Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: They all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round.
They all laughed when Edison recorded sound.
They all laughed at Wilbur and his brother when they said that man could fly.
They told Marconi wireless was a phony. It's the same old tribe.
[00:00:20] Speaker B: Welcome back to 100 Years of Television, where for 100 weeks that started in October 2025, we're going to recall the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television and video.
The countdown will culminate on September 7, 2027, the 100th anniversary of the day television was invented.
I'm Paul Schatzkin, author of the Boy who Invented Television, the definitive biography of Philo T. Farnsworth, who invented first all electronic television system.
In the last episode, the whole world was watching when violence erupted in the streets of Chicago during the Democratic National Convention in the summer of 1968.
Today is countdown number 44.
Julia.
On March 22, 1967, veteran television writer and producer Hal Cantor attended a fundraising gala in support of the Hollywood branch of the national association for the Advancement of colored people, the NAACP.
Hal Cantor was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1918.
He was a white Southerner who built a successful Hollywood career writing for film and television, whose credits included one of the most controversial shows of the early 1950s, Amos and Andy, which we covered in Countdown 70.
Cantor listened intently to the evening's keynote delivered by NAACP Executive Director Roy Wilkins.
Looking back on that event in 2011, Cantor recalled that Wilkins talked about the Negro and about the Negro's place in the entertainment business, how little they were represented on the air and or backstage or behind the camera. His talk was compelling. He was very reasoned, very articulate and not angry.
It was something that affected most of us there in the room. And I thought to myself, there's more I can do than just giving money.
Wilkins speech got Cantor's creative wheel spinning. He thought if I could do a television show that depicted blacks as people and not as black people, it might do some good.
But Cantor's creative wheels had barely begun turning when America's wheels started coming off completely.
The Great Migration had promised black Americans a better life in the urban north, but it delivered them into overcrowded housing, underfunded schools and brutal policing. In the summer of 1967, the bill came due in Newark. The July arrest of a black cab driver set off six days of rioting that left 26 dead.
Less than two weeks later, a police raid on an after hours bar In Detroit ignited five days of violence. 43 dead, more than 7,200 arrested and some 2,000 buildings destroyed.
Lyndon Johnson responded with the Kerner Commission, whose February 1968 report delivered a scathing verdict.
White institutions created the ghetto, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.
The report saved its sharpest criticism for the media, which it found reflected the biases, the paternalism and the indifference of white America.
And of course, that rebuke included television.
And Hal Cantor. The veteran TV producers whose credits included Amos and Andy, knew that as well as anybody in the business.
By the time the Kerner Commission report was released, Hal Cantor had already turned his experience at that NAACP fundraiser in March 1967 into a pilot script that he pitched to NBC.
By the mid-1960s, television news had been showing much of America's racial strife in real the fire hoses, the marches, the funerals and the flames.
But primetime was an entirely different story.
It's true that several TV series featured Black characters in supporting roles.
Bill Cosby won an Emmy for his role as a black sidekick on I Spy.
The Mod Squad included Clarence Williams III as one of its three central characters, and Nichelle Nichols had a seat on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise as Lieutenant Uhura, the communications officer on Star Trek.
But lead roles for black characters remained elusive as network executives moved slowly in deference to their still sizable Southern audience.
Into this challenging environment, Hal Cantor pitched a show that would feature a black woman in the lead role.
Cantor started by going back to the well he knew best.
He thought about how he could place an African American character at the center of television's most familiar landscape, the weekly situation comedy.
Though Cantor spoke often about the development of the show that became Julia, he never directly addressed the question of why he chose to feature a black woman and not a black man in the featured role. The choices seemed both principled and strategic.
Drawing on his long experience creating mainstream network entertainment, Kantor first envisioned a character who could deftly defy any stereotypes.
A widowed nurse raising her child fit comfortably within television's existing domestic sitcom template.
That simple premise made the concept easier to pitch to NBC and easier for NBC to sell to affiliates in places like Alabama and Mississippi.
Cantor sweetened the mix by adding another contemporary detail.
He wrote the Widow's Story around a husband who had been killed in Vietnam that answered all the sure to be asked questions about why she was raising her child alone. With a touch that would pull on middle America's patriotic heartstrings, NBC approved a teleplay for a pilot Cantor called Mama's man to focus on the relationship between Julia Baker, the single mother, and her young son, Corey.
The next challenge was finding the right actress to portray Julia.
Cantor's first choice for the role was Diane Carroll, a glamorous and multi talented actress whose career began in New York musical theater in the 1950s. In 1962, Diane Carroll was the first black woman to win the best actress Tony award for her performance in no Strings, which was also the first Broadway production to feature an interracial romance.
At first sighting, Cantor proclaimed, that's Julia. But he had doubts whether the actress could shed the Broadway glitz enough to be believable as a working mother and nurse.
The casting then became a Hollywood legend of its own.
Diane Carroll had her own reservations about the casting as well.
At first she doubted that such a show could even work, describing it in one account as something that was going to relieve someone's conscience and thinking that Cantor should find another actress.
Nor did she care to leave her safe and familiar Manhattan to know anything about living in California.
The mutual doubts were overcome with some sly intervention by NBC executive Dave Tebbett, whom Carroll thought of as a pretty good friend.
He found it amusing that Kantor didn't think she could play the part and practically dared her by saying simply, I think you can.
Diane Carroll flew to Los Angeles three days before a scheduled audition with the still reticent Hal Cantor, who was actively considering several other actresses for the she brought her own makeup man, hairstylist and personal assistant who went to work on the character while Carol mastered every line of the dialogue.
The actress who showed up for her audition had dropped her sophisticated image entirely. She changed her hair, wore no jewelry, and wore a plain woolen dress.
In other words, an actress showed up in Hal Cantor's office as Julia Baker.
Before the reading began, Cantor turned to the actress's agent and said, that young lady who just came through the door, if Diane Carroll looked like that, I could understand it.
That is Diane, the agent said.
And when it was over, Cantor said, well, Julia, it's nice to have met you.
Cantor had his actress now. What he needed was a new name for the show.
Carol herself, as well as some of her activist friends like Harry Belafonte and James Baldwin, did not think that the working title Mama's man, reflected favorably on the community the show was intended to appeal to.
Carroll's publicist wanted him to call it the Diane Carroll show, but Cantor objected. This show's not about Diane Carroll. It's about a black nurse and her little son, cantor recalled. So we settled for Julia.
Julia premiered on NBC on September 7, 1968, just seven months after the Kerner Commission report blasted the mainstream media for reflecting the biases, the paternalism and the indifference of white America. A black woman had the lead role in a network situation comedy, the first time a black actor was cast in a starring role on TV since the cancellation of Amos and Andy and Beulah in 1953.
One memorable scene in the first episode may have set the tone for the entire series.
Julia Baker has applied for a nurse's position with an aerospace firm and is discussing her application over the phone with her prospective boss, the crusty but soft hearted Dr. Cheglee, portrayed by veteran character actor Lloyd Nolan. Having previously interviewed in person with the HR supervisor, Mr. Colton, she has this exchange with Dr. Chegley.
[00:11:37] Speaker A: Has Mr. Colton told you?
[00:11:39] Speaker C: Tell me what?
[00:11:40] Speaker B: I'm colored.
[00:11:41] Speaker C: What color are you?
[00:11:43] Speaker A: I'm a Negro.
[00:11:45] Speaker C: You always been a Negro or you're just trying to be fashionable?
[00:11:50] Speaker B: But even with the question of race comically handled, Dr. Chegle manages to hand on to at least one other stereotypical trope when he asks Julia to come in the following morning.
[00:12:02] Speaker C: Look, can you run out here tomorrow morning? I'd like to get a look at you. Yes, Doctor. What time would be convenient? Be here at nine and make yourself as handsome as you can manage. I'm tired of looking at ugly nurses.
A married one.
Nine o'. Clock. Try and be pretty.
[00:12:22] Speaker B: In its first season, Julia ranked number seven in the Nielsen ratings, drawing an average of 24.6% of all TV households. But the numbers tell only part of the story.
For all her groundbreaking presence, Julia Baker lived in a stylish integrated apartment building.
She worked at an upscale aerospace company, she dressed impeccably, and she navigated a predominantly white world with barely a hint of friction.
Despite the show's broad acceptance among the TV viewing public, that seamless portrayal drew hostile fire from black critics and pundits who felt that Julia was too comfortable, too affluent and too insulated from the realities of black American life. In 1968, for example, the Saturday Review's Robert Louis Sheyhan dismissed the show's setting as a far cry from the bitter realities of Negro life in the urban ghetto, the pit of America's explosion potential.
Even Diane Carroll had her doubts.
In a TV Guide profile published in December 1968, Carroll said, the moment we're presenting the white Negro and she has very little Negroness. I don't delude myself into thinking that I'm operating in the context of anything but a white society.
Perhaps the poet Novelist and early voice of hip hop, Gil Scott Heron put it best in his 1970 anthem the Revolution Will Not Be Televised.
[00:14:06] Speaker A: The Revolution will not be brought to
[00:14:07] Speaker B: you by the Shaffer Award Theater and
[00:14:09] Speaker A: will not star Natalie woods and Steve
[00:14:11] Speaker B: McQueen or Bullwinkle and Julia, a lyric that cynically casts the fictional Julia Baker in the same context as a cartoon buffoon.
After ranking in the top 10 of all shows on American television in his first season, Julia slipped to number 28 in the 1969-70 season.
And when Diane Carroll's contract came up for renewal during the third season, she asked to be released.
After three seasons and 86 episodes, Julia faded from the screen.
During its brief tenure, Diahann Carroll won the Golden Globe for best actress in a television comedy and became the first black woman nominated for a lead actress Emmy Award.
Whatever its triumphs, whatever its shortcomings, Julia showed the networks that they could no longer ignore the potential of black characters to carry a primetime television series or the potential of black audiences to watch one.
Julia established the beachhead for countless shows over the decades that followed. Norman Lear's Good Times and the Jeffersons, the acclaimed miniseries Roots and and eventually the Cosby show, each staked out different territory on the same ground Julia Baker had broken.
Some went deeper into the black American experience.
Some drew the same too comfortable criticism all over again. But they all walked through a door that Hal Cantor and Diane Carroll had opened together in spite of and because of each other.
This brings us to the end of number 44 in the countdown of the top 100 milestones in the first 100 years of television.
Stay tuned for the next episode, when TV finally goes where no man has gone before.
Thanks for listening to 100 Years of Television, a two year countdown to the centennial of television on September 7, 2027.
For more, aim the gizmo of your choice to 100yearstv.com this podcast was written, recorded, edited, engineered and uploaded by me, Paul Schatzkin and is a production of Farnovision.com if television was invented by somebody named Farnsworth, why don't we call it Farnovision?
[00:16:41] Speaker A: They all said we never would be happy. They laughed at us and hated. But how? How you got your lives right now?
