TeleVISIONS (October/November 1975)

TeleVISIONS/4 Cyclops: man with one eye in the land of the blind By William Severini Kowinski Every other Sunday on the television page of the New York Times Arts and Leisure section, there is a column signed by a creature that used _to call itself Cyclops. There in one found phrases like “...Cosell, who wears his ego like a cow-catcher on the locomotive of his mouth and roars through our ears scorching our brains?’ or “‘After two weeks of the wholesome new TV season, I feel as thought I’ve been locked inside a gigantic hot fudge sundae with my mouth wired open.” Adventuresome or otherwise literarily inclined readers may have moved from there to the Sunday Book Review section of that same newspaper, where, generally on the back page (where almost everyone actually starts reading, having briefly checked out page one to see who's ipso facto-guaranteed bankable book has been puffed or slaughtered) they ‘ may from time to time find a column by John Leonard, former editor of the Book Review. It seemed to be laced With the same sort of ’ scazzling wit. Some coincidence. In the September 21 issue of the Times, the one-eyed mask was dropped to reveal that John Leonard is Cyclops. He has left his post as Book Review editor to become something called the Times chief cultural correspondent. “I became a TV reviewer by accident,” Leonard says. When he switched his book reviewing from Life magazine to the New York Times in 1969 (when Life was still alive) his editor at Life wanted (a) to keep Leonard's writing in the magazine and (b) the services of a television columnist. Enter the famous formula, a plus b equals Cyclops. (Actually, Leonard wrote under his own name for a few years, until he became editor of the Sunday Book Review. “Life still occasionally receives letters thanking the magazine for getting rid of me in favor of Cyclops,’’ Leonard wrote in 1972, ‘‘or demanding my return and the firing of Cyclops. So much for a distinctive prose style.”’) From Life to Newsweek and now biweekly in the Sunday Times, Cyclops fights a never-ending battle with Rhoda, Kojak, and Apple's Way, keeping one wise eye on the similarly uniocular fube and the other, presumably, on the road. Why does a man who not only has a secure niche in the land of letters but a certain dominance there want to jump the babbling brook of denial into televisionland? Because “being powerless is liberating,’’ Cyclops says. “You can say what you want about the play and the actors; it won't close and they won't be fired, on your account. By the time your Cyclop’s stylish prose has many delights. Often, his wit is its own reward, as in his observation that the erstwhile anchors of ABC News, Harry Reasoner and Howard K. Smith ‘look like a pair of defeated congress men..." or that Walter Cronkite of CBS “comes on like a combination of God and Willy Loman, selling disaster with a shoeshine _ and a jowl.”’ Other times, when we as readers/viewers feel most helpless against the deadening insanity of some shows, his’ good style is our revenge against bad TV. Some of these innoculations against ennui come in small-dose one liners, viz. “‘Mike Douglas is Dinah Shore in drag."’ Others are antidotes sufficient to revel in, as this 1972 description of Let's Make A Deal: “Some weirdo prowls up and down the aisles, waving hundred-doilar bills, asking members of the studio audience whether they've got a whale tooth or Linda Kasabian’s autograph or Spanish fly. If they do have it, they can either keep the cash or opt for the unseen. The unseen—a Polaris submarine, Dean Martin's bladder, 34 years on the jungleboat at Disneyland, capital punishment—sits behind a curtain. Zowie.” But what sets Cyclops irredeemably apart from other tube reviewers, and makes him worth reading, is his exploration of moral Cyclops harbors suspicions of how ; brittle our culture may be comment appears in print, the object of it has vanished. Millions of people saw exactly what you saw, have already made up—or shortsheeted—their minds about it, and told Mr. Nielson."’ Also “You are being paid to watch television, which means that you don't have to apologize for doing what all your friends do secretly and feel guilty about.’’ Spoken like a true liberated literary elitist. So why should we, the great unvarnished, read the pithy observations of this wordwinching vaudevillian? It’s not because Mr. Cyclops is always right. ‘Colombo is going to wear thin as a routine,”” he writes. ‘The detective who seems stupid but is actually smart is funny only the first time around.” Right. So much for the predictions of 1971...But it isn’t because he’s a fool, either. Recently. his columns about H.R. Haldeman being generously paid for a CBS interview (he saw nothing wrong with it, except stupidity, comparing it to print media practices) and money hassles between TV stars and executives (he defénded. the stars, suggested salaries based on how royalties are handled in the book biz) have made singular good sénse. Significantly. in these and other instances, Leonard's experience outside television is the illuminating element. dimensions and the resonances television sets otf -in the recesses of our culture, not to mention our nervous systems. Cyclop’s most unpopular review while still at Life was his denunciation of All In The Family, which began: “All In The Family’ is a wretched program. Why review a wretched program? Well, why fix the septic tank or scrub the sink with a magic scouring pad? Every once in awhile a reviewer. must assume the role of a Roto: Rooter, stick himself down the clogged drain of the culture he happens to live in, and try to clean away the obstruction.”’ His point was that Archie Bunker's bigotry was insulting to workingmen, and that bigots were perforce allowed to be considered funny and forgiveable. It was a starchy stand, and drew 90% negative mail. Leonard watched the program some more, and duly reported that his basic response was unchanged. ‘The drain is still clogged, and once a week most Americans wash their faces in the dirty water left in the sink, unless like the voters for Wallace, they drink it instead.”’ Pretty strong stuff. especially directed as supposedly unserious ‘‘entertainment."’ But that’s what Cyclops is all about. (Lest Cyclops seem snooty, let us mention that he does like Mary Tyler Moore.) photo by G. Wurzburg In his more recent Times columns, he has scaled down the tour de force quotations from Sartre. Ezra Pound and Wallace Stevens, to deal more directly with television as experiences of contemporary culture. He thinks the medium, even as it is now used. is strangely important, and he tries to define how, even if those attempts seem to sneak in with the passion and the patter. **Television is now our only way of talking to each other about who we think we are,’ he writes, in a column about the Academy Awards marqueed “Let's Hear It For Vulgarity.”” In a piece on TV néws reporters as superstars, he slides in this mordant claim: “They are paid to be more than messengers; their celebrity is conferred on them because they are our stand-ins for life as it is botched outside our livingrooms.”” His view of the import of television was most clearly expressed in the last line of a column published this July: “The networks are our substitute for culture.” It is a heavy premise tor a literary person to make, one who is aware of how important the systems of ideas transmitted by books, humanized and absorbed in lengthy letters, serious conversations and lively journalism once were to the care and feeding of previous cultures. Nowadays, it’s true: West coast is linked to East principally by Johnny Carson and Tom Snyder. Layers of our culture are defined by who loves Lucy and who gets off on Uncola commercials. Some people relate better to characters on General Hospital than to their spouses or children. If you can’t be your own best friend, there's always Merv Griffin. Cyclops knows this. He is intimating the terrible suspicion of how brittle our culture may really be, made up of mass merchandized illusions with plenty of sheen and no guts. When he praises Lucas Tanner:. it's not because “David Hartman plays the part of an ice Cream cone with dimples” but because a serious, idealistic teacher is a good role-myth for his children to see. When, a few years ago, he devoted several columns to praising Dick Cavett, it was because “Cavett’s dignity enhances our own. I hope he survives many seasons of our discontent, because then he will be helping us to survive them as well.” When recently he lauded a non-network special, “Three Women Alone,” for being “about real people and emotions that TV usually ignores or trivializes,"” it wasn't because (as he wrote in his controversial A// Jn The Family review) “...of my ideological delinquencies, my toilet training, my SAT scores, my Higher Seriousness or my chromatic complexion,” but because he knows television is a vital factor in our lives—and he cares. eT Note: A selection of Leonard's Lifé columns are published in his book? This Pen for Hire, by Doubleday. The Paid to care about TV’s new season By Maurice Jacobsen Watching a Sony at the other end of a long conference table in a window-less American Broadcasting Company meeting room, Marvin Kitman leans forward with a quizzical look in his eyes. “You know I don’t like to review these shows before they go on the air. It kind of takes the fun out of it for people watching at home.’’ No wonder, Kitman, television critic for Long Island's Newsday just finished looking at four hours of the new offerings conjured up by ABC. And for the most part they weren't very good. The preview was presided over by Vic Gedaliah, one of ABC’s public relations people who appeared at proper intervals to change the video casseftes. The atmosphere was embarrassingly comparable to a young filmmaker tentatively hoping for approval from a senior critic-at a private screening and making uncomfortable small talk when it doesn't come. Only in this case the end results were produced on budgets of over $250,000 and were going to be given a guaranteed audience of more people than saw Gone With the Wind when the epic film had its first theatre run. “IT don’t think it'll work,”’ he says looking at a new situation comedy On the Rocks, “They're trying to make a funny show about some poor miserable losers locked in jail. The show is based on something they did on the BBC. If they were smart they would have just imported the original, it’s probably a whole lot better.” For Kitman the day started optimistically enough with a show called Welcome Back Kotter, a sit-com about your basic New Yorker. Gedaliah probably pulled this one out of his hat first to put the critic in a good frame of mind. The half-hour preducéd by the same people who created Chico and the Man is a story about a street kid who, after college, returns to teach at his old high school. It’s a show that Kitman could easily relate to as the school was set in the same neighborhood where he grew up. “You know most families take their kids out of the city to get an education, Not mine, they brought me to Brooklyn to get educated.” Coming from a background of writing for the now-defunct New York publication Monocle, a magazine of satire, commentary and analysis, he’s been Newsday's television critic for almost five years. He’s the media critic’s answer to Art Buchwald. But sitting in this conference room seven stories above Madison Ayenue he is on the receiving end of the same public relations machinery as Betty Tate Cooper of the Yuma Daily Sun, or Dick Kline of the Des Moines Sunday Register, and a very impressive piece of machinery it is. As the minions who run this public relations mill are most surely reminded each day, the business of the networks is not to deliver a program to an audience, but is to deliver an audience to a sponsor. The larger a Maurice Jacobsen is an executive editor of TeleVISIONS. William Kowinski is a freelance journalist, playwright and _fictionist living in Cambridge, where he spends much time waiting for the tooth-fairy to finally arrive. ' a tae” c the audience the larger the advertising révenue. So, needless to say the networks want all.the publicity they can muster and the television writers and critics from around the country area prime source. There are about .80 (major newspaper writers the networks refer to as “the TV press,” but perhaps less than half devote the better part of their week to writing columns, opinion pieces or investigative reports on the broadcast industry. Gary Deeb, TV critic of the Chicago Tribune tells of one veteran in charge of the TV section for a paper: in Baltimore who was quoted in a recent teature story as saying he ‘“‘never went in much for criticism,” stating that his primary function was to let viewers know what was on TV that night and to let them decide for themselves whether they liked it. John O'Connor television critic for the New York Times does not speak kindly of the majority of his colleagues feeling there is a “low state-of-the-art’ in television criticism. “Critics should stay removed, they shouldn’t let themselves get caught up in the glamour of the business. Many are nervous about talking with stars and will accept just about anything they are told without challenging the idea.” O’Connor doesn’t take part in the twice yearly junkets which all three networks stage. But, for a television writer from middle America whose job is to fill in the spaces around the ads and program listings in the Sunday TV Supplement, a chance for a free-ride to Los Angeles is irresistible. Once on the coast the writers are given the royal treatment, wined and dined, and given a chance to meet the stars and program executives. At NBC everyone goes at once. But CBS breaks the groups down, taking small batches to the coast over a period of time. According to Bill Greeley, one of the four TV writer/critics at the New York office of Variety, they do that in order to “keep the rotten apples away from the bunch. They don’t want people like Gary Deeb asking embarrassing questions in front of a group of gentle people from the Midwest. What they try to do is to get all the trouble makers together at one time.” From the networks point of view one of those trouble makers is Les Brown, author of The Business Behind the Box, former Variety staffer, and now television correspondent for the New York Times. At the Times they make a clear distinction between reporting on the activities of the broadcast industry and reporting on program content. “I’m responsible for what comes out of the box, Les is responsible for what goes into it,” is the way O'Connor puts it. ‘ ea ee Se spt 7 But this distinction is not the case everywhere and is one of the reasons why the trade press such as Broadcasting, and Variety have a special kind of relationship with the networks. TV writers outside the major markets of New York, Chicago and L.A. rely on these publications as their key sources of gossip about programming and behind the scenes policy decisions. Consequently the trades have an inside track. At Variety a reporter is assigned to each network, Bill Greeley covers NBC, but he has covered them all. “Nobody really knows anything about television’’, he feels. Speaking as a 16-year veteran he’s not inclined to moderate his innate cynicism. “Each Friday we all go over to the networks and do our “Bear Dance’.”” The Bear Dance according to Greeley, is the Variety writer's parade around to the network executive offices for the latest news each week. The rounds include the programming, research,and sales depart Marvin Kitman likes television too, but is decidedly much more candid in his appraisal of the networks. “They're rotten and exploitative, butweall know that,” he says with a smile. Kitman describes his philosophy of criticism by explaining he writes for the “closet viewer’—the person who likes television but often doesn’t want to admit it. He is undoubtedly a closet watcher himself, so Kitman tends to have fun with his subject without mincing words. In an article, “‘How I Would Improve TV”, he suggests a ‘“Broadcasting Act of 1984” that would establish a whole new set of priorities for station licensees. But before that happens he suggests, ‘“‘as an expression of gratitude to a’l entrepreneurs who risked thousands to nake millions in the old days.....they (Congress) might proclaim a five-year moratorium period in which all existing license holders will be urged to make as much profit as possible, which for most would not “The networks are rotten and exploitative, but we all know that...” ments. The last being “one of the better places to garner information.” “We've got to keep a delicate balance with these guys,”” he admits, but adds that both sides are using each other. “They know that they've got to give us straight information so that, when they want to run some bull by us, they can get away with it.” Some of that bull appeared to be the networks optimism over station clearances. Each affiliate station has the option of running its own locally produced program or a syndicated show in place of what it’s fed by the network. The acceptance by an affliate of a network program is called station clearance. These agreements are very important to the webs (a Variety-ism for the networks) as sales rates are based on potential audience. When pricing new shows with no track records, the number of affiliates carrying the show is critical; thus optimism over clearances helps spur sales. Most years these agreements come in automatically, but this year with the “family viewing’ hours in place and the presence of some strong independently produced shows such as Space; 1999 some network shows are being bumped. “We'll let them get away with their line this week, but I’m checking around and will get the real story next week.”’ Greeley obviously knows what’s happening, but of course, ‘‘Variety likes television....it’s what we're all about.” necessitate any substantial change in practice. In this way every millionaire broadcaster could retire a multi-millionaire broadcaster.” Kitman is not much kinder on public broadcasting, “‘at least with the networks we know where they're coming from.....PBS is the height of hypocrisy, half of what they show is corporation-sponsored and they’re always running scared out of their wits that they'll say something to offend someone.”” On Long Island, Kitman has his own special style of criticism, but across the river at the Times John O'Connor is a bit more temperate. Coming to the New York Times in 1971 from the Wall Street Journal he takes an intellectual approach to the medium. “‘I write for the people who read the Times, who are a different audience than the people who read the Daily News for instance. | try to provide a service to my readers, to let them know what's happening with television, what good programs are going to be aired, what the current and future trends are going to be.” To that end O’Connor is one of the few critics, if not the only critic to write seriously about the New York public access channels and video showings in the city. He thinks the work of independent video producers is important and wrote in a recent column of the convergence of style between network documentaries and the work of TVTV. He is also committed to public television feeling that if he has any influence at all (which he surely 5/TeleVISIONS = Marvin Kitman (above), under an ABC barrage, is the critic for Newsday. John O'Connor (pictured at left) notices TV for the NY Times. Photo montage by the author. does) it is in bringing public attention to New York’s PBS affliate WNET. “Television,” he states, “‘is like a piece of furniture. It can be found in almost every home in America.....it is a very important part of our cultural environment.” O’Connor views television as a serious medium, worthy of criticism on the same level as that found in film or theater. He is upset that more writers are not dealing with the industry on that level. Gary Deek of the Chicago Tribune shares that view. He points out, “many TV critic-editors got their jobs because their managing editors saw the TV beat as a nice soft, ineffectual spot for a nice, soft, ineffectual reporter.’’ No wonder CBS doesn’t like him hanging around during their press tours. But for the most part he’s correct, most newspaper managers call the people assigned to cover television, ‘editors’ rather than critics. At many papers in addition to writing about the medium they have been assigned the task of compiling the daily TV logs, a clerical chore at best. What we have then in mass circulation daily papers, are two ends of a spectrum. On one end are the critics, the individuals who see the medium as more than just a glamourous outlet to sell soap. “It’s impossible to talk about radio and television in America without taking about American. life,”” writes Ron Powers winner of a Pulitzer prize in 1972 for his television columns in the Chicago Sun-Times. “No other critic on a newspaper deals with a medium that reflects so directly the personality, character, hopes, fantasies, distraction, myths, and delusions of the American People.”’ Powers, I fear, is in the minority in his perception. At the other end of the scale are the hacks who for the most part are merely products of foolish newspaper managements that demand directly or indirectly, that the TV beat be covered in a frothy, showbiz manner. After all, the thinking goes, television is cheap entertainment and not too much significance should be attached to it. But then again, what more can we expect. Newspapers, like television, are a reflection on ourselves. If we accept what we are spoonfed, what more can we ask for? Like Bill Greeley says, “‘nobody knows anything about television anyway.”’ Or do we?