Tedium Transcended
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television TEDIUM TRANSCENDED BY MARVIN KITMAN I envy those who found The Winds of War truly boring. What exciting lives they must lead, tube-wise. Maybe they have special sets that give them...
...The world of law and Jaclyn Smith according to Sidney lasted a mere four hours over two nights, and after 60 minutes I was so enraged I wanted to scream...
...In the words of Christopher Plummer, who was fascinating as the Cardinal from whom Chamberlain learns the ropes at the Vatican, Father Ralph was blessed by the gods...
...Their constant capsulizations undermine the suspense...
...The medium, as Kitman's lawstates, is tedium...
...It meant Ali would be missing from a segment or two...
...We knew, for example, how the War turned out...
...It defies all the past conventional wisdom...
...3. The Plague of Bad Writing...
...You could have read the collected works of Judith Krantz in less time than it took to see the ABC miniseries based on Herman Wouk's novel...
...Ali (Quick-Draw) MacGraw could not even hold a baby well...
...Despite the warts of Winds-the bad casting, Dan Curtis' bad direction, the dull overwriting-a compelling force drove the show forward...
...5. The Plague of Teasers...
...Maybe they have special sets that give them only taut and gripping shows...
...am ashamed to admit that I also was not bored by The Thorn Birds, the ABC blockbuster version of Colleen McCullough's novel...
...Twenty-seven critics, including several in Kansas, declared Winds a snooze...
...Moreover, Wouk's subplots rivaled Jackie Suzanne's for depth...
...She was a 35-year-old brat...
...I relived my childhood watching these events on TV...
...That poor unfortunate woman...
...Not even a scriptwriting Hercules could do that...
...Every time the character Natalie announced she wanted to take off for Lisbon or wherever, we cheered in my house...
...Ex-model Rachel Ward, who as Meggie Cleary had a father-complex for Father Ralph (Chamberlain), was excellent...
...1. The Plague of Ali MacGraw...
...The $40 million extravaganza was close-captioned for the deaf, prompting novelist Harvey Jacobs to wisecrack that some of the hearing-impaired people he knew were stuffing cotton in their eyes...
...Paying the phone bill was more riveting than some of the portions of the Jastrow and Henry adventures...
...Ours are belly up...
...It was my duty to watch...
...In TV there is boring and then thereis really boring...
...MOWs consist of a series of short plays, each having a beginning, a middle and an end-before every commercial break...
...7. The Plague of Critics...
...As the tormented priest Chamberlain gave his best performance since he played a begonia...
...The original adapter, Jack Pulman of BBC miniseries fame (I, Claudius), died while laboring on Winds and Wouk carried on...
...At the risk of having my credentials as a grump suspended, let me confess that I voted with the viewers on Winds...
...It ran six hours a night on all three networks until the year 2000," they explained on Not Necessarily the News, a satirical Home Box Office offering...
...They will watch good acting, for example...
...The segments often seemed all middle...
...In doing so, Winds survived the seven plagues of TV drama...
...Still, whenever a 10-hour drama about Australia in the '20s and '30s is a huge ratings smash on a commercial network, it gives me pause...
...A 13- or 14-hour treatment might have been better...
...Such passion at her age...
...In short, a hit of unprecedented proportions...
...4. The Plague of Commercials...
...Nevertheless, the miniseries attracted an incredible 148 million American viewers...
...Consider the main competition, though-Knott'sLanding, Falcon Crest...
...Kate Nelligan would have been perfect in the role...
...Well, forbidden love is always popular...
...Now that it is obvious that we do (we're a well-rounded people that way), ABC will no doubt make sure they never do anything so fine again...
...Why was T-Birds-if I may use the minititle for a miniseries-so successful...
...Besides, I reasoned, reading the New York Times day by day during the Big One must have had its flat parts, too...
...ABC had spent a huge sum on the epic, shlepped around seven countries for locations, shot pictures of Mitchum in front of every Dusenberg and Packard still extant...
...The basic story was there...
...T-Birds was a shortie as far as today's miniseries go-I could have stayed for another 50-60 hours...
...Next time you cuddle up with Tolstoy or O. Henry, try stopping every few pages and reciting an ad for Volkswagen or Datsun...
...And Winds was the equivalent of seven movies of the week in an eight-day period...
...The excessive speed limit established for the fast-paced action dramas of the '60s has been repealed...
...The triumph of T-Birds further suggests that people are interested in quality TV...
...Other things were on that week: Hill Street Blues, Cheers...
...Imagine ho w Scheherezade would have lost the king's interest if she ended her night's tale by revealing the best of the one to come...
...And if Winds was molasses, The Rage of Angels (NBC's biggie the following week, taken from Sidney Sheldon's page-turner) was much worse...
...how FDR could have is beyond me...
...Initially I thought I was hooked by guilt...
...And Americans may have an intense interest in sheep ranching and shearing: Never have I seen so much wool shorn, on prime time TV, yet...
...T-Birds did not have a single Ali MacGraw...
...A millionaire amateur when it comes to TV, Herman Wouk wrote his first tele-play at 18 hours, reminding me of Chesterton's remark about how he did not have time to write a short note so he wrote a long one...
...They had previews of the scenes you were going to see as soon as the commercials stopped, if you could bear to wait that long...
...Her three emotional responses were petulant, petulant and petulant...
...I have not trusted those eyes of Mitchum's since his '40s movies...
...Comparing her to earlier ABC model-actress phenoms such as Cheryl Ladd, Jackie Smith and Shelly Hack is like comparing silk to polyester...
...I was willing to suspend the rules of historical accuracy for 18 hours...
...As a matter of fact, all the biggest hits seem to be about long ago and far away, as the pop song of the '40s put it...
...Your wife is hooked on Frank Sinatra records...
...The President wants you to go into the deodorant-spray business...
...Or perhaps along with the regular channels they're getting a special one that pipes in some kind of pixie dust from Hollynose-a real ultra-high frequency channel...
...Jokes about The Winds of Bore, as the industry conscience, George Maksian of the New York Daily News, called it, were a leading growth industry in the first quarter of 1983...
...The networks are diabolically self-destructive: They ought to have their hands tied to their chairs, or be strait-jacketed and sedated...
...The Winds of War broke new ground: It went beyond monotony...
...Maybe the denizens of Venus and Pluto had a dubbed tape, or one with subtitles...
...This proves that once you have solid acting, sound production values and a decent plot, you can spin your tale out indefinitely...
...So that's what made Hitler invade Poland-talks with Pug Henry had broken down...
...I kept secretly tuning in night after night...
...Three out of the 18 hours were words from our sponsors...
...The Thorn Birds was an experiment, an attempt to figure out whether Americans like quality as well as junk...
...The saga of how every female in Australia lusted after Richard Chamberlain's body had ratings that topped Winds...
...In the case of Winds this meant roughly 18-20 climaxes per night...
...A certain curiosity attends a priest who falls for a woman, even when the intrigue takes place in Australia...
...The Axis won...
...I've come to a couple of other conclusions...
...In the wake of McCullough, the industry is at this very moment poring over the remarkable statistics...
...I wonder whether the networks have made the connection...
...No less disorienting was the oddity of hearing wild praise for the latest cars manufactured by the very people who seconds earlier were killing Poles on the road to Cracow or machine-gunning American sailors at Pearl Harbor...
...It was all the same to him, to judge from his emotionless deadpan...
...The Winds of Warthe story of how World War II interrupted Ali MacGraw's vacationwas interminable, sure...
...Nostalgia negotiated a truce with the facts...
...By the time Winds was over, the whole had transcended the parts...
...She was trying to find herself in the role of the Jewish research assistant, Natalie Jastrow, and in every scene she found something else...
...Your boat has sunk...
...But something else was going on...
...John Houseman was better at hefting tots...
...To begin with, people are bewitched by far away places...
...2. The Plague of Somnambulism...
...No, this was something new-the teaser-within-the-teaser...
...ABC was slipping in come-ons that weren't the traditional sort where they divulge the whole story in the first 60 seconds, excerpting the best moments and leaving you to wade through the rest of the intervening dreck...
...6. The Plague of Humor...
...You have to watch TV, or be a student of metaphysics, to understand this concept...
...Maybe my interest did not lag because the subject was my war...
...Robert Mitchum played Pug Henry, without whom, it appeared, the War would not have been possible (he had to meet with the world leaders before they did anything...
...As it is said, all Wouk and no play...
...I ate the whole thing, indigestible parts and all...
...The movie-of-the-week form is exacting...
...Byron Brown (the token Australian in the cast), Richard Kiley, Jean Simmons-all the stars were superb...
...Would Generals Kimmel and Short catch the Nips at Pearl Harbor this time...
...The bombings, the massacres, the desperate comings and goings, the cheating wives and husbands, the treachery and manipulation by elder statesmen and leaders...
...The lack of surprise posed a major creative problem...
...Actually, it ran 18 hours the week of February 6-13...
...Nothing fazed him: People could say, "Your son is dead...
...My set started to fog up in that first episode when she was ogling Father Ralph...
...Fighting off the advances of women of all ages was a challenge...
...It was like a glacier moving...
...After all, their rebuilt and flourishing industries are major American TV advertisers...
...Since I don't like to play the numbers game, suffice it to say that the whole known world as defined by Nielsen was watching ABC the evenings of March 27-30...
...Even Barbara Stanwyck was surprising...
...Such interruptions would create a weird effect in any story...
...Shades of Shogun, about life in 17th-century feudal Japan...
...What's the matter-they couldn't find a Jewish actress to convincingly portray a spoiled, immature person...
Vol. 66 • April 1983 • No. 7
