On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television TINKERING AT NBC by marvin kitman In the 1960s, an advertising agency fashioned a slogan for a whiskey company client by paraphrasing President Lincoln's remark to his Secretary of...
...She is 22 years old and his "constant companion...
...Morale was so lousy that people sustained themselves by spreading tales about who would replace Freddie...
...Maybe he will succeed Tinker as president of MTM Enterprises...
...Or, having left his mark on all three commercial networks, perhaps he will replace Bill Moyers (who is going to CBS) on public television and do a show called Fred Silverman's Journal...
...On the other hand, maybe I'm being unfair...
...On Television TINKERING AT NBC by marvin kitman In the 1960s, an advertising agency fashioned a slogan for a whiskey company client by paraphrasing President Lincoln's remark to his Secretary of War: "While you're up, get me a Grant...
...He also is the one who did Hill Street Blues, a show that scored much longer wi'h the critics than you might gather from the ratings, not to mention his out and out classics: Mary Tyler Moore, BobNewhart, Rhoda, Phyllis...
...It was chutzpah, or perhaps a death wish...
...I wouldn't be surprised if the first series to come out of the new Tinker regime at NBC is called Polo Lounge?the story of the intrigue, passion and romance that takes place between the Polo Lounge and the swimming pool of the Beverly Hills Hotel...
...People pointed him out on the streets...
...But it could be ho-hum NBC with this new guy, Tinkerbelle...
...When he started at NBC, he thought Moliere was Norman Lear's brother, Moe Lear...
...In a way, they were correct...
...Everyone was wrong...
...The word is that while he was brought to NBC to head the whole operation, Tinker is looking for somebody to run the business side of the TV network so that he will be free to concentrate on programing...
...To put it more graphically, here we have one of the pigs at the trough that is the TV industry suddenly becoming the man with the feed bag...
...There was talk that NBC was going to do another quality mini-series based on this work by the author of Shogun...
...It soon became clear that the only real programing talent Silverman possessed was putting shows in the right place in the schedule to take advantage of the rivals' vulnerability—something a computer can easily do...
...That's his strength...
...Besides, how good could Tinker be if Mary Tyler Moore cancelled him...
...The new Silverman was still the same Freddie...
...Maybe he will give the job to Arthur Taylor, formerly of CBS...
...Regardless of whether he finds a suitable second man, Tinker will probably do the programing himself, behind the scenes...
...The invention of Freddie Silverman was the last of the pathbreaking developments in the print medium, right up there with paper, the typewriter and crossing out mistakes with Xs...
...Only twice before has a program wiz like Tinker been named head honcho in broadcasting, both times at NBC...
...In effect, NBC has replaced a dog with a cat—remember MTM's mewing logo?—but whether he will be good for the network remains to be seen...
...But he was the first superstar TV executive, a true celebrity...
...Presumably, this had worked at ABC, which was number one when Ed Griffiths, the chairman at RCA before Brad-shaw, stole Freddie away...
...Despite his coming originally from New York, Tinker fits in suspiciously well...
...He spent $12 million, and the train didn't have anything in the cars...
...If the first major indoor sport in America is watching television, then a close runner-up for the past three years has been trying to read hidden meanings into Freddie's actions at NBC when there were none...
...Although I'm not optimistic about NBC s future under Grant Tinker, he is probably right to seek out someone to handle the merchandising...
...Then NBC could be known as Tinker and Taylor...
...By the second year of his reign there were already third and fourth generation Silvermanites at NBC...
...Now the cry is, hi-ho Silverman, away...
...And at the end of last month General David SarnofPs ghost—the muse of RCA's new chairman of the board, Thornton Bradshaw—must have whispered the familiar words...
...He gave NBC his famous schlock therapy: Take the quality efforts of others, cheapen them so that they conform to mass taste, and promote them on the air so relentlessly that everyone is ready to scream...
...Being a paratrooper had more security...
...He was a household name, like Draino...
...It could be the new Dallas, especially if it stars Tinker's secretary, what's-her-Twinkee...
...The American public, Silverman was willing to gamble, would watch anything that moves...
...When Tinker is replaced his spot could go to Evers, then to Chance...
...It turned out that he was a poor social engineer, too, the Hitler of television bosses...
...He looks California: thin, tanned and healthy as an orange...
...He was like the boy in the bubble, sealed off from germs...
...Unfortunately, he took a third place network in a three team race and in three years managed to keep it last...
...But the situation is potentially corrupt, because he will be in a position to buy shows from his old friends and stiff those whose jogging suits didn't come from the right designer...
...He fired his hand-picked executives as if they were somebody else's appointees...
...He also dresses funny: Every time I see his picture in the newspapers he's in a jogging suit...
...Yet I still think there has been nothing in the last three years more original than Silverman's Super-train...
...I've never met a man who owned his own jet that I liked...
...The second was Freddie Silverman, formerly of ABC...
...That's how deeply he gets into things...
...Can you imagine the guy's gall, making himself responsible for the bottom line, hiring the cleaning women and checking the expense accounts...
...It is a great American tradition to kick a man on the way down and give him a little momentum...
...I've always maintained that it came to him while he was lying on the beach during one of his famous vacations...
...I hope they were all listed on his ABC expense accounts since his active mind was working furiously under the hot sun...
...He was doing the work of two men?Laurel and Hardy...
...coverman's best idea for TV was, of course, jiggly...
...Silverman, the poor nebbish, never fit in...
...It's not going to be the same without him...
...Headline writers will have a field day...
...He and Lee A. Iacocca may have been the only top corporate executives the public recognized, and Freddy did it without commercials or the government' s help...
...If you aren't casual and laid back you look as out of place as the British did in India...
...He must have a formal jogging suit for the press portraits his office sends out...
...The first person thus elevated was the genius who invented 7bcfay, Tonight and a zillion other television shows—Pat Weaver...
...But it turned out he read the 1,200 pages in one day...
...Grant Tinker's name has almost always been associated with quality...
...Whatever Silverman's contribution, he certainly lowered the tone of television at ABC so much so that everyone thought he could sink no lower at his new company...
...You aren' t part of the crowd that makes the shows, all of whom are out of touch with reality...
...You have to dress that way to exist out in the Big Avocado, the planet of Los Angeles...
...Bradshaw said Silverman was still wonderful, but Tinker would be even more wonderful...
...That Silverman failed was not merely due to the quality of his mind or programs...
...He managed to go from bad to worse at NBC, where he topped Blansky's Beauties, Hello, Larry, Sheriff Lobot-omy, and Pink Lady and Floyd with Roller Girls...
...True, Tinker did give us the sitcom about the Boston Symphony Orchestra with Paul Sand, and Tony Randall as the Philadelphia judge—two fine failures...
...That's what the job can do to a man...
...Or maybe he cancelled Mary—but what does that say about his taste...
...It could be on a trampoline or a volleyball court...
...But whoever made ABC number one is still there...
...Comeon, next they'll be telling us that Miss Twinkee Tinker is very talented, that she has serious aspirations as an actress—she wants to be the next Susan Anton...
...How am I going to continue being a TV critic without having Silverman to kick around anymore...
...His supporters kept saying how difficult his job was at NBC...
...Freddie is not a cultured person...
...In the end, he was alone in the bunker—nobody could talk to him, nor would he talk with anybody...
...Freddie was trying to be a programing genius and run an enormously complex organization with more vice-presidents than the United Nations combined...
...No one can deny, however, that an important ingredient in his downfall was his approach to programing...
...Think of the possibilities if someone named Evers is hired...
...Programers don't make good company chiefs...
...And I thought the industry was already a cozy little sty...
...Who...
...The truth is, I'm really sorry to see him go...
...It would have been smarter to go for MTM's other Grant, since NBC has enormous problems and everybody knows that old Lou can do anything...
...Why not have a show, he must have asked himself, where the plot was a girl jumping upand down...
...you ask...
...I remember how, after the smashing success of Shogun—which he hated until the ratings came in—he began reading James Clavell's latest, Noble House...
...He was the little chubby, untanned guy in the young portly cadet suit, the one wearing black socks with clocks at the pool...
...the shows without it lacked something...
...In the '70s the same line could be widely heard in public television offices...
...Right off the bat, he doesn't appeal to me...
...explained Irwin Segelstein, his friend and coworker at NBC...
...It could be Barbi Benton or it could be Susan Anton...
...There are executives who come to meetings at MTM Enterprises in their tennis shorts...
...I don't care how the other critics knocked jiggly...
...For it was announced that Freddie Silverman's replacement as chief executive at troubled NBC would be Grant Tinker, head of MTM Enterprises—Mary Tyler Moore's old company...
...While he is up, I'll bet he could even get a grant...
...One of his big problems was that he had absolutely zero experience and training in running a multi-billion dollar corporation like NBC...
...From the beach in Hawaii, where hedoessomeof hismost wonderful work, Uncle Freddie declared that he wanted to do something better with his life anyway than get a million dollars a year, stock options, limos, and the freedom to put starlets in top managerial jobs where they are in charge of stapling scripts together—or whatever it was all those leggy beauties were doing at NBC the last three years...
...Then there is the stuff I have been reading in distinguished supermarket journals like the Star, about Grant and his secretary...
...I'm sure all my remarks about Silverman's tenure at NBC may sound like just an excuse to let him have it one more time, to pelt him with a few nails before hammering the coffin lid shut...
Vol. 64 • July 1981 • No. 15
