On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television COSTLY COSTUMED KITSCH BY MARVIN KITMAN For no discernible reason, The Adams Chronicles ended suddenly last April 13, midway through Charles Francis Adams' career as an...
...My technique for determining the popularity of a show is admittedly not as scientific as the Nielsen's, but the Kitman Cocktail Party Index allows a more straightforward approach...
...Adams was bitchier, presumably to conform with history...
...The beautiful actress had progressed from a teen-ager to a 110-year-old person on CBS' The Diary of Jane Pittman...
...And it usually is—until it gets a show that grabs more than its usual scattering of viewers...
...We may go to war with England," explained the respondent, a top editor at McCall's magazine...
...William Daniels assumed the mantle in the eighth episode, until he died in the tenth, covering the years 1817-43...
...On Television COSTLY COSTUMED KITSCH BY MARVIN KITMAN For no discernible reason, The Adams Chronicles ended suddenly last April 13, midway through Charles Francis Adams' career as an industrialist...
...But it was not so crucial that you actually watched it...
...Rockefeller or even the Howard Hughes family—should be on the drawing boards now...
...It was said Walker couldn't play the role of an aging woman...
...For the last five years, the public television establishment had been reminding me that never before had a historical series of such scope and dimension been attempted by American TV...
...The BBC, I remember thinking seditiously, could have done this kind of thing better and at a cheaper cost to us taxpayers—if only the Atlantic Richfield Oil Company and the other disinterested patriotic organizations had brought it to us sans the intervention of our own American artistes...
...In fact, the producers created a kind of John Quincy Adams Repertory Theatre, with different actors playing the part of the baby, the little boy (age 4-6), and the older boy (7-13...
...Television, it seems to me, is not the proper medium for a dull treatment of history...
...In fact, one fellow I polled said, "Adams who...
...During the January 20 premiere, I should have felt moved to stand up and salute, but I wasn't...
...She wouldn't have made a good Abigail Adams," a WNET/13 source told me...
...Everybody in the intellectual community was reportedly tuning in to Sir Kenneth Clark's glorified art lectures...
...The eggheads in public television management should know better than to flaunt figures selectively...
...CHANGING CHARACTERS mid-page, so to speak, was to become a continually irritating problem in the Chronicles, especially among the males...
...She's not authentic...
...Live by the numbers, as commercial television has taught us, and you die by the numbers...
...Besides, the alternative medium is supposed to be above that sort of thing...
...How could a young thing who had already gained fame as Fawnie Lassiter, the eternal symbol of flaming youth, eventually grow old...
...What was the point of covering so much ground if the drama did not keep people glued to their sets...
...What is the Petroleum Broadcasting Service waiting for—the Tricentennial...
...So you can understand why I thought The Adams Fever was the most curious phenomenon in modern television history since The Civilisation Plague of 1970-1...
...Despite the gripping plot, and the vast audience claimed for the series, the majority of my interviewees were unresponsive...
...But he left after one segment, also for a higher calling: He will be Serpico on next season's NBC series of the same name...
...Without warning, the original Abigail (Kathryn Walker) gave way to a new one (Leora Dana...
...That was a minor matter, however, compared to the issue of focus...
...Nor was John Adams, or any of his de-scendents, ever the equal of Don Adams as a cultural folk hero...
...You want to be enthralled...
...Historically, an actress' love for public television is never as consuming as her love for commercial television...
...The new Mrs...
...If The Adams Chronicles did indeed cause a febrile infection, it brought the temperature of public television up to a raging 97.6o At its peak, my own research indicates, interest in the series never quite matched this nation's intense intellectual preoccupation with the original Addams Family on NBC...
...It turned out, on more in-depth questioning, he thought "Chronicles" was an old American family name, like Cronkite...
...Birney handled the role quite well...
...And this is an authentic series...
...Though it may be treasonous to say, I feel public television has an obligation to grip a larger audience than the keepers of the Adams papers in Cambridge, Massachusetts...
...And in the case of the PTV audience, known for its rather limited attention span, not locking up a cast for the run of a series is a serious blunder...
...The first Abigail reminded me of a more mature Fawnie Lassiter (Kathryn Walker's earlier role in Beacon Hill...
...According to the public television establishment, this series of 13 episodes spanning 150 years and four generations of the historic Adams clan of Massachusetts was the most widely-watched show in the educational network's history...
...Just as I got used to one Adams, he would be gone...
...Okay, but where is the next one...
...The day after the seventh chronicle, I found one man who said he had been watching the show and wanted to see how it turned out...
...A total of 150 years in 13 weeks, they kept saying exultantly about the Chronicles in press releases and advertisements...
...That smacked of sexism to me...
...a few even called the local New York City PTV station WNET/13, demanding an explanation...
...Logically, one could then ask about the numbers for their other shows...
...Much was made in the preshow hype of how Chronicles had been based on the 300,000 or more pages of papers, journals and diaries in the Adams collection at Harvard...
...The turning point may have occurred in the fourth episode, when a weird thing happened to Abigail Adams...
...In the seventh episode, featuring JQA negotiating the exciting Treaty of Ghent—never before seen on prime-time TV—he was played by David Birney...
...Yet when you asked people what they thought of the 11th episode—you remember, the one where Sir Kenneth showed the slides of his wife and car and other relies—they said, "Oh, I haven't seen that episode...
...It was stylish and kitsch, nice to have around the house...
...I go up to somebody at a cocktail party and ask whether he/she has been watching a program...
...The real reason Kathryn Walker suddenly departed, of course, had nothing to do with her incredibility as an aging Abigail...
...The story of the Adams family's first 40 years—covered in the initial three episodes—was second-rate costume drama, ranking below the tales of the French family of George Sand, the English family of Jennie or the many Russian families in War and Peace—all British hits previously seen on American public TV It was not even as interesting, in the experimental sense, as that California family, the Louds...
...The Adams Chronicles, its proponents argue, should be seen as an ambitious first step toward homegrown costume drama...
...Ultimately, this very expensive show failed because it did not engage the TV viewer...
...For the third time...
...It caused what the PTV flacks called The Adams Fever—sort of the swine virus of television...
...Instead of building a following, as an absorbing story would both at my house and on the cocktail party circuit, The Adams Chronicles soon began declining as a conversation piece...
...If it took five years to get the nerve for this project, surely another chronicle—of the Mellon...
...But Forsyte was a story taken from a set of engaging novels, not a lesson based on letters, diaries and scraps of history, and as scrupulously supervised by scholars as the average series on Russian public television must be...
...Their use of an emotionally hot word like "fever" was probably intended to give the new saga the aura of earlier public TV smashes like the British imports The Forsyte Saga and Upstairs, Downstairs...
...For some fans, this development was traumatic, the saddest night on public TV since Lady Majorie went down with the Titantic...
...What about Cicely Tyson, I found myself wondering during this dispute...
...Your trouble is that you don't want to learn anything from television,' said a WNET/13 executive who listened to all my complaints...
...I don't know how American TV viewers will manage without their regular Tuesday-night chapter in the story of one man's family...
...Literally tens of people were up in arms...
...Not only that, but her whole personality seemed to change...
...But as the commercial networks have learned, easy identification with characters is essential for making people believe in them, the fundamental first step in involving an audience...
...Last week it looked imminent...
...I first began noticing something was seriously wrong with the show in my own house...
...Nevertheless, the series was what is known in television terms as "costume drama...
...Theoretically, rank-and-file TV viewers can cope with a cast of actors playing the same character...
...But PTV officials have the Nielsen ratings to prove the success of their Bicentennial project—none of which I am going to cite, for their own good...
...I'm guilty here...
...Mostly I attend literary cocktail parties, where the elitists, the only audience served well by public television, meet to eat on the publisher's cuff (taking royalties out of starving authors' mouths, I always think guiltily...
...The Adams Chronicles could be called "coffee table television...
...Her role in Beacon Hill was beckoning...
...The producers, I suppose, hoped to duplicate the success of The Forsyte Saga—showing us several generations of a family...
...The role of John Quincy Adams as an adult was shared by several performers, too...
Vol. 59 • May 1976 • No. 11
