On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
ON TELEVISION By Marvin Kitman As Long As It Moves Summers have been occurring on television since David Sar-noff officially launched the industry at the New York World's Fair in 1939. But this...
...These included one of my nominees for an Emmy award —for the most creative use of film on a tv show—nbc's Tuesday Night at the Movies...
...Yet the re-run season, it has always seemed to me, does not have to be a summer of discontent...
...The real lesson here, however, is that amateurism improves the entertainment values of television...
...Four years later, the networks were thinking big...
...Another reliable harbinger of summer is the critic's denunciation of re-runs...
...But this year, summer seems to have set in earlier than usual...
...My working title for this new concept in summer programming is General Sarnoff's Amateur Hour...
...In keeping with the ebb and flow of the commercial seasons, Channel One's summer show premiered March 21...
...In the fortnight beginning March 15 alone, 12 network programs knocked off for the season...
...It is currently fashionable to attack the industry for cutting the regular season...
...the substance of their remarks could be summarized in the words of that great television reporter, Mel Allen: "How about that...
...Some critics don't even watch television during the summer, on the theory that the shows they disliked the first time will hardly have improved with age...
...Still, there is something to be said for the tv summer season: It keeps a lot of people off the streets at night...
...What do you need so much money for...
...The seasons really dragged then...
...It could be a time for experimentation...
...This is the same as saying there would be no value in the critics repeating their September-February reviews...
...A heavy season of costly specials makes any curtailment of production an attractive idea," Time reports...
...What we have in television today is a "mini-season...
...Rowan and Martin wisely use their limited material in 30-60-second sketches...
...I know it must sound outlandish to suggest that amateurs could equal the entertainment values of commercial tv...
...I have seen dozens of classics representing the flowering of 30 years of creativity in the medium—everything from specials, old movies and Westerns to crime, talk, variety, situation and topical comedy shows...
...Four or five hundred dollars...
...A re-run, titled The Confrontation, a one-hour documentary on the historic Army-McCarthy hearings, will be televised by abc on April 5—too late to affect the Wisconsin primary, but in plenty of time for South Dakota, Oregon and California...
...While the networks might understandably be reluctant to turn over prime time for this experiment in genuine public broadcasting—which the Ford Foundation would surely underwrite—they probably could afford an hour at two or three in the morning to test its validity...
...In the competitive projection and analysis of the New Hampshire primary this year, nbc predictably played the numbers game with percentages and key precincts...
...But at least Channel One accomplishes its limited goal: It underwhelms you with the potential of summer television...
...The plan can't fail to win an Emmy in public affairs programming...
...It wasn't a complete waste of time, for I have been able to formulate a new law on television: // it moves, the public will watch it...
...The tv repertory company, via closed circuit television, presents an hour or so of skits that fulfill everyone's fantasies about what he wants to see happen on the air...
...Mostly the show is amateurish, in terrible taste, and meaningful to its community, the East Village hippies...
...But let me call your attention to the work being done at "Channel One...
...Basically, it was due to either mechanical or human error...
...a critic could even read a review...
...As continuity acceptance director to rule on these matters, I would recommend a responsible cultural leader, perhaps Allen Ginsberg...
...It was an important factor, for example, in the success of the first truly satirical network television show, nbc's The Rowan & Martin Laugh-in...
...Whatever the programs' shortcomings as art, they are unquestionably more cheerful to watch than the spectacle of our cities going up in smoke...
...Whatever good has come out of the 1967-68 season is due to thinking small...
...Instead of the old-fashioned full coverage of the Democratic and Republican Presidential conventions, abc will present late-night wrap-ups...
...I'm trying to buy a juke box...
...In Studio 8-H (which nbc built for Toscanini) $3 million worth of electronic data processing equipment, the largest assemblage of computers ever installed in one room, was engaged in spoiling the fun of waiting up for the late election returns...
...It will also interrupt re-runs with bulletins about important developments...
...The Jackie Gleason Show went to re-runs on February 17...
...The cameras cut to the human brains at nbc only now and then, to ask what they thought of this or that development...
...Programmers might have underestimated the way Irish people in New Hampshire mill towns respect their ethnic background, or just how many Democrats and Republicans like McCarthy because he was strong on Communism...
...What I enjoyed most was the computers finally losing an election to the people...
...a housewife could give her secret recipe for breaking an egg...
...1 saw it happen on nbc, but from other sources I learned it was a bad night for political machines in general...
...Well, I remember the old days when the television summer began in June?but not fondly...
...Personally, I think the machines lost in New Hampshire because of over-confidence...
...A reporter from the Channel One news department, for example, conducted an interview with a man (it might have been a woman) on an East Village street: "Do you have any loose change...
...It is re-run on Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights...
...This Was the Week That Was failed, as did other experiments in tv satire, because it stretched out limited material to full-length sketches...
...No, to live in, baby...
...If it is true that the public will watch anything that moves, and that the public really owns the ultra-high frequency waves, would it not be possible for one of the three networks to turn over a block of summer time to the public...
...an armchair general could analyze the news from Vietnam...
...A playwright could present a one-act play...
...The following morning I at last had the thrill of explaining the significance of the downstate farm vote to my son...
...a "year" for a typical series these days lasts 26 weeks...
...To listen to music...
...How much do you need...
...I refer to the television reports on the New Hampshire Presidential primary, March 12...
...What i have in mind is an experimental amateur tv show, a place where anyone who thinks he has talent can get 15 minutes or so to do his thing...
...For instance, one might view summer programming as a retrospective, a kind of festival of what the industry considers the best shows produced in the heyday of tv—that golden age of three or four months ago...
...At that pace, a high percentage of their one-joke routines work...
...I had been waiting for something like this night ever since the machines began ruining tv coverage of elections in 1960...
...Then they were just a novelty, a gimmick...
...Some of the credit for this promising development, though, should go to the emergence of small minds in the networks...
...But the machine forgot to tell us that President Johnson would get only 230 votes more than Senator McCarthy...
...The only restraints on the performers would be the stipulation that material be neither pornographic or seditious...
...This is an approach developed by the American Broadcasting Company to prove it didn't need a merger with it&t to come up with innovations in modern communications...
...I wouldn't recommend it any more highly than any of the other re-runs on this summer's schedule...
...This is an experiment in underground television conducted in a mini-theater on East 4th Street in New York...
...This is neither the time nor place to go into the complex reason of why the machines booted an election...
...For days after the primary, I pondered how unprofessionalism might do for commercial television what the Public Broadcasting Laboratory has done for educational television...
...Later on this summer, we shall be seeing the first mini-political conventions...
...A machine down on Wall Street," an nbc executive once explained, "that we cut to now and then...
...At other times the stuff Channel One sends out to its audience, grouped around three tv sets in the theater, reminds me of Allen's Alley...
...Along with millions of other people, I have been watching this exhibition for several weeks now...
...asked the interviewee...
...Most observers explain this in financial terms...
...One of the few pleasantly surprising things to occur on television this past season took place during a test run of mini-political coverage ever all three networks...
Vol. 51 • April 1968 • No. 8
