Showing What's Wrong

Stereotype No. 1: High school teachers are fussy, frightened and old, hiding from the world in a cloud of chalk dust. Stereotype No. 2: High school principals wear three-piece suits, stern expressions and are totally devoid of humor. Good shows often result from giving the lie to stereotypes, witness ABC-TV's Room 222, which features a handsome black history teacher (Lloyd Haynes) and a rumpled, comfortable principal (Michael Constantine), whose strongest trait is a sense of underplayed humor. It works; in the current season, Room 222 has appeared consistently among the ten top-rated programs, and deserves it.

"If there's a formula for Room 222, I guess it is to show something that's wrong," says Haynes of the series, "and maybe show how to help it." Out of this notion have come some pertinent and moving moments of television drama. Life within the confines of any school is not all light or dark, and neither is life in Room 222. "If you have a serious situation, you want to give it the full weight it deserves," says Constantine. "But if you play it like Hamlet, you'll be left standing with drama all over your face."

Teaching, Not Preaching. Striking a balance between humor and concern, Room 222 manages to teach moral lessons without being preachy. A new teacher, straining stolidly to be as hip as his students, is joshed into the realization that he will get along much better if he is just himself. Students petitioning for the replacement of an elderly teacher who is using an archaic teaching approach in a marriage-preparation course are gently prodded into more understanding of their teacher. A few episodes do deal with weightier stuff: the problems of a militant black youth involved with a middle-class black girl, the dilemma of a Mexican-American boy who balances his academic limitations against his ambitions and decides to reject his counselor's recommendation that he go to college.

From time to time, the show has run into problems--first of all, the network's own attitude. "They are frightened of our being too heavy, and are distrustful of their being too comedy-ish," says Producer Gene Reynolds. "The powers in TV-land want to know whether it is comedy or drama; it is very difficult for them to twist their imaginations to encompass both," says Constantine. The show is billed as a "comedy-drama," but the show's originators managed to persuade the network to eliminate a standard but bothersome sitcom laugh track. "Our humor is too subtle for it," Reynolds explains.

Says Constantine of his role: "There came a point where I refused to do another joke because I felt my character was being written like a clown. One week I came very close to asking to be let out of the entire series because there had been a couple of weeks like that." Hence, there are seemingly endless bull sessions between cast and producer to work out better dialogue and clearer confrontations between characters. One day Haynes vehemently announced: "These scenes are so far away from reality! There's no attempt to get any sort of realism in the dialogue between the black actors." Result: there's more realism now.

The idea for the show grew out of Producer Reynolds' friendship with Dr. Norman Schacter, principal of Los Angeles High School. Many of the show's exterior scenes are shot at L.A. High, while the series' interior sets are based on the classrooms, corridors and offices of the school. Several script ideas have taken shape in the minds of the show's writers after spending time on the campus talking to teachers and students and sitting in on classes. "Arizona State Loves You," the story of a college coach recruiting a black high school athlete, is based on a similar incident at L.A. High. Reynolds happened to be in Schacter's office one day, and overheard snatches of a telephone conversation between the principal and a college coach who was trying to lure one of L.A. High's black sports stars to his team.

Pregnancy and Abortion. The show has yet to touch on subjects that are heavy but very real to today's high school students: narcotics, pregnancy, abortion, antiSemitism, racial polarization, the draft, some of which were dramatically depicted six years ago on the Mr. Novak show.

"Mike Constantine and I would like to see them go into more serious areas," says Haynes. "But if we do a show on narcotics, for example, then we've got to show an out, a solution. Otherwise we're only talking about what people already know." Nevertheless, he adds, "in some cases we should be honest enough to show that things can't be made right."

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