On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television THE YEAR OF THE RAT AND THE NOVEL BY MARVIN KITMAN The biggest trend in television this fall will undoubtedly be the cancellation of the new shows that were advertised throughout...
...We can go right into the show...
...The word from the Coast, as they say in our business, was that the five episodes in the can, as they also say in our business, were truly the best things NBC had...
...A lot of people already tell stories like that today...
...I guess the network executives finally looked at one episode...
...Will it do away with the monologue, which has been an intrinsic part of the novel since 1740 when Samuel Richardson wrote his four-volume Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (the first miniseries...
...A TV writer friend, Max J. Friedman, was expecting such good things from Snip that he had begun to work on spinoffs, including Blow Dry, Set, Curl, and Just Trim the Sideburns, Please...
...Will characters now think to themselves only in dialogue...
...At the time I wondered whether the discovery that good stories are to be found in novels was made by one person, poking through the dusty stacks of the Beverly Hills Public Library, or by a committee sitting around a swimming pool...
...Then with its Novels for Television series, ABC rushed headlong into the vacuum created by the medium's historic aversion to literature, buying up the rights to such other modern classics as James Michener's Hawaii, John Dos Passos' USA and Alex Haley's Roots...
...In the early '50s, nobody in television research thought we could watch an hour of one thing, unless it was variety...
...When it came to drama, viewers were credited the attention span of a child (30 minutes...
...The industry's current infatuation with the printed word is usually credited to Frederick Pierce, president of ABC television, who explained in May 1975...
...He said...
...Even so, I wish NBC would have let me skim Gibbsvitte for a week or two before casting it aside...
...That Gibbsville got on the schedule in the first place is perhaps a bigger story than how fast it got the ax...
...But further research revealed that the idea had come to be fully appreciated after the stunning ratings achieved by Leon Uris' masterpiece, QB VII, broadcast in April 1974...
...Still, I was taken aback at how fast one of the networks canceled its first shows...
...And then I said...
...Rummaging through the credits the network publicity department sends out to whet appetites, I noticed that CBS refers to Executive Suite as being a spinoff from the movie of the same name, rather than the original novel...
...The novel is a natural source of material for television, which could make for superior programming...
...ABC is also bringing us a Shaw work, the continuation of Rich Man, Poor Man, this season joshingly dubbed, "Book II" (Tuesday, 9 p.m...
...What I am concerned about now is the fate of the novel after the first ratings come in...
...The other networks soon followed ABC's lead...
...They say the show really captured all the excitement and chaos of a modern-day beauty shop, partially observed already in a mini-sitcom about a manicurist (Madge...
...Once an Eagle by Anton Myrer...
...But I am old-fashioned in such matters...
...Now the inclination is to follow a principle of modern dentistry, the old pull-the-tooth theory: If it's painful, get it out fast...
...Their treatment of an untried piece of literature reminds me of the publishing houses who send their copies of first novels directly to the remainder stores, eliminating completely the middlemen (the potential book buyers...
...QB VII, Rich Man, Poor Man?they all seemed to wind up looking like made-for-TV movies, a form more antinovel than novel...
...This network, you may remember, once coined the word "speotacular...
...Since then, there has been a steady decline in NBC's gift for calling a spade something else, as you can see from this season's attempt to choose an appropriate title for a really big, big show: The Big Event (Sunday, 9:30 p.m...
...My own enthusiasm for the literature project, however, was tempered by what happened during the process of translating the novels to the screen...
...In the context of this history, ABC's decision to televise a book like Rich Man, Poor Man in a 12-hour format was a courageous, speedy act, one that every critic and literate member of the audience should cheer...
...Back in 1975 the network was buying books like an English Lit major turned loose in Brentano's with his parents' credit card...
...They could just go directly to the story board...
...I'll leave it to the fiction writers to protect the integrity of their craft in the face of hundreds of thousands of dollars in rights acquisitions and millions of paperback sales generated by TV for even washed-up, has-been and never-was novels like Rich Man...
...Two months ago, when I stumbled on the trend—a hazard in TV criticism...
...And will avant-garde novelists bother writing books in the first place...
...Apparently 1976 is the year of the novel on TV, in addition to being (in the eyes of the quickly canceled producers) the year of the rat...
...In the old days they used to wait 26 weeks to cancel a series...
...Abc's venture in the world of literature represented a major break away from the industry's traditional thinking about its audience's mentality...
...NBC—fighting hard to overtake ABC for last place in the annual ratings race—dropped two of "AH the Best" even before premiere week opened on September 20: Snip and Gibbsvitte...
...Any day I expected to hear that a network had acquired the rights to Beowulf...
...Why let the patients suffer for 26 weeks or 26 minutes...
...After a brief pause (for commercials), the tube would fill up again with the second act from an I Love Lucy, a perennial favorite...
...On Television THE YEAR OF THE RAT AND THE NOVEL BY MARVIN KITMAN The biggest trend in television this fall will undoubtedly be the cancellation of the new shows that were advertised throughout the summer as "All the Best" (NBC), "The Hot Ones" (CBS) and "Fly the Friendly Skies of ABC...
...When the producers started doing 60-minute dramas they decided the audience needed prestigious cultural figures like Loretta Young, Ronald Reagan or Dick Powell to serve as hosts...
...NBC spared no expense in acquiring novels in the public domain: The Prisoner of Zenda, Les Miserables, The Adventures of the Scarlet Pimpernel, The Corsican Brothers...
...The complete story was supposed to have been broadcast last spring, but when the ratings soared the network decided to keep on telling it...
...and Evening in Byzantium by Irwin Shaw...
...CBS has on its schedule Cameron Hawley's Executive Suite (Monday, 10 p.m...
...Then, suddenly, the series was killed...
...It was like when Don Ameche invented the telephone and thought people would only want to talk on it for three minutes...
...The Dark Ages will be a time of enlightenment compared to what TV's next 20 years will be like if the novel fails its test...
...The uniqueness, such as it is, of the original author, is lost in the homogenizing TV-committee system of creation...
...No anthology of The World's Great TV Executives' Sayings would be complete without that observation...
...The series seemed to have everything ?styling, travel and the romance of hair-dressing...
...Such is television's love of literature...
...If I am going to spend 12 hours steeping myself in, say, Irwin Shaw, I am more interested in hearing his words than those of Dean Reisner, who wrote the screenplay along with a team of uncredited associates...
...The fall schedule reads like the paperback rack in an airport drugstore...
...It was supposed to star David Brenner playing Warren Beatty in TV's first sitcom about the life of a hairdresser from Philadelphia who chases a beauty-salon operator (female) to Cape Cod...
...It's a good idea...
...Technically speaking, the shows were only "delayed," a euphemism for canceled that is not up to NBC's formerly high standards in euphemistry...
...a kind of Golden-Little-Books presentation of great lit'ry works, including The Captains and the Kings by Taylor Caldwell...
...The network executives, who usually come from the world of sales, sit down with the TV writers and hammer out an artistic consensus...
...Somehow that last one always makes me feel like I am mixing it up with the slogan of another user of the public's airwaves...
...Besides Gibbsville, NBC had —as of this writing—a series called Best Setters (Thursday, 9 p.m...
...The "delay" of Gibbsvitte was a little more difficult to understand...
...The second breakthrough in the drama field occurred when somebody said, Why do we need a host...
...Company chairman Pat Weaver's term of the 1950s was later downgraded to "special," and through overuse came to mean "ordinary...
...I only hope viewers have an insatiable appetite for the new shows...
...In any case, the outbreak of great literature this fall raises a number of questions: Will TV ruin the novel as an art form, the way it ruined the movie...
...But why worry about these things...
...It took only 30 years to figure this out...
...It always seemed amazing to me that the television moguls had such a fixed idea about the length of time we could be involved in a story...
...first our eyes go, then our brains—the talk was that the networks would cancel shows while the first episodes were still on the air...
...The Rhinemann Exchange by Robert Ludlum...
...Of all the big events on the network's fall schedule, Snip was the one I most eagerly anticipated...
...Should one or two of the best sellers get a disappointing sales report, fine literature will be blamed, not the industry executives who glutted the schedule with novels...
...Based on the John O'Hara novel, the series was probably too highbrow for TV...
...Twelve minutes into a sitcom, according to this industry scuttle-but, the screen in your living room might suddenly become a blank...
Vol. 59 • October 1971 • No. 20
