On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television NOVEL SOAP OPERA BY MARVIN KITMAN I was hostile to the hit series based on Irwin Shaw's literary classic Rich Man, Poor Man when it began on ABC February 1. The format was annoying:...
...Rich Man, Poor Man—like Upstairs, Downstairs or Beacon Hill?was a soap opera...
...It is the bag that the poverty-stricken (creatively) networks bad put over our heads and were slowly pulling shut, until Rich Man's success...
...I would feel more ebullient about the triumph of "Novels for Television" concept if it weren't for some dark rumors...
...She regularly weeps by the time 13 minutes of Medical Center have elapsed...
...Fred Silverman, who became the cultural hero of the day for the success of Rich Man, realized his competitor's mistake: It was ridiculous to expect that TV viewers would stay home four nights in a row for anything, unless they were unemployed or on their death beds...
...The Untouchables and other similar high-minded shows...
...From all reports, I suspect my state of New Jersey was closer to being washed out to sea the Monday night of the stunning climax than at any time since the hurricane of 1936...
...Instead of resting on their laurels, the programmers are apparently already planning a series based on Rich Man, Poor Man...
...That the same network should now be cast as the leading electronic lover of fine books struck me as particularly ironic because it was NBC that initially recognized a great truth about novels: Good stories are to be found in them...
...If I am to spend 12 hours steeping myself in the work of Irwin Shaw...
...But nothing is for nothing in this world, and I felt back in February that the price we would be paying for TV's supposedly free Shaw novel would be high...
...My advice to the network is: Let Scheherazade be the guiding light of the future, not Steve Austin or Starsky and Hutch...
...With all its flaws, this really is a promising development for the medium...
...We would think we were getting an easy education by watching this movie and the rest of "ABC Novels for Television...
...For the first few weeks a moving linger (the equivalent of lips) could be used to help viewers follow the plot...
...The one difference was that where the earlier show had only been a half-hour long "continuing story," the network touts promised the new saga would be something more—an "event" they called it...
...For example, plenty of sex...
...So Silverman scheduled his extravaganza once a week (on Mondays...
...A woman I know who works for a leading public TV network (its initials are PBS) sheds tears just hearing the theme music of Brian's Song...
...Well, the continuing event turned out to be trash...
...And like the good ones, it was, as they say in the business, "well mounted.' The central characters were played by unknowns: Peter Strauss as the rich man, Senator Rudy Jordache...
...How quickly they forget...
...Yet the segments weren't as dirty or violent as the warnings indicated...
...But good trash, which is not the same as bad trash...
...Yet even the low-scale criers like myself sniffled and felt a deep sense of loss at the death of poor Tom Jordache, the misunderstood boxer...
...Rich Man, Poor Man was "broadcasting" in the truest sense...
...school of programming...
...People react in various ways to television shows...
...There is little doubt that Rich Man, Poor Man will be nominated for television awards in virtually every category, except "Outstanding Soap Opera.' Not that this is any criteria for enjoyment, or good trash...
...Print movies," as this technique could be called, would be something unique on TV for a change...
...This act of genius inspired the movement I currently lead to carve a bust of Silverman on TV's Mount Rushmore, Washington Heights, where on a clear day you can see the "A" on the ABC building downtown...
...You could even sell ads for the bottom of the page, as in a newspaper or magazine...
...In 1972 it stumbled upon Fletcher Knebel's Vanished, turning it into a four-hour film starring Richard Widmark, presented on two consecutive nights...
...and Susan Blakely...
...In the case of the latter, you know right away that any moron could get as much out of what you're watching as you are...
...The serialization of the Shaw novel managed to do the impossible: It grabbed the masses and, whether they admit it or not, the intellectuals like myself...
...I'm old-fashioned about such things...
...The show also featured interlocking characters involved in what seemed to be a relatively complex story, making you feel you were using the old noodle even if you weren't...
...On Television NOVEL SOAP OPERA BY MARVIN KITMAN I was hostile to the hit series based on Irwin Shaw's literary classic Rich Man, Poor Man when it began on ABC February 1. The format was annoying: four two-hour and four one-hour segments, a total of 12 hours for what after all was essentially going to be a rather long mnde-for-television movie...
...This program concept is the cause of so much boredom and restlessness among TV viewers...
...Walking around the offices of New York's educational TV station, WNET/13, on wintry Tuesday mornings, I even heard the resident eggheads heatedly discussing what had happened on the previous night's episode...
...The uniqueness of the original author is lost in the medium's homogenizing creative system...
...Actually, though, we would be participants in a kind of con game where the show makes money while the public gets a distorted view of what legitimate notion is supposed to be...
...Its low ratings almost ended the novel's budding career as a source of programming ideas...
...Instead, he did a trick with Susan Blakely...
...The televisionization of Shaw's novel had many of the things one expects from quality trash...
...ABC's censors lowered their standards for some episodes?especially those clearly marked "parental guidance advised" (you're supposed to ask your kids if it's OK to watch...
...Then in 1974 NBC gave us Joseph Wambaugh's The Blue Knight, packaged in hour-long segments running on four successive nights...
...In fact, the whole concept of "ABC Novels for Television," the lit'ry name network merchandisers picked out for hawking six or eight drawn-out TV movies, reminds me of the 19th-century London bookseller who advertised a new volume: "You pay nothing for my book, sirs...
...The average series repeats its story every segment, leading Grou-cho Marx to observe, "I don't need a tranquilizer, I have television...
...What made me most skeptical about the grandiose plan for the Shaw book when I heard about it last year, was my knowledge of the process involved in translating serious works of fiction to the television screen...
...A bouncing ball would be fun to read along with...
...One watched Bill Bixby, for instance, expecting him to do a trick from The Magician...
...Julie Jordache (played by Susan Blakely) jumped in and out of bed as often as Xaviera Hollander...
...No doubt that device helped the ratings as much as Silverman's shrewd scheduling...
...I am a more calloused soul who ranks fairly low on the Pavlovian tear scale...
...Anyway, everything I had read in the papers about Rich Man, Poor Man prepared me not so much for the television equivalent of Gone With the Wind—another long story about an American family in transition—as for a 1970s version of that ABC classic Peyton Place...
...The supporting characters, drawn from the ranks of TV series regulars, gave the whole enterprise the atmosphere of an Emmy show...
...Or Laurence Olivier might be pressed into service?like the readers employed in old Cuban cigar factories to impart the great classics while the laborers toiled away—to help those reluctant to peruse the tube by themselves...
...As the networks may discover, we have an inexhaustible appetite for good stories, especially because they have been starving us since 1947...
...Edward Asner and Dorothy McGuire, as the parents of the brothers Jordache, were especially distinguished...
...Its previous claim to cultural fame had been its discovery in the early 1960s of the popularity of educational series on machine gun usage...
...With that show, ABC gambled viewers would remember the plot from week to week and the idea intrigued us...
...You only pay for the binding...
...Invariably they all wind up looking like made-for-TV movies, a form more anti-novel than novel...
...It involved the emotions of a widely varied audience, the highest goal trash can attain...
...If a television film can't say its piece in two hours, a critic's rule of eye reads, it can't be much of a story...
...Beacon Hill, the CBS experiment in raising the level of TV, failed to excite many people this way and was an example of what could be called narrowcasting...
...I bristled at the thought that ABC would become known as the friend of literature, the egghead commercial network...
...I suspected the public would be belter served by putting the book on the screen verbatim, so to speak...
...It also seemed to me that the televisionization of this best-selling novel—the tale of two brothers, one of whom grows up to be rich, while the other becomes poor (and, eventually, dead)—would set back the cause of fine literature in America...
...By the final episode, I had also reconsidered my position on using novels for televsion...
...I had become hooked by the story...
...And after watching it through March 15, or what the advertisements announced as "The stunning climax,' I finally had to admit I must really be a lover of good trash on TV...
...I am more interested in seeing and hearing his words and or pictures than the images of Dean Rcisner, who wrote the screenplay for the show...
...They all turned in their best performances...
...ABC has done more to lower the standards of television than any other network, overloading its schedule with action-advertures and Westerns (the bang-bang, you're dead...
...Nick Nolte as the poor man, Tom Jordache...
...This is one of the important distinctions between good trash and bad trash...
...ABC should not plead intellectual bankruptcy so soon...
Vol. 59 • April 1976 • No. 9
