The Ddreyfuss affair
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television THE DREYFUSS AFFAIR BY MARVIN KITMAN Robert Dreyfuss has picked up his last bass fiddle. Never more will he say "excuse me" on Saturday nights when he bumps into an inanimate...
...He wasn't even married...
...Were they saying, in effect, "Well, young Robert, this may be hard to break to you, due to your being sensitive and insecure...
...It was something I knew I could trust...
...Then they tuned in again at 9 P.M...
...But the Robert Dreyfuss case is still open...
...But why couldn't we change those rules...
...The show's death could retard the cause of symphony orchestras as settings for TV comedies by a hundred years...
...What gave everyone the energy to get up and change the dial this time...
...Was the public acting out some kind of television-induced mishagas...
...I first became interested in music when I was six months old...
...Even Mary Tyler Moore had crooked seams her opening season...
...Ma-a-ybe...
...He was cute, wistful and funny, with a wide assortment of friends and lovers, and parents who had financial problems...
...Does Ted...
...What does Tony Orlando have that Dreyfuss did not have--except a mustache...
...Perhaps viewers were not interested in the Boston Symphony...
...Would the show be alive today if Robert Dreyfuss had sported a wrinkled raincoat a la Columbo...
...Robert Dreyfuss made them jealous...
...I re-e-ally have to know...
...A great deal depends on finding the answer...
...Sierra on NBC--the first unintentional situation comedy about National Park rangers--failed because the action kept getting in the way of the scenery...
...What was it about this series that offended people...
...Two members of a committee called "Friends and Lovers in Mourning for Robert Dreyfuss," Betty Cruet and Marlene Weisman, have written a new introduction for the show: "Hullo, my name is Robert Dreyfuss...
...My parents referred to this as the time I finally left home...
...Nakia on ABC was the classic story of the wooden Indian (DOA...
...I got a violin for my sixth birthday and promptly began taking music lessons...
...The success of Robert Dreyfuss, on the other hand, would have been the start of something bad...
...I asked with my usual naivete...
...It bothers them to see a person working at a creative job, no wife and kids to worry about, and an endless supply of girl friends in a little black book...
...Or was a show about a symphony orchestra, any symphony orchestra, simply too heavy for TV...
...Surely it was one of the larger tragedies in the annals of premature TV deaths...
...He re-e-ally violated all the rules, dear Robert...
...But we want to prove conclusively that a half-decent program can indeed fail, sandwiched between CBS' big guns on Saturday night...
...It has long been a maxim that television audiences are so apathetic they will watch anything that moves after All in the Family--except, of course, Bridget Loves Bernie (whose demise was only a mercy killing...
...No longer will our ears be caressed by the sound of his "re-e-allys" and "ma-a-ybes.' He has come to the end of the line at that big unemployment office in the sky, officially known as Calucci's Dept...
...No new show is perfect...
...Antibussing activists in Boston reportedly were upset about the musician with the bass boarding a bus at the beginning of each episode...
...As a concerned viewer and a professional critic, working out of the Showicide Bureau, I have spent much time the past few weeks trying to get to the bottom of this senseless killing...
...Upon turning 29, I joined the Philharmonic Orchestra in Denver, where it's cold, figuring I could warm up a few girls (but that's another story...
...Does Rhoda cheat on Joe...
...The infant mortality rate in television this past season was exceptionally high...
...He's back!' Boston, this is your last chance...
...Would Dreyfuss have succeeded if he had been lucky enough to find a post with the Philadelphia Orchestra...
...By the time I was seven, my father thought I should be getting into bigger and better things...
...My own theory about the new Dreyfuss case is simpler...
...Did viewers really prefer to see the heartwarming paramedics of NBC's Emergency rescuing people off the tops of burning buildings, an attraction that could be enjoyed at 6:00 and 11:00 every day on the local news...
...the source gasped...
...The facts so far are these: The first few episodes were not exactly comedy classics...
...Possibly the viewers were bothered by the fact that a classical musician wore patched-up Levis...
...Robert Dreyfuss was the central character in CBS' Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers, the first situation comedy about the sex life of a classical musician...
...Comical Germans on TV are always supposed to be outsmarted, as in Hogan's Heroes...
...Meyer-bach was a shrewd individual who supplemented his pittance from the Boston Symphony by betting on professional football games...
...Frequently, though, the causes of death were clear...
...So he went out and bought me a bass fiddle...
...Yet despite its off-moments, in the context of situation comedy Friends and Lovers was bright, intelligent and amusing--worthy of inclusion in the CBS Saturday night schedule, the super-bowl of TV comedy...
...My mother used to hum Beethoven's Ninth Symphony while rocking me to sleep...
...Even if Dreyfuss did play a bar or two of Mozart, the program should have been kept on the air under the equal time provisions of Section 315 of the Federal Communications Act...
...Well, I wound up here in Massachusetts, where I'm now a member of the Boston Symphony...
...Never more will he say "excuse me" on Saturday nights when he bumps into an inanimate object...
...Serious music lovers who also watch television have been known to bear grudges against particular orchestras dating back to the way they first did Mahler's Fourth...
...Robert Dreyfuss was the first male sit-com hero of the Jewish persuasion, as they say on TV The audience can tolerate Rhoda Morgenstern because deep down they knew Valeric Harper isn't really Jewish...
...Does Mary Richards hang around shady bars...
...All this broke the laws of TV," a reliably informed network source explained...
...There is widespread agreement that a number of mistakes were made in the presentation, one in particular being that the show's opening did not offer a proper biographical sketch of the main character...
...Was turning him off the pub-He's way of expressing its disapproval of the school situation in Boston...
...Conceivably it was the show's other characters...
...J'accuse me for bringing it up, but this Dreyfuss business is a clear case of latent and overt anti-Semitism, the two worst kinds...
...He didn't have a sickening TV wife or a family of sickening TV children...
...His father was investing in a sailboat concession on one of those man-made lakes in the Southwest when the end came...
...My favorite musicians were the Chipmunks, but I discovered they were phonies after the batteries in my record player wore down...
...That was when I first turned to classical music...
...I was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts...
...I'm a college graduate...
...for Mary Tyler Moore...
...Change those rules...
...He didn't solve any crimes or rescue cats from burning buildings...
...It comes from losing lots of wars...
...He was just a young, single musician dealing with the little annoyances of life...
...Was it a question of personality...
...People get upset spending half an hour with someone normal but happy...
...Its death was mourned by a mere handful of viewers, possibly no more than about 18 million, the last Nielsen ratings indicate...
...Should he have shaved and polished his head like Kojak...
...And Rhoda didn't marry a nice Jewish fellow, even though there are so many of them on the West Side...
...It couldn't be music per se that people rejected...
...That would have helped a little...
...One theory advanced is that Robert Dreyfuss was so much like the people who watch television that he reminded them of their own reality...
...My sister-in-law referred to this as 'Oh, no...
...His hair appeared to be combed with a bass fiddle bow or with a garden rake...
...The obituaries from the networks were published before I had a chance to review some of the deceased...
...It may be among the few mysteries that will never be solved in a medium where everything gets solved--from bad breath to murder to the causes of inflation--in as little as 30 seconds or as much as 60 minutes...
...But hostility toward the show probably went beyond the opening credits...
...We Wiennese have developed charm into a national asset," Meyer-bach explained one night in the orchestra locker room...
...Only he'd have looked more like Harpo Marx than Peter Falk...
...Born last September 15, it died on January 14, at 15 episodes of age...
...TV viewers have heard more music on All in the Family, featuring Edith and Archie's rendition of "Those Were the Days,' than in all of Friends and Lovers...
...We have the fall-season Nielsen charts, submitted by CBS, as Exhibit N. Just for the record, however, I know some viewers who used to skip All in the Family and wait for Friends and Lovers before joining the mass demonstration of love for Mary Tyler Moore...
...One of the best of them, Fred Meyerbach, had a German accent, although he passed himself off as an Austrian...
...The death of Robert Dreyfuss was not accidental...
...On or about the week of September 15, people started purposely turning off Friends and Lovers at 8:30 P.M., after watching All in the Family...
Vol. 58 • February 1975 • No. 4
