The Silvermanizing of TV

...His favorite show last year was The Captain and Tenmlle...

...But my favorite remains Freddy's, delivered at the height of carping by critics that matters appear to have taken a turn for the worse since the advent of Silvermamsm In defense of Laverne & Shirley, Charlie's Angels, Three's Company and his other smash hits, the Wunderkind held that if the American people live with these sorts of programs, they presumably want them and should have them The same argument can be made for heart disease...

...In ABC dramatic shows (disregarding Roots, which is easy, since it was his predecessor Marty Starger's baby), Silverman has been especially wonderful Whenever it was possible to lower the population's standards a notch, he did it Let any greasy kid stuff program, like the specials Having Babies (October 1976) and Having Babies II (October 1977), get high ratings, and the next thing you know you've got a series Having Babies begins on ABC in the spring, if all goes well, it will run mne months I was never really knocked out by Freddy's esthetics when he was at CBS either Although he got, or took, all the credit for MM *S*H, All in the Family and The Mary Tyler Moore Show, it should be remembered that he is the man who discovered Me and the Chimp, Big Eddie, Khan, Dirty Sally, and Planet of the Apes Yet one would have to admit that the sitcom art at ABC this season has been a distillation of Silverman at this best San Pedro Beach Bums, Operation Petticoat, Love Boat, Tabatha, Sugar Time, and Blansky's Beauties rival anybody's list of the six most atrocious shows of the generation What really boggles my mind is that he developed these turkeys while he was ahead in the ratings—a time when a programing chief should be at the top of this game, burning them in there, free and easy like a young fastball pitcher with a good curve and a big lead I^have heard many rationalizations for the sorry condition of television today...

...He poured a good deal of his executive energy and his company's money (about $500,000 an episode) into making that program what it became, and that was not the Dead Sea Scrolls Freddy also thinks Mane Osmond is a great entertainer and destined to be the superstar of the next 20 years, the Tenmlle of the '80s and '90s Look for his first move this summer to be luring Mane to NBC As for an offer she couldn't refuse, how about a new organ for the Tabernacle...

...Redd Foxx Show went off the air It is a sad day when we have to depend on the taste of the American public for protection against our leaders...

...What makes Freddy Silverman different is that he has sold us out and he has no guilt At ABC we discovered that he was nothing but a Trojan Horse, a dangerous kid disguised in adult's clothing Now Freddy, the modern Typhoid Mary, is about to embark on the last of his appointed rounds, spreading his form of infantile paralysis, and if all goes according to plan, the Silvermanization of commercial television will be finished by 1980 No statement about Freddy's influence would be complete without one visual, however, and I will try to draw the picture for you in words It is Redd Foxx in a Farrah Fawcett-Ma-jors wig A full page ad showing exactly that was the highlight of Silverman's ad campaign to sell his bonus baby to the people They didn't buy and 77k...

...The Silverman saga shows how dependent success is on a good education and a respect for learmng There's a second moral here, too Never deny a student a job simply because he is inexperienced and his head is filled with book knowledge One day he may become your boss and take away your private dinmg room, chef, maid and other necessities...

...On Television THE SILVERMANIZING OF TV BY MARVIN KITMAN ON PREVIOUS occasions in this space, I have mentioned Fred Silverman en passant, as they say in chess But since Freddy has been unanimously elected president of NBC (he ran unopposed last month and takes office in June), I think the time has come for an m-depth examination of his success First, a biographical note or two on his early life, a made-for-TV version of the Horatio Alger story The son of a Queens television repairman, Fred became a poor graduate student at Ohio State University, where he did his master's thesis on ABC programing, 1953-59—the period when that network was mostly carrying NBC reruns They were very taken with the study over at ABC, especially the part about how impressed he was with their scheduling of Peyton Place, and it won him a mail-room job By age 25, Freddy was running CBS's daytime programing, at 32, he was in charge of its entertainment programing Six years latei, in 1975, he ascended to the presidency of ABC, for what has been widely described as "a lot ol money " And now he is jumping to NBC tor a pot so sweet, just the thought ot it gives me a diabetes attack At 40, lie can boast of heading all three major networks, a feat so grand that in the infant medium of television there is no name for it yet I suggest the Top Hat Trick...

...In a sense, all programing executives resemble Willie Loman—who had only a shoeshine and a smile Every night these sensitive men must go home to face the criticism and disgust of their loved ones—wives who returned to school to become social workers, and college-age kids At cocktail parties, they are the targets of abuse, spoken and unspoken, when they tell people what they do for a living I remember Mike Dann, Silverman's forebear at CBS, suffered terribly at having to say he was the man who made the Beverly Hillbillies a hit Only by airing Death of a Salesman could he assuage his guilt...

...Many of the elements of success, of course, mere biography cannot reveal Take Freddy's solid grasp of the fundamentals what works once (Six Million Dollar Man) will work twice (Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman), and what works for a half hour (Happy Days) will work for an hour (Happy Days and Laverne & Shirlev) Add to that Freddy's ability to play the schedule like an accordion Some shows he streched out (Rich Man, Poor Man, a 12-hour minisenes, ran for 10 weeks), others he squeezed together (Roots, 12 hours long, ran on eight consecutive nights)Silverman also has proved himself a whiz at spending millions to buv mmiscule talents His lining away...

...Freddy wasn't always that bad, and at first I was a strong supporter of his His background as an academician and programer was more interesting than most (the other big shots usually came from the world of TV sales or business management) And I admired the way he made decisions unilaterally after all, great entertainment has consistently tended to be the product of a single courageous man—a Florenz Ziegfield, a Louis B Mayer, a Mike Todd Silverman's colleagues, by contrast, hid behind committees I have come to resent Freddy because he has given television back to the kids After years spent fighting to prove to the networks that the average viewer is not a moron, that his intelligence is not 12 but at least 14, we won a victory in the early '70s With sitcoms such as All in the Family and dramas like The Execution of Pvt Stovik and Jane Pittman, TV began growing up Then, suddenly, Freddy in his short two years at ABC brought back smarmy kid-vid again The ironic part of it is that no one asked for the dumb stuff Viewers had been quite happy with The Mary Tyler Moore Show, M*A*S*H and the newer Barney Miller They were waiting for the big step forward, and got three leaps backward instead...

...But what will insure Freddy's immortality as the greatest invention since Wonder Bread is his taste Most of the medium's executives, as you probably have guessed, are interested in great books, listen to opera a lot, and will never admit to actually watching what thev call "that crap " That's for the people The best that the top brass will do is attempt to keep tabs on the show s the masses arc-watching Schlosser, lor example, regularly asked his chant tear what he liked on TV The chautleur was the closest Schlosser got to a real person in the ride between his home and 10 Rockefeller Plaza Every so often, though, wc find somebody in history who has the good fortune to be one with the people he is leading In the mid-'60s, there was Hugh Hefner (By the way, he discovered Barbi Benton I remember her keeping her mouth shut at the Playboy Mansion in Chicago, where I was invited to visit in 1972 along with other prominent intellectuals of the period, including Max Lerner ) Freddy Silverman is the Everyman of today According to all the reports, he is a homebody, not the flamboyant type who lives to have lunch with Farrah Fawcett He simply does his job Day after day, he watches TV at the office, mght after night he watches it at home It's frightening...

...Barbara Walters and Redd Foxx from NBC was a lesson in how to use money, and not brains These contracts took overpriced properties off NBC's hands—among the few successful economy moves made by the outgoing Herb Schlosser regime, in the light of Walters' and Foxx' failure to help ABC ratmgs I suspect there will be a blizzard of greenbacks in the summer of 1978 when Freddy gets his hands on the NBC till, I mean tiller Another significant element in the Silverman climb was his insight that the American public loves to hear double entendres One of his big smash hits at ABC embodying this perception was Three's Company, a situation comedy I can't believe is on the air, let alone number four or five on the rating charts Its presence anywhere in the top-10 list makes one wonder if there is still intelligent life on this planet Perhaps the surest sign of Silverman's genius was his soon realizing that Americans would love to see as well as hear double entendres And what double entendres he has given us on Chailie's Angels and Sugar Time' The latter, a shameless spinoff of the British Rock Follies, features the two and only Barbi Benton One episode had the three girls spending what seemed like half the show playing a game of volleyball Silverman understands that the American public will watch anything, as long as they move...