On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television THE THING ABOUT 'CALUCCI' BY MARVIN KITMAN Now here's the thing about Calucci's Dept. Forget that business about the show dying because it was too sophisticated, and went over the...
...TV viewers don't like to see obesity every week...
...they just don't like to be entertained by them...
...It was the first artistically successful comedy show in years to be written by foreigners (i.e., people outside the Hollywood establishment responsible for grinding out all the programs that have given sitcom its good name...
...Dirty Sally gives the other side of the Nabokov story, where an older woman (a Ms...
...Tammy Grimes . . . Julie Harris . . . Bobby Morse . . . Robert Loggia . . . They were from the Broadway stage and they all failed on TV...
...It had a Broadway star (Jimmy Coco) and therefore it never had a chance from the beginning (September 14 on CBS...
...Besides, many Italian-Americans resent its cancellation...
...It was uneven...
...He was hot on Broadway when NBC gave him his own series, T.H.E Cat, a program that turned out to have less lives than M.O.R.R.I.S...
...Her voice screeches like a nail on glass...
...And on that show, they never even had a regular Italian-American government agent...
...William Conrad isn't fat...
...And he has an exceptionally large bone structure...
...Everyone can watch this half-hour "Family Western series," as CBS calls it...
...People couldn't relate to a series about the civil service bureaucracy and red tape...
...She nursed him and she cursed him...
...Sanford & Son, NBC's offering in that time slot (Friday nights at 8 p.m...
...Those campaigns are a joke anyway...
...Nolan brings to the role a few personal touches that no director would have dreamed of, such as playing it without her false teeth...
...tells a person who has waited in line for 15 minutes...
...He's a terrible actor, but is he built...
...It makes them want to do something really interesting, like the Viva demonstration test...
...Somebody at CBS must have a terrible grandmother complex-a real hatred of old women-to have dug up that Gunsmoke episode and turned it into a whole series...
...The woman is played by Jeanette Nolan...
...Women viewers enjoy wondering what Banacek is like when he takes his clothes off...
...CBS needed a replacement in a hurry for a New York disaster, and so it brought in another California classic, a spin-off of Gunsmoke...
...Now here's the thing about Robert Loggia...
...That's the kind of stuff that belongs in the American Journal of Sociology, or a Brookings Institution report, not on a TV situation comedy...
...The sexy young 'un is played by Dack Rambo, the season's first serious rival to John Davidson of The Girl with Something Extra-at least in the dimple department...
...It should have been saved anyway...
...It was the only series produced in New York, and Hollywood didn't want it to succeed because then the city might start getting back other television productions...
...Look at George Peppard in Banacek...
...Now here's the thing about Dirty Sally...
...It ranked 62nd out of 62 in the Nielsen ratings...
...And together they hit the trail for Californy...
...Now here's the thing about Fred Silverman, the CBS genius who is responsible for these decisions...
...As a spokesman for Tuborg Beer...
...Humbert Humbert) travels across the country with a mere boy...
...She chews tobacco like a ballplayer-and spits more often than the entire Oakland Athletics team did during the last World Series...
...Its subject matter was all wrong, too...
...Those fireside chats followed by blackouts and fadeouts are very suggestive, and God knows what they are doing during the commercial breaks...
...The only real success story they have had on TV in the last few years is The Untouchables...
...It was the start of something new, the avant-garde invasion from New York...
...TV audiences will accept stage actors as beer spokesmen...
...It was sabotaged by the Hollywood film industry...
...Some people...
...He was the son she never had...
...It's not avant-garde programing -It's more like the National Guard, the kind of show the network always calls up whenever there's an emergency...
...you knew you had never seen a series like this before...
...however, may be reminded of another family drama: Lolita...
...instead of 9:30 p.m...
...The fact is the network bigwigs can salvage anything they want...
...You're going to be human beings-and if you don't know how, FAKE IT...
...The show failed because Joe Calucci was too fat...
...He is nowhere as good an actor as Coco...
...Now here's the thing about Jimmy Coco...
...A lot of adults weren't allowed to watch it because it conflicted with The Brady Bunch, a children's favorite on ABC...
...That's the official excuse they always give at the networks when a great series is canceled...
...In any event, that the network can select such a wide range of programing for the same time period in the same season is of some interest...
...Dirty Sally Fergus, the product of Hollywood minds, was a character in a 1971 Matt Dillon two-parter...
...She was quite a fiesty old gal, this Dirty Sally, had a heart that made it hard to be mean and orn'ry...
...And together they hit the trail for Californy...
...also didn't help Calucci's ratings very much...
...It wasn't based on an idea imported from England...
...on January 11...
...But today Loggia's a television star...
...While it was the most interesting new comedy to come along in two years, and the first promising TV effort of Renee Taylor and Joseph Bologna, it sometimes promised more than it delivered...
...It's his job...
...We know better...
...But there were bad nights when Joe Calucci should have taken whatever sick leave he had accumulated...
...It's a safe show, a turn away from TV's new permissiveness and creativity...
...Calucci ahead of its time...
...Now here's the thing about Dirty Sally and Calucci's Dept...
...It has something to do with the East Coast's snobbery or the high prices on Broadway...
...There are many unexplained gaps in the relationship between Sally and her "friend...
...the Cat...
...Now here's the thing about Dirty Sally...
...Middle America doesn't know from the civil service mentality either...
...The rest of the country somehow manages to survive without hassles and bungling...
...Now here's the thing about Cannon...
...in the same way M*A*S*H was saved: by putting it between A11 in the Family and Mary Tyler Moore on Saturday nights...
...Now here's the thing about Dirty Sally, the new series that replaced Calucci's Dept...
...If one goes by the lyrics of its theme song, the series sounds like a solid, conservative, old-fashioned show from television's past-a program somewhere between The Beverly Hillbillies and The Glass Menagerie...
...Forget that business about the show dying because it was too sophisticated, and went over the heads of viewers' heads...
...I've got seniority and asthma...
...What do the kids know about unemployment offices and the starving Armenians in Europe...
...Running a minority program only means earning a little less money from commercials, a loss that qualifies a network as a patron of the arts...
...Is it hot enough for you...
...Everybody would have waited 30 extra minutes for her, and in the meantime Joe Calucci would have become a folk hero...
...So Mary would have started at 10 p.m...
...It's not my job to give you the envelope," a member of Calucci's Dept...
...The old woman found a young outlaw wounded in the valley...
...In another episode, Calucci tells his staff: "You're going to care about people...
...Yes, but only by 10 minutes...
...And she taught him right from wrong...
...Even George C. Scott couldn't make it (East Side I West Side), because he was a great actor...
...As soon as Joe Calucci started his day in the first episode by asking the plant in his office, "How's it going, cactus...
...They want to see something they admire...
...But he's in better shape...
...CBS could have started a campaign to rescue it, as they did for that wasp show The Waltons...
...The nation's entire supply of red tape is stockpiled in a government warehouse in Long Island City, and daily allotments are trucked each morning to state unemployment offices around the New York City area...
...There was a rumor, incidentally, that in his last hours as New York's governor, Rockefeller was going to offer Coco the job of heading the state unemployment office, renaming it "The State Unemployment Caluc-ci Dept...
...Nobody is excited by the thought of Calucci with his clothes off...
...And you can't just shut your eyes to enjoy Dirty Sally...
...She was a grandma to this lad...
...But nothing came of this, and at the moment Jimmy Coco is back on the line with a lot of other actors...
...In commercials...
...Outside of New York City, bureaucracies don't have any red tape...
...He will make it big on the tube some day...
...Look at Rock Hudson's success in McMillan & Wife...
...For instance, CBS could have saved Calucci's Dept...
...Now here's the tiling about Calucci's Dept...
...She is the most disgusting, physically repulsive female I have ever seen on television, a filthy old hag who never uses any of the products in the advertisements...
...He should leave his brain to science so that future historians can find out what makes the mind of a vice president in charge of programing tick...
...He's all muscle...
...The series had what it takes to be a hit eventually...
Vol. 57 • February 1974 • No. 3
