On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television SEASONAL SMOG BY MARVIN KITMAN Several weeks before the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, I read that the British polo team was thinking of sending over oxygen masks for its...
...they've already had to revamp a few episodes . I hear that Wagner will be doing a complete analysis in five minutes, almost as quickly as she used to clean up the house...
...He does an incredible Jesus of Malibu...
...Certainly they were no worse than the lounge lizards at the Polo Lounge...
...One of them plays a cello or a bass fiddle, I can't remember which...
...My iguana, Brandon, fell asleep near the beginning and still hasn't awakened...
...Unless you have been totally out of touch with the real world, you know that this show about the reptilian Visitors who come to earth began as a four-hour series that had great ratings last winter, as did the six-hour sequel in May (see "Nazis from Outer Space," NL, May 16, 1983...
...Foul air, I say...
...I grew up in Monongahela City, Pennsylvania, where you could smell nearby Donora and Monessen...
...The briefly famous NBC scientist and government consultant has become the forgotten orangutang...
...E/R (CBS, Tuesday, 8 :30p.m...
...Mention him now and people think you're talking about the guy who went to Washington...
...You can chart the downhill course as the quality of what is breathed has steadily declined...
...Looking at the latest offerings from LA had me gasping for air in New Jersey...
...Dina Merrill, the tycoon's wife behind the chase of a couple who bleach their hair or change their hairdos weekly, makes Alexis look like Snow White...
...for instance, is another funny doctor show—M*A *S*H in the emergency room—with that laugh riot Elliot Gould, who hasn't doneanythingcomical since he married Barbra Streisand...
...I think the television industry needs to be sent away to a fresh air camp immediately...
...Even my pet turtle loved it...
...is this year's Scarecrow and Mrs...
...At ABC, the latest Aaron Spelling is all glitter, of course...
...They're not trying to get away...
...The first afternoon of my initial junket to the TV studios in 1980, the sky was filled with a purplish-chrome green cloud, real poison...
...But if you believe that, you believe Mr...
...The program is too literary for me...
...Hunter (NBC, Friday, 9 p.m...
...One can imagine the anguished sessions in the NBC offices while they sniffed the air, pondering "For not to V," as William Shakespeare put it, more eloquently...
...Sometimes I think we all work for secret government agencies...
...The duplication could be an example of Mendelian laws at play, a kind of genetic selection of concepts...
...Maybe it ought to move to the Monongahela River valley, where the mills are now empty...
...With the supply dropping almost continually through the ' 80s, the best they could turn out last season was Mr...
...Marathon runners, for example, have to take iron pills to add oxygen to their blood so they can think and run at the same time...
...The reptiles were merely doing their job...
...King...
...We didn't trust any air we couldn't taste in my childhood...
...Hidden cameras should be licensed, the way guns are in many states...
...I don't know who, either, nor does it matter...
...Would you want a horse, with or without a mask, writing television programs...
...Although I don't want to alarm anyone, a shortage of oxygen is what made Venus, Pluto, Mars, and Battlestar Galactica uninhabitable...
...Nevertheless, it failed to become a center of TV production, or of culture...
...The British, who are famous for their reserve and understatement, feared that their horses would not be able to run at maximum efficiency because of the smog...
...Michael Landon, on the other hand, plays a real angel in High way to Heaven (NBC, Wednesday, 8 p.m...
...Originally, I wouldn't touch Kwith a 10-foot tadpole...
...in October...
...It was nothing, we were told —a sure sign of oxygen deprivation at work...
...Being deprived of oxygen has a bad effect on animals...
...No one ever sees the connection...
...TV or LA— which will die of asphyxiation first...
...The slash in the title is supposed to be innovative, along with Gould's mumbling...
...My review of its first two hours could have been summed up in a one letter conclusion: B—for borrrring...
...Los Angeles officials, the Olympic Committee and the press all made light of the smog issue during the XXIII Olympiad...
...As Chachi, he wooed her on ABC's Happy Days before a whiff of nitrogen dioxide gave somebody there the deadly idea of spinning it into Joannie Loves Chachi...
...Even the producer hates this show...
...Compared with LA nowadays, Monessen and Donora were the Swiss Alps...
...But I worried all summer that some pony or its rider was using up the vital stuff that a TV script writer, or the associate producer who rewrites the script, might need...
...It seems that the final battle in V: The Final Battle was not the final battle at all...
...V got under your skin, particularly when the human beings on the show started making a lot of antilizard cracks...
...I wasn't terribly concerned about the British horses, who probably had other problems, such as being slow to begin with...
...For all the network hype and stories in the papers, he wasn't very memorable...
...They also have guest clients each week, including Vanessa Williams, the noted former Miss America, with her clothes on...
...Don't ask me why...
...On a clear day you can't see very far in LA either...
...is Dirty Harry—Fred Dyer, the football player, is Clint Eastwood—plus a Dirty Har-riette...
...Industry produces smog, too...
...No police problem is too big for her...
...And if you seat monkeys before a typewriter, it is said, they might write the same sitcom...
...The traffic, in turn, produces more smog, further reducing oxygen levels...
...But the main one out there, besides TV, is cocaine...
...Smith...
...Aside from V, almost every program this season reminds me of something else...
...it is also cruel—Candid Camera by a sadist...
...The 1984-85 fall TV season has nothing that is even as original or exciting as Mr...
...The country has gone reptile crazy, looking forward to the next landing, no doubt about it...
...In Hot Pursuit (NBC, Saturday, 10 p.m...
...It's like a plague, a combination of jet lag and future shock...
...On a slightly ugly day, everybody rushes into their cars to go driving...
...The major change is that Morgan Fairchild has replaced Joan Collins as the resident bitch...
...with Tony Dan-za, the boxing idol of Taxi...
...It was ironic, but indicative of the atmosphere, that the only intelligent voice on the screen came from a monkey...
...a bionic shrink who charms hardened cons...
...Upon arriving in the city where the future happens first, as they are fond of saying, I myself have always noticed a certain disorientation coming over me...
...Nobody who has lived in the Monongahela River valley would hold up his nose at an air problem...
...Neither show is very funny...
...Luggage comparisons were sly versions of Polish or Yugoslav jokes...
...I began to feel sorry for the aliens, and I'm sure I wasn't alone (you would be surprised how many Nielsen families are from another planet...
...Jones, his friend the baboon, is at ABC...
...How is it possible that in .the Free World, where there is no thought control, of only seven new situation comedies produced by the three networks combined—and never before have there been so few—two are about a male babysitter and feature TV matinee idols...
...is an expansion of the classic 1983 TV movie...
...Smith...
...The same colors, incidentally, show up on the lung x-rays of television executives...
...Maybe white grains rise into the atmosphere when the coke is cut...
...Actually, he was a chimpanzee who delivered the most urbane, witty dialogue to be heard on the tube last year...
...Name one outstanding creative person to come out of the valley, besides Andy Warhol of East McKeesport, Stan Musial of Donora and Marvin Kitman of Finleyville...
...is not merely a dumb imitation of last season's reality programming craze...
...It made me nostalgic for my boyhood...
...Without taking any credit away from bad writing, bad acting and bad decision-making, I would say that whatever is in Bananaland's air strongly affects what we get on the air...
...The famous so-called laid-back quality of the locals, generally assumed to result from some controlled substance, is probably also merely due to a lack of oxygen...
...After all, there are only a limited number of possibilities in alphabet combinations...
...This starts at the airport, where visitors are picked up in private golf carts...
...Interstellar history could be repeating itself in LA...
...Cover Up (CBS, Thursday, 10 p.m...
...People Do the Craziest Things (ABC, Thursday, 8 p.m...
...I' 11 admit I have been affected too, or rather, infected...
...The valley itself was beautiful, the little you could see of it...
...It's Little House Upstairs...
...A Cagney & Lacey look-alike, Partners in Crime (NBC, Saturday, 9 p.m...
...Remember the Golden Age of network comedy and mysteries like Co-lumbol Back then, in the early '70s, a modest pool of oxygen was still around stimulating those white cells, and I don't mean cocaine...
...Smith is currently running CBS and Mr...
...It was a very alarming note...
...Ditto the strange way they talk, using words like "bitchin'" and "rad...
...The show plays pranks on ordinary people—not celebrities—and makes them look like jerks...
...It's about two undercover agents who work for a secret government agency...
...Lindsay (Bionic Woman) Wagner is back as Jessie (ABC, Tuesday, 10 p.m...
...they're just aimlessly touring the freeways...
...The cast, after disembarking from The Love Boat and checking into Hotel, has gone out for jobs at a celebrity gossip magazine, Glitter (Thursday, 9 p.m...
...stars those two great detectives, Loni (WKRP) Anderson and Lynda (Wonder Woman) Carter, both of whom were married to the same man, now deceased...
...But that was before I saw The Last Days of Pompeii, shown opposite it in May (except for TV critics...
...Thursday, 8:30 p.m...
...In any case, the most exciting thing at NBC this fall, next to Grant Tinker's lo-botomy, is the return of V(Friday, 8 p.m...
...It's a matter of priorities...
...On Television SEASONAL SMOG BY MARVIN KITMAN Several weeks before the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, I read that the British polo team was thinking of sending over oxygen masks for its ponies...
...CBS has Charles in Charge (Wednesday, 8 p.m., EST), starring Scott Baio...
...Also on people...
...What's more important to you, a bunch of horses running around a lake or the people who make TV shows...
...ABC is giving us Who's The Boss...
...the plots of Les Miserables, The Fugitive, Dynasty, and Dallas are mixed into a bad series...
...He is an au pair boy in the home of a working couple with lots of children, none of whom is Joannie...
...That's why the roads are crowded at 3 p.m...
...It's a real horse race—without oxygen masks...
...Paper Dolls (ABC, Tuesday, 9 p.m...
Vol. 67 • August 1984 • No. 15
