Media

...FRANK McCONNELL 326: Commonweal...

...The Take the Money and Go---Please award: To Roseanne Barr, who was never that funny in the first place, and who set a kind of world record in taking her Andy-Warhol fifteen minutes of fame and using it to maximum disadvantage...

...GERALD WEALES MEDIA THE FIRST "MURRAY AWARDS" WINNERS & LOSERS t's spring...

...The Maybe Lincoln Was Wrong award: To virtually everyone connected with reporting the Gulf Massacre, sheep led by hawks and fleecing their herds of viewers, fooling a helluva lot of the people for what seems to be a helluva long time...

...In years to come, I would hope that Commonweal's readers would feel free to send me, care of the magazine, their own nominations--with the understanding that they may or may I 17May 1991:325 not have an effect on the final tally...

...dumb--and "Cop Rock"--really, truly, seriously dumb...

...or "Freddies," after Freddie Silverman, the wunderkind programmer of the seventies and eighties who made the whole industry infantile...

...It is the most truly and breathtakingly moral act I have seen in many a moon...

...The Good as Bochco at His Dazzling Best award: To "Law and Order," which regularly produces cop stories any detective writer would kill to invent, which includes the best courtroom drama this side of"L.A...

...As for the cameraman, I figure...well never mind...

...As she sits on the bed beside her boyfriend/roommate, an out-of-work juicer, talking about it all, she breaks down...

...There are several vigorous and very similar talk-songs for the Engineer, and at least two big musical numbers, one of them replete with dance acrobats...

...if you've got a hundred bucks, go check it out for yourself...

...award: To Stephen Bochco, who followed up "Hill Street Blues" and "L.A...

...The (probably) annual What the Hell Does Stephen Bochco Think He's Doing...

...In line with my imagination, and Uncle Murray's personality, here are, in no special order and with no attempt at fairness, the Very First Murray Awards ever, for 1990-91...

...Spring, most archaic societies would agree, is the real new year, the beginning of new life--as Easter and Passover denote--and the time to look forward to new and richer life and take stock of the old one we have just come through...

...I thought of"Vladimirs," after Vladimir Zworykin, the man who invented the cathode ray tube and made the whole industry possible...

...If you don't think that little guy is going to get free booze in Heaven for that, and maybe hang out with the other little guy who halted the tanks in Tiananmen Square, then you pray to Somebody Else from me...

...The You're a Genius, But Don't Pay Any Attention to It award: To Jeff Smith, PBS's "Frugal Gourmet," who week after week reminds us that the preparation of food is a sacramental act, who does it with deep and contagious love for the world's cultures whose food he prepares, and who does it with more real spontaneity and wit than Arsenio, Jay, and Johnny all together on their best day in the week...

...This is addictive, but there are space constraints...

...But what shall we call them...

...Those, anyway, are the Murrays for '90-91...

...The Never for God's Sake Listen to People Who Tell You You're a Genius award: To David Lynch, one of our most important directors, for letting "Twin Peaks" degenerate from maybe the most challenging thing ever on network TV into a cutesypoo, and now essentially defunct, exercise in camera-winks for the Saturday (now Thursday) night Chablis and Brie set...

...This award actually is a kind of subaward to the one given David Lynch for screwing up "Twin Peaks," but since Bochco isn't as much a genius as Lynch, we--I--thought he deserved special mention...

...Because those folks know that January 1 is an elegant fiction foisted upon the overChristmassed, still-hungover consumer market, and that spring is the time when it really all begins again...

...There are occasional strains throughout that suggest that this is a musical about the East, but the score is as relentlessly Western if not as inventive as Madame Butterfly...

...does any ritual more clearly demarcate the transition from the old to the new...

...So, in the spirit of the season, I ' d like to announce the first annual springtime awards for the best and worst, silliest and most creative uses of TV...

...The Take the Money and Goy award: To Jackie Mason, a very funny guy--that's guy with a "u"--for struggling--what a mensch--to stay afloat in "Chicken Soup," a series that, the only reason you would watch it, is it had Mason, and so why--I'm asking you, why--did the meshuggahs at the network try to make it Abie's Irish Rose or--feh?--Bridget and Bernie...

...For this year's awards, the polling process was easy: I was the nominating committee, the counter of the votes, and the donor of the awards...

...So they are the Murray awards, named after my uncle who first, in 1948, rented a gigantic-console, five-inch screen TV for our house to watch the Kentucky high-school basketball finals, and changed my life forever...

...The air feels fresher, the birds sing more obnoxiously, the cattle on the hill behind my house are regarding one another with more than bovine interest, and---oh yeah--the TV season is grinding to a close...

...We all love awards and we all love lists, and there's a certain solemnity in giving them, a certain humanity even in saying, formally: "We have taken note of what you do--and it stinks...

...The Grammys, Emmys, and Oscars all cluster liturgically around this time of year: and why...

...This man has not been served well by television...

...For me, Miss Saigon was a miss in more ways than one, but do not take my word for it...

...The camera obligingly shuts down--only, seconds later, to switch on, literally behind the guy's back, as he hugs and comforts the girl...

...The interesting thing about doing this, I'm surprised to say, is learning not just how central is the Tube to my (our...

...As I said, I'd love to get submissions for next May's crop...

...And, coincidentally, The John Williams of the Small Screen award: To Mike Post, who seems to have written the best theme music for every show from the haunting "Hill Street Blues" to "Quantum Leap" and beyond, by understanding that the small screen needs "small" themes--no Wagnerian freak-outs, but just a piano with string accompaniment, say, meditating on a few plangent chords: less is more, and more than enough...

...The entertainment industry agrees with this mythic view of things...

...or "Glass Teats," after the brilliant Harlan Ellison's term for the Tube in his own TV criticism...

...Law" with "Doogie Howser, M.D...

...Even in Southern California, where the passage of the seasons is about as dramatic as temperature gradations in a Holiday Inn lobby, it feels like spring...

...I left the theater not humming, but muttering, "you are the sunshine, I am the moon," one of Kim's musical statements on the nature of their love, although I cannot understand why she could not have been the sunshine just as easily and be the moon...

...But Zworykin deserves more respect, Silverman is too much a paradox, and Harlan would be ticked off at me, and I like him...

...perception of the "real world," but how much its frequent best and its frequent worst resonate with, tease, and encourage, our moral sense...

...Law," and which really should be two hours, not one (this from my wife, Celeste--the only externalr meddling in this year's Murrays...

...That I was baffled on this point (despite a liberal education which taught me that Renaissance poets loved the moon as woman--monthly changes and all that) probably explains why I found much of the show repetitious and a little foolish...

...And the winner is...

...On "The Best Hotel on Skid Row," an installment of HBO's sleaze-umentary "America Undercover" series, the crew is interviewing a junkie prostitute who can't get a job, wants out of The Life, and can't get into a methadone program...

...And the guy turns to the camera and says, "Could you turn that thing offfor a minute, please...

...And finally, The Diogenes award...

...The Take the Money and Gloat award: To everybody connected with PBS's "Civil War" series, for getting monster ratings and a Newsweek cover out of a show that, using archaic film techniques and hyperventilating voice-over, conveyed to a stunned America the breathless message, "Gee--ain't war awful...