Real. Life. Drama.
Monday, April 12th, 1999
My wife walked into my office Monday afternoon and issued a terse bulletin: "The cotton mill in Cabbagetown is on fire—it’s completely ablaze. There’s a guy on a crane."
Sure enough, most of local television was on the story (although Channel 46…er, CBS Atlanta, seemed not to be paying attention.) I snapped the TV on to WXIA, and there were vivid live pictures high over a would-be huge trendy loft-complex-to-be going up like the second burning of Atlanta. We both watched transfixed as a crane operator clung for dear life as choppers were mustered for a rescue.
We witnessed most of this drama through the lens of Bruce Erion’s 11Alive Skycam, for the simple reason that when it comes to stories involving aircraft and air rescue, Erion tracks and reports the story better than anyone else. A former Vietnam chopper pilot, Erion understands the problems rescuers faced intimately, and he’s able to communicate to us Earth-bound folk in a remarkably clear, jargon-free manner. Everyone else in the air over Atlanta (with the exception of Keith Kalland, who, after all, isn’t piloting and talking) have the crippled communication skills of, well, pilots.
If WXIA had left good enough alone and stuck with their early team—Bruce talking with weatherguy Royal Norman back at the studio—they would have won the afternoon. But no, they brought in insipid reporters on the ground who didn’t seem to be tracking the information Erion and Norman had before it was their turn. We saw Bill Liss and Kevin Rowson saying absolutely nothing of interest, poorly. We saw Jennifer Leslie trying the patented consultanty "the crowd’s prayers were with the crane operator" crap.
And WXIA’s last shred of credibility disappeared when Wes Sarginson and Brenda Wood where connected live to a hoaxer—one of those Howard Stern fan-weasels—who claimed to be in charge of the mill. I tried to warn them, screaming "Hoax! Hoax!" at the TV, but, did they listen?
Meanwhile, over at WSB, the quality of ground reporting was better if only because anchor Richard Belcher and reporter Sally Sears seem to have some inkling of the history of this town. Sears reported that her vantage point in Oakland Cemetery was "roughly on the line between where the Union soldiers and where the Confederate soldiers are buried," and for a moment, this "Breaking News" event was happening someplace other than Genericville.
By my count, Fox 5’s Sharon Crowley wins the award for saying "as you can see here" the most times in succession during a live shot— sometimes four to five times in one sentence while trying to gather her thoughts. Fox 5 folk in general trotted out the phrase "raging inferno" most during the live coverage. On the other hand, they deserve big credit for having enough perspective to put together a lengthy historical piece on the mill and Cabbagetown in general. Real background information, cool!
Later Monday evening, both 20/20 and Dateline did sum-up pieces that used extensive amounts of their Atlanta affiliate’s video—with scant acknowledgement. And in a promo faux pas, nanoseconds after Dateline showed us the climatic moment, WXIA told us to "stay tuned for an amazing rescue you’ll have to see to believe…"
Uh…no thanks, we just did. In fact, by midnight, if you had a television on, you shared the experience with a whole bunch of your neighbors. It was a reminder to me that there are some kinds of "Breaking News" that can hold you riveted to your screen, connected with your fellow viewers, compelled to find out what happens next.
Pictures from my headphones
Monday, April 5th, 1999
It’s springtime in Atlanta, and the airwaves are filled with the smells of ballpark franks, Skip Caray’s aftershave, and, of course, all those turtles.
I’m walking down Highland Avenue, dodging smokers in the sunshine, NPR’s WABE in my ear in between innings of the Braves opener. Bruce Dortin reports: "Georgia has 134 miles of turtles. That is, 134 miles of coastline." Ah, we need radio of this caliber to make news operations like WSB radio’s actually seem sophisticated.
I thumbwheel my walkperson back to Newstalk 750, WSB, where you get traffic reports from a guy who has earned his psuedo-military rank under decidedly mysterious circumstances, and where reporters bellowing "depend on it" just make me nervous.
But it’s also where listening to Braves Baseball is about as close to the best of what commercial radio can be these days. Pictures actually form in one’s mind, and unlike most morning radio shows’ image-conjuring, they’re not the kind you slap your temples to eject from your skull. There are just those four familiar voices, and the aural aroma of the game. Pete’s encyclopedic perspective and Don and Joe’s insights are just gravy—I listen for Skip Caray’s distinctive cadence, laden with just how he’s feeling right now. He is, by turns, a 12-year-old kid in love with the ballpark life and a curmudgeonly old man who really doesn’t want to say it’s the Ikon Office Systems scoreboard, even if that’s what’s on the damn card.
Later the same evening, I stash the radio and force myself to stay up to watch The Late, Late Show with Craig Kilborn—just for…just for…just what is the point?
There, at 12:37 in the morning, when there really aren’t all that many people awake, we have Craig, the new boy. He’s wearing a Conan O’Brien pompadour, he’s sitting in a fine-veneer set that seems cobbled together from the old Greg Kinnear Later digs and where Charlie Rose sat for CBS News Nightwatch, circa 1988.
There’s a two-shot—it’s the Letterman shot, precisely. Craig waves goodbye a la Dave. Vaguely creepy music plays. I’m baffled. The overnight ratings say the timeslot’s audience hasn’t increased, but he has attracted—you guessed it younger viewers, who, I must conclude, lack the time-depth to detect the recycling of sets, hair, and ideas.
The lengths that CBS will go through to buy some young demographics seem, well, ruthlessly capitalistic. No sooner does CBS CEO Mel Karmazin again express his FCC-prohibited deep desire and longing to acquire NBC, then rumors pop up in Monday’s San Jose Mercury News that AOL would like to absorb that tasty morsel CBS.
CBS owns a heavy majority in about a zillion—okay, about 160 radio and TV stations (including Z-93, WAOK, and V-103 right here). They’ve got TNN and CMT (sewing up the country cable acronyms.) and now, in no April Fool’s joke, they shelled out something like $2.5 billion in stock last week to buy King World Productions, the syndicators of Oprah, Wheel, and Jeopardy. (How valuable will this pricy grab be after Ms. Winfrey leaves?)
And why should you care?
Visualize the classic eyeball logo. The announcer speaks: "This…is AOL."
Well, it makes me shudder.
Italic Anxiety
Monday, March 29th, 1999
When the lotto jackpot creeps up above $70 million the concept that people are buying lottery tickets suddenly drops into the brains of assignment editors and out of their mouths as if it were actual news, deserving of Dedicated Determined Team Coverage You Can Count On. Get those crews out there! Bring us those familiar pictures of hands, cash registers, money and tickets. Unleash those anchors, enabling happy talk on the order of “gee, I guess I should get my tickets. Time for sports. Bill, d’jou get your tickets yet?”
When Bill Gates cranks out another book of public relations tripe about e-mail, the Internet, and how corporations can be rejuvenated by installing Windows-based machines by the hundreds, who at Time magazine stands up and says “we should put this brilliant man on the cover”…? Did we hang onto every word of Henry Ford decades ago when his basic message was “the world will become a utopia if you buy enough of these basic black cars?” Well, hmm, maybe so.
And just when exactly did Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw discover that they were more than pretty-boy anchors—why, they’re authors, qualified to pontificate in print on the meaning of the century, or of the generation past? If they had so much extra time for authoring, why didn’t they instead snag a camera crew and go out and find some actual news?
Yes, these are just rhetorical questions. And no, don’t get me started. Uh-oh. Too late for that.
Did they hire Tom Skerritt to shill for Aleve because the guy looks like he’s in perpetual headache agony? I’m standing in front of the mirror, scrunching up like crazy, and no, I can’t make my face do that.
Is there some sort of gender thing going on when they counterprogram Ice Dancing Championships with Die Hard 2, or the Final Four with Something to Talk About?
Is Craig Kilborn going to tank as the new host of the Late Late Show because he refers to himself as “frat-guy fun” and “charming” in interviews?
If they pick Joel Siegel of Good Morning America to replace the late Gene Siskel, will we tune in one day to find Ebert’s hands around Siegel’s throat?
If the Supreme Court outlaws camera crews riding along with cops (as they kick the doors in of America’s shirtless and blurry-faced), will the Langley-Barbour series Cops be able to survive with only eleven years worth of reruns to syndicate? (or gee, will the Supremes require them to erase those tapes?) Maybe they’ll just require the producers to blur out the entire program.
When a station tells you that something is “New at 11,” what exactly do they mean? Are they operating from the NBC Zen Theory of Reruns that says (and I quote), “If you haven’t seen it, it’s new to you?”
Do the producers of Jeopardy! wail on Alex Trebek during commercial breaks when he’s spent too much time doing funny voices, helping out Canadian contestants, or pointing out the failings of hapless guests? (Seems to me as if right after he does that, we come back from break, and he’s much more subdued.)
And will I get my runaway italics corraled before next week?
Re-sprung.
Saturday, March 20th, 1999
We’re still kinda staggered around here. It was an amazing trip…two-plus weeks in Africa and the time in London, Paris, Amsterdam, and…well, that’s where I got this hacking cough that I’m still trying to (hack! cough!) lose.
But I can see the signs. We’ve turned the corner. Spring is in the air. Sam and I went by the Botannical Garden Friday afternoon, and it was a lot more colorful than the week before…not yet the proverbial riot of color, but it’s getting there. And with each degree-day of warmth, with each non-African bird singing in our backyard, I feel as if we’re getting back in sync with the forces of nature immediately around us, after exposure to the forces of nature a continent or two away.
We were sub-Equatorial, and you didn’t even get a lame t-shirt. And I haven’t put any pictures up this increasingly rusty site. I have tossed all the most recent Media Rares into the archives, giving you a nice complete set to plod through. Go! Look! Comment!
We’re going to try to get some more quality time in the out of doors in the next couple of weeks, but work is calling. There’s a 108 pound box from Chyron sitting in my office demanding to be hooked up. There’s images to make, logos to fly, web pages to design, ideas to kick around, beepers to set off, and conference calls to cough through.
And then after that, some serious maintenance on this site. I’m not kidding.
Enjoy your spring.
Message reaches…audience?
Friday, March 19th, 1999
There was a brief flurry—it may well now have subsided a bit—where every Internet company, no matter what its actual business, wanted to become a portal—that place from where (they hoped) your web browser would start on its exploration of the great .com unknown. It would, they hoped, be a friendly place, customized with the news, stocks, weather, sports scores and other junk that you wanted to see—and of course serve as the search engine—even if what it was doing was linking to another portal’s search engine, so as you typed "golf clubs" in, a piece of software somewhere would make a note the person sitting at your machine, someone who lived at zip code 30324 (you told them this to get the weather) liked golf, so maybe we should be showing him or her golf ads.
It’s always fairly creepy when a banner ad pops up on my web browser showing clear evidence of an attempt to target me based on where I’m surfing—and yet that’s the Holy Grail of advertising. Message reaches audience. The folks who sponsor NASCAR know that if you’re a Dale Earnhardt fan, chances are you want to shop at a certain kind of place, and they can conclude you’d be in the market for, say, Texaco gas and motor oil.
It’d be creepier if "hyper-appropriate" ads showed up on the television show I’m watching, since there’s absolutely no feedback mechanism about what channel we’re tuned to (another reason I like over-the-air broadcast television) —although of course media buyers, the people who buy commercial time on behalf of advertisers—are trying to make similar guesses. If you’re watching "Felicity," you may want to look at this spring’s fashions from Old Navy, for example. Watching Dan Rather? You may have bladder control problems. A recent issue of Electronic Media dove a little more deeply into that paranoid place—where the execs at the older, stodgier TV networks were complaining that since media buyers were, for the most part, folks in their mid-twenties, their personal favorites are the only shows that get advertising money. An endless parade of "Dawson’s Creek"-clones, they say, will be the result. (Not likely. Scary, but not likely.)
This ability to effectively target advertising is one of the reasons big corporations are investing heavily into these all-in-one news/portal/city guide things on the web, and why we’ll be seeing more and more "local" sites that purport to give us the "ultimate" guide to Atlanta. Cox Interactive (yes, more or less the same folks who bring us the AJC and WSB) have quite a head start in this and a handful of other markets, and I give them credit—their Access Atlanta site has a healthy dose of "here" on its zillions of pages. Contrast that with atlanta.sidewalk.com, Microsoft’s extension of a service that’s seen some success in Seattle and San Francisco and some other places out west. I don’t recognize our town in its pages. It feels like a soulless, generic template generated by a server in Redmond, Washington, operating on instructions like "insert the words ‘kudzu’ and ‘grits’ every 18.5 words."
For better and worse, Atlanta’s way more subtle, complex, and inconsistent than that.
Vast PBS Wasteland
Monday, March 15th, 1999
Just exactly when did Public Television become this vast wasteland of self-help, where any psuedo-credentialed goofball with graying hair can show up and hustle his 13 Habits of Effective Morons or 12 Ways You Can be Wealthy Without Guilt or 10 Ways of Eating More Multicolored Fiber? And why must we be force-fed this pablum interspersed with interminable pledge breaks from GPTV’s generic annoying hucksters, or WPBA’s very un-generic, very annoying, creepy, big-haired, cloying, overmanicured-fingernails-on-the-blackboard Alicia Ames?
How did these nutcases overtake the formidable walls of the great grey Corporation for Public Broadcasting? Where have all the Great Performances and American Masters and breakthrough documentarians gone? Why has this sub-genre of programming, unworthy of the infomercial format, taken over stations we support with our donations? Where’s Steve and Norm, Julia Child and Fred Rogers, Martin Yan and Rick Steves? (I’ve found all of them annoying on individual occasions—but they tower over this pledge break junk.)
And by the way—we need no more Irish dancing. How about a decent night at the theatre, or rerun some Africa footage from "Nature", or maybe even force me to sit through endless rebroadcasts of "Antiques Roadshow"—just get these fake, dangerous book hucksters off our public airwaves.
* * * * *
WGNX isn’t owned by Tribune Television Stations any more, so they’ve deep-fortysixed their call letters (trivia buffs: the WGN part stands for the "Worlds Greatest Newspaper"—the Chicago Tribune) and are now referring to themselves as "CBS Atlanta," which, yeah, I guess they are. The new owners, Meredith Broadcasting, are said to be planning to pour a ton of money into its news operation to make the station more of a contender in that silly marketplace we call Atlanta local television news. Think that’ll make you watch?
* * * * *
"That 70s Show" had its "season finale" Sunday night, but "will be back with new episodes in the summer." What the heck does that mean? I’m sorry, but if you have a season finale, you’re required by television law to sit and wait quietly for the fall. That’s just the way it is. And you’d be even more confused if you saw "Days Like These," a current British sitcom that takes the exact word-for-word scripts from "That 70s Show," changes a few cultural references, and then throws the pages to a lookalike British cast of poorly-dressed 70s kids—and, well, it works, in a strange parallel-universe way.
* * * * *
One of my favorite things to do these days is listen to newspeople choking on the phrase "Black College Spring Break" in lieu of the much more evocative "Freaknik." The purveyors of the website www.freaknik.com (they also have .org and .net) have no such compunctions—they’re busy selling the name and the idea of the party—the actual physical reality of what happens the third week of April doesn’t really make much difference to them.
I thought I’d check local media websites and see how they referred to this event—but WXIA, WAGA, and WGNX have no search engine. WSB borrows Access Atlanta’s search—and that’s where the only results came from: Access Atlanta has no problems with the "Freaknik" name, it seems.
Arf! Determined! Dependable!
Monday, March 8th, 1999
Threat of a storm sends panicked Georgians to grocery stores to stock up on…wait for it…bread and milk. Wanted murderer here, child molester there. Yes, I’m watching Fox 5’s News at 10. You know, the one with that cluttered, bricky-techy background and where the talent names are tossed in letter by letter from the right side of the screen. (Why? Because we can.) Yeah, Fox 5. The one that’s currently running a promo that throws every conceivable dictionary word ("Urgent, Innovative, Intense, Serious…" ) at the screen in 30 seconds to see what sticks to their newscast—and nothing does.
After that meaningless promo barrage, I check WAGA’s website to see if they’ve got the same pointlessness there. But type carefully if you’re trying to find it…http://www.fox5.com/ will take you to some people trying to sell (possibly illegal) cable TV converters. The real Fox 5 site is www.wagatv.com. That might be hard to remember because the folks at Fox-owned WAGA have done everything they can to make you forget the proud WAGA call letters. They want to establish "Fox 5" as the single, unified brand that you turn to for news, endless episodes of the Simpsons, and people who throw chairs at each other on talkshows. Problem is when you have something like the 50th anniversary of a station, those pesky four letters are bound to come up every now and again.
The Fox 5 site reports that the station signed on the air in April 1949, but that was contradicted by a report last week on Fox 5’s News at 10 that, indeed, the station turned 50 exactly this past Monday. I’ll go with that because I trust Doug Richards’ credibility over the anonymous fingers behind their somewhat stale web pages.
Richards’ "Closer Look" did a decent job of flashing back through the images of a bygone station. We saw the terrier named WAGA that served as the station’s mascot in the early days (hmm…maybe stations need mascots again) and we beheld a bunch of white guys in bad 60s and 70s garb reporting on the steps of the statehouse. We saw former WAGA GM Paul Raymon admit he dressed up as a cowboy TV host named Pecos Paul (but he uttered nary a word about presenting two decades worth of really bad editorials.) We beheld Lester Maddox and Hosea Williams and (if you watched very carefully) Guy Sharpe and Richard Belcher and Forrest Sawyer and some of the other people who moved on from WAGA while the getting was good. I didn’t catch images of long-time WAGA anchor success Brenda Wood, or Chuck Moore, or Ken Watts.
In fact, I was just settling in and enjoying the nostalgic hit when the report was over—no more time to look back, we’ve got news to report! And what news was that? I’m not kidding: A dog (not a terrier) comes to the rescue of an overwhelmed pig! That story coming up on Fox 5 News! And stay tuned for the Battle of the Broken Hearts on Jerry Springer—right after the news.
There’s no mistaking that television has changed, right? Happy birthday, terrier station.
The way TV was meant to be
Sunday, February 21st, 1999
When people notice that our television doesn’t connect to a cable in the wall or a dish on the roof but to a set of good old rabbit ears, I get up on my high horse and say "around here, we get television the way God intended, out of the air." They, of course, look at me as if I’m nuts, and say "don’t you want to watch CNN? The History Channel? MTV?" Well, I travel a lot and am in places with cable enough that I get more than my fill of Comedy Central and E! and Ultra-Headline News and ESPN-whatever and VH-1000. I’m fine, thanks. Couldn’t eat another bite.
What I don’t say is that I’m not very impressed with what Media One has to offer our neighborhood, and until they install fiber on our street and sell high-speed internet access along with countless channels of home shopping, I’d rather watch TV the way it’s "supposed" to work, ghosts and all. Actually, it’s not supposed to have many ghosts, but in an urban area filled with lots of shiny buildings that reflect radio-frequency energy, that’s what you get. So, for us, if we set up to get WSB and WXIA well, WAGA and WTBS suck. We get used to watching multiple Greg Madduxes (Madduxi?) on the mound. Sometimes, watching Monica Kaufman is less painful if she’s accompanied by her ghostly twins.
Yeah, I know, I’m rationalizing. The ugly truth is that television in and of itself doesn’t work that well (you heard it here first) , and people with any source of income at all (including some friends with huge piles of debt and zero disposable income) put cable on their necessity list, right up there with water and electricity. "I work hard," they say, "and this I do for me." It’s only when you start looking at the service with an anti-monopolistic, Consumer Reports-y eye that it doesn’t seem as if you’re getting that much for your dollar. How much was basic cable when the service first came to Atlanta in the early 80s? $7.95 a month. How much are you paying now?
And for those of you patiently waiting for digital television, I’m afraid I have another paragraph of pessimism to pass on. The good news is that ghosts will be a thing of the past. The bad news is, like so many things digital, your picture will either be perfect—or nonexistent. Early reports of folks trying to get their new-definition pictures out of the air (the way…oh, never mind) say that you’ve got to aim your fancy digital antenna right at the transmitter you’re trying to receive, or you’re screwed. Some cities have all their TV transmitters on one central high-place (the World Trade Center, for example.) Here, we’ve got to point at the Carter Center (roughly) for WSB, Briarcliff Road for Fox 5 and WATL, and…well, you get the idea. And plans for cable systems to transmit the digital signals are still in the very, very sketchy stages.
Kinda makes you want to rent a movie and forget about the whole thing, right?
Buffy at the Beeb
Friday, February 12th, 1999
LONDON—In my early days of public broadcasting, when I would push the buttons that brought today’s episode of Sesame Street to a close and roll Misterogers Neighborhood, I learned our traditions flowed from the motherlode, WGBH in Boston, and, beyond that, from the grandmotherlode, the noble BBC in Britain. It is through this bloodline that we get seemingly endless serialized Brit drama poured into an envelope called Masterpiece Theatre, and it is why if you watch the credits carefully, many episodes of Nova are, in fact, repackaged versions of the BBC’s Horizon. The Antiques Road Show wouldn’t be coming to a Cobb Galleria near you if it wasn’t for its even more turgid British predecessor, and without Monty Python’s Flying Circus there would be absolutely none of the humor that is on TV today.
Well, maybe not that last part.
It is true that even some legendary US commercial television shows—All in the Family and Three’s Company, for example, were remakes of British successes. But it’s amazing how now the pop culture pipeline flows both ways.
Among the top-rated shows in British broadcast and satellite viewing these days: The Simpsons, Friends, and ER. Up-and-coming: Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Stargate: SG1, and South Park. Ricki Lake does quite well, too, go figure. Most overused catchphrase in the UK written press of late: "D’oh!"
In fact, American programming of the style and quality (ahem) of South Park is the successful ammunition that the other television channels have against the monopolistic BBC, which, for the first time in its existence, is seeing audience shares dip below 30%. There are only a handful of broadcast competitors squeezed onto a total of three non-BBC channels. But add to that Fox via direct broadcast satellite, which in the UK goes by the name Sky—pure Rupert Murdoch, right down to the success they’ve had with Wildest Police Videos 2, and yes, some competition is happening here, thanks to Homer and his Yank pals.
So it’s amazing that the BBC continues on, in its quirky yet gigantic way, funded by the license fees levied on every television set in England. Yes, take a deep breath and consider that next time the pledge-begging Alicia Ames makes you want to kickbox your TV. It’s kind of like paying for cable, except the picture isn’t that good, and you still need an antenna. Worse, they take that money and make television by the most expensive means necessary. When the BBC goes shopping at equipment conventions, they buy the Eddie Bauer versions of cameras and tape machines, with the leather seats, the fog lights, and matching luggage. If a crew of 3 is needed, they have a dozen.
It’s the same complaint I have with religious broadcasters: if you’re spending the quarters tossed into the plate by poverty-line grandmothers, do you really need the Cadillac of cameras?
Ah, don’t get me started. Suffice to say: the BBC’s nobility and tradition rides on the backs of working class Britons who just want a little noise on in the living room after their shift.
So they may be turning to a little Buffy with their supper.
Nose job and a double room, please.
Friday, February 5th, 1999
LONDON—When I was in journalism school (and yes, I have to admit I actually went to school to be able to write these words for you), I imagined the thrill of filing a story from an exotic byline.
And, well, now I have. Gosh, it is a kick to bat words into my trusty Powerbook from the land that ice machines have still largely forgotten. The United Kingdom, where the Internet, the Simpsons, Buffy, and most other components of our pop culture survive, albeit in a strange other-side-of-the-road alternate universe.
And it’s from England’s newsstands that we get the inspiration for a new generation of "men’s lifestyle magazines," rightly skewered in a recent Newsweek. Publications like Maxim and their followers are (yes, it’s possible) even more focused on breasts and beer in their euroincarnations. The newest of these critters here: Boys Toys, which has a woman sprawled on the hood of a car, surrounded by (as I squint at the cover on the newsstand from a distance), the bold words "Sex," "Get Rich Quick," and "Win a Porsche." If you see these words above the fold on next week’s Atlanta Press, you’ll know why.
On their way to American shores is a similar horde of women’s lowest-common-denominator pubs (or their clones) that make Cosmo seem like TV Guide. Take a twentysomething gal’s magazine called…uh, Minx that screams "Be a sex goddess (first turn to page 28)" next to its Jewel-clone cover model. She sits alongside a headline that says "Nose job and a double room please," for a piece about those oh-so-popular cosmetic surgery/vacation holiday combo packages. Also inside: how to be happy—stop wearing black, buy a furby, get married, and take drugs. Oh, don’t thank me for this advice—thank Minx.
Maybe it’s just truth in advertising—yet another of these glossies (I was too numbed at this point to note the name) heralds "It’s OK to Be a Slut." Say it loud.
And memo to the AJC’s feature department: every Tuesday, the London Daily Mirror now gives women Zone—a section that is not "girly, but sexy, in your face and modern." Mirror editor Tina Weaver, speaking to Britian’s Press Gazette, minces no words. "It’s not going to be a giggly, how-to-pull-a-fella type…it is quite sexually explicit and we will cover every aspect of sex unblushingly." The launch issue had orgasms, lesbianism, bisexualitym and an imaginary diarist that out Bridget Jones-es the original exponentially.
Just imagine the ladies at Mary Mac’s tea room opening their afternoon AJC and finding that kind of garden of earthly delights!
No, I understand that editors have to do what they can to sell copies, but it is from the British tradition that we get an editor prattling on (and they all do, especially here) about the noble importance of their work and their indispensability to their target demographic—while ordering up new ways to feature sex—both the actual word and absolutely any variation on the idea—for their next cover. That duality, popularized perhaps in the States by Hugh "read it for the articles" Hefner, definitely has deep roots planted in the Old World.
Pam charges the camera
Sunday, January 31st, 1999
Maybe I wasn’t the only one who noticed that WAGA…er, Fox 5 was eating everyone’s lunch when it came to the Falcons march to the Super Bowl. The slumbering promo machines at WXIA and WSB came to life, claiming that no, they were your station for the Atlanta Falcons. They had the inside dope, the reporters players trust, and saturation coverage that would annoy even the dirtiest of early 1960s Ford compact cars. (Hey, my Dad drove a 1964 Falcon; consider that reference a brief tribute to him.)
But that’s the problem with promos, and the challenge for all promo people, be they television, radio, or print. Deep down beneath all that hype there has to be the slightest germ of truth…a tiny nugget of veracity that the rest of the wretched excess can hang on, and when it isn’t there, it’s easy for the viewer to take one look and say "Naaah," and hit the remote.
You can have Pam Martin come charging at the camera from across the newsroom at full tilt, but when all she has to say is "live, local, latebreaking, that’s Channel 2 Action News," she has just delivered a completely content-free fastball that went sizzling toward my head—leaving nothing in its wake. Back to your desk, Pam…live, local, sheesh. Channel 2 needs to have an emergency operation and have at least two of its dozen or so slogans surgically removed.
And then there are those spots for a certain large Atlanta daily that show us how people who want it all can do it all—they just have to cook up recipes from the paper while reading the business section about where their boss should build their next project (the actress points to Gwinnett county and says something like "This is a real growth area." Really? Alert the media!) and, oh, by the way, check your horoscope to find the mate of your dreams. The nugget of reality may have been in this commercial at one time, but it left in disgust.
And so do we, switching the channel.
"Hi folks, we’re here for another two hours…"
Look, you can have Tom Park and the lovely whoever-she-is in their winter overcoats making as if the Atlanta Toyota spot they’re slamming your way is happening right now, live from the car lot, but when you turn the TV on in Florida and see the same duo pulling the same hustle for Toyota of Orlando (and how many other dealerships?) the whole "we only have two left" thing seems a little lame.
It’s back to that germ of truth, and you might laugh, but it can be found in the most pathetic places. The guy on the Wolfman Furniture spots really is just about that much fun to be around; his on-camera awkwardness is that tiny tidbit of real that lets you work with the rest of the contrivance.
Yes, I am saying I’m more likely to buy furniture from the Wolfman than a car from Tom Park.
Just not very likely in either case.
What’s the frequency of eeee-vil?
Saturday, January 23rd, 1999
During the first season of the incredibly bad Nightman (seen Saturday nights and every so often at 2 in the morning on channel 46) they had a weekly recapitulation where a lab-coated man of science explained to saxaphonist/crimefighter Johnny Domino why he was hearing these voices in his head, "and Doc, they’re all bad voices." Veteran Avengers actor Patrick MacNee gave it all he had. That lightning strike caused Domino’s head to become something like a cosmic radio, he explained in deepest profundity to the baffled piece of beefcake before him. "And Johnny, you’re tuned to the frequency…of evil."
Eeeee-ville. It always sounds…well, evil-er, with a British accent.
They’ve taken that explanation off the open in this show’s second season, possibly to avoid royalty payments to MacNee, and deprived me of just one more of my guilty pleasures. Edward J. Wood may be dead, but the tradition of really bad filmmaking continues in syndication, a land where all the dialog is just about that bad, all the world looks like Canada or Mexico, and all the implants are way below average.
Forget the first-tier productions like (I can’t believe I’m saying this) Baywatch or Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. No, they have a budget. I’m talking about The Crow: Stairway to Heaven, Poltergeist: The Legacy, Air America, Acapulco H.E.A.T., Pensacola: Wings of Gold, Highlander: The Raven, and their ilk.
Oh yeah, and that Pamela Anderson Lee one.
And that Viper thing, and Psi Factor: Tales of the Paranormal….and did I mention Earth: Final Conflict?
You’ll find them lurking in and around movies on weekends, on late at night Saturday and Sunday, on plain old broadcast televison for the most part—I won’t even get into their cable cousins Silk Stalkings and the like here. Maybe it’s just that frequent ingestions of these broadcast empty calories reassure me that whatever I do in television is somehow nobler. Maybe it’s just because I like seeing familiar places in Vancouver and Toronto masquerading as the south (this, of course, was part of the fun of The X-Files before they moved south to help David Duchovny’s marriage. Who knew that North Georgia looked just like the Pacific Northwest?)
Naah, it’s just the overwhelming implausibility of it all. The superhero/crimefighter/saxaphonist and his police lieutenant babe-friend. A crack group of Canadian-accented US government investigators, led by Max Headroom, working out of a series of mobile trailers (much larger inside than out) with a deadpan narration by Dan Ackroyd at the beginning of each hour. A dead (you heard me) musician/motorcyclist/crimefighter, and his police lieutenant buddy. An immortal (oh, that’s better) babe/thief-turned-crimefighter, and her ex-police lieutenant buddy. Mr. Barbra Streisand and his crew of top gun wannabes, greased up, hair-gelled, and ready to fight for us. A secret operations force that uses Dennis Rodman as a mission specialist (at least they didn’t say master of disguise.) A protective services agency that uses Pamela Anderson Lee as their front (make up your own joke here.) A top secret force of babe operatives, led by Lorenzo Lamas, based in a nonexistent country where…oh, forget it.
It’s just plain cheese. It’s do-it-yourself Mystery Science Theater. It’s a fine way to keep Canadian theatrical unemployment to a minimum. So…enjoy all you want, they’ll make more.
There’s news, there’s information.
Monday, January 11th, 1999
There was a point when the hunk of newsprint that landed on your front door and the half-hour of transmitted pictures and sound arriving at the dinner hour were chock-full of news. This happened here. That happened there. Who did what, when. And after they told you this news (or printed it for your perusal over breakfast), they didn’t tell you again. That content ceased being news—they reported it already, so there was no need to repackage it or repurpose it. The Falcons won. Here’s the score. A murder happened last night. Here’s the who-what-where on that. Okay, done.
But somewhere in the process, a decade or two ago when clever marketers realized that what they had was not so much a service as a product, the word "news" embedded in "newscast" and "newspaper" became a more of a lie.
I hate to say it, but I peg that moment of change right around June 1, 1980, when CNN went on the air—although I could probably attach culpability to Entertainment Tonight, USA Today, and the television news consultants coming into vogue at that time.
It was about then that I began to hear the word "information" attached to "news," and my initial impression was that information was kind of a weak cousin, a non-time-specific, loose gathering of fact or spoken utterance. Compared to news, information had far fewer active ingredients. If you had news for dinner, the dog would get a nice bowl of information.
News, need I say it, carries the connotation of "new." In and of itself, it has a short shelf life. So what do "news" executives do to make it last longer? They pad it out with filler, and use the same content again and again.
Now, we hear about an event before it’s going to happen in a half-dozen different ways, then we get saturation coverage of the event itself, and then reports of that event are recycled, chopped, and pureed into a bunch of regurgitations for days after it happened. And I’m not just talking about big, long-term stories like impeachment, global conflict, and the environment. It all gets this treatment.
Just one example.
I watched WSB’s Action News Sunday Morning last Sunday, God knows why. It was, in short, a rerun of the week’s reporting on Channel 2. Not an insightful week-in-review, mind you, but an actual re-showing of the news, presented as if it might still be news to you. Falcons coverage: recycled. Health features from earlier in the week: recycled. Interminable cold weather blather: recycled. The actual amount of reporting on events that happened between 11:30 pm Saturday and noon on Sunday: 0%. And the repeat reports were so content-free to begin with that it was thin gruel indeed by the time we got it served for Sunday brunch.
Well, sure, news directors say. Nothing happens in the middle of the night on weekends. So why do we have lengthy newscasts on Saturday and Sunday mornings? A simple reason: they’re a cheaper wrapper for commercials than anything else, including kids’ cartoons and old reruns of Gilligan’s Island. It’s for the same reason that the "Sunday" paper is in fact all but completed by Friday, and is about as fresh as expired milk.
The only way this will change, of course, is if the all-holy research reveals to the execs some day that we’ve lost our taste for this stuff. Be sure to mention that you have, if someone asks…it might be news to them.
Television to milk cows by.
Monday, January 4th, 1999
I’ve come to understand that not everybody keeps my late night hours, and are therefore not as familiar as I am with the stuff that falls from the airwaves after Conan O’Brien, Bill Maher, and Tom Snyder have gone to bed. (And if you never see even those shows, clearly you get up at 6 am and are growing corn and soybeans somewhere west of Piedmont Park.)
Me, I’m just becoming lucid at 1:35 in the morning, and broadcast television at that hour is a delightful potpourri of infomercial, news rerun, and programming for the narrowest of audiences.
Take NBC’s offerings over the years. In the era when they still had Dave Letterman at 12:35, they followed it an hour later with Later with Bob Costas, an hour of simple one-on-one interviews so interesting and entertaining, they outdid Tom Snyder at his own game. Well, never one to leave a good thing alone, somewhere during Letterman’s transition to CBS and during Conan O’Brien’s shaky start as host of Late Night, NBC replaced Costas as host of Later with Greg Kinnear—a talented actor, but a lousy interviewer and at best, a Letterman impersonator in his role as talk show host. Not long after that, Kinnear’s movie career took off and O’Brien made the 12:35 show his own distinctive comedy playhouse, and Later became this weird, sad science experiment, hosted by a night-after-night succession of pathetic NBC "stars" (for example, Peri Gilpin from Frasier interviewing what’s-her-name the other woman from Frasier) doing shameless PR for the peacock network.
Worse, on Friday nights, the show once called Friday Night Videos became something called Friday Night, starring someone named Rita Sever. In this day an age there aren’t a lot of people on television who are simply untalented, but Ms. Sever is…simply untalented. Her NBC bio offers few clues why someone more annoying than anyone on network television (and I include Fran Drescher in this comparison) has been given a show of her own. It’s almost as if she was married to the head of NBC late night programming or something…what? Oh! She is married to the head of NBC late night programming.
So I guess that explains why NBC has announced that the next host of Later will be..well, her.
Bob Costas, still very much alive, is rolling in a cemetery somewhere. Tom Snyder, also not dead yet, but retiring from late night TV, is probably doing so in protest of the Sever move. And Linda Ellerbee, godmother of late night literate news programming (she co-anchored the wonderful NBC News Overnight in the early 80s) is probably just shaking her head in disgust.
So what’s a cable-free viewer to do, switch to WSB’s Jenny Jones rerun? Learn how to make Big Money Fast in real estate? Well, we latenight folks have been given a bit of a reprieve from this torture. Since after Christmas and through January, the Later timeslot is and will be filled with 16-year-old reruns of SCTV—Canada’s own latenight sketch comedy series arguably funnier and more original in its prime than anything else on the air. If you’ve never seen Dave Thomas, Joe Flaherty, Rick Moranis, Catherine O’Hara, Martin Short, Andrea Martin, Eugene Levy, and John Candy working together, why not stay up late—or set your VCRs, if you have cows to milk early in the morning.
The cool of the night before Christmas.
Friday, December 25th, 1998
So this is Christmas, and what do I hear? John and Yoko in mp3 splendor in my earphones, as cold rain falls outside our Atlanta home. We’ve got the best of it, as any glance at the weather would tell you. The places where our friends and loved ones live–from Minneapolis to Curtis, Michigan to Seattle to Positively Columbus, Ohio are shivering tonight and, well, it feels cold to us.
And so happy Christmas. We hope you’ve had fun as well. or are having fun. Sam and I just returned from a wonderful evening of family-stuff at Jim and Rebecca’s, which followed an afternoon of just-the-two-of-us closeness as I helped slice potatoes and marinate a turkey for our family dinner tomorrow night. Sounds romantic, right? Well…yeah! Aside from traveling together, some of our most together moments come at times as innocuous as these. It’s a very cool part of being married: an overwhelming closeness from sharing the most seemingly simple experiences.
I find myself just closing my eyes for an instant amidst those moments, grabbing a mental snapshot, saying to my addled and often baffled brain remember this moment, this feeling, this place. And most often I do.
I think there are times if asked the meaning of life, I would answer: to collect a series of those remembered moments. To take them in, to play them back when you need to, to celebrate those sorts of instants.
Sometimes, music–often the trendiest of popular songs, the song of the moment, will help me store and recall these feelings. I could tell you the songs from the radio during the 1980-they killed-John-Lennon December, and the honeymoon-in-London Christmas in 1989. Then you can go way back and attach the Vince Guaraldi ‘Peanuts’ score to my late-sixties holiday (yes, I’ve always identified with the very-roundheaded Charlie Brown) and…well, you get the idea.
Holidays are sometimes supposed to be guaranteed manufacturers of these remembered moments. If they happen conincident with special days, fine, but I say get them where you can.
So I wish you–we wish you, a very happy holiday, and a new year filled with memorable moments.
By the way, ‘War is over, if you want it,’ John says.
Fascinating, Ms. Barbara.
Friday, December 25th, 1998
What kind of year was it? Well, don’t draw any conclusions from Barbara Walters’ 10 Most Fascinating People of 1998 special. Anyone who puts a former Spice Girl and the egomaniacal director of Titanic on a ‘best of 98’ list is either desperate for bookings (what, you couldn’t get Leo?) or seriously out of touch with the vibe here at the near-end of this odd decade.
It might be me who’s out of touch—it wouldn’t be the first time—but I’m sure not hanging around people who are captivated with the latest round the world balloon attempt, or who desperately wanted one of those Furby creatures from hell for Christmas, or who will take Barbara’s word for who was really the most fascinating.
Mostly, I just shake my head. It seems as if that great big self-feeding all-consuming media machine that eats up public relations factoids and spews out hundreds of channels of news and news-like substances day in and day out is..well, just about exhausted. Or maybe just wheezing.
Here’s your darn story on the crush of holiday travel, they seem to say, flopping it up for our perusal on the fake mahogany news desk, offering us a tired old flounder that’s beginning to stink just a little.
Can you picture anyone at home saying “Honey, look! They’re saying the airport will be busy during the holidays. Who’d have thought? We better take precautions! Oh, they’re offering ‘more details!’ Bullet points! Get me a piece of notepaper!”
We got your insightful political analysis, served up as if fresh by Tim Russert: “Look—here’s James Carville and Mary Matalin—let me dust them off a bit—wonder what they’re going to say about all this?” Oh I don’t know, Tim, might it be anything new?
And you want heartwarming, we got heartwarming news. Our top story on Christmas day—Jews fill in for Christians on their jobs! We’ve got team coverage on this breaking heartwarmingness. In other news—it’s cold! People’s cars are stalling out, especially up north! And the cold is messing up—you guessed it—holiday travel!
Part of the sense of exhaustion comes from Repetitive Promo Fatigue (RPF), which it what happens when any human is battered with nonstop hype and tease. How many ways can they say “the latest on the mess in Washington, tonight at 11”? How many times can they slam “breaking news” in our face with a “Ka-thwummmm!” sound before we don’t instinctively jerk our heads toward the screen? “Something god-awful happened. We’ll tell you not now, but tonight at 11.”
But maybe the biggest part of it is that behind the promos is a fatigue in presentation. Darn near every television presenter seems to have that look of “boy, have I done this before.”
I keep waiting for the retro to kick in. One anchor in a loud sports jacket reads the headlines—all of them, national, international, state, and metro—off the AP wire into a huge silver microphone in front of a white-acoustic-tile background, with the sounds of long-dead teletypes clacking in the background—for a total of 15 minutes, that’s it. Big horn-rimmed glasses. Crew cut. It could be John or Monica, take your pick.
News, in black-and-white.
