I was watching "Quickie Nirvana," the fourth-season episode included as a bonus/preview with season 3 of The Rockford Files (the complete season 4 will be out later this year). It's a David Chase script about Rockford working for an aging New Age cultist played by Jane Curtin's cousin Valerie Curtin; as always, the job leads to a big stash of money turning up unexpectedly, and Rockford getting into more trouble than he anticipated when he took the case -- the usual.
But one thing that struck me as interesting was the ending, where Rockford meets the Curtin character again and finds that she's now given up all the sensory-deprivation-tank lifestyle and turned to handing out leaflets for a Christian preacher. The scene openly -- and, let's face it, kind of heavy-handedly -- posits that there's no real difference between Christianity (or at least some varieties thereof) and cultism.
The interesting thing was that nobody involved seemed to think this was a problem, or potentially controversial. Nowadays, you couldn't get this scene on the air without a lot of controversy (Aaron Sorkin's whole misbegotten Studio 60 made a whole arc out of the fact that you can't put a "Crazy Christians" sketch on the air). And even five years later, you couldn't have done it without controversy, because within five years TV producers would become obsessed -- I mean literally, unambigously obsessed -- with fear of the so-called Moral Majority. So the scene is, unwittingly, a sort of cultural time capsule from 1977.
I saw this episode on cable a few weeks ago and wondered if a TV show today would dare to film that scene. And I wondered what kind of protest it might meet if it was shown as part of a current series.
ReplyDeleteI just watched this episode myself. It's one of my favorites in the entire Rockford Files series. Lots of laughs.
ReplyDeleteI really don't think the final scene is such a big deal though. It never appeared to me that the writers were trying to portray Christianity as a cult, so much as Sky's predictable approach to it. She previously got mixed up with a shady holy man and, now, has managed to do it again.