When a Critic Counted

...Arriving second in the field, but a more felicitous writer than Gould, he developed enough of a following to have his thoughts presented as a thrice-weekly column, syndicated to many other newspapers across the country as publishers began to concede that television might interest their readers...

...It took television a long time to happen...

...The live telecasts of the hearings were one of the landmarks of TV's infancy...

...On his way home quite late that evening the music salesman passed the same Davega store...

...At 11 p.m...

...But Gould's power was different...

...The result could be a highly prized three-line entry among TV Key's recommendations...

...Then, on August 17,1956, Gould praised the coverage, the anchormen, and especially David Brinkley's "dry wit and heaven-sent appreciation of brevity...

...By 1969, the country's "educational" TV stations united into the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) after a long campaign that Jack Gould played a major part in...

...That anyone would watch television early in the morning was considered a fantasy...

...At CBS Murrow and Sevareid would be added to the convention coverage in 1960, to lend what was hoped would be color and wit to Walter Cronkite's anchoring...

...and the Night Visitors...

...For news documentaries, I remember, someone from TV Key would show up in NBC's film editing room, stand over a clattering moviola to watch a not quite finished assemblage unreel while the producer would describe the scenes and their purpose as he read from a still unpolished script above the din of the workroom...

...From the beginning, the networks contributed conscience money, and Tchaikovsky and Shakespeare and their ilk departed commercial television...

...In his era the weekday Times was still printed in only two sections, with his news and reviews on the inside back page of the second section...

...In a few years every newspaper would have at least one TV critic, usually paired with a reporter who kept up with the industry's news and gossip...

...at NBC perhaps the largest single source...

...In the early months of 1956, the majorproblem seizing the management of NBC News was who should anchor its coverage of that summer's national political conventions...

...But in 1952 NBC's Pat Weaver launched Today, which Gould called a disappointment...

...Their day usually started with a sort of newscast, film clips reused from the previous night's network newscast with bulletins from the wire services...

...I was reminded of all that by the publication of Watching Television Come of Age (Texas, 248 pp., hardcover $55.00, paper $22.95), a selection of writings by New York Times television critic Jack Gould, chosen and edited by his son, Lewis L. Gould, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Texas, Austin...

...Executives from outside news dropped by to shake hands with Huntley and Brinkley, invited them to lunch and asked their opinions...

...The political conventions still made news in those days and their gavel-to-gavel coverage attracted huge audiences...

...They showed nothing but test patterns, straight lines and shades of gray to help viewers at home adjust their sets...

...CBS was proud of its serious contemporary dramas...

...the boys, who had not been allowed to utter a word during the program, would slip quietly away while daddy, notes in hand, dictated his review for the next morning's Times...

...Networks began in 1948...

...More important, while the number of Atkinson's readers who reacted to a good or bad review could fill or empty a Broadway theater, the fraction of the total viewing audience that read Gould's reviews or, indeed, the Times, was piddling in network television terms...

...But not until videotape cassettes of upcoming programs started to be delivered to them far enough in advance to allow for studied contemplation and painstaking evaluation, did their reviews take on greater importance outside television's inner circle...

...The TV critic for the Herald Tribune, John Crosby, was more accepting of such entertainment phenomena...

...has had real competition from NBC...

...the first time that the Columbia Broadcasting System...

...His influence was often compared to that of the newspaper drama critics who then ruled the Broadway theater: John Chapman of the Daily News, George Jean Nathan from the Hearst papers, Otis Guernsey of the Herald Tribune, and above all the others Brooks Atkinson of the Times...

...Its contribution to what remains known as the "Golden Age of Television" was formed by such writers as Paddy Chayefsky and Worthington Miner...

...Jack Gould's influence, in fact, was on the people inside television, not its audience...

...In October 1956they replaced John Cameron Swayze at the helm of the network's suppertime newscast...

...There followed a mix of soap operas and unambitious musical shows: half a dozen people talking and singing...

...Television could wait...

...it is time they stopped whimpering and acted as grownups...

...Lewis Gould describes how he and his brothers would sit with their father in the studio he had outfitted in their big, rambling house in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, watching a new drama or comedy on one of the sets lining the walls...

...The conventions were less exciting than had been hoped, but the combination of Huntley and Brinkley elicited a warm public response...

...They are a significant source of revenue...

...They were standing in front of the window displaying television sets, he later told me, and were watching (without hearing) the proceedings of Senator Estes Kefauver's committee inquiring into organized crime...

...the earliest television programs were basically radio shows on camera...

...They caved and carried most of the debate from then on...

...In the interim, an entrepreneur named Steven Scheuer saw a demand and offered to supply it through a service he established called TV Key...

...Their reviews, especially Atkinson's, could make a show a hit or doom it to close the next weekend...

...Not until 1946 were there TV stations with regular programs in the United States...

...His initial review appeared in October 1944...

...David Sarnoff opened RCA's exhibit at the 1939 New York World's Fair by announcing proudly, "We have added sight to sound...

...A typical fascinating segment presented a renowned Shakespeare scholar-with actors in costume illustrating examples from the plays-as he set forth his proof that rural Englishmen like the Bard of Avon were educated enough to singlehandedly call on the classical allusions, geographical mastery and contemporary sophistication that run through his plays...

...Inside you could watch, through a glass wall, an orchestra and four girl singers belting out the hits of the day, and see them at the same time in miniaturized and tremulous black and white...

...They wonder sourly what happened to the miracle and decry the uses it has been put to, forgetting that in its early days its prime attraction was professional wrestling...

...Although the book treats that as the principal example of Gould's impact, for me another one speaks better to the pusillanimity of the network chiefs...

...All the networks eventually developed morning programs, and many independent stations have their own...

...His Manhattan orientation blinded him to the social implications of a phenomenon such as Elvis Presley, whom he denounced...

...The public was shocked and entranced...

...obscure politicians became heroes...

...Long forgotten was the time when a handful of stations, mostly along the East coast, began broadcasting around noon and signed off around midnight...

...The entire atmosphere at NBC changed...

...For too many Americans they are the main source of information about their world, a chilling thought...

...The opinion pieces reprinted in the book include one that ran October 31, 1956, and strongly castigated the three networks for failing to carry live the UN Security Council debate on the resolutions intended to end the invasion of Suez...

...There is no escape from the law of unintended consequences...

...It was not audience acceptance that brought this about, it was Jack Gould's column-or, rather, how the people in charge of the network were influenced by it...

...To begin with, his reviews appeared after the broadcast, so he could lure no viewers to tune in-or out...

...The Ford Foundation underwrote a remarkable program series called Omnibus, a sort of magazine of all the serious arts, that moved among the networks...

...GOULD, who reported news and tidbits of the Broadway stage and nightclubs before his elevation, was committed to live drama because he thought it spontaneous and vibrant, like live theater...

...Unfortunately, this conveys little of the exhilaration that accompanied television's emergence-the tentativeness, the adventures of discovery, the false starts, the gradual but steady institutionalization...

...Before there were Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather and Peter Jennings there were John Cameron Swayze and Douglas Edwards and John Daly...

...During its decade and a half on the air the Huntley-Brinkley Report became the most widely watched and potent daily news program in the history of American television...

...Looking back from these days of cell phones, TiVo's and the World Wide Web, it all seems so 20th century...

...Before there was television there was radio...

...On his way to work one of those early days, a music company salesman passed a Davega store and noticed a crowd three and four deep...

...He or one of his handful of employees would attend rehearsals, vet press releases, and interview producers and cast members to judge which programs to commend for viewing at night...

...Their enthusiasm can be judged from the fact that, in a milieu engorged with press releases, they waited six weeks before announcing the decision...

...There was still a cluster of more than a dozen people watching that same window where the TV sets were turned on, although broadcasting had ended for the day...

...Finally a local clergyman-a job conscientiously rotated among the faiths-would utter something called a sermonette, and a plummyvoiced announcer would intone, "And so we come to the end of another broadcasting day...

...the sale of TV sets around the country soared in the weeks before the conventions...

...Late night programming evolved slowly...

...Television was now well established as the country's dominant medium, and for better or worse a powerful force in the society, ubiquitous and intrusive, the bane of parents, the despair of intellectuals, the platform of politicians, and the darling of advertisers...

...Others, from good colleges, sought validation in the eyes of their peer groups for their vulgar careers, which, again, only the Times was empowered to endow...

...Television was competition...

...World War ? put Samoff's factories to other tasks, and called to military service the visionaries from their garages and basements...

...It seems an unlikely background for the New York Times' first television critic, perhaps the first such on any American newspaper...

...Back then commercial television also felt obliged to offer occasional cultural programs...

...As far back as the 1920s inventors and tinkerers were trying with some success to send pictures through the air without wires...

...This was the biggest effort all the news divisions had to make, and it would most affect their reputations for the next four years...

...Television's executives and programmers were in awe of Gould and danced to his tune...

...The book's stated objective is to illustrate what was important to Jack Gould and the fights he fought...

...he retired in 1972...

...the new medium was validated in the public mind...

...According to his Introduction, the late John Ludlow Gould was a scion of the "American aristocracy" whose ancestry was "in the New York upper crust...

...After-school children's time was given over to the likes of Howdy Doody and Hopalong Cassidy...

...Many newspapers carried the service...

...Given Gould's traditional favoring of CBS News, particularly his adulation of Edward R. Murrow, the review struck like a thunderbolt...

...Thus viewers could finally judge what to watch, rather than what they should have watched...

...After one of Presley's tumultuous appearances on the Ed Sullivan program, he wrote, "It must be remembered by the Columbia Broadcasting System that even the 12year-old's curiosity may be overstimulated...

...He worked in the medium for about four decades-at a network for a while, and then on his own as a syndicator, selling old movies, recycled network series and filler programs to stations around the country...

...He praised the "first real change in the network news situation in a long while...

...Next came the network news, drama and comedy, until the late local news: five minutes of reports, five of sports and five of weather, each including commercials...

...David Sarnoff, William Paley and Leonard Goldenson "should search their consciences...

...There are still those who remember a world without television, and how, when it came, it seemed something of a miracle...

...At first, they would not even print program listings...

...Some had come up through vaudeville or similar branches of show business and were hungry for respectability, which in their eyes the Times bestowed...

...Work stopped...

...Jack Gould's power stemmed from those reviews, and he quickly became, to his embarrassment, a powerful figure indeed...

...Impressed, the salesman quit the music business and got himself a job in television...

...Origins are for historians...

...And their deadlines, too, were before midnight...

...From the thousands of reviews, broader critical pieces and news stories he wrote in those years, his son has culled about 70...

...Gould's bluntness would be unthinkable from the dozens of journalists plying his trade today: "The gigantic network broadcasting industry disgraced itself...

...The top brass agreed only because they had no alternative to suggest...

...They must be as versatile as Leonardo da Vinci...

...CBS stations featured The Late Show, consisting of such minor movies as Hollywood would let television buy, edited sometimes to the point of incomprehensibility to make room for commercials...

...Almost everyone in television, therefore, always opened the paper from the back, or, as Eric Sevareid quipped, as if they were reading Yiddish...

...Besides the NBC Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Arturo Toscanini, the network had an opera company and even commissioned its own operas, most notably Gian Carlo Menotti's Amah...

...Pat Weaver, NBC's programming czar, boasted that more people saw Sleeping Beauty that Sunday than had seen it in all the performances on all the stages of all the continents in the century since it was written...

...NBC had a variety show called Broadway Open House, featuring a burlesque comedian named Jerry Lester and a woman named Dagmar, whose principal talent was the size of her bust...

...Late one winter Sunday afternoon it presented a live performance by Britain's Royal Ballet of Tchaikovsky's Sleeping Beauty, drawing an audience of 30 million...

...The networks don't have an excuse for their behavior...

...His deadline was 11:15...

...After a lot of discussion, some of it quite testy, NBC's top executives accepted the recommendations of some news department middle managers: first, that there should be two anchors, and second, that they should be Chet Huntley, who was anchoring a half-hour review program in the Nielsen desert of Sunday afternoon, and David Brinkley, a Washington reporter who did inserts for the network's primary evening newscast...

...He ended up a wealthy man...

...Since TV is not a discipline but a medium, its critics have to render opinions on all the art forms, plus news programs and documentaries and even sports coverage...

...The news department was viewed a little less as a nuisance and a little more as an asset...