The Herridge Style: The Life and Work of a Television Revolutionary by Robert Herridge and John Sorensen

Expand

The Herridge Style: The Life and Work of a Television Revolutionary by Robert Herridge and John Sorensen

'The Herridge Style: The Life and Work of a Television Revolutionary' by Robert Herridge and John Sorensen

Robert Herridge saw television’s potential as more than entertaining or educational. He thought it could be art. The World War II veteran and Greenwich Village poet strode into New York’s CBS Building in 1950 with a pocketful of dreams. The network executive he met with told him, wisely, that he must first learn the craft of television, but in truth, everyone working in the new medium was learning. After a short apprenticeship with a kiddie western series, he was given opportunities to pursue his dreams even as the industry increasingly became a ratings war and a game of sponsorship. By the early ‘60s Herridge was pushed out, but not before he made some remarkable television.

In The Herridge Style, John Sorensen makes an impassioned case for Herridge as the great lost figure of early TV. Some of Herridge’s work has been lost; some episodes of programs such as “Camera Three” are housed in museum archives and have not circulated widely. Although Herridge sometimes spoke of television as an art apart from film or theater, essentially, he produced live theater with the benefit of multiple cameras, bringing unique productions of Hemingway, Dostoyevsky and Melville into American homes, along with performances by George Balanchine, Duke Ellington and Joan Baez.

Sorensen assembled the heart of The Herridge Style from the jumble of notes left behind by Herridge for the memoir he never wrote. Herridge saw television as “a fancy-free form explosive with possibilities” and himself—in a phrase he employed to describe a cast member—as “a rebel against the postwar mania for security.” He claims he saw it coming from the get-go: the commodification and dumbing down of a medium with the possibility for reaching everyone but he expected to gain “at least a measure of control over television’s future.” Herridge worked wonders on slender budgets before he was brought down by hubris, his refusal to compromise or bend. For him, losing an argument was like losing a child. Deemed difficult by management, Herridge lost his niche in the industry after making some remarkable programs in the face of skeptical overseers.

Get The Herridge Style at Amazon here.

Paid link