For good or ill, television is the world's paramount
entertainment
medium. Author Robert Kubey, pre-eminent in the field as both critic and
admirer, reminds us that "people throughout the developed world spend more
time watching television than doing any other activity but for sleep and
work." In the 1980s, when TV went global, programs like Dallas and The
Cosby Show were regularly watched in more than 90 countries.
We may know our favorite TV characters and personalities, but
we
know comparatively little about the people who create what we watch on the
box. Now we have an unprecedented and altogether extraordinary opportunity
to get to know, up close, the creative minds responsible for shows like
The Sopranos, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, The Tonight Show, I Love Lucy and
scores of other landmark programs.
With rare insight and with humor and humanity, Kubey has put
together fascinating interviews with dozens of writers, producers,
directors, actors, agents and executives. When the interviewees are brash
and opinionated, those qualities are left intact. What Kubey has done is
to blend personal histories with often bizarre career paths, and brought
them to life in candid conversations. Some 40 interviews show the
different and often circuitous routes ingenious people take in the
development of a career.
Readers will discover piquant vignettes on almost every page.
Here
are a few citations that will give you the flavor. More than one
interviewee talks about "going with their gut" or their
"instincts." Chris
Albrecht, the CEO of HBO, reports that a defining moment in his career
occurred when veteran agent and producer Jack Rollins told him, "Listen to
the gut of the performer. What's right for them, what they think is right
for them, because nine out of ten times it will be right."
Albrecht has been called the most original mind in
television. He
has been involved in the development of The Sopranos, Sex and the City and
Curb Your Enthusiasm. He started as a stand-up comic, co-owned the
Improvisation night club in New York and was an agent and producer before
going to HBO. He compares all that with "playing with my toy
soldiers."
Another producer, Gary Smith, is asked what makes his musical
specials unique, and replies, "The show comes from here. I'm pointing to
my stomach. I'm not pointing to my eye or my brain. If it doesn't work
here, it doesn't work...I don't think things in the gut can be learned. I
think this is intuitive."
What makes these stories so exciting is their utter
frankness.
Many of these television creators are among the medium's harshest critics.
They openly vent their frustrations with the industry and its products.
They paint a complex portrait of the conflicts between art and commerce.
You would not think they would bite the hand that feeds them, but they do,
and very eagerly.
What's more, they often speak out with a deep sense of
conscience.
Many raise their voices against the prevalent themes of sex and violence.
Kubey makes the point that "the complex bureaucratic maze of production
can make it difficult for the individual creator to define, let alone
enact personal aims, ethics, or values." Despite the obstacles, the social
conscience of the creator often shines through his or her sitcom or soap
opera and triumphs over "interference from the network; too many cooks
spoiling the broth; overdependence on focus groups, ratings and
demographics; and a short-sighted obsession with the bottom line."
Leonard Stern, one of the pioneers of TV comedy writing, who
did
The Phil Silvers Show and The Steve Allen Show, helped to found the Caucus
for Television Producers, Writers and Directors. He called this "the
conscience of the industry," and it represented from 70 to 90 percent of
the prime time television-with leaders like Norman Lear and Grant Tinker.
Active in the Caucus and in the campaign against sex and
violence
was David Levy. At Young & Rubicam, Levy helped to develop Father Knows
Best and I Married Joan. At NBC, Levy developed Dr. Kildare, Alfred
Hitchcock Presents, and as an independent, The Adams Family. He put Johnny
Carson on The Tonight Show. His comment was, "We are in the midst of a
cultural pollution that is just as dangerous as the environmental
pollution."
Sid Caesar was the biggest star in television from 1950 to
1957
with Your Show of Shows and Caesar's Hour. He denounces the increasing
corporate and commercial influences on TV and their negative effect on the
resulting product. He discusses what it was like to perform live before 50
million viewers in the earliest days of the medium. A successful funny
man, he hated the artificiality of the "laugh track" and canned
applause.
He is not the only one to remark that "a laugh track is a phony thing from
the start." Caesar and Woody Allen have often denounced the laugh track.
But Carroll Pratt, the president of Sound One, maintains it's a useful
device for "sweetening" a program, although he admits it can sound
"canned." He shrugs, "We're whores."
Bob Schiller and Bob Weiskopf, who did I Love Lucy, Duffy's
Tavern, All in the Family and dozens of other shows, think "the industry
has changed for the worse, I think because it has grown, like everything
else, almost like a fungus. There are layers on layers of people
separating you from the final product...telling us and our compatriots how
to write."
Steve Allen, who had a remarkable record of creative
accomplishment, was a renaissance man, writing over 50 books, magazine
articles, poetry, 8,500 songs. He pioneered the late night talk and
variety show format. He believed that people are "over-entertained."
He
said to Kubey, "The attention span of the American TV-viewing public-as I
see it-is now equivalent to that of a gnat."
Agnes Nixon, the most celebrated creator of soap operas,
brought
more ethnic and religious diversity to characters in her soap operas (As
the World Turns, The Guiding Light, All My Children). She says, "To me,
being good-that is, talented-is not nearly so important as perhaps doing
good." She adds, "I've always also tried to do public service by
presenting contemporary issues and disseminating information to viewers,
among them teenage prostitution, child abuse and wife abuse, alcohol,
drugs, AIDS and racial prejudice." For her, soap opera is the form of
entertainment "nearest to real life."
In Kubey's eyes, Grant Tinker was one of the most admired men
in
Hollywood. The creator with his former wife, Mary Tyler Moore, of The Mary
Tyler Moore Show, was associated with some of the best and most popular
programs of the 1970s-The Bob Newhart Show, Rhoda, Lou Grant, Hill Street
Blues, L.A. Law, and many others. Tinker frankly comments, "I guess, among
television's sins, the most obvious and the most mentioned are making a
bad or mediocre product; the witless forgettable product that many of us
sit through all the time. If television were only more daring and more
diverse in its offerings. TV is just repetitiously giving you situation
comedies and dramatic shows that all look rather alike...TV does have some
sins to answer for, in the area of gratuitous sex, violence and language."
Lee Rich, a legend in TV, with dozens of successful shows
(The
Waltons, Dallas, Falcon Crest) and the winner of many awards, is a man of
strong and unexpected opinions. For example, he thinks pilots are
unnecessary and wasteful. "Television doesn't need pilots," he says.
Larry David, the writer-producer of Seinfeld, created the
show
with Jerry Seinfeld, and made it successful in 90 countries. And yet, as
Kubey notes, it was "the first TV comedy to be about `nothing'."
Though
immensely likable, "each character took turns being more selfish and
self-absorbed than the next." He also went on to do Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Matt Groening created The Simpsons. It's going strong in over
100
countries. The Simpsons "overshadows most every other television program,
in its biting satire of American life. The show appeals to children and
adults alike and has revolutionized how commercial television thinks of
animation." Few may be aware that although the creative decisions are made
in the USA, the ink and paint and the actual filming are done in Korea!
The personal story of Jean Rouverol is fascinating. There
aren't
many people in Hollywood who've written soap operas and been a victim of
the late unlamented blacklist. With her family, and the family of Dalton
Trumbo, Rouverol fled the US to Mexico in 1951 so that she and her husband
Hugh Butler could escape a subpoena of the House Un-American Activities
Committee to name names. They stayed ten years.
Ironically, says Kubey, one would be hard pressed to find an
American family that has produced more wholesome, mainstream American
entertainment. (Autumn Leaves, Lassie Come Home, The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, Guiding Light, As the World Turns). Many of the scripts
had to be written under pseudonyms. "All our best friends," she said,
"went to jail-Dalton Trumbo and Ring Lardner for contempt of
Congress."
Describing the climate of leftist opinions and associations, Rouverol
says, "The best and brightest got themselves involved...You were trying to
better the world."
Gerry Laybourne, one of the most celebrated executives in TV,
created the Nickelodeon brand and turned it into the most highly rated
24-hour cable programming service, reaching a larger audience of children
than ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox combined. She says Nickelodeon was "very much
on the side of the kid. On the side of how do we make them feel better,
how do we make them feel not alone, and how do we make them laugh at some
of the crazy things that happen in their lives so they're not jaded by
it?"
Kubey gives scant attention to the current mania known as "reality
television" but he does talk about it briefly with Dave Bell, a producer
known for his hard-hitting documentaries and for the Emmy and Peabody
Award winning TV movie, Do You Remember Love?, a sensitive portrait of a
woman suffering from Alzheimer's disease, starring Joanne Woodward. Bell
was ahead of the pack on this: "I was certainly at the forefront of what
is now called 'reality television' and many days in looking at television
as it is today I think I was one of the people who helped create a
monster. I am especially unfond of virtually all of reality television."
Kubey clearly has the credentials for producing this
masterwork.
He is Director of the Center for Media Studies and Associate Professor of
Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University. But he also knows how
to coax candid interviews out of TV professionals, and knows how to tell a
story to others.
All in all, Kubey deserves our plaudits for this original and
expert exploration of the minds of the creators of TV. Unlike many
scholars, he knows how to make this journey universally appreciated and
engrossing for all to read. It may have been intended for scholars and
students of TV, mass culture, media and society as well as American
studies, TV history and media ethics, but it is also of major interest to
television creators and practitioners. In fact, everyone interested in
television will find his work innovative, instructive and utterly
fascinating-in a word, superb.
Bernard S. Redmont served as a correspondent for CBS News, Westinghouse
Broadcasting Company/Group W and other media outlets. He is Dean Emeritus
of Boston University College of Communication and the author of Risks
Worth Taking: The Odyssey of a Foreign Correspondent.
