On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television DOUBLE TROUBLE AT CBS BY MARVIN KITMAN Everybody loved The American Parade—until it went on the air last March 27, at 8 p.m. According to the full-page ads CBS took out, the day was...
...After all, he already is as partly bald as Mr...
...The object, clearly, was to fool some people into thinking this was an intellectual's Route 66...
...show, with Kuralt, and half of what works in TV news, starting with Today (NBC, 7-9 a.m...
...I'm tempted to call it "American Charade," since it was simply another collection of soft features, sort of an up-market Real People...
...We all do editorials...
...Crossroads is meant to last only through the summer...
...He could have played Karen Silkwood in a tube version of the eponymous movie...
...We didn't know," the parents said...
...After Charlie's lullabye, Bill Moyers' story about Christian Science practitioners was a real shocker...
...Still, I don't know what hundreds of TVs stacked up to look like an American flag have to do with the news...
...The last real CBS Reports was the famous West more land show, a couple of seasons back...
...They were also exactly the duo chosen not to be reunited when the magazine was put together in the fall...
...I seem to recall one in 1983 on the important subject of grizzly bears...
...They fired the theme song by Charles Ives next...
...Another fairly recent one covered the topic of college basketball, disclosing that inducements are given to students to play...
...T. Throw some Fortunoff jewelry around his neck, call him Mr...
...CBS obviously made concessions, perhaps including 50 per cent ownership of the station or rides in Van Sauter's limo...
...The 100 per cent increase in the number of hosts was news in itself...
...The prominent name thrown around as its creator was Nam June Paik, the noted video artiste...
...The replacement was Andrew Lack, his man on the half-hour Our Times series last summer...
...Remember, this was the show Moyers said he wouldn't touch with a 10-foot pole...
...Another theory, not mutually exclusive of the blank check speculation, is that they got rid of producer Shad Northshield for Moyers...
...His American almanac material on ducks flying home to Capistrano was for the birds...
...No doubt they will be repaving it several more times, though...
...Or been a wonderful night lamp at home...
...When a newspaper expires, regardless of how bad it was, everyone gets teary-eyed...
...he never burns rubber or chases anybody in that big van of his...
...What works on Sunday morning can be sleep-inducing on Wednesday night...
...I think they should have had Kuralt do the hour with his shirt off...
...over 32 years ago...
...The problem was that he was speaking a strange language the television public doesn't know: Washington politics...
...He just found other work to do, returning to Sunday...
...The station has been called a welfare operation for the middle classes...
...It was him...
...I'm such a lowbrow...
...I was among those who did not stand up and salute after the premiere hour...
...With TV and everything you didn't know that a fever like that is usually a sign of disease...
...But the pretentious garbage on the set of American Parade was something else...
...The set now consisted of a simple double-desk, a tooled antique leather job that probably came from the office of CBS News President Emeritus Van Gordon Sauter, where the decor rivals the Smithsonian's Early American Pavilion...
...You're both intelligent people, college educated, PhDs...
...Well, I have the same feeling about TV documentaries, especially CBS Reports shows done by Bill Moyers that brought us the scoop on the CIA's hidden army and why the Bronx burned...
...It was Crossroads when it returned to the air June 27, a Wednesday, this time as an 8 p.m...
...You have to wonder why they don't simply give the whole hour to Bill Moyers and his old CBS Reports team...
...Charlie always seemed out of place there...
...Apparently Moyers found a nine-foot pole...
...As it turned out, there weren't many people looking for one...
...Even then it is weak stuff...
...Few were lucky enough to get to see this unique structure, featuring more than 300 televisions in the background...
...That's why I'm not the head of CBS News...
...According to the full-page ads CBS took out, the day was to be another July 4. Actually, it was more like April 9, the day Bataan fell...
...The second opening night his big breakthrough was the discovery of a family of steeplejacks who stay together by fixing church steeples high in the sky...
...A child has fever, is thrashing about, and you don't pick up a phone and call the nearest doctor...
...Charlie's main trouble in providing entertainment on the road these days is that he always keeps all four wheels on the macadam...
...CBS Reports seems to have died— strangely, withoutany obituaries...
...On PBS' Wall Street Week Louis Rukeyser and Co...
...Having built a reputation as a serious person who did hard investigative reporting, he was not thrilled about interviewing Michael Jackson's one glove or doing other softcore stories...
...I have to confess that I never quite got the humor in video art...
...No overworked an-chorperson has ever been exposed to that many televisions simultaneously (I do not trust the safety of one, myself)-So if Kuralt seemed to be glowing on Tuesdays in April and May it was not the show...
...K, and The American Parade could have been competitive...
...People relate to him over picket fences in backyards...
...But it was too short...
...The continual juxtaposition of strong Moyers and light Kuralt sections in Crossroads produces schizophrenic viewing...
...Finally, they let go of Tuesday at 8 p.m., conceding defeat by The A Team...
...Technically he was "not fired fired," as they put it...
...We mourn...
...evidently believe that they have to walk through a bunch of rooms in order to talk...
...He came off as a dumpy man with a clipboard who was sweating too much because there was trouble back where we couldn't see...
...Moyers was genuinely startled...
...In the corridors of CBS News the prized bauble was known as "The B Team," because it was designed as an alternative to NBC's The A Team showing at the same time...
...The series was killed by low ratings, of course...
...I would have hired Moyers and Lack right away if I had really wanted them...
...Sure the design was impressive...
...Then the bosses opted for Kuralt and Northshield, who did the half-hour On the Road series last summer...
...Then they fired the set, although CBS News had been hailing it as the biggest technical advancement since sliced bread...
...We talk about being diminished...
...The format keeps interrupting the mood, making you feel manipulated...
...What's worse, the bits and pieces never add up to much...
...Meanwhile, CBS Reports, the most famous documentary series of all, a notable American institution since the days of Murrow and Friendly, now appears with about the frequency of Hal-ley's comet...
...It was supposed to have a message...
...So these potpourris don't have an audience or an impact...
...The toughest audiences understand him...
...Who, by the way, is tljis "Meese"hejoked about on opening night—an endangered species in Canada...
...They don't have anywhere near the impact of an hour-long, hard-hitting documentary such as Harvest of Shame, the CBS Reports special with Edward R. Murrow...
...He has a speech impediment, they said, even though Buchwald is widely acknowledged to be one of the funniest public speakers on the banquet circuit—a man who makes Presidents, bankers, professors, and me howl...
...alternative to ABC's The Fall Guy...
...But television documentaries, as a genre, invariably do poorly on the Nielsen thermometer, even when they prove to be the most memorable, talked-about events of a season (as was the case with Harvest of Shame and McCarthy) . Moreover, their surrogates, the magazines, do badly too...
...And the truth is, it can't fly, do interviews or even talk back to Van Sauter...
...They began by firing Art Buchwald, who did a two-minute comedy commentary...
...He interviewed a couple who were taking the Church to court because their baby boy had died under the care of one of its faith-healers . The parents discovered too late that their son's fever was an indication of spinal meningitis...
...Now, suddenly, he was incomprehensible on the tube...
...Charlie, though, was being subjected to lethal doses of radiation in Paik's avant-garde environment...
...Obviously the bungling CBS News management failed to realize that Kuralt doesn't need Nam June Paik's scenery...
...Everybody was afraid to ask...
...To me the almost hysterically promoted weekly news magazine, starring Charles Kuralt, seemed a little oversold...
...In fact, it was the most profound discussion of Christian Science I have ever seen on the screen...
...That was CBS' miscalculation...
...You mean the practitioner was trying to communicate to the mind of a 15-month-old...
...The new introduction, a fast-cut sequence of scenes, made it appear that the news anchors were characters in an entertainment series—two fearless, intrepid journalists wandering by roads and crossroads in search of hot stories...
...Like what...
...You can't win...
...Unfortunately, if you build an elaborate set that is a supposed work of art or costs a fortune, the director will feel obliged to use it...
...What anice bit of ironic justice: Trivialization of the news is not very popular either...
...I'm sure Bill Moyers got the plum assignment of j oining Kuralt at the wheel in retaliation for the commentary he did on Dan Rath-er's Evening News this spring, attacking his bosses' lack of principle in buying the Nixon tapes (see "Springtime for Nixon," NL, May 28...
...Paik also used to bang on a piano with his head and snip off John Cage's tie...
...He was thought to be kind of funny in his old performing days, when his act had someone playing a cello wearing a brassiere made of TVs...
...This was a powerful moment in a medical-religious horror tale every parent or kid could relate to...
...Moyers asked with his soft-spoken, comforting outrage...
...As for the all-new, improved, better-tasting Crossroads, I thought Moyers was great, but Kuralt was Som-inexville...
...It has been a hobby of mine this year to watch how a great network news department goes about fixing up a flop like American Parade...
...CBS News made much of the reunion of these two in the huge press the repairs got, saying they were exactly the right pair for the show and what had been wanted all along...
...But I'm too kind...
...Some of the best documentary producers in the business are sitting in offices over at the CBS Broadcast Center—with cobwebs on their typewriters...
...They also fired the producer, Robert (Shad) Northshield, the legendary veteran who has only invented the beloved Sunday Morning (CBS, 9 a.m...
...Charlie is running his thing about the little unique people into the ground...
Vol. 67 • June 1984 • No. 12
