The Waltons: An Introduction

The Season One Cast

I’ve always been a fan of The Waltons, ever since I was a little boy. You see, my earliest memories were of a latter-day Waltons, particularly when Mary Ellen was a nurse in the war and Ben was playing at the Dew Drop Inn. But recently I’ve felt that that the show deserved a closer look. And, of course, with the modern miracle of DVD, I’ve been able to grant such a second chance.

I’ve started watching the entire series, beginning with the first season and, hopefully, ending with the last. Okay, I was pretty skeptical of how the show would hold up to contemporary muster (despite its abundant earnings of Emmy awards).  But, so far, I’ve been considerably impressed. Many of the stories have truly affected me, contrary to my own better, twenty-first century, postmodern, pop-cultural sensibilities. The decision, for example, for John Walton to keep a male calf as a pet (despite his financial requirement to sell it for a car repair), has kept me far more rapt than any daytime judge show ever could. And wondering how the Walton clan could deal with a cynical, scrappy, ragamuffin from 30’s Depression-Era NYC has far more earned my interest than whatever reality show based on singing, surviving, cooking, philately, etc. you choose to throw at me.

The show was the brainchild of former Twilight Zone scribe Earl Hamner, whose fertile and extensive memories of growing up in the Blue Ridge mountains of rural Virginia during the 1930’s provided the material for a memoir, Spencer’s Mountain; a somewhat soapy Henry Fonda film of the same name (although taking place in Wyoming’s Grand Teton mountain range); and later a hugely successful TV movie CBS aired during Christmas of 1971, The Homecoming. 

In this powerful drama, Patricia Neal played Olivia Walton, matriarch of a clan of seven boys and girls (no, this was not the Von Trapp family) waiting for the return of her husband John from his job on Christmas Eve. Admittedly, the plot here is somewhat thin, but it’s the ample subplots and character vistas that fill out the story with drama, and real, honest heartwarming drama, no less. The eldest son, John Boy (as played by Richard Thomas), was Hamner himself, and so the story revolved around his thoughts and emotions, and, more specifically, the balancing of his ambition to be a writer with the loyalty and love he had for his family. Enough people tuned in for this to convince CBS that there was series possibility here, and the following fall season, The Waltons premiered, on Thursday nights at 8:00.

It was on these Thursday nights, before Mork and Mindy became must-see-tv for a boy bitten by the late-seventies sci-fi bug, that you could find me plopped down in front of the family’s ton-heavy Sylvania set, waiting eagerly to consume that week’s installment of the family drama. I know, “family drama” today means all things mawkish an moralistic (which best describes the show’s long-running competitor, Little House on the Prairie), but 40 years ago, it truly meant a show that the whole family could enjoy: adults on one level, the kids on another. It was the cornerstone of what was then known as the Family Hour (an idea long since blown to smithereens), in which, simply, the time from 8 to 9 PM was an untouchable window of wholesome programming. In other words, you could trust that your child would not be scarred, jarred or traumatized in any way from the tv he or she watched during that time period. What a concept!

The Waltons quickly became a Neilson’s hit, cracking the top 20 in its first season and rising to #2 by its second. In many ways, it was the antidote to the more topical, controversial fare that CBS had recently been famous for (All in the Family, Maude, etc), and, more broadly, reality itself, in which it provided an escapist alternative to the post Vietnam/Watergate malaise plaguing the country. In journeying back to the Great Depression of the 30s, we were somehow better able to handle the far less pastoral recession of the 70s. And of course, nostalgia is always popular, but rather than going back the standard 20 years, The Waltons looked back 40; it reflected a different kind of innocence – the sort of your grandparents’ youth, when everything seemed hand-wrought and crafted, all food was farm grown or raised, and family came above all else. The show, perhaps, echoed a conservative sentiment, given the family’s Christian, traditionalist inclinations, but the show never seemed political. Historically, it was probably just what we needed to counter all the strum und drang of what we’d been through. And watching it now, I think we still need it.

The Rocket will give you daily updates of the show, season by season, episode by episode. Feel free to watch along if you like, and comment on the blog as well. Good night, John Boy!