A bobwhite cry breaks the quiet of night among the firs and pines of the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia…. "Good night, Ma." "Good night, John-Boy." "Good night, Pa." "Good night, John-Boy…." and the lights of the Walton house on Walton's Mountain sometime in the early nineteen-thirties dim and a million viewers turn away from their television sets, eyes wet, souls heavy with false memory and hopeless longing. C.B.S. has filled another Thursday night with nostalgia, bathos, soap opera, formula plot, tear-jerking junk, and I and all those other viewers share a moment of tender shame at having been so painfully touched by such obvious commercial exploitation….

What myth or memory has caught so many of us? Why are we watching Mary Ellen go to a dance with her first boyfriend; Grandpa and Grandma relive a youthful jealousy; John-Boy befriend a midget, an actress or a...