This week in TV Guide: October 13, 1962

A striking cover this week, don't you think? Totally black-and-white except for the flesh tones on Hirschfeld's caricature of Jackie Gleason.*  Even the famed TV Guide logo has been stripped of its color.

*By the way, have you spotted "Nina" yet?

It's no surprise that Richard Gehman would take a snarky approach to this article on Gleason, the first of a three-part profile of the star. "One can gauge the depth of his lonliness by how high Gleason flies," is the psychoanalytic subheading to the article.  The premise continues as Gehman accompanies Gleason on a cross-country train junket to promote his new variety show.

So what evidence does Gehman use to back up his diagnoses? Well, first of all Gleason likes people - he'll spend five or ten minutes with anyone who asks for an autograph, and during the whistle-stop tour, he personally greets everyone who shows up to see him. He drinks heavily, when he drinks at all - he sometimes stops for weeks or months at a time. He's been known to overindulge in the same way with food.  His explanation: "I'm thirsty and I'm hungry."

He loves to hold court for hours wherever he is. most frequently at Toots Shor's in New York. Writes Gehman, "his bombast conceals sensitivity and tenderness, and his leafily prodigal behavior is is rooted in a mulch of loneliness and awareness of the essential tragedy of the human condition." While visiting him at his hope in Peekskill, New York, Gehman observes the other Gleason: more contemplative, moodily musing on his broken marriage, his less-than-ideal childhood (deserted by his father, orphaned by his mother), his hard road to stardom.

I still think that Gehman, in an effort to avoid the fan-mag tenor that the magazine now proudly displays, errs on the side of psychobabble, but there's no denying the power of this paragraph that concludes part one of his profile: "It sometimes occurs to me, as I think of Jackie Gleason sitting there in that voiceless, empty house, that all his activities, his businesses and his productions, his performances and his plans, are no more than ways to erase the dark brown loneliness from which he knows he never will escape. And the same can be said for all that abandoned gregariousness."

***

A couple of big specials provide the highlights for the week. First off, it's Dinah Shore with her inaugural show of the year, Sunday night at 9:00 pm (CT) on NBC.  Dinah's been associated with NBC for a dozen years, and this will be the first of nine specials she'll do for them this season. This really is a special though, a one-woman show of just Dinah singing with Frank DeVol's orchestra.

Sid Caesar's signed up for nine specials this season as well, and his opener is on ABC Tuesday night at 9:30 pm.  Unlike Dinah, Sid has a regular cast of characters appearing with him, including - get ready for this - our friend Paul Sand of the Second City Troupe.

Looking at this week's regular shows, we find plenty more entertainment.  Ttony Bennett is the headline guest for the aforementioned Gleason on his Saturday night show (CBS), and later that night Lawrence Welk and his Champagne Music Makers take over on ABC. On Sunday, Ed Sullivan's guests include Connie Francis, Louis Prima and Sergio Franchi. Tuesday on CBS, Red Skelton welcomes Kay Starr and Jackie Coogan, while later that night on the same network, Garry Moore has familiar faces Alan King, Nancy Walker and Dorothy Collins. It's an all=-star lineup on Perry Como's NBC show Wednesday: Lena Horne, with jazzmen Charlie Byrd and Stan Getz, as they try out the new Brazilian dance the Bossa Nova* with choreographer Carol Haney. On Thursday, again on NBC, Andy Williams has special guest Martha Raye. Finally, Jack Paar's Friday night show (NBC) has husband-and-wife Gordon and Sheila MacRae, Woody Allen, and the Harlem Magicians, a rival of the Harlem Globetrotters. I remember that team; they used to appear on television occasionally, and they were to the Globetrotters what homemade hamburgers are to the ones you get at a restaurant - good, but not as good. When I saw them, they were called the Fabulous Magicians, and their headliner was the great dribbler (and former Trotter) Marques Haynes.

*Don't like dancing?  Don't blame it on me.

***

If you'd rather have sports, we've got it.  The big game on Saturday's college football Game of the Week (CBS) is a classic: Oklahoma vs. Texas at the Cotton Bowl in Dallas. This game was just played here last Saturday; it's the centerpiece of the State Fair of Texas, where the Cotton Bowl is located.  As was the case this year, the stadium would have been evenly divided between the burnt orange of the Longhorns and the red of the Sooners.  However, unlike this season, the 1962 Horns came into the game flying high, ranked #2 in the country, and they would take Oklahoma in a tight defensive game, winning 9-6.  Texas would finish the regular season undefeated before losing in the Cotton Bowl on New Year's Day, while this was the second and final regular season loss for Oklahoma; they would finish #8 before they, too, lost on New Year's, in the Orange Bowl

More football Sunday, although the pro games vary depending on where you live, due to the NFL's blackout rule. If you're in the Dennison area, CBS gives you the Redskins-Cardinals game at noon; if you're in Wichita Falls, you get the Cowboys, playing at the same Cotton Bowl against the Eagles. If you live in DFW, your only choice is the AFL game on ABC, pitting the New York Titans (before they became the Jets) and the Houston Oilers.  Otherwise, the week's highlights are ABC's Wide World Of Sports on Saturday afternoon, with auto racing from Trenton and horse racing from Paris, and a middleweight bout between a couple of unranked fighters that night, also on ABC.

***

Last week I previewed getTV's new Monday night schedule, which features reruns of the Merv Griffin Show. It's fitting, therefore, that this week's issue has a profile of Merv, written by Edith Efron.  This is the pre-talk show Merv, and Efron's profile is, shall we say, much kinder than the Gleason article.  Griffin, at the time 37, is a man of many talents - classical pianist, jazz musician, pop singer, movie actor, composer, game show emcee - and now, waiting for the next phase of his life, he admits "I don't have a fixed image."

His self-image, as it is, is much more positive than it used to be, when he weighed 80 pounds more than he does today. As the weight dropped, his career took off; the novelty song "I've Got a Lovely Bunch of Coconuts" was a million-seller, after which he met Doris Day and wound up in movies, then met Tallulah Bankhead and wound up as part of her Vegas show, then would up on radio and television, and most recently a four-week gig as one of NBC's substitute hosts on The Tonight Show during the interregnum between Paar and Carson. So impressed with Griffin was NBC that they signed him to a contract for his own talk show, scheduled to begin October 1. That show will last, with a brief break in 1963-64, all the way to 1986.

Colleagues call Merv "warm," "talented," "clever" and "ingenious," and those last two perhaps help to describe Merv's future successes in the business world. There was the real estate deal in Atlantic City where he got the better of Donald Trump, just one of the shrewd deals that made him a major success in real estate. And we can't forget the two game shows that he developed and produced before selling them off for a good chunk of dough - Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! If memory serves, he even wrote the theme to Jeopardy! It was said that when he died, his net worth was $1 billion. In any event, next to Gene Autry, Merv Griffin was perhaps the most successful mogul in show business. And reading this article, we can say we knew him when.

***

The starlet of the week is actually a bona fide star, Sally Ann Howes, From the British music halls to Broadway to television variety shows and frequent appearances on such game shows as Password, she's become a familiar face to television viewers. This week, the elegant and stylish Miss Howes demonstrates "the beautiful trends for fall."

***

Best ad of the week has to be this odd comic strip-style feature for The Lloyd Bridges Show, an unusual anthology series in which Bridges played a newspaper reporter who, each week, would imagine himself in the role of the person about whom he was reporting. Later on it switches to a more conventional anthology, but I find this technique quite interesting. It's not as Walter Mitty as it sounds; more like the reporter trying to picture what must have happened in a given situation. Was he subconsciously testing himself, trying to figure out how he would have handled that situation?  Given that the show only ran for one season on CBS, we'll never know. I'm only surprised the cartoon doesn't have a thought bubble connecting him to the scene he's imagining.

***

One of the enduring mysteries of life is why we so often behave in a manner that runs contrary to what we say we want. That's no different with television, of course, where people claim to want quality programming while routinely ignoring it when it's offered. Dr. Herbert Kay, Director of the Center for the Study of Audience Reactions, thinks he knows why such things happen.

According to Dr. Kay, viewers drawn to family sitcoms are well-aware of their flaws and shortcomings, but their main reason for watching them is to "escape from crime, violence, brutality, uninhibited sex,* and other unwholesome or unhappy situations." Thus, while fans of such shows may describe them as "down-to-earth" and "true-to-life," what they really want is to escape that very quality, in favor of shows that offer happy endings and morals to the story.

*1962 style, anyway.

On the other hand, and this I find quite interesting given my own predilection for realism on TV, those who denigrate such shows as "trite" and "unpredictable" are drawn to shows that are not necessarily realistic, but "asks him to believe that it's realistic and could happen."  Therefore, such a viewer might find himself (or herself) watching a show such as Car 54, Where Are You? - a show that you might consider silly - because it doesn't make any pretensions or try to insult the viewer's intelligence. "Look," it says to the viewer - "we're going to try to make you laugh through slapstick and farce. Take us or leave us on those grounds."

It's always been typical of television executives that as soon as a style or format becomes a hit, imitation will follow.  Look at how many different versions of Friends swamped the airwaves. To a point, this is good thinking, because viewers do show a preference for new shows. However, they also put a premium on entertainment and production values, which means that a shoddy or cheap copy will be seen as just that, and sent fairly quickly to the garbage bin.

In short, the message is that while networks are often criticized for offering their viewers the television equivalent of junk food, they're simply acknowledging what they've known for some time now, something that researchers are only beginning to figure out - there's a difference between what viewers say and what they do, and programmers understand this. They've seen the trends, they've looked at the ratings, and they're doing nothing more than giving the viewers what they want.

***

Finally this week, a few quick notes from the Teletype section, since we haven't been there lately.

In New York, there's the report that NBC will soon be launching a new Goodson-Todman game show, the five-days-a-week Match Game.  Good move - it runs for seven seasons on NBC, then after a hiatus of four years is revived by CBS, where it runs for another six seasons, plus two or three more in syndication.

CBS Reports plans to focus on the current campaign for governor of California, pitting incumbent Edmund "Pat" Brown against former Vice President Richard Nixon.  We all know how that turned out; Brown, the father of current Governor Jerry, narrowly edged out Nixon, putting him into political retirement (or not, as the case may be), while Brown, four years later, would confidently predict another victory, this time against former actor Ronald Reagan. With Reagan winning by a margin of nearly one million votes, the laugh was on Brown.

NBC Opera is presenting a new Gian Carlo Menotti composition on March 3. Unfortunately, the Teletype doesn't bother to mention what it is,but thanks to the miracle of the Internet, we're able to tell that it's Labyrinth, not one of Menotti's bigger productions. From the sound of it, I think I'd rather like it; however, unlike Amahl, Labyrinth was never intended to be anything other than a television production, one specifically designed to take advantage of the techniques and opportunities offered by TV. It has never been performed again. TV  

TV Jibe - riviting talk TV

After you drop that first anvil on someone's head, it always gets easier

The twin issues of violence on television and the quality of children's programming have received attention virtually since the beginning of the medium; frequently the controversy has combined the two into one - violence in children's television.  And among the shows most frequently panned by anti-violence advocates: cartoons.

As this article by Tom Klein at Cartoon Research shows, the issue dates back to Dr. Alberta Siegel's pioneering research into the relationship between violent cartoons and child development, initially centering around a 1941 Woody Woodpecker cartoon called "Ace in the Hole."* Klein continues his look at the issue here and here, and I'd encourage you to check all three of these articles out, as well as this story on the relationship between violent cartoons and - Stanley Kubrick!

*Not to be confused with the 1951 Kirk Douglas/Billy Wilder movie of the same name, about which there was nothing cartoonish.

Personally, I've never felt that watching Wile E. Coyote being flattened by another Acme anvil, or seeing Bugs Bunny put one over on Elmer or Daffy or Yosemite Sam, had the slightest adverse effect on me.  If anything, I think the introduction to classical music that Looney Tunes cartoons provided far outweighed any ill effects that might have existed.  I'd wager that most of you grew up watching these cartoons - what do you think? TV  

What's on TV? Monday, October 10, 2005

On Saturday I talked about how different 2005's TV Guide was from the issues we usually look at, and this is certainly apparent when we look at the daily programming guide.  For one thing, the listings - except for prime time - appear only in grid format, and only the prime time grid changes from day to day.

That's why, for example, you'll see "Various Programs" indicated on the listings below; if a station had different programming each day in the 2:00-3:00 pm time slot, for example, rather than take up the time with what each day's show is the grid simply lets you know you'd better check it out yourself if you're not sure.  They know what they're doing here, though - the publishers were only too aware that by this time the bulk of TV Guide's subscription base consisted of hotels and motels receiving complimentary copies; more and more, people were depending on on-screen guides for their daily viewing.  For the same reason, the listings begin at 6am and run through 1am (for some, they end at 10pm) - most of what's on overnight is either informercials or programs that were already shown during the day.

A few random notes on the programming itself - you'll notice there's not a single movie being shown, or at least not during the times listed.  What a change from the past!  Also, the proliferation of infomercials (not seen in the past, or limited to the odd half-hour here and there), smarmy talk shows and mock court programs (each one existing only an excuse for people to shout at each other) and back-to-back airings of a particular show.  As I say, the times they are a changin'. So let's see what we've got.  Our programs are from the Twin Cities.

This week in TV Guide: October 9, 2005

TV Guide was already dead and buried long before this, the final "small size" issue, and the final one to feature local programming listings.  The death rattle probably started when the magazine was purchased by Rupert Murdoch in 1988 and began its transformation into a tawdry tabloid, but in truth the germ of the disease was contracted even earlier, as the medium itself changed.

From the outset, one of the primary goals of TV Guide was to win respect for television, to encourage people to view it as something other than a frivolous entertainment.  Publisher Walter Annenberg and Editor Merrill Pannit strove to elevate the level of dialogue from that of the typical "fan magazine," commissioning articles by noteworthy politicians, historians and authors, and featuring pieces from such writers as John Gregory Dunne, Joan Didion, Edith Efron and others.  Once it became apparent that television needed TV Guide more than the other way around, the magazine and its writers took the gloves off, frequently casting a critical eye not only at the shows themselves, but the stars who appeared in them.  And always, Pannit's editorials insisted that television could become better, with more of an emphasis on culture and the arts and improved programming for children, and that it should not dumb down its programming for the public.

At the same time, TV Guide was a staunch defender of television against its many critics.  It was skeptical, though not totally dismissive, of the idea that programs could have adverse effects on viewers, especially young children.  It constantly campaigned against government intervention, while reminding the industry that such intervention was inevitable if it refused to clean up its own act.  There were serious, incisive interviews with producers, directors and writers about how programs could better deal with controversial issues and adult topics, and whether or not there was an implicit censorship emanating from network headquarters.

All of that was part of the old TV Guide, the issues that you ordinarily read about in this space. But now, looking at this final issue, we notice the differences, large and small, that have appeared over the years.

For one thing, the daily listings now begin on Sunday rather than Saturday.  I suppose this makes sense given that the calendar week begins on Sunday, but I always thought the Saturday start made an implicit point about the importance of the weekend and how television was an instrumental part of the leisure time that Saturday and Sunday represented.*  That's the first, and most obvious, change, along with the staggering number of channels covered in the issue.  Not only has there been a multiplication of local stations, we now have cable as well.  It's this, more than anything else, that probably made the change in focus inevitable; in 2005, it was almost impossible to keep track of the hundreds of channels out there, and to publish them in a concise magazine format.  Today, ten years on, it's probably ten times more complex than that, considering the rise in original streaming series from Amazon, Netflix, and others.  How does one put out a television guide when people can get their programs at any time they want, even all at once if they so choose.  I wonder if a visionary such as Pat Weaver could have imagined it?

*For this issue, there are actually eight days covered, since subsequent issues will run from Monday to Sunday.

Sadly, there are other changes that are less understandable, ones that illustrate how the content has been cheapened.  Where The Doan Report once informed readers about things going on behind the scenes at the networks, we now have a full-page horoscope.  The "Shopper's Showcase," another innovation, is filled with advertisements for psychic and tarot readings and dating services.  There are recaps of the world of soaps, replete with sensational headlines like "Oh no they didn't!", and picture layouts that look more like the pages of People Magazine than TV Guide.  Then, of course, there are the full-page drug ads, replete with warnings on proper usage and possible side effects.*  What once was presented as news is now juicy gossip, written in a breathless "dish the dirt" prose.

*Fortunately, this was in the pre-Viagra era of heavy-duty advertising. 

Have I mentioned, by the way, that youngsters ought to get off my lawn?

There is, however, a single redeeming section that dares to hearken back through the years, a section commemorating the history of TV Guide with a look through the decades, featuring historical recreations of famous covers with today's stars taking on the iconic roles of the past.  The recreations are often quite witty, as with the case of an I Dream of Jeannie cover from the late '60s, with Regis Philbin and Kelly Ripa taking the roles of Larry Hagman and Barbara Eden (Right).  There's also a "Then and Now" section presenting quotes and icons of years past (such as the 1968 quote from Dean Martin when, asked if he could describe his philosophy of life in ten words, said he could do it in less: "Everybody should have fun."). They've also thrown in a picture of Diana Rigg in her Avengers leather outfit, so there's that.

This section functions much the same way as the retrospective film montages that frequent the Oscar broadcasts (another fun event of the past that seems to have lost its way in the last few years). They're fun on one hand, an affectionate parade of memories, of people you knew (and plenty you didn't), and on the other hand they provide a vivid reminder of how far away those times are, and that despite the brilliance that still manifests itself from time to time, those days - good and bad - are gone forever.

***

Since we're on a theme of change, there ought to be something to that effect regarding the programs on television this week.

Back then, Sunday Night Football was on ESPN

I've remarked often about the days when sports didn't dominate the weekend, but by now it does. There are no less than 14 college football games on Saturday alone, and thanks to cable there are now games on Thursday and Friday nights as well.  The World Series, the ending to which we looked at last week, hasn't even started yet; this week is the province of the League Division Series, followed by the League Championship Series; the World Series itself won't begin until October 22.  NASCAR, which once appeared a week or two later on Wide World of Sports, now gets live, flag-to-flag coverage on NBC, which shares NASCAR with Fox - a network that didn't even exist when the TV Guides we review were originally published.

The Close-Up, which once covered nearly half a page, now is reduced to a quarter of a page, and with so many programs from so many networks crammed onto the page (in small type, no less), it's what you might depend on as to what's worth watching.  This obviously applies to The Surreal Life, on VH-1 at 8:00pm (CT) on Sunday: "Feuding housemates Omarosa and Janice Dickinson battle to the (very) bitter end, leading one of them to leave the house in tears in the fifth-season finale."  There's a spotlight on the new series Relentless, a "true-crime series about women who took the law in to their own hands," that premieres on Oxygen at 9:30 Sunday. That was apparently good for a couple of seasons. Better that you might want to stick with this week's episode of Lost (ABC, Wednesday at 8:00), where Hurley tries to deal with numbers that keep coming back from his past, or Ghost Whisperer (CBS, 7:00 Friday), a "tearjerker" about a ghost reluctant to leave his grieving fiancee.* Even here, there's no rundown on casts, no details as to episode title - you either know it or you don't.

*Gee, I wonder where they got that idea from?

Movies remain as big as they ever were on television, but there's been a shift.  Instead of blockbuster theatrical premieres from the networks, and afternoon or late night movies from local stations, most movies today are broadcast on cable, and channels such as HBO and TCM give them to you unedited and without commercial interruption.  Remember how people used to complain about that?  And whereas even married couples used to sleep in separate beds, if you're lucky you can probably catch a glimpse or two of a bare breast now, at least if you have HBO or Cinemax.  Anyway, there are so many movies on TV now, and each one of them runs so many times a week, there's an entire section devoted to listing them - it's called, appropriately enough, "The Big Movie Guide," and it runs for 31 pages. You can find it in the back of the issue, right after the ad for the tarot readings.

***

It's been a strange issue to review, because the difference between this issue and one from, say, the '80s is far greater than the difference between that '80s issue and one from the late '50s. In the later case there were major cosmetic changes, to be sure, and the programming habits of individual stations could be somewhat erratic, but at least it was recognizable as the same type of creature.  Perhaps that's what makes this one so hard to follow, the fact that it's so different, so chock full of information that one doesn't even know where to begin to look.

And this only covers some of the stations available!

There are 10 local stations listed, and an additional 74 cable listings to choose from.  It's the ultimate in individualism, and when we look back over the years, we remember talk about the '80s being the decade of greed, and the '90s and early '00s being the time when the stock market took off and made everyone wealthy and prosperous until they weren't.  In the same way, we've seen television progress from a relative handful of local stations to increasing choices, first a number of cable networks and then an overwhelming number, a fourth broadcast network and then a fifth*, video cassettes and then DVDs and now streaming video enabling you to watch what you want when you want, even an entire season over a weekend, which means you're no longer subject to the programming decisions of others; and running through all this is a certain glorification of the individual.  And so we ask: has television promoted this, with its evolutionary choices driving the expectations people have about other aspects of their lives, or is it simply a mirror of how people feel regarding life in general, with television adjusting to that new reality?  Six of one, half a dozen of the other, in all likelihood, and yet - like the chicken and the egg, to belabor another cliche if we must - one of these schools of thought must have played a more dominant role, informed the other in some pivotal way.  Perhaps we need The Most Interesting Man in the World to tell us the truth.

*For some reason, PBS has never been counted as one of the Big Three, now the Big Four with the addition of Fox, and I'm simply following that convention.  Sorry, CW.

I'm not surprised that TV Guide changed its format, going to a bigger size and eliminating local programming. In a way, it's more surprising that it didn't happen sooner; I had been a loyal subscriber to TV Guide since 1972 and had read it going back years before that, but I'd stopped reading it three or so years before this; I'd actually gotten to where I'd ignored it for three or four months, never even opening the cover, before I got around to canceling the subscription altogether. It's true that it's more convenient to look programs up on the computer or through the channel guide from your cable or satellite provider, but it takes a bit of effort (I seldom get past the sports channels), and to be perfectly honest, it's nowhere near as much fun.

You wouldn't expect me to ignore
a Texas Ranger, would you?

For TV Guide was never really about the TV shows themselves, at least not about the titles. It was about the descriptions, the list of stars and writers, the way the shows interacted with each other and how one could plan an entire week's worth of viewing at a glance. It was reading about the stars and learning something about their private lives, even if that information was frequently laughably incomplete. It was about the editorials and articles urging improvement in programming, about prominent people from various fields making their suggestions, about stories that gave the historical background to documentaries or movies that were on that week. In those days one could read about the prospects of something called cable television, could speculate as to whether or not people would actually pay money to watch something in their own home, could imagine a large machine that would record programs for them so they could watch them later. There was even the hope that TV sets would become flatter, that you might even be able to hang them on the wall.

In short, TV Guide was about the future as much as it was the present, and when it was in the present it was all there. The issue of October 9, 2005, the final issue of its kind, is about a future that's already changing so quickly that this issue would appear quaint to us today, in the same way as that inaugural issue from April 3, 1953, the one with Lucy and Ricky's baby on the cover.

There is no sense of the present anymore, just a rush to reach a future that's much less exciting, with an emphasis on individual choice in viewing rather than the collective group experience.  As I said, it was inevitable.  But that doesn't mean I have to like it.

And if you damn kids are still there, get off the lawn - this time, I mean it. TV