Favorite TV Episode Blogathon: The Waltons, “The Book”

After watching several seasons of a TV show and seeing your favorite episodes several times, you begin to pinpoint certain episodes that stand out because of the quality of the writing. While some are just adequate, there are some episodes where everything “clicks”—every line of dialogue counts, all the elements of the story fit smoothly together. The Waltons Season 3 episode “The Book” is one of those. It neatly balances the show’s ongoing theme of John-Boy Walton’s literary ambitions and his recurring adventures at college with his family relationships and the background of everyday occurrences at the Walton home.

It’s probably the best episode built around John-Boy’s college experiences. Much could be written about the theme of John-Boy and college, an aspect of the show I’ve always found mildly irritating. John-Boy goes about devouring and quoting from and enthusing about books and poetry by great authors from all walks of life and varying degrees of formal education, yet he still clings religiously to the belief that if he doesn’t make it through college, he can never be a writer himself. Though this is stated explicitly often enough, the show itself ironically and perhaps unintentionally tells another story. John-Boy clearly draws his creative life from Walton’s Mountain, from his home and family, from the beauty of nature, and from his observance of human nature in neighbors and friends and interesting strangers he meets. He’s happiest when up in his room or wandering the woods scribbling away with pencil and pad. College, on the other hand, is mainly a place for him to struggle with chemistry and geometry, feel inferior beside more well-off classmates, and get into difficulties over lecture tickets, codes of etiquette and dance dates. “The Book” is really one of the only times we see him engaged in any meaningful literary activity at college.

At any rate, in this episode John-Boy gets into a creative writing class he’d been eagerly looking forward to—and it takes approximately thirty seconds for his new classmates to make him feel entirely out of his league. One is writing “a novella in which all the action is mental,” another “a fantasy about the end of civilization.” (Sound familiar?) When John-Boy, beginning to exhibit a deer-in-the-headlights expression, diffidently admits to writing short stories about family life, they deflate him even more by questioning him about his “approach” and tossing glib literary jargon back and forth across him.

What’s striking about this scene is how contemporary it all feels. The quickest way I know for a writer to get an inferiority complex is to go and read the synopses and glowing reviews of the books that get classified as Literary Fiction and win prestigious awards. Incomprehensible they may be, but depressingly highbrow and impressive. John-Boy’s classmates are matter-of-fact in displaying their expectations for “serious” fiction: “You must have sociopolitical overtones. Without that, work is meaningless in this day and age.”

So John-Boy—always all too easily influenced by criticism or praise—quickly finds himself wondering if his work, which doesn’t fit these expectations, really has any value. And I can sympathize with him here. It’s an easy trap to fall into for any writer who has no pretensions to being highbrow and simply wants to tell a good story, but is still concerned about the quality and validity of their work. Anyway, John-Boy is so despondent over all this that his mother Olivia can’t help but feel for him. But there’s nothing she can do to help—until one day she spots an ad in the paper that reads “Be Published Now!!”

Unbeknownst to John-Boy, Olivia takes some of his completed stories to the office of the grandly-named Majestic Press—a tiny second-floor office with a slick and smiling “editor” who encourages her to be optimistic about her son’s chances of publication, and promises an opinion on the manuscript “within the week.” It’s a setup that ought to be triggering alarm bells for anyone who knows anything about publishing, but just now in her concern for John-Boy, Olivia is all mother. And certainly not a literary agent.

No surprise, Majestic Press accepts the manuscript, and John-Boy goes off the deep end with delight. Lo and behold, his superior classmates, on hearing the news, suddenly become quite friendly. Publication evidently equals validation—the same stories they dismissed as merely “nice” before are now somehow worthy of notice because they’ve been accepted by a publisher. The episode itself doesn’t really explore this angle, but it’s there all the same: John-Boy’s most snide critics are now inviting him to speak to literary clubs on “the short story as a literary form.” And John-Boy—always all too easily influenced by praise or criticism—never looks back. He quickly signs a publishing contract without reading the fine print, becomes as self-important as any of his classmates, and takes his new role as a published author so seriously that he begins to rub most of his family the wrong way.

And then the fine print on that contract comes back to bite him with a vengeance…if you haven’t seen the episode, I’ll leave you to discover the rest for yourself.

Meanwhile, John-Boy’s younger brother Jason has been finding a humbler but more genuine form of success. After a professional musician overhears him playing his harmonica in the general store, he’s offered a job playing with a well-known local dance band. But in all the excitement over John-Boy’s book, Jason can’t get a word in edgewise to share his own exciting news. Poor Jason—always the most good-natured and obliging of the Walton family, and always getting the short end of the script. Most TV shows seem to have a character like that, I’ve noticed—a likable supporting character who’s saddled with misfortune upon misfortune, for no apparent reason but their own inherent niceness. (Mary Ingalls would be the most drastic example.)

In the end, it’s Jason’s success that gives the whole family a much-needed lift in spirits after John-Boy’s brief career as a published author has gone decidedly south. And John-Boy manages to patch his shattered dignity together and go on, hopefully a humbler and wiser writer…who will read the fine print next time.

This is my entry for the third annual Favorite TV Episode Blogathon, hosted by A Shroud of Thoughts. Stop by there to see what classic TV episodes other participants are writing about!