy enough.  God tunes us in at work and at home, and teaches us to aspire to be always to all people as we are to Him—or Her.”

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