‘Easy Reader’: Morgan Freeman’s unique first TV role
Even though he didn’t secure a big screen breakthrough until he was in his 50s, it wasn’t as if Morgan Freeman was an overnight sensation who came out of nowhere to suddenly end up as one of the most in-demand actors in the industry.
The release of Street Smart in 1987 may have landed him his first Academy Award nomination in the ‘Best Supporting Actor’ category and opened a raft of brand new doors, but the star had made his feature debut in 1964, the same year he made his Broadway bow in Hello, Dolly.
However, the first major part of his on-screen career came in 1971, when The Electric Company premiered. Over the course of six seasons and a mammoth 780 episodes, Freeman would play various characters in the popular sketch comedy series designed to educate and inform children on important issues while enhancing their literary and grammatical skills.
Disgraced comedian Bill Cosby and Academy Award winner Rita Moreno are among the other well-known names to have featured on the show, with Freeman playing a range of characters, including Vincent the Vegetable Vampire, Mel Mounds, Dracula, Easy Reader, and the decidedly less interesting-sounding Mark.
Despite taking his cues from the counterculture classic that was produced under a drug-addled haze, Easy Reader had nothing in common with Easy Rider, other than the nomenclature. Of course, that was to be expected, considering The Electric Company was for kids, but it was a bold reference nonetheless that would have gone straight over the heads of its target audience and raised a smirk among parents.
Freeman’s Easy Reader was about as effortlessly cool as you’d expect him to be in terms of wardrobe and demeanour, with his number one love being reading as opposed to rebellion. Instead of a cross-country journey of spiritual discovery that runs afoul of a cartel, he spends his time with Hattie Winston’s Valerie the Librarian to improve his comprehension of the written word.
Vincent the Vegetable Vampire drew his cues from Sesame Street‘s Count by being obsessed with things other than sucking delicious plasma from the necks of anyone who takes his fancy, while Mel Mounds was a DJ who introduced songs played by The Electric Company‘s Short Circus band, and Mark was pretty much just a guy called Mark.
Everybody has to start somewhere, then, with Freeman’s first prominent stint on television coming as part of an ensemble comedy that sought to educate and entertain. It wasn’t quite Sesame Street in terms of popularity, prominence, or ratings, but it did at least serve as the future Oscar winner’s foray into heading up an ensemble away from treading the boards. As history has shown, things worked out pretty well for him after The Electric Company went off the air in 1977.
