On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television TABLOID VISION BY MARVIN KITMAN Most tv magazines have print counterparts. Thus People, a show CBS is scheduled to launch in September, will be patterned after Time Incorporated's...
...While Roundtable was acclaimed at Elaine's, it often baffled viewers elsewhere, being a mix of news and the arts...
...My personal theory is that he thought he was supposed to be doing an American Express commercial...
...Senator John Glenn (D.-Ohio), who has been investigating leakage of atomic secrets and materials, then came on, and said in effect: "I don't want to worry anybody...
...Well, you have to assume that blood, sex and money could very well interest the American people...
...The original co-hosts of this cheery brew were two young fellows, Harold Hayes and Robert Hughes, discovered by Arledge at the end of a talent hunt slightly less intense than David O. Selznick's search for someone to play Scarlet O'Hara...
...One of his first pieces was an interview with the Rolling Stones' Mick Jagger, who said he was poverty stricken...
...All the same, it did make one contribution to culture, having inspired Clay Felker & Friends, which appeared on local station WNEW-TV in 1977...
...And furthermore, your mother wears army boots...
...For 20 minutes we saw the sportsmen throw half-eaten, half-alive rabbits into garbage cans...
...Still, all in all, it was probably the wisest course to take...
...I have this sick feeling that 20/20 is going to make it...
...His answers to Gerry's questions were in some kind of code known only to computers and Spinks' inner circle...
...I remembered again why I decided to become a critic instead of a doctor...
...The introductory week's blood-and-guts section featured greyhounds tearing little bunny rabbits to shreds as part of their racing training...
...Until ABC New gets its act together, the show will have to be called "20/100...
...Throughout the media hype for 20/20 last spring, I couldn't help wondering why a supposedly shrewd guy like Arledge, with an understanding of the Average Joe drinking a beer in his undershirt, would pick a man as exciting as Hayes for a mass appeal magazine...
...How bizarre, then, that after promoting 20/20 as an advancement that would outstrip the Round Brothers' invention of the wheel, Arledge should turn for rescue to Hugh Downs, geriatric glamor boy...
...I'm sure it just evolved naturally...
...It is too close to lunch to discuss what was wrong with Hughes' prior television work...
...It will be much lighter in tone than 60 Minutes, the 10-year-old CBS show that by today's standards is the Foreign Affairs Quarterly of the tube...
...A pregnant woman I know who made the mistake of watching it threw up...
...That part of the magazine's history, brief as it was (one week), could be called "Harold Hayes Strikes Again...
...They turned in unison and they started talking in sequence...
...Marash closed by asking him a number of shrill rhetorical questions, winding up with "Oh, yah...
...One of those alleged "TV personalities" who made his name in print—he was a prominent editor and author from North Carolina—Hayes is an alumnus of Harvard and later Elaine's, the hangout restaurant in New York...
...Another element in the program's formula is the freak segment, where the reporting is often done by that freak of journalism, Gerry Rivers (as he called himself in the old days before ethnics were in on New York TV), a.k.a...
...The number five is not hyperbole, a source told me, but fact...
...BUT RUN FOR YOUR LIVES...
...Hayes attacked the script on the prompter at fever pitch—nobody except him can talk at blurring speed and still wind up sounding like a 78 recording played at 33 1/3...
...The English upper classes affect inarticulateness, I am told, because anything will sound intellectual that way...
...The next week Dave Marash did an End-of-the-World spot that seemed to say, "eat meat and you die," and the week after that an 85-year-old man claimed the only way to save democracy was to establish the Fourth Reich or give Washington over to the KKK...
...Television has rarely shown so much real blood...
...My major difficulty with the new improved product featuring Hugh Downs—the man hired to make us forget about the initial hosts—is Hugh Downs...
...Somebody must have gone shopping one day, noticed stacks of the National Enquirer and its epigone, the National Star, near the cash register, and said, "Hey, there's nothing like that on TV...
...Besides, by firing Hughes and Hayes after the first reviews appeared, Roone showed the world how truly powerful we TV critics are...
...As for 20/20, the first such program to come out of Roone Ailedge's ABC News administration, it takes after the National Enquirer...
...was treated so harshly by the media—the critics were out to knife Roone, a reliable source explained, quoting Roone himself—that no one was willing to take the credit for having thought up the basic idea...
...On this show, the corporate executive did deliver a full-of-baloney statement...
...Who knows, they might have improved the second week, especially if Arledge employed subtitles or the lady who does the hand signals for the deaf on public TV...
...Geraldo Rivera...
...Due to poorly engineered rear ends, correspondent Sylvia Chase argued, many Ford products exploded on contact...
...What a real downer for an innovative, now, today, kind of show such as 20/20...
...His partner had a speech defect called the upper-class British mumble...
...Although it has not yet done any features like, "i ate my child for breakfast because we were out of cereal," the opening segments of the first three broadcasts presented some of the most revolting film in TV history...
...A similar story ran on 60 Minutes, but Chase seemed to dig much deeper into the subject...
...The most memorable altercation, he recalled, occurred when Hayes decided to drop Jimmy Breslin from the night's lineup moments before the show went on the air...
...In his original report, he told us that the president of American Cynamid would not comment on the distressing facts that had been uncovered...
...Happily, Marash returned to relieve the gloom with a follow-up on the chemicals-in-your-food fuss...
...When I think of Downs, which I seldom do, he is a musty pressed flower from the annals...
...For two years (1974-5) he was also the host of WNET/13's major locally produced show, Roundtable...
...Earlier in the 1970s, he appeared on BBC talk shows and did art lecture-type programs in the manner of Sir Kenneth Clark...
...Unfortunately, none of this behind-the-scenes-dynamism reached the screen...
...Originally, he was the Ed McMahon to Jack Paar on the Tonight Show...
...And when lightning struck this summer, he was sailing along in the twilight of an undistinguished career: He was working as the host of a public television program for senior citizens called Over Easy, (on at six in the morning in many cities...
...Roundtable died a slow and nasty death...
...This would have been the place for a laugh track, yet the scream track would have been appropriate as well...
...Through various discussions around the water cooler, the idea probably bubbled its way to the very top of the network hierarchy...
...The third episode of 20/20 presented us with an eye-catcher on mothers and kids killed in accidents while using Ford Motor Company products with gas tanks that were not situated over the axle...
...For another, the last-minute hiring of Bobby Rosengarten and his band couldn't have helped...
...The premiere edition last June 6 at 10 p.m...
...Indeed, they might find it very palatable if ladled out by a gentle old codger like Hugh Downs, who offends nobody...
...A subsequent Freak of the Week was Leon Spinks, the boxer...
...What they still need, though, instead of a laugh track, is a scream and gasp track...
...Less is known about Robert Hughes...
...Also, she had something CBS didn't have, perhaps because its news brass is too stuffy: pictures of charred mothers and children...
...The third and final ingredient of 20/20'% formula is the End-of-the-World segment...
...We were told not to worry, however, because it took an exceptionally gifted 14-year-old college student to put a bomb together...
...At any rate, the man is a credit to boxing, if not the human race...
...The new TV magazine, true to its print model, generally follows a pat formula that calls for each episode to start with a horror story...
...In fact, the horror features of 20/20 are pretty convincing...
...One night you might see Alger Hiss, the next some obscure writer who was a friend of Hayes.' Nevertheless, an air of excitement surrounded the proceedings, with participants often ready to grab each others throats...
...Chase recently told me there was internal opposition against her shots...
...For one thing, Hayes was no Johnny Carson, to put it politely...
...Will the newest electronic magazine work...
...She was probably right...
...The comeback of these two fellows—clearly establishing ABC as "a second opportunity offender" —was reminiscent of The Two Ron-nies, a BBC comedy series now playing on Public TV...
...she overcame it by arguing successfully that they were needed to make the point...
...An Australian, Hughes was very big in London journalism before becoming art editor of Time...
...He may have been too hasty...
...There were at least five (near) fist fights during the production of this thinking-man's Merv Griffin Show...
...The station packaged the BBC's /, Claudius for the American market and left on the cutting room floor a sequence showing a baby being ripped from its mother's uterus by one of the Caesars...
...Despite the fact that Rivera talked to him, this was no dialogue because Spinks can't speak English...
...In short, the dynamic duo was a disaster, and Arledge —a man very responsive to criticism —fired the two after only one performance...
...Thus People, a show CBS is scheduled to launch in September, will be patterned after Time Incorporated's weekly of the same name...
...The second week's edition began with 20 minutes on malpractice involved in Caesarean sections...
...The premiere show, for instance, gave us Sandor Vaneour explaining how kids in college today are making atom bombs instead of going on panty raids...
...I also remembered being grateful to WGBH in Boston...
...Or perhaps the ugly rumor making the rounds—that the gibberish Spinks spouted was caused by a production foul-up—was true...
Vol. 61 • July 1978 • No. 16
