Singin’ in the SUV.
Tuesday, November 9th, 1999
Is it really an Ally McBeal kind of world out there? I usually catch the last five minutes of the way-too-popular Fox show, in search of Fox 5 News at 10 (or bored with my other alternatives.) There she was at the end of Monday’s episode, happy without Prozac, dancing with Al Green, as Al sang a duet version (with an off-camera female voice) of "To Sir With Love" that became "To You With Love." (What the?) Damn near Singing in the Rain, with the overhead camera angles and the generally romanticized light and the lush orchestration and, well, there’s Al Green, dancing with and singing to our late nineties everygal.`
This show speaks to the inner Gene Kelly in many women, and well, um, I can respect that. Every time I’m trapped in a clog of traffic at Cheshire Bridge and LaVista, it seems there’s yet another young, single in a large yuppie scummobile (no, larger than our yuppie scummobile) who, safely ensconced behind tinted windows, is singing and swaying quietly to a muffled beat. She is, in every sense, into herself, happy with herself, pleased that although she might seem trapped into a horrific management or protoprofessional job unimaginable to her a few short years ago, she still has this private place where she can tune out everything outside her skull and dance to the music that may or may not right now be coming from the car radio.
I guess I’m not really complaining. Better a fantasy pas-de-deux with the 70s musician of her choice than becoming an oblivious careen-while-cellphone-chatting driver. But it does seem that Ally has, as they say, "given permission" to a whole generation of fantasists of every gender to tune out of brain-numbing meetings and drift off into the land of choreographed escapism, where a seemingly real Barry White is hiding behind the meeting-room potted plant, ready to burst into song.
(Well, some of those plants are really quite large.)
I suppose one way to look at this is that we’re being treated to the inner dancer of David O. Kelley, who probably sat through one too many mind-numbing conferences during his lawyer days. Yep, I can see him fantasizing about transforming into an anorexic young lawyerette who dreams up musical numbers at the workplace. (And don’t get me started on his private detective fantasies that somehow begot the misguided Snoops.)
Tuning out through tunes and dance is probably more interesting to watch on television than the real way officeworkers zone out-by surfing the web. Check your Hotmail. How’s your retirement fund doing? Download some MP3. And then, after lunch, maybe you’ll have some time to do some real work.
Ah, the productivity of the American office worker. Zoned out during the day at the office, dancing with one’s self in traffic, and then, after a light dinner, fully launched into the evening escapism of Ally McBeal (and don’t miss those spinoff shows Ally, Al, and the latest, A.)
With Calista around, who needs Calgon to "take me away"?
You, The Man.
Friday, November 5th, 1999
It’s kind of a tidbits-scribbled-on-crumpled-sticky-notes week, first, an advertisement: tune to WUPA, channel 69, right now for the best of television as it used to be! Well, sort of.
You see, I was working and watching (that would be television) the other night around 1 am and there, in a sea of infomercials was James Earl Jones-a very, very young James Earl Jones as the president of these United States, in "The Man," the kind of old movie even TBS is embarrassed to air now. It exists in that limbo between "new enough to be run on the big networks" and "old enough to be deemed a classic"-it was released in 1972 (and is available in avocado and harvest gold.)
But wait. It was written by Rod Serling-maybe the best guy ever to bat out teleplays. And, wow. Jones is quietly powerful, not yet a voiceover cliché. The supporting cast-Martin Balsam, Georg Stanford Brown, Janet MacLachlan, William Windom, and Burgess Meredith as a wicked Strom Thurmond type-are as strong an ensemble as you’d ever expect to see decked out in early seventies bad fashion. Heck, there’s even a Jack Benny cameo-what a refreshing change from Jay Leno turning up on every movie character’s TV. (Odd, fictional characters don’t watch Letterman or Nightline. Hmm.)
For every lousy rerun, for every time their transmitter blows a fuse (they’re now rivaling WPBA/Channel 30 for most outages), they up and go and do something great like run "The Man."
It’s these little stations, like tiny WNGM Channel 34, run out of an industrial park in Athens, and WPXA Channel 14, licensed to Rome that make surfing the fuzzy UHF band an occasionally rewarding exercise. Yes, if you do have cable, they’re being carried these days, coming in bright and clear (more or less), but what’s the fun of that?
* * * * *
You notice those "Closed captioning sponsored by" ten second blurbs on most syndicated shows these days. Yep, you guessed it-another ad. More revenue. What next? "The appearance of the color green on ‘Friends’ tonight made possible by"
* * * * *
Holyfield vs. Holyfield. I’m sorry, I just don’t get what WXIA’s trying to communicate in these promos. Okay, Evander talks with Brenda Wood, we get that. He’swhat? A man of contradictions? A divorced guy? All of the above? And then there’s that profundo tagline from the champ himself: "If someone asks me, I’ll tell them the truth." Wow, compelling. The 11Alive folks seem increasingly lost these days, and the attempts to stick hip music behind nonfocused promotion does little to help. "Right here, right now!" Uh..yeah. Please, stop.
* * * * *
If you have hypertension, do not take happy fun ball. If you’re pregnant, do not look at the package in direct sunlight. When ads for prescription drugs started appearing on television, I didn’t realize it was the start of a burgeoning trade for voiceover announcers. Apparently there are those out there who advertise that their specialty is reading those novel-length medical disclaimers in a non-threatening way: "This product in some cases causes your liver to explode, but hey, live a little!"
And chaos Rose.
Sunday, October 24th, 1999
Excruciating. And how was your weekend?
Watching the Braves play in Atlanta on Saturday and Sunday was painful on all kinds of levels. First, of course, there was that losing thing, which, if disheartening, is at least comfortingly familiar to long-time Atlantans. But more, it was the tone of desperation that creeps into the Braves own announcers (who I praised, what, one, two columns ago as being far superior to NBC’s Costas and Morgan)-whenever the Braves plight seems so hopeless on the field that they (and all of us) want to don jerseys and get out there to dosomething, anything.
Caray and Company’s voices-the amplified, broadcast unspoken angst of true Braves fans around the Southeast-was just too agonizing to listen to, so I switched WSB radio off and turned up the NBC audio.
Admittedly I was also in full-TV mode before the game to hear the cheers of the crowd as they introduced the Team of the Century (brought to you, we were told nonstop, by MasterCard.) Here was a true television moment-a bunch of old legends-names muttered reverently by our fathers, for the most part, standing up, live, for the most part, on a platform together mid-infield on a cold Atlanta Sunday night. Koufax. Musial. Willie Mays. Henry Aaron-of course.
Some of these baseball heroes were simply before my time-I had no idea what they looked like-how they smiled, who was taller, who got along with whom. A couple survivors all but predated television. But now, I saw-we all saw them standing together, no longer just names or faded baseball card images. And there too were the more contemporary heroes of the seventies and eighties-the likes of Mike Schmidt, Johnny Bench, and, I’ll be damned, Pete Rose. The big Red machine ran roughshod through my baseball childhood, and I wasn’t surprised when Rose was accused of rampant sports betting-including wagers on his own team. The guy always seemed more than willing to plow anyone down to win. But there he was, like Nixon a decade or two post-Watergate, standing up to a thundering ovation for what he did accomplish when he played the game. Fitting enough, I suppose. And even I wouldn’t deny him a moment with his peers, flawed humans all.
And since this was a precisely-orchestrated piece of televised public relations choreography, I didn’t expect that anyone else would, either.
Which is to say, I didn’t count on Jim Gray, the weasely NBC sidelines announcer I think I’ve seen at one time or another on all three networks now.
There he was with Pete Rose, in full prosecutorial mode. Don’t you think this would be a good moment to admit the gambling charges, Pete? Rose looked stunned, sweaty, furious. Isn’t this your last chance to come clean with the American people? Rose looked like he would like to devour Gray as a ballpark snack and get the hell away from that camera. Pete, why won’t you just come out and say you did it? This isn’t the time, Rose tried to say.
Maybe I’m getting older. Maybe my journalism-school instincts have dulled with time. But anyone who could make me feel sorry for Pete Rose, an old, flawed ballplayer denied the warm afterglow from a century’s end round of applausewell, Jim Gray did just that.
And the rest of the evening continued downhill.
Hometown boys.
Monday, October 18th, 1999
All season long, Braves fans enjoy games-whether aired on TBS or WUPA/69-presented by announcers we’ve all come to know and (more or less) love: Joe Simpson, Pete Van Wieren, Don Sutton, and Skip Caray. Then, during the now-almost-routine postseason, we find a familiar game in unexpected places-like Fox 5 or WXIA-with other voices not quite as comfortable as an old armchair. In fact, you might hear a discouraging word-or several-out of the mouths of these interlopers.
This can, I suppose, be a good thing. Taken in moderation, a dose of announcers not from ’round here give us a sense of how the rest of the world sees our favorite sons of the diamond. Caray and company are, after all paid by the Atlanta Braves Baseball Club, Inc., which of course is to say-by Ted. Or Time Warner. So although they’re not quite the "homers" some local announcers are, there’s no mistaking their loyalty to the corporation who signs their checks.
Joe Buck and Tim McCarver or Bob Costas and Joe Morgan have no such fealty, of course, so we get their slightly New-York-centric take on the baseball world. In terms of "objectivity" and accuracy-two admittedly hard to pin down characteristics-I’ll take NBC’s Costas and Morgan over the other two, no contest. Costas, the once and always smartest kid in school brims over with facts about every nuance of the contest, and Morgan just plain thinks about the game, and is kind enough to share his thoughts with us. Fox’s Buck does a fine enough play-calling job, but McCarver clearly has no love lost on our Atlanta boys. He’s not pure broadcasting evil, but he has his days.
Speaking of having their days, Skip Caray-in a class of his own as a baseball announcer and especially as a radio baseball announcer-does seem to have those days where he’s just plain pissed off at everything, and more often than not, during the playoffs when big ‘ol NBC or Fox are calling the shots-he’s noticeably grumpier in the announce booth-and on his pre-game talk show. It’s almost reached the point where callers phone in to ask Skip to explain the infield fly rule just to hear him go off on the voice at the other end of the line. (Seems also as if some people put their more naïve friends up to this.) Caray is (okay, like most artists) talented, yet temperamental. Of course, we don’t have to hear most artists host radio call-in shows.
An informal survey of baseball watchers 18-55 who I know indicates that what most Atlantans do is turn the Fox or NBC audio down and listen to Caray and company on the radio, so maybe our familiarity trumps grumpiness.
One strange side-effect of watching NBC’s coverage-where they apparently think they’re doing us a favor by not having the intrusive scorebox in all the darn time-is that I actually end up missing the score. I walk back in the room and I want to see the score right now.
Jeez. Familiarity breeds mindlessness, too.
Swingin’ through some pubs.
Tuesday, October 5th, 1999
Gee, I wish I could sync up writing to you with my mood swings. Sure, it’s easy when you’re Hollis Gillespie, and the world is selling crack just outside your door. The only thing that’s happening immediately outside these walls is that my neighbor’s wailing on a jackhammer and to be honest, I just don’t want to know exactly what that means.
I pour myself some iced coffee, pop an ibuprofen, and, squinting, consider the grotesque pile of magazines gathered around my feet. We’ve been out of town for a few days, and it shows.
We get way too many magazines. And I’m not talking about the professional journals my wife and I must (must?) subscribe to. There’s Newsweek, with a bizarre cover this week featuring Jesse Ventura, Warren Beatty, and Donald Trump, labeled "The Wild Bunch." It’s amazing how much this weekly has transformed itself in the past half-decade, now resembling the mutant love-child of Wired and Vanity Fair. When cataclysmic international news happens, they’ll get going on it (occasionally even grudgingly giving up a cover otherwise slotted for new breakthroughs in your and my health), but they’re really a lot happier going over The Blair Witch Project in painful detail.
An inordinate amount of the critical press has spent the last week wailing on Edmund Morris, the biographer-slash-fictional pal of ‘Dutch’ Reagan. So much as been said about this bizarre exercise in writer’s block evasion that I’ll leave the role of wise critic to the Tom Tomorrow cartoon that ran last week above this space. Me, I think we should assign smart-ass penguins to write all the psuedo-biographies from here on out, and save ourselves a lot of pain.
I kick Jesse’s face out of the way with relish, uncovering-who the heck is this anyway staring at me from the cover of Atlanta magazine? Yet another in a series of generic models who almost look like Helen Hunt or Janine Turner or some darn TV actress-but aren’t. Across the top: "Who’s Killing Atlanta’s Trees?" It takes a lot of guts for a glossy publication printed on one or two ex-forests to ask that question on the cover. Ah, I’m just in a bad mood-I kinda enjoy reading our hometown citymag these days, and not just because this column’s predecessor is working wonders behind the scenes there. No, I think they’re slowly conjuring a sense of "here" that even eludes the AJC’s daily efforts.
More publication shuffling reveals Georgia Trend, which I think we get for free because someone’s under the impression I’m a Georgia small businessman. (They’ve obviously never seen me in person.) This issue features "40 under 40"-a bunch of "successful" business types, mostly young, scrubbed CEOs of companies with fake-sounding-but-real names like Directo, Visionex, VerticalOne, and ProLinia. Yikes. I read Trend for the features about tiny South Georgia counties and their electric power companies. Yep.
I begin to kick the pile of print out into the hallway. There goes a National Geographic with a pig on the cover, a Smithsonian with a lizard, and a New Yorker with a grotesque Art Spiegelman illustration of their city’s mayor. Out, damn pubs!
I tell you, just too many magazines.
Redeeming some value.
Monday, September 27th, 1999
So what, exactly, is so revolutionary about Action?
If you said that the Fox sitcom breaks new ground by using lots of profanity-and then bleeping it out-you may be missing the point. Sure, that’s the hook they used to get us in the door, carefully deploying the show’s stars to talk shows everywhere armed with a clip of the pilot’s first scene, where studio exec Peter Dragon belittles a hapless cafeteria worker (whose parking spot Dragon has stolen) in a soliloquy laced with multiple applications of bleepin’ invective.
Anyone (with cable or a DSS) who’s sampled an HBO preview knows that the language-minus the bleeps-is nothing new. You’ll hear it on Sex in the City, Arli$$, Oz, or any other of HBO’s original productions, and sure enough, the HBO playground is where Action was originally destined to air. But no, for some reason (money? exposure?) the program’s producers sought out a Fox timeslot, and if this show travels over the broadcast airwaves at 9 pm eastern, it travels bleeped. And just to make the process even easier, they shot these scenes with a hyperkinetic camera that made sure something was passing in front of actor Jay Mohr’s mouth anytime he was conjugating "fuck" as an adjective. No fair trying to read lips.
Of course in the lucrative overseas markets for the show, Action will probably arrive uncensored, possibly even with a few extra scenes shot with the exposed breasts that give a show like this a true HBO-feel. But this is the United States of America, ma’am, and we have rules against that sort of thing on our broadcast TV.
No, language is not the reason this program should be congratulated for barrier-breaking. Instead, consider characters, story, plot. Here’s a show with a leading character so unredeeming, so unrepenting, so generally repugnant, he makes broadcast television’s previous attempts at "bad boys" (remember Dabney Coleman’s Buffalo Bill?) seem like complete weenies. He’s paired with Ileana Douglas’s completely original portrayal of a child-star-turned-not-quite-retired-prostitute, and together they’re trying to get a movie put together ("Beverly Hills Gun Club") that is so bad we can smell the script from this side of the TV. There is absolutely no traditional reason we would want this pair to succeed. And yet
We’re watching. We’re laughing. We’re surprised. We’re entertained. And we’re all the more fascinated because we’ve been told that the Dragon character is drawn-in some detail-from the no-kidding for-real life, attitude, and behavior of the show’s actual executive producer, Joel Silver. It’s a classic LA paradox: you don’t know whether to congratulate Silver for rich lode of material that comes from this level of self-revelation or condemn him for the Tinseltown weasel he apparently epitomizes.
But I come here to praise Action. They are telling stories that, taken as a whole, completely satisfy our prurient interest in the scummy core of the movie business. When this program completes its (hopefully successful) run there will be (writers please note) absolutely no reason to try and tell this story again. This lode will be completely mined. There will be nothing more to be seen here, so please move along.
Hud-sucker proxies.
Monday, September 20th, 1999
Someone handed me a copy of The Hudspeth Report the other day, just another one of those free papers (like this one) that decorate the entrances to restaurants, video stores, and bookstores around town. Hadn’t looked at it in a while, and when I do, it’s always with a nostalgic lilt. Ron Hudspeth was a columnist for the Atlanta Journal (before it was quite so inextricably welded to the Atlanta Constitution), and his mission then, as it seems to be now, was to chronicle the nightlife in Atlanta-at least the white boy, Buckhead-centric partying that Hudspeth and friends enjoyed and perpetuated: This bar was opening, that one closed. A TBS exec punched the lights out of some sales manager at Harrison’s last night. Ted Turner was seen dancing with an unidentified blonde. Harmon Wages threw up all over the owner of Panos and Paul’s. Ah, the early eighties.
Funny thing, there in the back of this late nineties issue of The Hud Report was a column bemoaning the good old days when the JourCon had real columnists. And, especially because these words were written by a guy calling himself Red Neckerson, I can’t really tell if he’s serious or not. He says, in a roundabout way, that the four best columnists the paper ever had were Hudspeth, the late Lewis Grizzard, the recently late Celestine Sibley, and the not late yet Furman Bisher. When Bisher leaves, he says, he’ll cancel his subscription. Why wait till then?
"Neckerson"’s nostalgia for Grizzard’s "usually hilarious vignettes on Southern life, written with enthusiam and pride" and for Hudspeth’s who-punched-whom-in-what-bar updates is a cry for recognition from the old-boy network who used to run this town, setting a significant part of its cultural agenda. Their area of influence has, now, retreated outside the perimeter, leaving intowners with a diverse population that deserves to be represented-somehow-in their daily paper.
They are not just the Hudspeths and Houcks and the people bickering on The Georgia Gang on Sundays. They are, for one thing, younger than these guys in their fifties. Some are African-, Asian-, or Mexican-American. Many are women. Sexual preference? Religion? All over the map.
The slogan of the Gannett newspaper chain (at least at one point) was "A world of different voices where freedom speaks." Nice ideal, but then again, the AJC isn’t a Gannett paper (and we may well be grateful for that.) I think the Atlanta Journal Constitution took the first steps toward that kind of ideal in the late 1980s during Bill Kovach’s tenure, when people like Ron Hudspeth began to disappear from its pages and the first tenuous voices from these other parts of our city began to be heard. How have they done since then? Well I wouldn’t put Colin Campbell (again, another white guy in his forties or fifties) up as the foremost evidence of that effort. Rheta Grimsley Johnson? Well, she certainly represents diversity, but not necessarily a voice from and of our town. No, I’d point you toward the words of people like Jeff Dickerson, Cynthia Tucker (with reservations) or even the ajc.com’s Nadirah Z. Sabir, for a sense of what this place, these days, is all about.
More, because we can.
Monday, September 13th, 1999
Live, from a studio that looked somewhat like the stern of a Federation starship crashed into a Times Square building, there they were, Diane and Charlie, your affable Good Morning America hosts. Look, they told us (in so many words)we’ve got it going on too! We’re kinda sorta out on the street-out over the street. We’ve got fancy neon and huge displays and, well, a lot of the same old set transported to this new place.
All of which is to say: GMA launched their new set on Monday. They spent millions. They had folks from co-ownedWalt Disney Imagineering helping them out. Do you care?
Will you care much when Bryant Gumbel’s revamped CBS morning show debuts with its fancy new street level set, graphics, music, and whatnot? Are you likin’ the new Peachtree Morning digs downtown? Did you start feeling better about WGNXer, CBS Atlanta news when they painted their brown set grey? How about when they plopped Jane Robelot and Calvin Hughes into the anchor chairs? Could you draw me a picture of the set behind John Pruitt and Monica Kaufman? Uh-huh.
I found myself wondering about this Monday night, watching a little Monday Night Football-to look at the graphics and animation. And there was plenty to watch. Every scoreboard element came a-tumbling onto the screen. The featurette at the top of the show was so laden with computer-generated animation that you were hard pressed to see the athletes and coaches in and among the simulated chrome, slabs of steel, and sparks. We careened around massive helmets that clashed together with huge explosions. Hank Williams, Jr. belted out game-specific lyrics from his spaceship (I can see the meeting: "well, this year we could put him and a bunch of cheerleaders in..uh..a spaceship!") Every damn statistic was brought onto the screen with a little spherical metal robot-sphere dude that looked like it escaped from the director’s cut of Blade Runner. Replays were delivered by a big glowing ABC-thing that looked like it could crush young children on the sidelines. And it was all really loud.
The scariest thing was that if you had a couple of grand to piss away, you could have been watching this wretched excess in high-definition. Aaaaggghh!
We have truly entered the Classic Era of "Why? Because we can." Yes, I blame Fox for having started this, and no, don’t get me wrong, I do like some of the crap placed between me and the action-like the upper-left scoreboard that keeps us up to date. It’s just that a few years back when Fox outbid CBS for the NFC football rights they set themselves up as the younger, hipper network by filling the blank spaces with graphics and accompanying wooshing sounds. Since then, every sports producer is told to "think outside the box" and go beyond Fox to give us something more, more.
The Good Morning America producers were given the same charge. An on-the-streets studio worked for Today, let’s do more, more. Get outside the box on that, too.
Problem is, we watch this stuff from inside the box, and from where I sit, it’s getting hard to see the stuff we want to see for stuff they want us to see.
Merging traffic.
Tuesday, September 7th, 1999
Poor Bryant Gumbel. Most of the hoorah surrounding the choice for his co-anchor on CBS’s revamped and rechristened The Early Show was overshadowed Tuesday by the announcement that uneven media behemoth Viacom would buy CBS, a deal worth something like 37 billion dollars. Reuters called it "the largest media marriage ever," although the company that will emerge will be just a tad smaller than Time Warner.
Chairing the merged company (to be calledViacom) will be quirky CEO Sumner Redstone, a man who could give Ted Turner lessons on odd gazillionaire behavior. President and Chief Operating Officer will be CBS’s current head, the quirky Mel Karmazin.
People you’ve probably never heard of.
What does this mean to you, the home viewer/listener/renter? Not a heck of a lot, except that the same people that own CBS will also have MTV, Nickelodeon, Showtime, The Nashville Network, Paramount, Star Trek, UPN (maybe), the syndication company that owns Wheel of Fortune, Oprah, and Jeopardy, Howard Stern, Blockbuster Video, and a big scary pile of TV and radio stations in their back pocket.
More choices? More options? Don’t count on it. It all means a staggering amount of your day to day media intake is controlled or will be controlled by Viacom, The Walt Disney Company, and Time Warner. That would be Redstone and Karmazin, Michael Eisner, and the lopsided tag team of Gerald Levin and Ted Turner. Quirksters all.
So where does that leave Fox or GE/NBCand for that matter, Microsoft? AT&T?
Well, maybe they need to get a deal of their own. "Our union will be king," Sumner Redstone said in a bombastic statement Tuesday. (Oooh! King of All Unions!) "We will be global leaders in every facet of the media and entertainment industry."
Yow.
As the dust settles on all of that royal stock swapping, we’re left with the more modest media news of the week, like the arrival of Later Today on NBC (prediction: in 5 years, Today will run from 6 am until 6 pm, 7 days a week.) and WXIA’s local offering, the oft-revamped Peachtree Morning, now originating from someplace off of Centennial Park (perhaps to keep a lookout for Eric Rudolph.) On the premiere of the former, we watched a few minutes of Florence Henderson talking really bad French with some chef before we were forced to retreat in pain. "They seem to be trying really really hard," my wife observed.
And then Later than Later, Paul Ossman and Carmen Burns (no relation) looked extremely uncomfortable semi-perched on stools, talking with a forgettable twentysomething actor who joined the cast of one of NBC’s teen comedies. Which reminds me: last week in the Sunday New York Times, Lynn Hirschberg profiled teen actors who are washed up by 25 in a piece called "Teenseltown-Desperate to Seem 16" Sad, true, and an engaging read, on the web for now at http://www.nytimes.com/library/magazine/home/19990905mag-teenseltown.html.
And so, back to Bryant, standing there wondering why the hoopla train went a ways past him, down the track, before backing up. They found Gumbel’s partner (in a search codenamed inside CBS "Operation Glass Slipper") in the person of Jane Clayson, currently at ABC. She’s (most recently) from Salt Lake City. Solet the games begin.
Cheap, profitable, retro.
Monday, August 30th, 1999
Former ABC Entertainment President Jamie Tarses said "this is a terrifying time for television."
Indeed.
She was quoted in this week’s New Yorker, in an article about why you won’t be seeing a new series from David Lynch on ABC anytime soon. (The series: Mulholland Drive. The reason: the execs hated it.) Tarses, who brought us-gifted us with-dumped on us-Friends, Mad about You, and Dharma and Greg, resigned under fire at the end of last week. No, not because of David Lynch or anything in particular related to her job-programming-but because she wouldn’t play well with others in the "synergistic" mess that is the ABC/Disney media megalith. She hated those money guys, those Disney folks. She wanted innovative programmingshe said.
Terrifying times, where affiliate station general managers, snappy dressers all, pull into their corporate parking spaces and go upstairs to pursue the overnights over morning coffee. Slipping again, a bit more lost to the lurking cable monster.
Meanwhile, the bills are coming in for fancy new digital facilities (WGNX..er, CBS 46 is building a nice shiny one in midtown) and lots of high-priced new talent (you know 46 snapped up Calvin Hughes from Dallas and Jane Robelot from CBS This Morning.)
Robelot, the press release says, is originally from Greenville, SC, but "with many ties to the Atlanta community." Gives WSB an excuse to run those "Anchors who know Georgia" promos some more.
Meanwhile, a struggling network like UPN reads the cable numbers and decides to get some WWF Smackdown of its own. The transplant (WWF is usually seen on cable’s USA Network) took, placing the almost-a-network number one among kids between the ages of 2 and 11, sucking in 6.2 million viewers with programming that’s way, way less expensive to produce than a one-hour drama like ER or even UPN’s own Star Trek: Voyager.
But there’s a even cheaper way to make money, and it’s name is Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, a summer series that has captured the (apparently limited) imaginations of the viewing public-just in time for it to be yanked into cold storage until the November ratings book-or whenever anything else ABC offers starts to falter. Yep, it’s darned economical to produce a show when you scrimp on research (they already got one question wrong) and charge contestants a buck fifty on a 900 line to sign up for the show.
Cheap and profitable-that’s music to Disney’s bottom line. And I guess it’s because of the reruns, but WWTBAM‘s ratings were double those of the show that followed it on Sunday-The Practice. That’s enough to make any station manager spit coffee into the nearest potted plant.
And of course the idea of primetime game shows fits neatly into the other successful programming theme, retro. Let’s see, cheap, profitable, retroI’m going to confidently predict that the next big successes on broadcast television will be Bowling for Dollars, Georgia Retired Anchor Championship Wrestling, and Hee Haw.
Terrifying? You bet. And that’s my final answer.
Giving away the store.
Monday, August 23rd, 1999
Because we don’t subscribe to the Journal-Constitution, (despite the persistence of the nice folks who call at dinnertime to offer it to us), we certainly appreciate that the AJC folks take the trouble to send us, unsolicited, some leftover advertising material just to fill out our Monday mail. Here, you didn’t get enough credit card offers, so read about this great price on chicken at Wayfield Foods! Or perhaps you need a good place to order thousands of return address labels, or get a great deal on some roofing, or clean every rug in your house for $12.95.
Gosh, that’s nice. Of course, they may be doing it to fulfill something their ad people call "guaranteed circulation," which means that for a certain price, they assure folks like Wayfield Foods that everyone in a certain zip code-not just those who pay for the paper-get their hands on their ad. Of course, that’s just about all that happens to it-the insert sails from the mail pile into the wastebasket without making much of an impression
So why kill the trees for something they know no one reads? The newspaper’s answer is simple: the advertisers are paying them for it. Okay, advertisers, why are you paying? Because the newspapers tell them it’s effective. Okaynewspapers, why do you tell themah, forget it.
There’s actually the same kind of disconnect happening as traditional media tries to find its way in the world of new media (that would be that Internet thing.) We’re a newspaper, says (for example) the New York Timestherefore our mission of gathering and reporting the news must continue on the web. So, fine, how will people pay for it? Well, most sites give the content away in exchange for the opportunity to show readers banner ads which link to other sites. So do you read banner ads? Yeah, well that’s what the Times finding out in research-people have developed scanning instincts that basically ignore the banner ads-they become all but invisible. (I haven’t come across anything that says that the same thing happens with newspaper ads, but if that ‘Reach’ ad insert in my mail is any indication, it’s invisible advertising too.)
There’s an increasing faction in the newspaper business of alarmed beancounters: we’re giving the store away! We’re telling people what we know for free! This won’t work! (This of course, ignores the fact that advertiser-supported television networks have done quite well with this model.) Dave Barry in a recent column (which, you guessed it, you can read on the web: http://www.herald.com/herald/content/archive/living/barry/1999/docs/aug15.htm) is firmly in the camp who says giving it away is nuts. He says "Sometimes we run advertisements in the regular newspaper urging our remaining paying customers to go to our web sites instead. ‘Stop giving us money!’ is the shrewd marketing thrust of these ads."
Well, maybe we’d give papers money for online content, Dave, if there was a small ‘pay here’ coin box attached to our computer monitors. Until it’s that easy, though, we’ll prefer free, even with those invisible ads, thanks very much.
Lessons of late night.
Monday, August 16th, 1999
"Are you involved in a sexual lifestyle so bizarre you have to keep it a secret? Call us at 1-800-96-JERRY and tell us your story."
Yeah, that’s exactly what you should do. This is the twisted logic of the nineties. Having a relationship problem? Go on television to confess. Got a secret? Only national TV will do.
Reach a crossroads in your relationship? Go on a blind date with someone a TV show staff picks, and then come on and talk about it on television…maybe you’ll have a Change of Heart. Why does that make sense to people? Yeah, honey, we should call and be on TV.
And the good news is that impotence can be treated if you go to the right place, which, apparently, is Cartersville, (the erection capital of North Georgia?). There’s a creepy guy in a white lab coat who will fix you right upand he knows, he’s been there.
These are the lessons of late night television.
It’s one AM, and although they’re closed for the night, Tom Park of Atlanta Toyota (and about a zillion other dealerships nationwide) is out there just to talk to us. Yeah, right. Whatever happened to that dogwhat was he, Spuds Toyota?
Killed in Iraq, I suppose.
"He’ll balance a motorcycle on his teeth, just for you, Tuesday on Fox." I can’t thumb the remote fast enough. "When you were a kid, who was on your lunchbox? Sir Issac Newton? Or was itthe A-Team?" What are they selling? What are they saying? And why do you care?
Owe another phone company money? We’ll hook you up for just $49! No credit needed! No ID! Oh, that’s logical. Can’t pay Southern Bell $17.44 a month, so you’ll pay these other folks 49 bucks? Mmmmok. It’s your money.
Every once in a while, one of those tough dogs hooks up with one of the pretty dogs (to the music of "Superfly.") They’re selling cars again, damned if I know which one-but these guys could care less about what lunchbox I had when I was a kid. It all blurs together. It all looks the same. It all cost someone a heck of a lot of money, and the message doesn’t stick in my mind, unlike Mr. Cartersville Lab Coat and Mr. Toyota.
Rappin’ Rosie O’Donnell leaps out of a school bus, singing (chanting?) about cheap kids clothes at something called ‘Big K.’ Is that anything like Special K? Or Kmart?
Click! Enormous bouncing coins over the landscape. Zap! Bouncing tires! We’re being hyp-mo-tized by gigantic round things. The round things morph into the Mastercard logo. Ooh, that’s priceless.
The irony emerging (as I click around) is that the classiest commercials seem to be on my old place of employment, the Superstation. What happened to Ronco? What happened to the profound wisdom that although in Japan the hand can cut like a knife, that doesn’t work with a tomato?
Then I sat straight up at the sound of a familiar TV voice from TBS past. Could that be? That is! Tina Seldin, former co-anchor (with Bill Tush) of 17 Update Early in the Morning-a landmark in Atlanta late night television. She’s apparently now recommending remedial education in various trades and computer specialties.
OK, Tina. Can I bring my A-Team lunchbox to class?
Stand by…for news.
Monday, August 9th, 1999
Random notes are piling up on the Curmudgeon Desk this week, so it’s time to take care of some of that business. Scribbled notes in one hand, nifty five-asterisks separators in the other, we begin.
* * * * *
After spending some time decrying the "Breaking News" wolf-crying of Atlanta’s TV stations, I throw up my hands as I watch their latest series of ‘proof of performance’ promotional ads. 11Alive, it seems, is your Breaking News leader! We get there first! We deploy more uninformed reporters than the other guys! We splat the whole unfinished mess onto your screen!
And you’re proud of this?
The ongoing devaluation of the phrase "Breaking News" means the verbiage-meisters will have to come up with a new term. "Mega-Super-No-Kidding-Ultra-Urgent-End-of-the-World-News"?
Which will then, of course, be run into the ground. Again, a reminder to TV news producers: when a new story comes into the newsroom, there is a term for itit’s called "news."
* * * * *
You’ve got to admire the clever construction that is "The Blair Witch Project." New York Times critic Janet Maslin said "like a cabin built entirely out of soda cans, ‘The Blair Witch Project’ is a nifty example of how to make something out of nothing." Indeedreports are that the success of the film (it brought in some $24.5 million last weekend, second only to the mega-budget Bruce Willis flick) are due to the skillful manipulation of buzz, of hype, of the promise of a scary good time, without needing the visceral depiction of blood and gore onscreen.
So I’d say these kids were paying attention in film school. And yet these filmmakers are being criticized in some corners for adroitly making terror out of vapor. Give them an A+! Give them a few million to pay off those student loans!
Oh, and by the way, the CP-16 film camera used in the movie (abandoned by the vanished young filmmakers!) is being auctioned off on the web. Of course.
* * * * *
I think I’m Paul Harvey today. Page 2!
* * * * *
A casual reference two weeks ago to WGKA (AM 1190) as a station that plays classical music earned me a testy e-mail from Mike Rose, the station’s General Manager:
"In a recent column on Atlanta radio, you mentioned AM Stereo 1190. You implied that we were an all classical station."
Well, no, I implied you played classical music. "Judging from your knowledge of our station, you probably haven’t listened to us for three years. We eliminated the stereo and all-classical format three years ago."
Uh…I listened very recently, but since my 1985 Honda has no AM stereo receiver I just assumed you were still stereocasting. I heard no announcements that said "now back in glorious mono!" Last time I punched the button for 1190, I heardclassical music.
Mike concludes: "You would enjoy The Voice of the Arts, 1190 WGKA, if you would listen."
True enough, Mike, and as many people have discovered, if they don’t listen, they won’t enjoy it. Thanks for your note.
Getting it first, without getting it right.
Tuesday, August 3rd, 1999
Just as with the Cotton Mill fire, I happened to be surfing through the channels when the earliest cut-ins hit the airwaves. Shooting in Buckhead. Maybe multiple injuries. Maybe a fatal.
Soon the parade of familiar images began. Same-yet-different helicopter shots of the Piedmont Road office buildings, festooned with ‘Breaking News" logos. Unsteady voices babbling early speculation. We think there’s a gunman still in the building. We’re not sure which building. The building has been evacuated. It hasn’t been evacuated. Disgruntled employee, we hear.
The ground units arrive, charged, it seems, with unearthing any shred of information and spewing it out live, verification be damned. Competition is cutthroat. WSB’s Vince Girasole is caught live on air screaming "Come to me now! You gotta come to me now, right now!"
We no longer watch "the news". We watch the birth and death cycle of a news event. We watch the raw information gathering. We get the misinformation along with the information. And because of this, we’re missing an essential step-several essential steps-in the journalistic process. We don’t get the part where the most experienced voices in the newsroom say "let’s verify that." Let’s get some background. Let’s make sure it’s really happening the way the spokespeople say it is. We miss out on context. But, like never before, we sure get to ride along on the search for what-the-heck-happened.
The Buckhead shootings were as prototypical an example of Breaking News, late nineties style, as you can get.
The cops deploy. They shove the ground reporters back, back, just a little further back. Their spokesman turns out to be our mayor (what are the odds?) who apparently can smell a high-visibility role for himself all the way from downtown. His arrival and every utterance is itself covered, overcovered, run into the ground. We see shots of the top of Campbell’s head via Chopper 2. It’s an angle you’ll only see on two!
The afternoon wears on. WSB presents bullet points of information down at the bottom of the screen where they usually show the traffic problems and the lottery numbers. Wes Speculation and Brenda Wisdom balance each other’s extremes on 11Alive. Bruce Erion and his chopper competitors show us great pictures of, well, the top of some office buildings, in between refuelings. And almost in spite of these efforts, the story develops. The gruesomeness of the crime becomes apparent. Numbing shock sets in as evening arrives, the news machine grinds on.
I can’t deny that watching this live unfolding is compelling-especially when revelations about the "shooter", "suspect", "gunman" come tumbling out on the airwaves-first from Washington, of all places: NBC’s Pete Williams talking about Barton’s Alabama past to Wes and Brenda. And Mark Winne’s interview with Barton’s civil suit lawyer out on Ponce laid out all kinds of juicy tidbits. But is this better than a story a week later that has perspective and a more confident accounting of the facts?
The sun set, and mumbled rumors became hard reports-they found Barton’s van up in Cobb County somewhere. The choppers raced north, and the final act played out. Someone labeled it a murderous "rampage," opening the door for several days of "rampage" coverage you can count on.
The dead were buried, not in private. Apparently we’re all supposed to mourn these people together. It gives us all "closure," or that’s what they tell us. It’s how news is done these days. And count on this: the next Breaking News event is just around the corner.
In Brenda’s shade.
Tuesday, July 27th, 1999
This sure feels like a recovery week to me, after the madness that is Coverage These Days Of A Major Event. This just in: JFK Jr. is still dead, and, mercifully, the sidebars and "touching human stories" are fading away—except on Neal Boortz’s radio program, where he just can’t let go of any part of this story—er, issue—er, story.
They used taxpayers’ money to bury him at sea! (He always speaks in italics.) The liberal Democrats are pushing him as a hero on the unsuspecting public!
Okay, Neal, give it a rest. It’s hot out here, outside your air-conditioned studio. Is this the fabled mastery of the talk form that catapulted you to the cover of this publication? Mark my words: there is a Neal Boortz saturation point, and I’m pretty sure we’re there now. He’s always on, and if he isn’t, Clark is! Generic rich white guys! And not rich enough—apparently. That’s why a big chunk of their programs are syndicated beyond the Atlanta market (dead giveaway: whenever Boortz or Howard say it’s 12 past the hour, they’re not talking to Atlantans, but to generic radioland.)
I think it’s the heat getting to me, but I just feel a complete disconnect from this kind of concocted, syndicated radio mush. Thunk! Thunk! I have to poke the grimy ‘AM/FM’ button several times now on my broken-down 85 Honda to get it to bandshift. There’s 99X, increasingly generic outside the Morning X domain. The House of Retro Pleasure could be located in any city, anywhere, instead of crumbling on a corner off of Little 5 Points (as I’ve always visualized.) Poke! Mash! Why doesn’t WABE carry NPR’s fine Talk of the Nation in the afternoons? Who’s really listening to generic classical stuff? (And why aren’t they just enjoying it on AM stereo 1190?)
Thunk! Back to AM. The Honda’s a/c is wheezing. I detour slowly around the inexplicably abandoned construction site that has closed down Morningside Drive. And Boortz is letting Royal Marshall promote his show (which airs on AM 680, WCNN.) Boortz is an industry unto himself, a spawner of spinoffs. Next thing we know his Dodge truck or his pressure-washed house will have their own shows on WCNN, and WSB overnights will air reruns of Neal’s bathroom breaks.
It’s just too damn hot. I pull into the Harris Teeter parking lot and am shaded by an enormous billboard of Brenda Wood, who, as I realize, squinting upwards, looks great in this photo. Not the typical anchor preen—it looks like she’s actually thinking. But then there’s the ‘We want you to know’ tagline. Know what, exactly? On the radio, Howard’s show is starting, and his openings sound increasingly canned, syndicated, generic: "welcome to your daily consumer empowerment zone." And remember—don’t mention the name of the company that’s screwing you, don’t mention where you’re calling from, help us out here so that Clark can cash in and become more consumer-empowered his own bad self.
Poke! Thunk! I’ve got some sort of acoustic-y bluegrass-y stuff coming out of my trashed car speakers now. Ah! WRFG finally cools me down a bit—the aural equivalent of a drink of lemonade in Brenda’s shade.
Has anyone here…
Tuesday, July 20th, 1999
Has anyone here seen my old friend saturation coverage?
Listen and hear the voices in American newsrooms everywhere:
Can we call it a death? Is it a disappearance? How long can we say they’re missing? Can we get a graphic that says "Lost at Sea?" How does "America’s Hopes Dim" sound? Can we get a reporter up to Hyannisport? How about two? Let’s send Pruitt! We need an animation! Get me every frame of JFK video we have. Find someone who knew him. Find someone who flew with them. Find someone who was at their wedding! Find someone who lives down the street! Find me someone who has the same last name. Get down to the Varsity and find me some real people and find out what they think. No, that’s too real. Find me the people who left flowers! Let’s get the airplane company on the phone. Any airplane company! Let’s get a crew out to Peachtree DeKalb. Let’s talk to pilots and get their reaction. Take that flower footage and give me a slow dissolve between Kennedy’s flowers and Diana’s flowers. His wife Carolyn, she worked with Calvin Klein, was it? Get me some models! Find me some crying models! Find me some crying experts! Get me a Kennedy biographer…make it two! We’ve got a guy who taught them to ride horses-get a crew out there! How are we doing on the "flying is dangerous" angle? Give me the word "Cursed?" fullscreen, superimposed over a shot of the ocean at sunset! Take these CDs and pull for me every cut of sad music you can! You have who? She what? Christiane Amanpour taught JFK Jr. to clean toilets!? That leads! That rules! Get her in here! Sit her down with Mike! Find me some more college buddies of his! Did she have any friends in school? Get me the guy who knew the guy who saw the guy who took them to work! We’ve got what? Some crying models dressed in colonial wigs? Great work! Get them in here! We’re going to need kleig lights up in Hyannisport. I want live shots at one minute past all night long from there. I don’t care if they’re just sleeping! Find me a spokescop! Get me a graphic that shows what a plane looks like close to the water! No, I don’t think we need to put a little cutout JFK in therethat’d be going too far. Make it move! Make it look dangerous! Where’s that radar sweep thing you used last plane crash? Get a crew out to the FAA. Find the guys who taught him to fly. Find the guys who flew with him! Now make the graphic say "Is all hope lost?" No, bigger and more urgent! Make it say "All hope is lost!" Rewind it to where she says "He was our own royalty!" Take that part! Find the cut of the guy who said "he could be President whenever he wanted." Slug that in there! No, music up! Tell Stone to nod some more when he reads that! We need a new animation! Get me…
Commentator Andrei Codrescu on Monday’s Nightline: "but for now, can’t we all just be quiet?"
