The Unshakeables: Lou Grant Confronts the “Unthinkable”

Halloween celebrated the fun part of being scared. But there are some fears that have no place in such a colorful, festive holiday.

Nuclear war is not a prevalent topic in the Comfort TV era for obvious reasons (“Will a nuclear winter finally give Jack a chance to cuddle up with Chrissy? Find out on tonight’s Three’s Company!”) But it did get a high-profile treatment in the 1983 TV movie The Day After. Back then the Emmy-winning film was considered such a landmark event that it was shown in American schools. 

Much of The Day After focused on what happens in the aftermath of an attack. It left an impression on me as it likely did on anyone who saw it. But there was an episode of Lou Grant that aired one year earlier that I found even more unsettling. Its title was “Unthinkable.”

The story opens with a school bus crash that puts one student into a hospital burn unit – just one of those typical, terrible things that happen almost every day in a major city like Los Angeles. But then the drama shifts from a small-scale tragedy to one that threatens the entire nation.

Lou Grant first figures something serious is happening when a congressman is suddenly called out of a lunch Lou attends with his publisher. He heads back to the newspaper to learn that the death of a king in a Persian Gulf country has left a power vacuum, and the U.S. and Russia are both trying to fill it, in part to secure the oil supply that flows from that nation.

“We’ll show a little muscle, is all,” Lou says. 

But subsequent events are more ominous: The President changes his travel plans. A Russian jet shoots down a U.S. plane. An oil tanker is fired on. Troops mass on the Middle Eastern nation’s border. California hospitals are put on alert.

The most frightening aspect of the story is how plausible each of these steps seems as the world moves closer to the brink of Armageddon. Everything that happens in “Unthinkable” has happened more than once in our real world.

And as unimaginable consequences gradually become more imaginable, the writers, editors and photographers at the Los Angeles Tribune do their jobs as the professionals they are, covering this potentially horrific story from every angle – medical, military, civil defense, even technology (with phone and computer lines vaporized, communication would be completely cut off). 

Grim numbers are collected – one bomb dropped on L.A. would immediately kill two million people; at any given moment, we are a half-hour away from annihilation.

In the midst of this, Animal interviews a man who has maintained a bomb shelter in his backyard for 30 years – which he now shows off with pride.

“You sound like you’re almost looking forward to it,” he says of the potential attack.

“Well,” the man replies, “it’s nice to see your investment pay off.”

And what about that scene with the student in the burn unit? It’s there so Billie can interview the girl’s doctor, who describes the awful effect of severe burns, which survivors of a nuclear attack would experience. From how they are described, many viewers will be with Animal when he says if the big one drops, he’d rather be standing right under it.

The show’s ending was not what I expected. Obviously they were not going to vaporize Los Angeles, since there were still a few episodes left in the season. But they also didn’t want to minimize the crisis with a “See, it was all for nothing” climax. Some may not find it satisfying how they resolved that impasse, but the episode’s message loses nothing from that decision.

Yes, you can sense Ed Asner’s politics informing the script. “Unthinkable” airs late in the series’ fifth and final season, and CBS probably would have picked it up for at least one more had the network not grown tired of his activism. 

But as someone who doesn’t share many of his views, I can still respect them when they are fairly and intelligently presented. Nothing that happens in the episode seems exaggerated or alarmist.

That’s one reason this tale stuck with me. The other reason is one I experience every time I return to this series: its poignant reminder of how journalism is supposed to work. The only thing more horrifying than contemplating the events described in “Unthinkable” is contemplating how they would be covered now by…well, feel free to insert your least favorite newspaper or cable news network here.  

The Legacy of Lou Grant

Journalism – real honest-to-God journalism – is dead. I can’t pinpoint an exact time of death, but it’s been on life support since the escalation of the Internet, and about ten years ago finally gave up the ghost. There are still reputable journalists plying their trade, but they do so in opposition to a tsunami of predetermined agendas, arrogance and flat-out incompetence.

Which makes the experience of watching Lou Grant (1977-1982) the best dramatic television series about the profession, a bittersweet experience.

Lou Grant understood the significance of responsible journalism without indulging in self-aggrandizement. The whimsical opening credits sequence, in which the lifespan of a daily newspaper is followed to an ignoble end, lets you know this won’t be a genuflection to the Fourth Estate.

The show also got what made print journalism interesting. It’s not the big “scoops” that win Pulitzers and bring down governments. It’s the research and the legwork that are necessary even for a lifestyle feature that will run on page 24. It’s the running down of dead ends and interviewing people who don’t want to talk to you. It’s working on a story for days and then having something happen that renders it useless.

The show is a procedural, like Dragnet was a procedural. It takes the mundane parts of a glamorized job and makes them compelling. When you watch it you’ll understand how it was once possible for biased and imperfect people, working within a clear chain of command, to produce something that could accurately be called “news.”

We see this system at work in the first episode. Reporter Joe Rossi (everyone’s favorite character unless you had a crush on Billie) exposes a police department sex scandal. Rossi has a strong anti-establishment streak and can barely conceal his delight when he writes it up. Lou knows the story is legit, but orders Rossi to rewrite it so the facts are more prominent than the reporter’s colorfully crafted condemnation. The paper’s publisher, Margaret Pynchon, believes there are already too many negative stories about the police and would rather not run it at all. But she prints the article, because it’s the proper thing to do.

It’s a tribute to the quality of the series that the novelty of building a drama around a sitcom character almost seems like an afterthought.

This is not the grouchy teddy bear Lou Grant from WJM News, who spent his days yelling at Ted Baxter and ducking Sue Ann’s advances. There are occasional references to Lou having moved to Los Angeles from Minneapolis, but when he takes the city editor post at the Tribune, he becomes a real newspaperman. And you don’t question it for a moment.

Ed Asner leads a sterling cast; Robert Walden’s Joe Rossi became an archetype for bulldog journalism. Fans so fondly recall Linda Kelsey as reporter Billie Newman that they may have forgotten (as I did) that she replaced Rebecca Balding, who appears in the show’s first three episodes. 

Mason Adams, as Tribune editor Charlie Hume, brings some of the good-natured cynicism inherent to portrayals of journalism since The Front Page in 1931. At a city desk meeting someone brings in a story about a train wreck in Romania with numerous casualties. It is relegated to an interior page, until someone mentions there were two people from Los Angeles on the train. “Now, it’s a tragedy,” says Hume, and it goes on page one.

In another episode, Charlie explains to Billie his hesitation to approve a feature article on the gang problems in East Los Angeles. “The people in West L.A. get nervous when we write about the Chicanos,” he says, “and the Chicanos don’t read the Tribune.” 

As wonderful as Adams is in this, I can’t watch any of his scenes without hearing “With a name like Smuckers, it has to be good.”

Lou may have left the sitcom world, but Lou Grant can be a very funny show when it’s appropriate. Much of the humor is provided by a photographer nicknamed Animal (Daryl Anderson) and assistant city editor Art Donovan, a dapper horndog played by Jack Bannon.  Bannon happily inherited the comic timing of his mother, TV icon Bea Benaderet.

Nancy Marchand may be better known to TV audiences from The Sopranos, but as Mrs. Pynchon she also brought humor to the series, especially when Lou and Charlie are summoned to her office the way first-graders are ordered to see the principal. 

I just love this show. So did enough viewers to keep it on for five seasons, and it would have continued if CBS had not become fed up with Asner’s politics.

Lou Grant won more than 25 Emmys, as well as Humanitas Prizes and Peabody Awards among other accolades. By any measure this was outstanding television. But I think it plays even better for anyone who worked in journalism – or ever wanted to. 

If the sounds of a typewriter make you more nostalgic than the songs played at your prom, this is the show for you. After a few episodes you’ll long for the days when news came from a newspaper, and not from a million websites and politically charged blogs of dubious intent.

We have access to so much more information now, and that’s good. But when you can’t tell the Onion headlines from those in the New York Times, it seems like we’ve lost something even more precious. In its original run, watching Lou Grant helped the masses to understand what goes into putting together that morning paper that arrived on all of our doorsteps. Today, it plays like a eulogy for a once-proud vocation.