On Television

...Maybe that explains his seeking help from a psychic Who can guess what really went on, if anything, in a statistical head like his...

...The biggest uncovered story in recent television history has been ABC's astonishing decline The Invincible One's ratings dropped faster than the mercury in the thermometer last winter, allowing CBS to reach first place in an unusual single jump (As a rule the charts show a pendulum movement, with one network gradually overtaking another) I sometimes think Freddie Silverman's major function in television today is to be a failure at NBC so that nobody will write about ABC having engineered the largest drop ever in a single season's ratings In any case, Freddie Pierce, the superstar chartist of the decade, suddenly found his charts going down instead of up...

...They were often illiterates, but at least they knew their own minds without a committee telling them what they liked If the autocrats lacked taste, atleast they had gumption They didn't need to look at research figures to tell them what the pub-he wanted They had theater seats to fill, aconcrete problem, notjustametaphys-lcal hypothesis involving numbers The Nielsens were bad enough in removing the public from the process of satisfying the public's desires a sample group of 1,200 standing in for zillions of TV viewers NowtheSchlepkin Brothers of TV have narrowed it down to one clairvoyant to represent all of us Pmch me I think I'm becoming Elizabeth Montgomery The networks have just finished mulling over their new fall schedules My usually incredibly reliable sources inform me that when NBC executives gathered in Calif orma in March to make their key decisions, they employed levi-tation I'm afraid the tables at 30 Rock will move higher than the ratings for NBC shows later this year Looking back, I think I preferred it when the complaint was that TV gave the public what it wanted Then there was a slogan on the wall that read '' We Have Our Pulse on the Fingers...

...ABC's slump reminded me of the Gluyas Williams cartoon in the New Yorker showing Proctor and Gamble executives standing around a swimming pool, waiting to see if a bar of Ivory (" It Floats") soap would sink At ABC they were all waiting to hear what the psychic thought about a piece of dreck like Two's Comfort I hked it better in the old days when entertainment tycoons exuded self-confidence You had individuals like Louis B Mayer, Samuel Goldwyn, the Warner brothers, Darryl Zanuck...

...Silverman would come up with a lot of ideas for programs, some good, some bad It was Pierce who would tell him, do this, don't do that The rest, as they say, is history Silverman, you may have noticed, has not been doing too well on his own these past three years at NBC But ABC under Pierce and his new Freddie Silverman puppet, Tony T , has also taken a turn for the worse...

...OnTelevision OUTPSYCHING THE NIELSENS BY MARVIN KITMAN THE MOST amazing story of the year in television was the recent news that from July 1978 to July 1980 top ABC executives Fred Pierce and Tony Thomopolous (Tony T) employed a seer to advise them about programming decisions You know, a soothsayer, a fortuneteller, apsychic, forGod'ssake' A lady who hears things and then tells all to the National Enquirer, the paper of record for more people than you would ever like to think Can you believe it' I do I always suspected there was some secret behind TV programming Quality alone could not be what determined which shows get on the air Nobody could have come up with such ABC gems as Bosom Buddies (Thursday, 8.00pm EST)orAlohaParadise(Wed-nesday, 9-00 p.m EST) without supernatural help But I used to think that TV executives studied chicken entrails For really big decisions there was t he old executive dartboard, or tossing a coin Two out of three wins I was shocked to see the ABC psychic, Beverly Dean, on NBC's Tomorrow show one night in March The executive of the year at ABC was a fat, dumpy woman, not one of those longlegged beauties with an overbite whom Freddie Silverman consults about NBC programs Then it occurred to me that my uncharitable train of thought merely revealed how foolishly cymcal my first reaction to the news was I was ashamed of myself for not taking the medium seriously ABC's hidden asset turned out to be, to use the technical term, a first-class noodge She was originally contacted because of her predictions in the newspapers about how ABC was going to become number one in the ratings, or some such nonsense Then she kept trying to advance her own programing interests, a TV movie of this or that The network could not get rid of her so they put her on the staff, where she could be ignored along with many another TV executive Besides, a woman like Beverly Dean is to be feared She could put a jinx on ABC and it might have seven years of bad ratings Still, a psychic telling the network what to do sounded like an episode out of Bewitched On the other hand, they don't call it Hollyweird for nothing The bizarre irony was the utter predictability of her advice Among her achievements was telling Fred P and Tony T to let a show run for a while, and then it would be successful Any fool in the street—or any TV critic?could have told them that for nothing Take the best ABC show of the year, Breaking Away, which was cancelled and replaced after two laps around the track in the six-day bike race that is this wild and crazy TV season I know 55 people who would have told ABC for free that keeping the movie spin-off on the air would help it attract an audience In theindustry, however, they prefer to pay for advice Someone pulling down $54,000 in a two-year contract with options, as the psychic did, is apparently more convincing than plain common sense The whole affair reminds me of the Schlepkin Brothers, those movie moguls m George S Kaufman and Moss Han's Once in a Lifetime TheSchlep-kins, all 12 of them, used to run the cloakrooms in West Coast theaters before they went into motion pictures Two of the brothers were always flying home to Brooklyn to see their little old mother and consult with her about what was good as well as future trends "Such a lovely thought," acharacterin the play observes with awe "Why, their aeroplane bill alone is $10,000 a month " Remember, this was back in 1930 I do not mean to knock Freddie P and Tony T , the Schlepkin Brothers of TV, for taking a step backward by hiring a psychic On the contrary, I think their approach was an improvement over the way prognosticating is usually handled in the business Lackluster though she was, the psychic had to be better than some of the other mavens Most of the higher-priced ones don't even watch TV Or own a set They are authorities The ones who do watch television generally have three sets going in their offices, with the sound alwavs off At least the seer would sa\ of a program, "I liked it It's good "The words are no longer heard these days in television land Nobody asks whether a show is good or bad, schlock or quality, getting something across or not The latter-day Schlepkins probabl\ had lo run for the dictionary to find out what "like" meant The industry is now overrun with communications chartists Their progenitors are that strange group of creatures found on Wall Street who converse in figures, whose whole life is guessing what stocks will do, whether you should buy or sell The numbers are examined rigorously, but no one even wonders what the company in question manufactures In a similar way, the TV chartists tell you that a show will do well if you put in a "hammock" here, and bend your ear with blather about flow and sampling These are grown men, frequently with at least two college degrees Their mothers are proud of them And all they do is talk Nielsens A Nielsen is more real to them than people, m fact Reuven Frank of NBC News once observed that "there are more people [about 5,000] earning big money, sizeable incomes from analyzing Nielsens than there are Nielsen families [1,200] " Frank added, "Not only is that all they know how to do, but they are not very good at it " TV executives have learned to leave out the human factor They are computers, and civilization's one saving grace is that they are wrong so often As I see it, hiring the psychic was ABC s well-meaning attempt to bring a regular person into the organization TV executives are cut off from the real world The closest a Freddie Silverman comes to talking with the common man during the work day is a chat he may have with the chauffeur who drives him down from Central Park West to 30 Rockefeller Plaza (about two miles as the hmo crawls) The TV lords prefer the isolation booth because everyone wants to sell them something, East coast or West Every gas station attendant in California first looks in the car to see if the owner is a somebody who can make him into a star—that's why they have such long gas lines out there And as Alan King once groaned, "Every cabbie in New York is trying to sell me a sitcom that is better than what they got on " 'll have to check with my medium off Sixth Avenue about how I should assess the whole present state of affairs Nevertheless, I must admit I was stunned to hear it was Fred Pierce who pioneered the psychic research program He was the one TV executive whose acumen I respected, even though he is a numbers man Pierce was a research whiz before he became president of ABC Television He was one of those bonng looking handsome guys in a 42 long from Finch-ley, a corporate type nobody ever notices He shrewdly shunned the limelight at ABC, keeping a low profile and letting the other Freddie then at the network get the press Pierce, however, is part of a breed developed in the Borough Park section of Brooklyn, a place that has had a greater impact on Western Culture than is popularly known The family used to own a shoe store, later it changed its name and Fred rose to the top on talent His gift was knowing what to put on the air because he had the facts from the charts He was the one behind the scenes at ABC telling Freddie Silverman, the geruus-in-residence, what to do in the glory years when ABC went from last to first...