- Marvin Kitman -
- Marvin Kitman -
A League of Their Own
By Marvin Kitman
marvinkitmanshow@worldnet.att.net
Oct 14 1997The unheady, oversexed Head Over Heels on UPN won the race for the boob(y) tube prize, the first of the wonderful new fall shows to be canceled. A projected big loser in the Famous Kitman Exit Poll, it beat out Hitz and most of the other UPN fall schedule winners waiting to die. What we are seeing are the opening shots of what may go down in history as the Valentine Massacre of 1997, named in honor of the new chief executive at UPN, Dean Valentine, who is dedicated to the elimination of all the garbage that has become synonymous with the name UPN.
I would blame UPN's bad streak of luck on El Nino -- except it began three years ago with the first programs. Valentine, who at Disney Television/Animation was responsible for such marvelous shows as Pinky and the Brain, not to mention the first season of Home Improvement, has his work cut out as UPN battles WB in the race to be last in the hearts of their countrymen, as reflected in the Nielsen ratings.
As good as Valentine's choice of new comedies and dramas is, in the existing system UPN will always be mired in the ratings cellar. This has a bad effect psychologically on all involved.
Sure, everybody knows UPN and WB have fewer stations and cover less of the country. And some affiliates are known as "coat hanger stations," low-power UHF outlets. So even if ER or Seinfeld were on UPN or WB, they automatically would be out of the race for anything but the bottom 10.
But the Nielsens count them anyway. The Nielsens have no problem comparing apples and oranges. Good and bad shows are always on the bottom of the weekly standings, like fruit in a cup of yogurt.
I think this is dispiriting to the cast, writers, producers, valet parking attendants and especially to network execs. It gives them the image of being losers. And in L.A., image isn't the only thing, it's everything.
In this society, where it is important to be No. 1, to proudly exclaim "We're Number 98" somehow doesn't have the same ring.
People making the shows try to maintain the fiction that they're doing their best work, regardless. It's for posterity. But it's only human to think, "Hell, nobody is watching."
There are good shows at the bottom. Seventh Heaven was No. 92 (out of 108 the week of Sept. 29-Oct. 5). Buffy the Vampire Slayer was No. 93. But nobody is going around shouting, "`We're number 92 or 93," since it takes too long to hold up that many fingers.
So-called "good numbers" affect the creative process. Back in the days when Fox was making good programs, before there was a WB and UPN to bring up the rear, the so-called Renegade Network ran into this problem. Roc, one of the five best African-American comedies, was always at the bottom. TV Nation and The Critic were perennial cellar dwellers. They all struggled for a while as the network went through the charade of ignoring the ratings as statistically irrelevant -- and the shows were canceled.
The way it works in TV is: With high ratings, the networks leave you alone. Your show is left to grow by itself, allowing the creators, producers and writers to follow the instincts that made the networks buy the show in the first place -- without getting those "notes" (or ways to improve the scripts) from the "suits" (executives). When you're low in the ratings, the suits are around all the time justifying their high salaries. These guys, whose only qualifications as writers may be knowing at least 25 of the 26 letters in the alphabet, feel they can tell the professional writers how to do their jobs.
As sad as it may be, how hard can you really cry about a show rated No. 107 as it is being dumped in the middle of the night along Sepulveda Boulevard?
Why should a show with some promise, like The Sentinel, be permanently scarred as 91? Or why should Moesha be a 93? Ultimately, playing this numbers game saps a network of its creative strength. It makes them think the best they can do is to compete for a small niche audience instead of being true broadcasters, doing shows for everybody that owns a TV set. They will never grow up to be real competition for the major networks.
What commercial network television needs is a new way of keeping score, a new way of doing ratings.
I have a proposal: Why not divide the competing networks and put them into two separate leagues, as in major league baseball?
In one league I would have the existing old-time franchises: ABC, CBS, NBC. Let them battle it out on their equal playing field as they do now. No change.
In the other, or second league -- what I'd call A League of Their Own, but they could come up with something sexier -- I would put Fox, WB, UPN and any other expansion weblets who want to compete.
Overnight their shows would no longer be 97 or 103, but 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and so forth.
In the beginning, if you recall, the new American League in baseball was considered inferior. The Junior Circuit, it's still called. Ultimately, it achieved parity and even dominance at World Series time. The same thing can happen with the junior TV circuit. As the new networks start making better programs, freed from the psychological shackles of being losers, as they increase the number of affiliates, market share and nights on the air, they can become truly equal.
I can see the two leagues competing in a playoff and World Series of programs: Seinfeld up against the leading junior circuit comedy. And networks could get moved up or down, "relegated," as it's called in the United Kingdom soccer football leagues. ABC, for example, could be moved down to the second division league, the way things are going.
I realize Fox, in the beginning, will bellow about being No. 1 in A League of Their Own standings. But that's OK. After a while it will get tired of crowing like a rooster on a dung hill and get down to the serious business of fulfilling its destiny, or whatever Rupert Murdoch had in mind when he founded the network besides making as much money as possible.
Of course, the new networks will need visions of their own. That is what Dean Valentine, with his intelligence, wit and vast experience in broadcasting for all the people, might bring to UPN. As the new league gives its shows statistical stature, the junior circuit will start to attract the better "players." The new league could become associated, say, with alternative, experimental, even quality dramas and comedies with a style of broadcasting all its own in this new atmosphere of creative freedom.
They laughed when Ban Johnson proposed a second league in professional baseball. But it turned out to be only canned laughter.
Marvin Kitman's column appears twice weekly on UltimateTV. Kitman is the television critic for New York Newsday.
Why cancel 'Dr. Quinn'?
By Marvin Kitman
Tuesday, June 16, 1998NEW YORK -- Jane Seymour was shocked by the cancellation of her CBS show "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman." And so was I.
Traditionally, whatever mealy-mouthed excuses the networks give for dropping a show, it's the ratings, stupid. But "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman" didn't have low ratings.
Au contraire.
"DQMW" consistently won its time period -- 17 out of 22 weeks this season. Despite being buried in the death-slot at 8 o'clock on Saturday nights -- when, as the prevailing wisdom goes, nobody watches TV anymore -- at season's end, it ranked number 54 (out of 113).
I may not have been the biggest fan of Dr. Michaela Quinn -- who went out West to tend to the medical and emotional needs of the people of Colorado Springs -- when the show debuted with a two-hour movie in 1993. Let's face it, it was no "Lonesome Dove," which recaptured the Old West for TV again. Jeff Sagansky, then CBS chief executive, didn't like "DQMW." CBS threw it against the wall in desperation. And it stuck.
It was, observed reader Ken Scourbys of Brentwood, New York, the '90s version of Jane Seymour as Barbara Stanwyck in "The Big Valley," combined with a bit of "Little House on the Prairie" and a touch of "The Waltons."
Wonderful chemistry
But it was a damn good show for what it was. There was wonderful chemistry between the leads, Seymour and Joe Lando, who played the enigmatic Sully. Theirs was, as TV series go, an epic love story, told against a historic background. The show also was about family values, while dealing with racism, sickness, death, love and homosexuality, topics just as timely now as in the 1870s.
Jane Seymour as Dr. Quinn was a woman ahead of her time, an outspoken champion of liberal and humanitarian causes, a courageous and successful pillar of the community. She is a much better role model for young women today than that cultural leader Ginger Spice of the Spice Girls, who has been gaining more headlines than the truly aggrieved frontier doctor.
Being British, Jane has tried to keep a stiff upper lip about the insult and financial injury caused by this inexplicable cancellation. She is not doing anything rude.
But I'm mad about it.
"DQMW" made Saturday night a time when the whole family could sit together and watch a show whose main ingredients were not drugs, sex, violence and cynicism. Viewer Cindy Santner of Valley Stream, New York, and her 10-year-old daughter, Sara, would watch the show not only because it was good entertainment, but also because it was educational.
"I can't tell you how much my daughter has learned about medicine, life at that time and social issues," said Santner.
Good ratings, good values
Good ratings? Good values? With lots of educated, affluent, passionate folks watching it with their kids? What more could you ask of a show?
It still wasn't enough for Les Moonves, the head programmer at CBS -- that notorious outlaw, Doc Moonves, the crazed leader of a gang of network desperadoes who lynched a whole passel of quality shows this fall. Who in their right mind would have strung up "Dr. Quinn," as well as "Michael Hayes," "Brooklyn South," and those comic legends, Bob Newhart and Judd Hirsch, the stars of the sitcom "George & Leo"?
TV executives have turned every time slot into a scene out of "High Noon." Dr. Quinn won the shootout, only to be shot in the back as the show rode off for its summer vacation.
What an outrage.
To make matters worse, Doc Moonves has been pouring snake oil on the fire, making disparaging remarks about the quality of audiences. The people who watched "DQMW," according to Doc Moonves, are unacceptable. They are, for example, too female.
He is not a misogynist, as reader Jennifer George of Virginia Beach, Virginia, has charged. He also has labeled the audience as too soft and too rural.
No, Moonves is only, what we used to call back in the 1870s, a hypocrite.
CBS for family?
It was only last year that Moonves was swearing that CBS was a family entertainment network. Forget the idiocies of running after the youth audience, like all the other networks during that disastrous season of 1996, before he took over. Remember "Central Park West"? And now he is back, trying to ignore the past rhetoric, swearing to Madison Avenue that CBS is going after an urban male audience.
By taking away Dr. Quinn's license to practice medicine on Saturday nights, Doc Moonves has made room in his hip fall schedule for new target-audience programming like the chop-socky "Martial Law." "America's Night of Television" will now become "America's Kickboxing Fightfest."
Will "Chicago Hope" be next? What about that hip (as in hip replacement) "Diagnosis: Murder"? The network could just as easily round up and cancel "Touched by an Angel," "60 Minutes," "Cosby" and the much-loved "Everybody Loves Raymond," all of which went for an older audience than "DQMW."
The notion of CBS trying to reach a new audience that's not too female, too old, too soft or whatever weakness it has by turning Saturday night into all-violence viewing could be funnier than some of its new fall sitcoms. "I was raised in Brooklyn," explained reader Cathy Steinhardt of Wantagh, New York, "and it's hard to believe that young, urban males are going to be lured into staying home to watch the new CBS lineup on Saturdays. Usually they're out on dates or hanging with friends."
What is this obsession with young urban males, anyway? As Judy Trest of San Diego, California, who has just fallen from the infamous target audience group, explained: "I'm personally doing 90 percent of the shopping in our family, purchasing items for ourselves as well as two adult children and one 7-year-old grandchild. This includes decisions on cars, furniture, electronics, etc. That is three generations. Your younger 'target' audience is generally only purchasing for themselves."
There is something rotten about this business at its core. I'm sorry CBS feels they are not making enough money by wasting one night of programming for families. My heart bleeds for any corporation that grosses $2.8 billion a year and can't turn a satisfying profit, but can overspend $500 million for NFL rights. But why take it out on Dr. Quinn?
You know what? I'm beginning to suspect that there is something wrong with Les Moonves. I've been painting him as a good guy, that he was a champion of quality shows, especially when he started the season with "Michael Hayes" and "Brooklyn South." But maybe he is just as bad as the rest of them. He is just another one of those old snake-oil medicine men, promising us anything, then making it disappear and giving us the same old thing.
If you ask me, someone should file a malpractice suit against Doc Moonves.
Kitman is the television critic for New York Newsday. His column appears three times a week on CNN Interactive's Showbiz section.
E-mail Kitman at MarvinKitmanShow@worldnet.att.net
(c) 1998, Newsday Inc. Distributed by Los Angeles Times Syndicate.