When a moment on television attains “event” status, it usually retains that status no matter how many years have passed. The miniseries Roots, the final episode of M*A*S*H; that time Heather Thomas and Heather Locklear slid into the baseball dunk tank together on Battle of the Network Stars…just me? Fair enough.
Through television’s first four decades there were many such moments that live large in our collective memories and remind us of the power it once wielded – sometimes responsibly, sometimes not – during the time when TV still qualified as a mass medium.
In September of 1988, nearly 100 cast and crewmembers of the ABC sitcom Head of the Class traveled behind the Iron Curtain to film the one-hour episode “Mission to Moscow,” which aired two months later. At the time this was an event, meriting feature stories in the New York Times, Los Angeles Times and the show business trade papers.
The episode became more accessible recently with the DVD release of the series’ third season. If people still cared about DVDs, it would have been the subject of a special feature with cast members sharing their recollections and producers describing the logistics of such an undertaking, I bet it would have been fascinating.
But most people don’t care about DVDs anymore, and apparently they don’t care much about Head of the Class either. The series was an afterthought in the many obits/tributes to Howard Hesseman published last month, though he was top-billed as high school teacher Charlie Moore on this successful series for four seasons, the same span of time he spent on WKRP in Cincinnati.
In my DVD review of the series’ first season I called it “blunt-force comedy.” But perhaps that was too harsh. Let’s say instead that Head of the Class delivered fast food comedy. It’s easy, it’s fun, and it’s enjoyable while you have it, but afterward you may believe you should have spent that time on something more nutritious.
That said, this was the first U.S. television series to film an episode inside the Soviet Union, and it aired at a pivotal point in Russian history. That same year, President Ronald Reagan, speaking in Berlin, urged Mikhail Gorbachev to “Tear down this wall,” and “Glasnost” and “Perestroika” were Russian words as familiar to every American as “Natasha Romanoff” is now.
The Berlin Wall fell one year later. The Soviet Union collapsed, Germany was re-unified, and (largely) peaceful revolutions brought democracy to Poland, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia and Romania.
Into this moment of monumental transformation, Charlie’s Moore’s Manhattan high school honors class travels to Moscow to match wits with a Russian team of students, a sequel to an episode from the previous season in which the Russians came to America for the same academic competition.
Over the course of the hour we watch as the students visit the Kremlin, Lenin’s Tomb, the Space Museum and St. Basil’s Cathedral. After recounting the story of how Ivan the Terrible had the cathedral’s architect blinded so he could never again build something so beautiful, Charlie adds that the architect is “now working for Donald Trump.” And you thought the Hollywood left only started hating him in 2016.
The story then follows different groups on different adventures: Conservative student Alan meets his Soviet counterpart and they debate the merits of their respective governments. Eric looks up the Russian branch of his family tree; Arvid and Dennis meet two Russian girls, whom Dennis suspects are working for the KGB; Literature student Simone plants flowers on Chekhov’s grave; Charlie and Janice visit a high school and field questions from students about America. We hear the questions but not their responses – which seems like a missed opportunity now.
“The Russian kids turned out to be kids, just as Russians in general have turned out to be people, just people pretty much like us. And that is something we want to show,” said series executive producer Michael Elias. Rich Eustis, another executive producer, added, “If we can diffuse the concept of Soviet people as enemies, we may have done some good.”
A more clear-eyed assessment of the experience of filming in Russia has since emerged from an unlikely source – boxer Mike Tyson, who was married to cast member Robin Givens and made the trip with her. “This place looks like New York City in the 1940s in a black-and-white movie. You see people on the lines. It looks like the Depression with people waiting for soup,” he recalled. “It’s a great experience, but I don’t want to give America up.”
But there would be no talk of decades of political repression, gulags, or suppression of religion. That wasn’t the point, I know. Yet it’s interesting how, in those rare moments when communism and democracy are referenced, our entertainment industry followed its natural tendency to aim criticisms inward instead of outward. When a Russian teacher tells Charlie what she thinks of America – “everybody is in debt, there is no culture and everybody owns a gun,” he doesn’t dispute the assertion, except to sheepishly retort that only one in four Americans owns a gun.
The significance of this event sadly did nothing to improve the script writing, which is perhaps why the show’s most effective moments emerge from the travelogue filmed by students Darlene and Sara. These dialogue-free segments feature interactions with Russian people that seem genuine, or at least unrehearsed. Such scenes from everyday life, streets and schools and markets, were not commonly seen on television back then outside of nightly network news broadcasts.
It’s worth seeing – or worth seeing again if it’s been 30 years. And while it may not rival the moon landing or The Beatles on Ed Sullivan, “Mission to Moscow” remains a landmark that deserves to be remembered. If you don’t believe me, perhaps you’ll believe The Hollywood Reporter: “Your history books may say otherwise, but in my mind, the Cold War was ended by Rocky IV and Head of the Class.”
