Blurring the Type
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television BLURRING THE TYPE BY MARVIN KITMAN There was a violent reaction last summer to the launching of the TV magazine called (after the location of CBS News' headquarters) West 57th....
...It is supposedly returning in June with yet another name, 1986...
...Six months of deep thought at NBC went into developing a winning concept for American Almanac...
...It's an accepted part of the folklore that NBC news magazines do not succeed...
...Sometimes 1 think there is something about NBC itself that has doomed it to failure in this area of journalism...
...The Action News Theme on the local shows is a pop standard...
...But I digress...
...NBC had slated it for a March re-debut with a new title, Profiles...
...Others, repelled by it, quipped that a dreadful disease had started in midtown Manhattan...
...Wrong...
...Dull, tiresome, old-fashioned...
...NBC News hired focus groups in four cities to come up with a staggering concoction of classic 1950s journalism...
...They actually conducted research to prove this is what we were hankering for...
...It had the most solemn people assembled in one place in history...
...Although more topical than 1984, it is not a name that's going to grow on anyone for very long...
...Richard Salant called it a wash...
...It was not a case of somebody going home and asking his wife or mother what kind of magazine she wanted...
...Even the serious network evening news shows have music written for them, albeit more cerebral...
...In fact, Wallace and Vieira were the two front-runners who lost out to George at the wire in the on-air Kentucky Derby the Old Guard foolishly conducted for the female slot on CBS Morning News, leaving viewers totally confused...
...Poor Roger will no longer be sole anchor of the muddy show...
...No, they paid for the insights that resulted in American Almanac...
...They say it's for 13 weeks, "guaranteed...
...What do you think, what's your gut feeling, ma...
...Like Louis B. Mayer in the old days of entertainment...
...Both the name and the re-debut were subsequently canned...
...It wasn't CBS News, it was Entertainment Tonight...
...But music is no stranger to these precincts...
...During its first five years, when it was being shuffled around, 60Minutes was a failure...
...As Richard Salant reminded me in a Connecticut newspaper article, however, Friendly's documentaries always opened with Copeland's "Appalachian Suite...
...Nor is Ferrugia about to give Geraldo Rivera competition for the title of Most Energetic Reporter on Television...
...The reporters resembled Robert Redford and Jane Fonda...
...Some said it was the greatest thing since onion rye, the best show to hit the airwaves since Milton Berle or 60 Minutes...
...Poor Roger, after all these years he was still apologizing for being on the tube, presiding over what essentially amounted to a compilation of videos—MTV with a literary varnish...
...Did my President and my CIA know this was happening—financed by my tax dollars...
...A most unusual scheduling ploy, you're probably thinking...
...Nobody said that was why they were taking it off the air, naturally...
...Not even the music or the videostronics could take away from the story by Jane Wallace, one of the magazine's all-young featured reporters...
...The secret behind NBC's concept is secret, of course, and I'm not into industrial espionage...
...How glitzy can you get...
...They didn't like the very tape it was recorded on...
...The first few "issues" admittedly offered fluffy showbiz stuff, but so did Edward R. Murrow on his Person to Person...
...The titular head of the reporting team—the "Fearsome Foursome" as CBS News' flacks called them—was John Ferrugia...
...Once they left it alone, it took off...
...I was really getting into it last summer when suddenly, after six episodes, it left the air on September 7. The ratings were abominable...
...There was an examination of the contras in Nicaragua that made my hair stand up and salute...
...To see a true TV magazine you have to get up early in the morning and watch Today, or Good Morning America...
...They can't be yanked around the schedule, or cancelled and resurrected...
...Finally, they seemed to settle on once a year—at 2 a.m...
...It also gave us a whole hour of Roger Mudd...
...But the ratings were terrible...
...And you couldn't even hang it up in the john...
...The so-called good guys were deliberately attacking and killing civilians, slitting throats, mutilating innocents...
...On the other hand, the numbers were no worse than those for Mister Rogers' Neighborhood...
...They never thought to hire anyone with curly hair before, an oversight that for personal reasons always troubled me...
...In any case, I would find it hard to list excerpts from the table of contents of American Almanac without falling asleep...
...My point is that TV magazines achieve success through habit formation...
...Neither woman is in the Georgian mold...
...But it was pretty good, especially compared with the other TV magazine launched last summer, NBC's American Almanac, starring Roger Mudd...
...I know it had twice as many producers as any other magazine show, and not one of them could tell a joke from an elephant...
...I kind of liked it, though, despite the flashy, high-tech feel reminiscent of a video arcade...
...None of them liked the style or the content...
...West 5 7th must be doing something new, I concluded...
...I was thinking of filing an antidiscrimination suit...
...They are TV news shows consisting of three short reports, tied together by the ticking of a clock or Hugh Downs' pacemaker...
...It was the sort of radical reporting you would expect from the guerrilla television makers on Public TV...
...American Almanac made the Farmer's Almanac look like the National Lampoon...
...Poor Roger's Almanac," as we called it...
...The two women correspondents, Jane Wallace and Meredith Vieira, had a lot more promise than the last big discovery made by the Old Guard at CBS News-Phyllis George...
...It was all part of the keep-them-guessing strategy for building an audience...
...There's nothing sacred about the prime time TV magazine format anyway...
...Subliminally I dance with Pat Harper, Sue Simmons or Michelle Marsh (my local anchors) to its beat...
...But the big news is that American Almanac is also being resuscitated...
...And so on, into the night...
...They preferred to speak of themselves as "the best and the brightest...
...Another breakthrough at CBS News...
...Both are tough, competent, first-class journalists who bend over backward never to smile...
...Then it might be off for three years, then on again for four or five weeks, whatever...
...Sure, it also had some vapid pop music with a twitchy beat—the Mod Squad of news...
...I knew my colleagues were treating West 5 as if it were the bubonic plague...
...Amid much ballyhoo, CBS has now lifted West 57th out of the moth balls and dropped it into a new time-slot (Wednesday, 8 p.m...
...While 60 Minutes and 20/20 are supposed to be the models, they aren't really magazines at all...
...First it was supposed to be on every week, then every month...
...One of the most outspoken critics of the music on West 5 7th was Fred Friendly, president-emeritus of the Edward R. Murrow School of Journalism...
...West 57th in its initial incarnation wasn't even around long enough for Tom Wyman, the chairman and CEO of CBS, or Gene Jankowski, the president of CBS Broadcast Group, to get its name right...
...Fred Friendly and Bill Leonard blasted it...
...He wore a lemon yellow tie opening night and favors wide suspenders...
...These youthful (below 50) correspondents tended to appear on camera in shirtsleeves...
...Bob Sirott, who usually did the showbiz pieces, could be recognized by his curly hair...
...So it goes with the 14th NBC magazine that didn't work...
...They generally aired American Almanac on Monday night opposite a bowl game, or the night before New Year's Eve, the leanest time of the year for TV viewing...
...There hasn't been so much shirtsleeve in journalism since H.L...
...It turned out to be a black hole...
...The magazine was getting buried by reruns...
...Eventually, stronger pieces began to appear last summer...
...They are not called the Luddites of TV over there on West 43rd for nothing...
...But basically American Almanac tried to 1) avoid confrontation and 2) have no celebrity interviews—two established winners...
...There was talk about its being back on the schedule later in the year, maybe in a couple of months...
...Yet they don't stop fooling around with them until they again prove the folklore right...
...That was quite a sartorial setback for Turnbull & Asser of Jermyn Street, London, haberdashers to CBS News since the days of Murrow...
...Not even its defenders believed West 57th was a bold, no-holds-barred news show for the 1990s, a breakthrough gazette, the magazine for yuppies...
...That's a lot...
...Test patterns seemed to do better...
...I'm not discussing whether American Almanac was worth saving...
...He was there ahead of Jack and Bobby...
...West 57th Street," they both miscalled it at the stockholders' meeting last fall...
...Then they said, "We tried for you, fella...
...He will be assisted by the charismatic Connie Chung, who made the early-morning Sunrise work...
...People either loved or hated it...
...The New York Times added to the August heat by attacking the premiere two days in a row...
...He was the one who put the cameras into Marilyn Monroe's closets in the golden age of serious TV journalism...
...It's amazing how they can mesmerize themselves in the television industry...
...West 57th was more me, as we say...
...He's not the sort I'd want to be alone with for an hour...
...On West 57th some of the stories worked and some didn't, just as happens in the best print journals...
...We have found a hole in the information flow,' Roger Mudd had chortled in advance of the premiere last summer...
...Menken at the Baltimore Sun...
...This man was a particular eyesore to traditionalists...
...Yes, it was guaranteed a run by Grant Tinker himself for the next 147 years, at 2 a.m...
...They have back of the book pieces, front of the book pieces, out of the book, etc...
...The opening looked to them like a cross between Lou Grant and Miami Vice...
...The programing plan for West 57th was not bad compared with what NBC did to American Almanac...
...They disagreed with everything that was being said, starting with their being called Young Turks...
...Whenever a TV show is described in book terms—chronicle, journal, almanac—yon know something is wrong with the thinking...
...West 57th was the brainchild of a triumvirate of Young Turks at CBS— Howard Stringer, Eric Ober and Andrew Lack (the producer...
...The CBS effort was 57 times better than NBC's magazine for young fogies...
...Yet three former presidents of CBS News, echoing the sentiments of the organization' s veterans, came out against the show 2-0-1...
...Sure...
Vol. 69 • March 1986 • No. 6
