John Lennon & Yoko Ono’s TV Time Capsule

Transport yourself back to a time when America had just three major television networks and a single daytime talk show was able to generate viewer numbers as high as 40 million a week — more than a fifth of the population back then. Now imagine, if you will, a broadcast climate in which a beloved fixture of afternoon TV, watched in red states and blue, would risk alienating a significant chunk of his audience by welcoming as co-hosts a celebrity couple known for their revolutionary zeal. You can almost hear the suits’ alarmed cries: “We’ll lose the housewives!”

But this actually happened in February 1972, when John Lennon and Yoko Ono — fresh from penning their human-rights protest song “Attica State,” a lament for the lives lost in the tragic prison riot and a stinging denunciation of the country’s judicial and penal systems — sat in with the affable host of The Mike Douglas Show for an entire week. They were free to invite their own choice of guests to talk about everything from politics to biofeedback therapy to the benefits of a macrobiotic diet. Erik Nelson’s doc Daytime Revolution reassembles that bold experiment in bringing the counterculture to the squares as a lively time capsule.

The Beatles had broken up two years earlier and Lennon remained a global music superstar, while his wife, Ono, was at that time still a more divisive figure. Longtime fans blamed the legendary band’s split — fairly or not — on the Japanese multimedia artist, who was seen as an intrusive presence when Lennon started bringing her along to recording sessions.

But the couple’s symbiotic relationship and Douglas’ natural warmth and professionalism made the unorthodox matchup a surprisingly smooth fit once they got past some initial nervousness. Lennon’s charm seems to have been a big help; he’s seen more than once serving as a reassuring mediator between Douglas and their guests.

When Douglas asks, early in the first of their five episodes, what they’d like to talk about over the course of the week, Lennon and Ono respond, “Love, peace, communication, women’s lib, racism, prison conditions, drugs.” They make it clear that their creative and political agendas are intertwined, and they are there to spread the word. If Douglas feels any apprehension about how palatable that might be to his audience, he doesn’t let on.

At first glance, Douglas would appear to be of a generation and a mindset incompatible with Lennon and Ono. That impression is furthered by the lounge-act version of the Beatles’ “Michelle” that the former Big Band singer performs as an intro. But Douglas’ openness, as much as Lennon and Ono’s relaxed spontaneity, is a reason the experiment works.

Even when Douglas expresses discord with the radical views of guest Jerry Rubin, fearing he might bring a disruptive element, the host is respectful and receptive as the activist talks about rallying the nation’s disaffected youth to help defeat Nixon. That moment is one of many in which the capacity of people on opposite ends of the political spectrum to exchange ideas without hostility sits in stark contrast with today’s climate of maximum-decibel anger.

Mostly, Douglas seems tickled to be chatting with guests from outside his regular booker’s orbit, or participating in Ono’s communal art projects — one of which involves the reassembly, one piece per day, of a broken teacup. The atmosphere is convivial, but also candid and informative, with appearances by names like Ralph Nader, Black Panther chairman Bobby Seale and comedian George Carlin.

Then there are the less familiar faces, like biofeedback researcher Gary Schwarz, who hooks them all up to electrodes to measure their internal responses to music; avant-garde musician David Rosenboom; macrobiotic chef Hilary Redleaf, who leads a cooking demonstration making hijiki pockets; and folk singer/activists Nobuko Miyamoto and Chris Iijima, known as Yellow Pearl, whose lovely song about second-generation migrants “We Are the Children,” carries a message still relevant more than 50 years later.

Miyamoto, Schwarz, Rosenboom and Redleaf are among a handful of guests adding commentary in the present day, rewatching video of their appearances and recalling their initial disbelief when they got the call to appear with Lennon and Ono. Miyamoto shares a great anecdote about resisting efforts by the show’s director to tone down some lyrics deemed subversive, while Redleaf proudly displays the payment stub for her $100 honorarium (she cashed the check).

Vocalist Vivian Reed, who performs the stirring gospel hymn “His Eye is on the Sparrow” on one of the episodes, also looks back, with pinch-me, this-really-happened joy. Reed had worked with Douglas in Vegas, so along with frequent guest Carlin, she provided a bridge between the host’s comfort zone and that of Lennon and Ono.

Nader, who was 37 at the time and is now 90, brings context to explain why these episodes were so transgressive. In his 1972 appearance, he recommends a how-to manual for politically and socially motivated students to organize, pushing a more responsible grasp of citizenship. In the contemporary interview, he wryly echoes Lennon and Ono’s sentiments encouraging young people to get out and vote by reminding us that skepticism is more useful than cynicism in politics.

An interesting side note in all this is the presence behind the cameras of Roger Ailes, who had worked his way up from publicist to producer on the show. Noting that Ailes had first met Nixon when the politician was a guest — an encounter that led to him working on the candidate’s first presidential campaign — Nader makes the droll observation that you could see the future Fox News CEO studying every aspect of the TV production machine, thinking, “Someday I’m going to make sure that television is a major tool of right-wing politics.”

Nelson leaves a gap in the documentary by not discussing any fluctuations in viewership during that week, or whether any of the countless syndication stations that carried the show received complaint letters. But plenty of first-hand insight and off-camera observations are provided by longtime associate producer E.V. Di Massa, who was 24 the week of the broadcasts.

While the focus leans harder into social change than music, Lennon does reflect on the Beatles years, his upbringing and early influences (he and Paul McCartney shared a dream to follow in the footsteps of Carole King and Gerry Goffin as the next great songwriting team). He’s reported to have said the basement studio in Philadelphia where The Mike Douglas Show was taped reminded him of storied early Beatles venue The Cavern, in Liverpool. Amusingly, he offers the faintest of praise for McCartney’s first albums with Wings — though it’s worth noting that this was a year before their commercial and critical breakthrough with Band on the Run.

Ono’s musical interludes can be a little hard on the ears, but they definitely have value as quirky period pieces. Lennon’s affecting performance of “Imagine” at the keyboard takes a song banalized by decades of sappy covers and restores it to its purest form.

The musical highlight, however, is the first-ever meeting of Lennon with one of his inspirational heroes, Chuck Berry, looking like a cool cat in a purple fringed shirt and crisp white trousers. When Berry busts out his signature guitar-playing duckwalk moves during a duet with Lennon on “Memphis, Tennessee,” it’s delightful to watch the bands’ faces light up. The unrehearsed aspect of the musical segments only adds to the pleasure.

Attempts to integrate archival news footage of the time — Nixon’s China trip, Vietnam misinformation, marijuana alarmism, school busing protests — could be more seamless, but the footage from the shows is the rightful star.

There’s been no shortage of Lennon documentaries; it was just over a month ago that the Venice Film Festival premiered both One to One: John & Yoko, an intimate year-in-the-life record, and TWST: Things We Said Today, an experimental snapshot of the Beatles’ 1965 Shea Stadium concert. But this recap of a unique and deeply sincere bid to demystify utopian ideals for the conservative masses using the platform of popular television offers a fascinating glimpse into a very different period in this country’s past.

Onscreen text at the end notes that within weeks of the broadcasts, the Nixon administration moved to silence the couple, sparking a three-year legal battle when Lennon was threatened with deportation. That chapter, unsurprisingly, was covered in yet another doc — 2006’s The U.S. vs. John Lennon — executive produced by Nelson.