The Tube Effect
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television The Tube Effect By Marvin Kitman Television is so good today because of my work at The New Leader from 1967 to 1987. Thanks to my 221 columns, comedies are funny, dramas are...
...But then, I'm not too thrilled with color, either...
...Where did you get the notion you would be expected to watch TV programs...
...This insight prompted me to advocate a Free Coke Plan with drug stamps, like food stamps, for the needy...
...My thing was to look at commercial TV as if I had not seen it before, which was true...
...The fictitious characters were the politicians, like President Ronald Reagan...
...The medium is the message...
...Instead of returning to politics, where he had done such super work managing the media for the LBJ Administration, he went into public TV programming...
...I'm culturally disadvantaged," I told Mike, listing my shortcomings...
...A writing teacher at East Stroudsburg State College conducted an analysis of eight Charlie's Angels scripts—my favorite heavy drama of the period—and discovered there were a total of 5,312 words in the average hourlong program...
...But if I brought up that week's Bonanza rerun, they would correct my version of the plot...
...How else could you explain the need to nosh so often...
...There was a rumor that John O'Connor of the New York Times, for example, had a set with one channel—13...
...Happy days were here again...
...I had one of the finest minds in Western civilization prior to becoming a TV critic...
...Conversely, those I panned stayed on...
...There is a sense of closure in my writing this essay...
...The New Leader further allowed me to do investigative journalism...
...There was another problem: I never watched TV I grew up at a time when educators and social scientists were warning that it could damage the mind...
...It was the only mistake Ah made as a publisher...
...I was different from other serious critics at the time...
...I needed the soundtrack to cue me when a bad person entered the room...
...NL readers, only watched public TV and serious critics followed suit...
...David Boroff, The New Leader's highly regarded first "On Television" columnist, held the post from 1962 until his sudden death from a heart attack at 48 in 1965...
...I am especially proud of having perceived the axiom known today as Kitman's Law: Pure drivel drives out ordinary drivel...
...But like former FCC commissioners who flip to the broadcast companies, I would not be surprised if I wind up at a TV network...
...She would watch out of the corner of her eye while flipping pages...
...I'm no authority on science, yet I knew my kidneys were not the same...
...He also said the people on the musical variety show that replaced his comedy program (The Fred Allen Show) in the late 1940s were atribe ofpygmies who traveled from channel to channel like small gypsy bands...
...But there were only 1,005 discrete words, the others being discrete sounds such as grunts...
...What I loved most about my new profession was its negative power...
...Could it be, I asked my readers, that the producers and writers who came up with the unfunny shows they must have thought were funny, as well as the network executives who bought them because they must have thought they were funny, and the people on the laugh tracks, were all on cocaine...
...I was asked to be the TV critic of Newsday, the Long Island daily newspaper, writing a column five times a week...
...Shortly after I took the job, Moyers left the paper...
...By the 1970s, I began noticing changes: Every eight minutes or so my mind wandered...
...Then a funny thing happened when I sat down in front of the tube: I was enthralled...
...But what did Allen know...
...I knew absolutely nothing about such classics as My Little Margie, TV's first speed freak, or that profound study of teenage angst, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis...
...My children were fascinated by the sight of their father, who only weeks before had been warning them that TV would rot their brains—as well as their teeth, from those junk food commercials—watching F Troop and writing down the dialogue...
...By the late 1970s, things were going so well that I was virtually illiterate...
...I could no longer sit and watch an entire movie without commercials...
...I also liked the theoretical nature of my work—making new discoveries about "the great American metaphor," as Marshall McLuhan called it...
...Some people have a photographic memory, what Oscar Levant dubbed "total recoil...
...A 14-catalog rating was mediocre, an 18 boring, a 22 terrible, and so forth...
...Today people would kill for the job...
...I was to discover that so-called nonviewers watched more commercial TV in the closet than confessed commercial TV junkies did openly...
...Ask GM where that led...
...We gain and we lose...
...HDTV is one of those industry-friendly plums...
...any laments always had to do with what was being portrayed...
...I say to TV: Good night, good luck and good riddance...
...The best shows are still in black and white: Compare The Honeymooners and Car 54, Where Are You...
...I constantly felt the urge to go to the bathroom or to go outside and buy something...
...She always watched TV with a pile of catalogs by her side as we sat on our couch for two...
...Hogan's Heroes, I later perceived, was TV's way of commenting on the Vietnam War during the repressive Richard M. Nixon years...
...For years I have been telling them what to do...
...He was successful anyway...
...What of the future...
...They made exceptions, though, for heavily promoted public television series...
...ASEARLY as 1969,my work at The New Leader began to pay off...
...Television seemed a museum without walls, as André Malraux had advocated...
...Moyers became a recurring problem...
...I was the one who cracked the secret of the first name of Lieutenant Columbo in Columbo...
...The only one left out of the creative process was the poor viewer at home watching in stunned incomprehension...
...Just when I was ready to return in some form to my roots in these pages, the Going Out of Business sign went up...
...It was right out of Detroit's auto industry playbook: planned obsolescence...
...Back in those days it was assumed intellectuals, i.e...
...Archie and Edith, Meathead and Gloria were the real people in our lives...
...More people know Fonzie," the civil rights lawyer Martin Garbus told me in the 1970s, "than Brezhnev, Andropov, Nicaragua, and George Washington combined...
...The characters on sitcoms became beloved members of our family, more dear than our relatives because they left at the end of a half hour...
...Nobody wanted thejob, including me...
...Personally, I place it second, after the comic book...
...And I was the first critic to postulate that programming was so bad in the '70s and '80s because everyone in Hollynose (Southern California) was on cocaine...
...While reminiscing, I must acknowledge a special debt I owe The New Leader...
...The average length of a sitcom is 23 minutes—just as long as your average cocaine high, I'm told...
...Television, I started to notice, makes us all a family, an extended family—or perhaps the word I'm searching for is extruded...
...it is on a par with the FCC giving station owners switching from analog to digital six extra channels, presumably as a reward for the good job they were doing with their existing channel...
...People I had run into among my literati set told me the only TV they watched was The McNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, and maybe for laughs a Presidential press conference...
...Finished catalogs would whiz by me...
...My mind is a total blank about TV," I added in preparing to respectfully decline the honor...
...Running the risk of being like one of those people at the holiday party who can't get out the door even afterthe shrimp platter is finished, I cannot leave without thanking The New Leader for giving me the opportunity to watch television— and get paid for it...
...I am still not old enough to replace Andy Rooney on 60 Minutes...
...This became particularly evident when the crowd at Elaine's mysteriously cleared out at certain hours during the Dallas and Dynasty years...
...In the few lines I have left, I just want to say the Golden Age of TV is now...
...I was able to adapt to television's overload of creativity because I have a builtin defense mechanism...
...I don't want to alarm anyone," I wrote, hitting the alarm button, "but have you considered that you might be mutating because of all this TV...
...HDTV was a stupid pet trick to make everybody's TV set obsolete...
...I would ask my intellectual friends what they thought of the fifth episode of Civilisation, Sir Kenneth Clarke's definitive examination of the history of art in the last 20 centuries...
...Writing in these pages, I declared it an endangered species and a greater menace to society than commercial TV, simultaneously...
...I even had the gall to complain about the sponsors on public TV Commercials, or enhanced underwriting as it was euphemistically called, in my time went from the best ad slogan ever written in 12 words or less—"The Following Program Is Brought to You by a Grant from Mobil"— to the Saab spot already seen on commercial TV It got so bad that kids' programs were sponsored by junk food companies, and those old house shows by public-spirited do-it-yourself merchants...
...It all began one fall day in 1966 over lunch with Mike Kolatch at Farm Foods, a dairy restaurant on West 49th Street in Manhattan...
...Ah hired you," he used to say at crowded public television events...
...In addition, the magazine gave me the freedom to crusade against things like HDTV In all my years I never heard a single person complain about the quality of the pictures on the screen...
...I am weighing my options of an entry-level job as a vice president...
...I have a number of offers on the table...
...My job as a critic was to pick up the discarded catalogs at the end of each hour and count them...
...Watching TV was gradually causing us to lose a few minor faculties, such as word recognition...
...In my debut column of February 27,1967,1 startled my readers by writing about a show on a commercial network...
...Clarke in a bikini on the island of Santorini...
...The size of cantaloupes, Fred Allen used to predict, to go with brains the size of peas and ears shrunk to kernels...
...The eight shows together used a vocabulary of 3,350 words, about that of a child entering the first grade...
...But enough bragging...
...So much for those who said TV was not an educational tool...
...As a freelance writer, my mind—after my fingers—was my greatest asset...
...My wife Carol is an avid catalog reader...
...As our kidneys shrunk, our stomachs grew...
...Yes, Dear is the funniest thing since Aristophanes...
...In TV's second decade the programs were bad...
...I was a struggling freelance writer who did not realize what a crucial time it was in the history of television as an art form— not to mention the art of TV criticism...
...I was a satirist, but you couldn *t parody what was already a parody of itself...
...The next development could be the eyeballs...
...It's going to be worse after us...
...to Two and a Half White Stupid Men...
...I began by watching all the old works of art, called reruns...
...It was too quiet sitting alone and writing...
...FCC chairman Newton Minow called it a "vast wasteland," shortly before he went to work for CBS as corporate counsel...
...I had become an audiovisual person...
...Otherwise, if at night I suddenly remembered a plot from Laverne & Shirley, I would wake up screaming...
...I was so impressed by how impressed he was with the depth of my lack of qualifications that I finally could not refuse him...
...In 1966, however, everyone was talking about the end of the medium's Golden Age...
...Coincidentally, I left Newsday in April 2005.1 had a tryout, as I explained, and the paper and I agreed it was not working after 35 years...
...I would put on a tape of a big blockbuster miniseries like Spartacus...
...It was Lieutenant, as in Sargent Shriver...
...Another one of my contributions to TV criticism was disseminating the Carol Kitman Catalog Rating System (patent pending...
...It turned out to be a keen satire on the military mind, the mass culture equivalent of Catch-22...
...I know lots of people who do it for free—and think it's fun...
...We want somebody with an open mind," he responded...
...Television is the greatest medium for enlightenment ever invented, as Ed Murrow said before he was pushed out the door to early retirement at CBS...
...I never watch it...
...One of the multitudes that read the NL was Bill Moyers, the publisher of Newsday and former press secretary to Lyndon B. Johnson...
...Reality TV is the height of drama programming...
...Thanks to my 221 columns, comedies are funny, dramas are gripping, and originality flourishes on the airwaves—notwithstanding the nine versions of CSI and the six editions of Law & Order...
...now I would be able to do it myself...
...Five of the shows I praised during my first season at the NL immediately went off the air...
...I have total forgetfülness...
...Public television was another target of mine...
...it has yet to fulfill its promise...
...Looking back with satisfaction at my years here, I can still remember how I got into this important cultural work...
...Blank stare...
...I could not tell when something I wrote was funny without a laugh track to alert me...
...The fifth episode, you remember, the one that had the pictures of Mrs...
...It's a good thing, too...
...I had to apologize for liking his shows, using one-third of my space to note the possible conflict of interest, until I totally ignored him...
...I later found out it was Moyers who had suggested hiring me, something he never let me forget...
...I spearheaded the attack on begathons, which pre-empted the programs people like you were sending in money to see...
Vol. 89 • January 2006 • No. 1
