Ah, the joys of public domain. Recently, the streaming services whence I get my nightly entertainment have discovered that a number of series from the Dawn of Television have entered that hallowed state. So I get to revisit favourites from my early childhood (we're talking preschool, here) and appreciate facets of the storytelling that I'd sort of missed, being 5 years old and all.

To my delight, they've dug up Yancy Derringer. You should see it if you can. Yancy is a dodgy riverboat gambler type who lives in Yankee-occupied New Orleans during the Reconstruction. He has a Pawnee friend named Pahoo who uses actual Amerind sign language. The stories are about the lowlife that hangs around Bourbon Street.

Now, you might be thinking that this story is potentially dated, and horribly un-PC. You might be thinking it will offend women, Native Americans, other minorities, and people with a lick of sense.

You would be wrong. This series is 34 episodes of intelligent fun sent to us from 1957 by time machine. Okay, the plots are ridiculous. People get tossed into the Mississippi River a lot, and survive more often than I find strictly realistic. (I wonder if those California people had ever been on the Mississippi?) But the stunts are great. Jock Mahoney (Derringer) and X Brands (Pahoo) were professional stuntmen at the Olympic level. They delight in outrageous feats of gymnastics and knife-throwing and -catching. As for offensive, the Pawnee recognized German-American X Brands (his real name) for his faithful representation and knowledge of their language. Together with the stars, African American actor Bill Walker helped make a mockery of racial stereotypes: he played Yancy's butler Obadiah, but also Jeremiah, the doorman at the gambling casino, plus any other Biblically named characters they could think of. He did this with a broad wink at everybody. Bill Walker was a leading activist for African Americans in the film and TV industry.

The series is both feminist and ahead of its time, diversity-wise. Yancy Derringer, a sort of cross between Casanova and Rhett Butler, has a lot of women friends. They are not mere foils. In one episode, the Yankee military governor of New Orleans is about to be shot dead. Who takes out the bad guy? Yancy, Pahoo, the Union Army? No, indeed. The well-dressed lady the fella's been dating. Okay, she faints after that, but that was a lot of excitement. The woman who was a secret agent and foiled the payroll robbery aboard the Sultana (great name for a riverboat) didn't faint, nossir. She just winked. And not all the women are eye-candy. Some are older women with something to say. And Louise Fletcher shows up as twins, fancy that.

One of the regulars in the series is Miss Mandarin, a restaurateur played by Lisa Lu, who was born in Beijing. Yancy seems to be carrying a torch for this elegant woman, whom he addresses as 'Celestial Lady'. He keeps kissing her hand, while strongly implying that he would kiss her differently if she permitted. This is utterly remarkable. Why? Weren't there Chinese businesspeople on the Mississippi River in 1868? Of course there were, and every year after that, too. It would be inaccurate to portray the Lower Mississippi region without Asians. But. . . a 'white' man kissing an Asian woman? In 1957? This was bold stuff. Good for them.

Besides Yancy, whom I remember from way back then (though I didn't notice all the kissing stuff), the streaming services have dug up Decoy, a super little series starring Beverly Garland as a policewoman. Boy, is she ahead of the pack. Casey Jones, female detective, is better at conflict resolution than Columbo, even. There's a bit of New York noir in it, but there's also some great psychology and a bedrock sympathy for the common human. Great stuff here, and it's feminist, too.

So why am I bringing this up? Just to say, 'Old TV was better?' No, indeed. I want to talk about something completely different. I want to talk about assumptions.

They used to call it 'Man of the Year,' but they can’t do that anymore, so they call it 'person.' They want to be politically correct. That’s OK.

You know who said that. I don't have to tell you. As someone tweeted in response, 'When a middle schooler becomes prez.'

But there's more to that inane remark than just childish behaviour. There's a warning flag for writers. Donald Trump, along with all the other sloppy thinkers on the planet, thinks 'Man of the Year' is the default position. Time Magazine only called the title 'Person of the Year' because they had to include women now, and that's Political Correctness and a threat to the status quo. Which is a stupid thing to say. It's 'Person of the Year', you dolts, because the title is chosen among all the influential people who made news last year. Those people might be men, women, kids, or Small Furry Creatures from Alpha Centauri. Grow up.

So what's the warning flag? Beware of assumptions. A certain contingent in the world accepts the way things were in 1957 as 'normal'. To them, any change from that version of 'normal' has to be explained away. This is a form of default logic that totally lacks any validity.

What makes 1957 the norm? What makes Don Draper a role model? And if you watch television from 1957, you'll notice something. Not only are things not the way they were in the 'old days', but they were never like that in the old days, either. And some very intelligent TV writers were willing to say so, just by pitching their stories into a realistic space: one that had more variety in it than a mass-market commercial.

Who were these writers? I did a little digging. The scripts were written by Mary Loos and her husband Richard Sales. Sales also directed a number of the episodes. Loos and Sales were a bang-up writing team. Mary Loos was the niece of Anita Loos, the author of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Both Anita and Mary had fascinating personal stories, which I don't have space to get into here. But they'd been around, and observed a lot of people. It comes out in their writing.

So what am I saying? Don't feel obliged to assume backward thinking in your story. Don't let the rednecks have all the ink. Set the default mode to wherever you want it. If you're writing something historical, of course, you should take into account the fact that in ancient Rome, people paid lip service to the pantheon, and equated Christians with Communists. But you should also know that not everyone agreed. Who gets how much of the ideological real estate is totally up to you. It's your computer page, darn it. Set your own default modes.

And make the other people explain themselves. The ones who don’t agree with you. Can you imagine what it would be like if Donald Trump had to explain to an impartial observer just why he would rather be called 'Man of the Year', meaning he'd been in competition with 49% of the adult humans in the news, than 'Person of the Year', signifying that he'd been noticed over twice as many newsmakers? See what I mean?

And yeah, yeah, Yancy Derringer is not what you'd call historically deep. Jock Mahoney doesn't even know how to pronounce 'New Orleans' or 'Baton Rouge' right. But in its appreciation of the diversity of a port city in a time of change, Yancy Derringer is head-and-shoulders above what you're used to in the 21st Century. Take a look and see.

Writing Right with Dmitri Archive

Dmitri Gheorgheni

02.01.17 Front Page

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