Rawhide “Corporal Dasovik” (December 4, 1964)

Brought in fresh to executive produce the seventh season of this flagging cattle drive western, young upstarts Bruce Geller and Bernard Kowalski (only a year away from launching Mission: Impossible) blew everything up.  The pair commissioned a series of scripts that systematically dismantled the basic underpinnings of the genre: “Damon’s Road” was a buoyant musical comedy with Barbara Eden as a hooker performing Geller’s infectious ditty “Ten Tiny Toes”; “The Meeting” was a weird postmodern hybrid that pitted the cowboys against a nascent mafia.  The high point, though, was “Corporal Dasovik,” a very early Vietnam allegory with an uninhibited Nick Adams as the inexperienced (indeed, dangerously unfit) officer who inherits the command of a grizzled cavalry patrol.  A menacing, shaggy John Drew Barrymore plays the de facto leader of the enlisted men who undermines Dasovik at every turn, urging him to abandon the guardianship of an Indian treaty that none of them understand or believe in.  Dasovik goes through squirm-inducing paroxysms of cowardice before finally sacrificing himself in battle, less out of personal bravery (though he does inspire the others, in a way) than because he cannot find a way out of the trap duty has placed him in.  The soldiers in this army were unshaven, filthy, larcenous, derelict, and seemingly quite capable of killing their superior officers, and the gist of Lionel E. Siegel’s Western Heritage Award-winning script was nothing less than to toss all of television’s accepted notions of militarism and heroism onto the scrapheap.  Geller and Kowalski soon followed: the CBS brass fired them and ordered the new regime to “put the cows back in.”