Kraft Television Theatre “Patterns” (January 12, 1955)

The comparisons to Arthur Miller and Death of a Salesman weren’t merely superlatives; Rod Serling understood that the surest way to probe the American character in the fifties was through the world of business.  (And director Fielder Cook and his sweat-soaked cast discovered that the boardroom, as much as the vaunted kitchen sink, was a setting tailor-made for the cramped TV screen.)  “Patterns” charts the corporate power struggle between rapacious paper company CEO Ramsey (Everett Sloane) and his more compassionate number two man Sloane (Ed Begley), as told from the point of view of a younger man, Staples (Richard Kiley), who realizes he has been hired to take Sloane’s place after the latter is deposed in a kind of deft samurai maneuver undertaken to avoid a public firing.  Staples is Serling’s surrogate, an innocent from Cincinnati (from whence the writer had himself moved), given to mouthing idealistic platitudes; when Sloane drops dead after a vicious chewing out, Staples decides he will resign.  But Serling has a trick up his sleeve: his hero has those Shakespearean flaws of ambition and indecisiveness, and comes equipped with a sweet little Lady Macbeth wife.  In the end, Staples lets Ramsey talk him into staying on, ostensibly to continue to challenge Ramsey’s ruthlessness by carrying on Sloane’s moral tradition, but really just to pursue personal success.  In 1955 Serling probably meant Ramsey’s argument that Staples’ talent would be wasted if he walked away to some backwater job at face value – but then, Serling stayed in business with Hollywood and wound up writing crappy Night Gallery episodes.  That’s the wily value of “Patterns”; its ambivalence makes it now more than ever a sobering cautionary tale about the danger of buying the seductive lie of ethical expediency, whether it’s about business, or politics, or those polar ice caps that aren’t really melting at all.