Problems with show


I'm trying to get into this show on the Decades binge, but it's hard. The two main characters come across as self-centered know-it-alls who think they have the answers to everyone's problems. They definitely think they are God's gift to women.

When I watched the premiere episode last Saturday night, I actually enjoyed watching the George Maharis character get punched in the stomach. I thought, you arrogant jerk, you deserved that.

I've read a lot of the positive comments on IMDB about the show, which has helped me understand the appeal of the show to a lot of people, but I just can't get into it. Not trying to be a troll, but just wondering if anyone else feels the same way.

Do like the Corvette and the Nelson Riddle cool jazz theme music.

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I think this show is an acquired taste. If you are used to modern television, it will be particularly hard to appreciate 'Route 66.'

But I would say it's worth it, if you choose to stick with it. The show and its characters (and its unique scenarios) will start to grow on you. That's what happened to me. Granted, not all episodes work-- but some of them are quite brilliant.

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You're not a troll, and I can even understand your initial reaction. Route 66 is not only from a different era of writing & acting, but the cultural model for young manhood, especially non-conformist young manhood, was also different.

The key is to remember that Tod & Buz don't think they know it all -- but they want to know it all, i.e., what's life all about, what does it mean, where are they going, who will they become, what is the range & depth of being human? In quite a few episodes their opinions & beliefs are challenged & they achieve a measure of humility & growth. They often challenge each other, sometimes to the point of physically fighting. More than once they'll admit that their self-righteousness in particular situations is due to fear & ego. Yes, they have confident personalities & a belief that they're going in the right direction ... but there are plenty of bumps along the way, many of them due to their own attitudes, which tend to get bruised & adjusted as they grow a little more each time.

It's interesting to see how Then Came Bronson handled this same scenario less than a decade later, at the end of the 1960s. Jim Bronson is looking for many of the same things as Tod & Buz, but he's much more laidback, open to what others have to teach him -- all without ever losing his core being or seeming wishy-washy. Tod & Buz were shaped by the 1950s, the Beats, the existentialists -- their approach to discovering the world (and themselves) is more head-on, more raw & often anguished. They suffer! And usually they get something good out of it.

Now, maybe this style just won't resonate with you personally. As I said, you're not a troll if you just can't get into it. Not everything will connect with everybody, it's all a matter of temperament & what rings true for each viewer. I'd only say that if you stick with the show, you may see many of the things I've talked about in this post.

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Owlwise just offered excellent, concise wisdom about this series. I will now offer something more to the Original Poster: context.

1) Tod and Buz had grown up in the 1950s, so their adult sensibilities and values were shaped in that decade -- true. However, their early childhoods would have been spent in World War II-and-postwar America. Take that into account when considering the worldview, influences, and standards of masculinity that formed them respectively. (Every film or TV show one views should be considered within the time frame of its production, and the values, viewpoints, and identifications of the audience toward which it was first aimed.)

2) Tod and Buz are closely bonded friends but from sharply different backgrounds. If the "premiere episode" you watched first, OP, was the actual first episode ("Black November" by title, I believe), this was only sketchily explained by Buz in conversation with another character -- but Tod's mother had died during his childhood, so he was raised alone by his wealthy industrialist father. But after his father's recent and unexpected death, it took his entire estate for Tod to pay off his father's unsuspected debt load; so after a privileged upbringing, Tod was left with nothing except their beloved sports car.

3) Buz, by comparison, had grown up combative in the savage, unforgiving Hell's Kitchen area of New York City. (In the excellent second-season episode "The Mud Nest" we'll learn in poignant detail of Buz's degree of rejection over knowing that he literally had been abandoned as an infant on the doorstep of strangers, never knowing his own family.) As a young adult Buz had been an employee of Tod's father, and had "clicked" with the boss's son. With the end of the company and his job, the two good friends with no roots between them decided to take off in that Corvette to travel the country in search of where it might "feel right" to try planting new roots. (As Buz roughly puts it to yet someone else during the episode "1800 Days to Justice.")

Never having had family ties of his own, Buz grasps what it's like for Tod to have lost his. Tod, in turn, admires Buz's self-sufficiency as well as the sensitivity stored right beneath his survivalist outer layer. Yes, they occasionally argue and even have more than one fight themselves; and at least once they decide to go their separate ways (fortunately reconciling before episode's end: "Like a Motherless Child," if I have that title right). But many viewers (including I, who only really started to watch this series two years ago) learned to appreciate how beautifully complementary those two characters are. Their bond of loyalty and support for each other, and mutual compassion toward others, became one of popular culture's great depictions of 20th-Century friendship.

I just wrote this in something of a cloud of loss myself, as I learned only yesterday of Martin Milner's death. It took me longer to appreciate Tod Stiles as a character than I needed to "get" Buz Murdock (who is still my favorite), but Milner's performances gradually brought me around. I could enjoy the series even more (as such a latecomer), knowing that both stars were still around more than 50 years later. However, now I'll think of Tod as dead at 83, so the few remaining episodes I still need to see on DVD will make me identify with Buz even more poignantly.

Most great films deserve a more appreciative audience than they get.

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ScopeWatcher, an excellent in-depth analysis of the characters & the times that shaped them!

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Great post. Unlike you, I was alive and watching TV when Route 66 aired, so I understood from the get-go the culture that Todd and Buzz were coming from - urban industrial - since it was my culture, too. You could never see it today, because no on in Hollywood today could write it authentically. When I watch DVDs of Route 66, it reconnects me with the world I grew up in, where a couple of guys with nothing but a car could travel the country, pick up a job practically anywhere and make some money to put away in the bank while they tried to find where they belonged in the world. Most people today just could never understand how that could be.

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Well said!

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Exactly! In my case, I was born in Tucson at about the exact same time the production was there to make How Much a Pound is Albatross? In addition to being a really great episode, it shows me what at least some parts of my birthplace looked like. We happened to move far to the East three years later and, other than a visit when I was five, I've never been back. I have a personal connection to that show and this series that no other can ever match.

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I'm trying to get into this show on the Decades binge, but it's hard. The two main characters come across as self-centered know-it-alls who think they have the answers to everyone's problems. They definitely think they are God's gift to women.

When I watched the premiere episode last Saturday night, I actually enjoyed watching the George Maharis character get punched in the stomach. I thought, you arrogant jerk, you deserved that.

I've read a lot of the positive comments on IMDB about the show, which has helped me understand the appeal of the show to a lot of people, but I just can't get into it. Not trying to be a troll, but just wondering if anyone else feels the same way.

Do like the Corvette and the Nelson Riddle cool jazz theme music.

As others have said, you're not wrong. But in that era of TV, the white male stars were always presumed to have the moral authority in all situations when, in retrospect, that's reeeeally questionable.

But ROUTE 66 was better written then most churned-out, studio-bound shows of the time. It has a certain organic, not overly-produced flavor because of all the location shooting. And, of course, it has that wonderful (what I call "funereal") early-'60s JFK/ColdWar/TwilightZone-y, end-of-the-world vibe which seems to have the effect of focusing things in a nice, doom-laden way.



--
LBJ's mistress on JFK:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WcXeutDmuRA


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Knock off the politically correct b.s.! As indicated by the recent election of Donald Trump, people are REALLY getting sick of political correctness. "White male stars" were NOT "always assumed to have the moral authority" back then. In fact plenty of them were portrayed as villains and plenty of women and minorities were portrayed as having moral authority, even in this TV series.

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Many of the posters here lived the America of Route 66. For them, watching it must be an extraordinary leap into the past. I was born during the show's last season, so my America was something completely different.

When I first discovered the show in the 1980's, some of the cultural changes which had occurred made aspects of the show difficult for me. Eventually, however, I came to recognize the show for having recorded a very unique period in America, a time of great optimism and confidence. I guess the show more or less parallels the period of John Kennedy's presidency. It's a great thing to get a glimpse into the way people thought and behaved at this time.

Since I didn't live it, I can't say for sure, but I'd guess Route 66 embodies the attitudes of this period better than any other show. I'm grateful for that. The America that emerged shortly afterward was a much more cynical place. Route 66 dreamed big. Keep these things in mind when you watch it, and I bet you will enjoy it more.



"He was running around like a rooster in a barnyard full of ducks."--Pat Novak

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That's it exactly! I was a boy when Route 66 was one & I felt that sense of big dreams, just as you've described it. Quite a few TV dramas from that time shared that sensibility to some degree, exploring the human condition & always holding out hope for new possibilities. And I can testify, from that boy's perspective, how exciting & glorious the future looked from the Kennedy years, especially with the space program promising to open the heavens, and the inspiring speeches of Martin Luther King promising to break down the racial barriers, to mention just a couple of indicators at the time.

Of course, as John Lennon sang, "Life is what happens when you're busy making other plans." And the later 1960s & afterward were very different from what we had expected -- not all bad, but different -- and yes, eventually more cynical, which has continued to this day. And I don't think we'll ever get that sense of promise & confidence back.

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I'm not one of the people who worship at the Kennedy altar, yet I cannot help but admire the man. And it does seem that the world went spinning off in a completely different direction on November 22nd, 1963 (when I was about 3 month old). One cannot help but wonder what may have happened if any one of a thousand minor events had kept either Kennedy or Oswald from their date with destiny.

Certainly, I picked up on the leftover optimism that was still around in places as I grew up in the 1960's, even among all the mayhem. I always feel as if my dad's generation was about the luckiest in American history. Born in 1940, he was too young for Korea, too old for Vietnam, and in fact, was just about Todd and Buzz's age. Those guys really had it all going for them. Getting an education was relatively inexpensive, and jobs abounded.

I tend to be one of those people who believes Kennedy would have avoided the Vietnam quagmire. Listening to those tapes of all the important players involved in the decision making during the Cuban Missile Crisis truly drives home the idea that Kennedy had a talent for avoiding bad outcomes while still maintaining relative American dominance. What might have happened with Vietnam, I don't know, but it does appear likely that given a chance to re-allocate all the blood and treasure dumped into that war, a lot of the great things the "Route 66 Generation" hoped to accomplish might well have seen fruition. As it was, the only optimistic idea that saw it's way past Kennedy's death was the moon landing, which may ultimately wind up as humanity's highlight for my lifetime. I would think it likely that the space program, for instance, would have been taken much further by now had Kennedy lived.

Of course, there are all sorts of unanticipated "maybes" which may have occurred had history taken other turns. Maybe Vietnam convinced the Soviets that the crazy American's would stand and fight whatever the cost to prevent the spread of communism. Perhaps perceived weakness would have led to a nuclear war. Maybe the Soviet Union would never have fallen. That's the thing about history. You can play "maybe" a lot but there is no way to test your hypothesis.

In the end, we are left with what for me is, a very short but romantic period, a period of intense optimism that presents us with a lot of "What ifs?" and perhaps a few lessons to be learned. I think that many of us could learn a great deal from watching Todd and Buzz (and Linc, too.), especially when it comes to their sense of obligation to do the right thing, to lend a hand to others in need. Simple morality. We could do a lot worse than to take up their examples.



"He was running around like a rooster in a barnyard full of ducks."--Pat Novak

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I was coming of age when it first aired, and I was naive enough to believe that the world we lived in in 1962 was going to be the world I would work in and live my life in. Jobs would not be hard to come by, and you could have a blue collar-type job and make a decent life for yourself. Man, what a surprise I got. Vietnam took friends and relatives, the whole world seemed to turn more sinister and like it that way, and if you wanted to have a good life, you had to go to college and even grad school and get very, very lucky. I love to watch the DVDs and remember what was and think of what might have been.

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Lots of men in their early to mid 20s still do think they know everything. Nothing has changed.

As far as being god's gift to women, same thing. Also, there were also less eligible men, as each war took it's toll on the male populations.

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Its, not it’s. Is it really too much trouble to proofread to prevent SpellCheck interuptus?

You’d have, you know, intellectual credibility if you did. Like that matters to you.

Fun fact: the Civil War was the war that took the greatest toll on the US male population.

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