On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television CANCELING QUALITY BY MARVIN KITMAN AS WE ALL know, when TV shows die they go to the happy hunting ground in the sky—up in the ozone where The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and Julia and Fay...
...It's always a miracle that any actor cares about anything in foreign affairs other than the Belgian or Bolivian bimbo he's having drinks with at the Polo Lounge...
...What's more, during the week in May when Lou Grant was bumped, the show actually did better than Cagney & Lacey—its replacement in the fall schedule...
...Taxi had a lot of mileage in it yet...
...It's not as if ABC had a lot of hilarious sitcoms lying around in cans, waiting to go on the air in place of Taxi next season...
...Fawlty Towers had six episodes one year, with another six tacked on asa postscript...
...For what these productions have in common is that they are the work of people from MTM Enterprises, either the corporation or (in the case of Taxi) its graduates...
...Ed Asner was gone...
...And the burned out one, Jim Ignatowski (Christopher Lloyd), was getting funnier and funnier over the years...
...We shouldn't muzzle TV actors politically just because of their profession...
...For surely Tinker will go back to milk MTM after his fling at NBC ends—in less than two years at the rate he is going...
...Taxi's creators and producers are James L. Brooks, Stan Daniels, David Davis, and Ed...
...This sounds heavy enough to make an episode of Lou Grant...
...I shouldn't mention this now: Rosenfield is liable to cancel Cagney & Lacey too...
...ABC's research group disagreed, saying the show was "too urban...
...Since the laughs seemed forced, the fluff was dropped after the first few installments...
...Well, theirs are obscene...
...He really pulled the show together in the second year when Little Louie, the awful despatch-er, became a major character...
...Ratings aren't the sole consideration for a show's survival...
...I smell a conspiracy to get even with Grant Tinker, the former MTM Enterprises president who sold CBS and ABC the hits in the first place...
...It starred that lovely actor, Judd Hirsch, a superlative performer who brought so much warmth to the role of Alex Reiger, professional hackman and amateur social worker...
...Barney Miller and M*A*S*H have said everything they ever wanted to say about the police squad room and the insanity of war...
...Pynchon, the Trib's owner, is buying CBS...
...They jab at their calculators, calculating what the public wants...
...The ratio has exceptions: By the time it dies next January, M*A*S*H will have lasted three times as long as the Korean War itself...
...So you have to ask why CBS rushed to unload one of their better efforts so quickly, within minutes, it seemed, after the Nielsens started to slide...
...That may seem lovely to us outsiders, yet it's hell for a thinking person...
...MTM—the home of quality television...
...They used to say that the Devil could cite Scripture to do his evil work—well, researchers citing Nielsens are more dangerous...
...Most of the shows are too light and they survive...
...But Rosenfield and the other big brass at CBS opened the trap door and zap...
...Maybe Asner is going crazy, having delusions of persecution: They're all out to get him...
...It was one of the few CBS shows that dealt with anything of substance...
...No matter what develops, NBC's announcement is an amazing turn of events...
...They only want to think or talk about themselves...
...Though I admire Asner's courage, I personally never could pay much heed to him on El Salvador...
...Ratings are simply tools or guides, not a guillotine that automatically beheads a show...
...I believe there was even some information formally exchanged between the TV show and Mother Jones—something unusual for the tube...
...Now how about Lou Grand I wouldn't besurprised to hear that Mrs...
...If the research doesn't fit their designs, they call the Nielsen Company and chew them out...
...The people loved Taxi...
...They are forced to live in penal compounds like Bel Air (next to Beverly Hills), where everybody else is a celebrity too, or at least rich, and understands their problems and need for privacy...
...On prime time the series raised issues you could not get people to read about, and that was a real achievement...
...The cast was great...
...Tinker defected to the enemy, NBC, and the other biggies don't want to fatten his calf anymore...
...Research" in television consists of a bunch of guys in Brooks Brothers suits (and at the top, Paul Stuart suits) sitting at the network desks mulling over their figures...
...This could be a series for the antitrust division of the SEC...
...Or that's what they hoped—except the critics and the public went berserk about the cancellation...
...The Trio's newsroom was full of multidimensional characters (on the TV scale, of course...
...The wording of the death sentence especially rankled me...
...It has won the "Best Comedy" Emmy every year that it has been on the air...
...On the other hand, some shows are killed while they are still sowing wild oats, long before they are ready for the reaper, of which the television networks are the grimmest...
...As if Taxi had been a Country and Western revue before it started winning all those Emmies and high ratings...
...One possible explanation is that gypsy cab drivers were protesting: Taxi was the only regular series about a licensed cab company on the air, and the gypsies demanded equal time from the FCC...
...As if the poor network had just bought the Brooklyn Bridge...
...Very sterile...
...It happens, sure—about as frequently as Halley's comet zooms by...
...Fortunately, most actors are narcissistic...
...So who is kidding whom here, pals...
...To take the latest instance—I thought the way CBS canceled Lou Grant was terrible...
...This brings us to Asner's allegation that his political beliefs prompted the move...
...Muir and Julia and Fay ride the Supertrain, and Lou Grant is publishing the best damned newspaper with Carl Kolchak from The Nightstalker as the Trio's crack local reporter and Joel McCrea as foreign correspondent...
...the Nielsens are their idea of current events...
...A sinister pattern emerges from the scrubbing of such hits as Lou Grant and Taxi (and one I haven't even gone into, WKRP in Cincinnati, another casualty among the top quality shows of the 1980s...
...There are other strange goings on this spring with the release of the new schedules...
...The storm of protest over Asner's speaking out on Central American politics disturbs me...
...This heaven is so crowded because the life span for television shows is shorter than most people's lives, a ratio akin to a dog's longevity compared with a man's...
...And while we're at it, let's get Billie Newman (one of Lou's ace reporters) to run for Mayor of New York...
...THE Lou Grant brouhaha didn't upset me a bit compared to ABC's cancellation of Taxi...
...That'stheonly way I can account for a totally insane decision...
...No wonder it was canceled—they always axe the good shows, the ones I like...
...Weinberger, who just coinci-dentally happen to be the original back-field that created The Mary Tyler Moore Show for Tinker...
...The researchers can prove whatever they want...
...Lou Grant's premise was that entertainment need not be trivial, that addressing some of the social concerns of our timecould been thralling...
...Taxi is a very funny show...
...The network has denied the charge, insisting that they would never bow to pressure from Moral Majority types or conservative affiliates who just didn't like Asner going around opening his big fat mouth...
...He didn't give atomic secrets to Salvadoran Leftists...
...Not being able to think, write, or discuss issues—if that is an actor's kinkiness—is the final indignity...
...To further thicken the plot, Tinker has announced that NBC intends to put Taxi on its fall schedule...
...The way I see it, if we can have a grade B movie actor making foreign policy, there should be nothing wrong with a grade A television actor telling him what is wrong with it...
...The usual practice is to find a new spot for a flagging program, particularly in this very freaky, highly irregular season...
...That they should be taken seriously is something else again...
...Lou Grant also topped The Wonderful World of Disney that week...
...Instead, Lou Grant chose to be the Mother Jones of TV drama, exploring some of the same issues that magazine did (waste dumping in theThird World, for one...
...They deal with samples, numbers, and never bother talking to people...
...You'll see...
...A sitcom coming back after being canceled by another network...
...Punishing actors for having views on political issues is baloney...
...The Honeymooners, for example, lasted 39 episodes in one season and seemed immortal...
...Apparently that doesn't count...
...What it has in cans is the video equivalent of botulism...
...Besides, most of us know beans about Central America, including the professionals in the Administration and Congress studying the matter full time...
...You've heard of gross profits...
...Heck, I don't want to hear what Alan Alda has to say on Southeast Asian politics and corruption in the Syngman Rhee government, either...
...Rosenfield is too heavy, the clown...
...Using the newsroom simply for melodrama would have been easy...
...Let's face it, Asner didn't do anything so bad...
...In TV parlance, "urban" means one of the guys is black...
...Too urban...
...Remember, though, even paranoids have real enemies on occasion...
...There is a good time to die...
...Initially the show was a combination of hardnosed reporting and humor...
...Rosenfield also said the ratings were dropping on Lou Grant...
...Andy Kaufman as Latka declined in importance, improving matters...
...Then came Emmies for many of the stars and solid ratings—a healthy slice of what we used to call "quality television...
...Pinocchio's nose begins to grow...
...It's scary...
...Then there was little Danny DeVito...
...Lou Grant's heaviness was exactly what made the series strong...
...ABC comedy next fall is going to be as funny as the fall of Carthage...
...I don't recall weight ever being a criterion for sending a show off to Elysium...
...James Rosen-field, executive vice president of the CBS broadcast group, kissed the show goodbye by claiming it was "too heavy...
...If they were, nobody would have ever heard of Hill Street Blues, and Carroll O'Connor would be driving a cab in Brooklyn today—All in the Family had lousy ratings at the beginning...
...That's what saved it the first season, when the ratings were terrible...
...Get me rewrite, sweetheart...
...The successful ones are already inakindofprisonasa result of being rich and famous...
...The scene looks like a Household Finance office...
...Aw, that's too bad, CBS—I cry for you all the way to your bank...
...He simply expressed support for the Left in El Salvador...
...In case you have forgotten along with Rosenfield, Lou Grant was about muckraking journalists...
Vol. 65 • May 1982 • No. 11
