Network Execs: Please, Get These Guys a TV Set!

As he was preparing last May to exchange his job heading the NBC Entertainment Group for the chairmanship of Paramount Pictures, Brandon Tartikoff mentioned that he had been watching a lot of television while recovering from injuries suffered in an auto crash.

And he added about the medium that he’d been so influential in shaping for more than a decade that he didn’t like what he saw, lamenting the “endless sea of sitcoms and reality shows” on the networks.

Then last week, while addressing TV critics in Los Angeles, CBS Broadcast Group President Howard Stringer warned ominously that if the industry continued to play it safe, “mediocrity is inevitable.”

Such comments by Tartikoff and Stringer bare a reality that many viewers have suspected for years, but one so terrible and profoundly disturbing that no one had the courage to address it. Not until now, that is, when we have evidence of the shocking truth.

Television’s top executives don’t watch television.

Based on his comments, it took an extended period of incapacitation to force Tartikoff to expose himself to the genre of programs--those “endless variations of basic standard sitcoms”--that he himself had been urging America to watch. Maybe if some of his colleagues were forced to sit in one place for long periods of time occasionally they’d have to look at TV too.

And Stringer fears that TV mediocrity may be coming ? That’s like worrying about Quasimodo getting bad posture. Stringer is unaware that mediocrity has been coursing through TV for ages, that it’s the defining quality, the very soul of the business that pays his handsome salary? Get this TV executive a TV set.

You do get the feeling that the elite of network moguldom spend a lot of time hermetically sealed inside their executive suites. The situation recalls that famous Mike Dann line about America being to a network executive what he flies over getting from one coast to another.

Well, if these guys haven’t been watching TV, S. Robert Lichter has, and it’s a tossup which is worse--his skewed viewing or no viewing at all.

Lichter is the prolifically left-bashing media researcher who has co-authored a new book titled “Watching America: What TV Tells Us About Our Lives.”

What Lichter told Los Angeles Times readers in an Op Ed piece last Friday was that prime time is contaminated by “politically correct” programs preaching a “brand of left-wing populism” that reflects the TV industry’s “socially liberal” sensibility. Which, of course, is what we’ve all been saying about General Electric and the other raging pinkos of U.S. megabusiness that operate networks.

Come, now.

Lichter says he and his colleagues found that 75% of Hollywood’s top writers, producers and studio executives “place themselves on the political left” and that 80% “vote Democratic in Presidential elections.”

So much for their influence.

If, as many critics of the medium would argue, an abundance of TV violence and sex has made us more violent and sexually permissive, then it would follow that leftist-controlled airwaves would make Americans more politically liberal. But, of course, the opposite is true, evidenced by a diminished Democratic Party and overwhelming votes for conservatives Republican Presidents Reagan and Bush.

Are viewers’ brains porous or malleable only when encountering TV messages promoting sex and violence but resistant to left-wing propaganda? Or is it that Lichter’s scenario for a show-biz cabal of the left is as much fantasy as the simpler, narrower prime time of old he appears to pine for?

Lichter decries Hollywood’s increased interest in being an educator and finds “telling” his survey results showing that “two-thirds of Hollywood’s creative elite believe that TV entertainment should play ‘a major role in promoting social reform.’ ”

This is an indictment?

Although script execution rarely matches intent, prime time has indeed become more socially aware and sensitive to the changes driving contemporary society, and it’s about time. Not that any medium sloshing in an “endless sea of sitcoms and reality shows” ever will even vaguely resemble the rabid social reformer that Lichter worriedly envisions.

But even moderate change is traumatic to those appearing to hold special places in their hearts for a previous TV age when father knew best and mother baked brownies.

“Prime time wasn’t always like this,” Lichter notes. “Until the late 1960s, television’s alternate reality was dominated by the private lives of traditional families and the protection of society by high-minded law enforcers. Social institutions worked, moral codes were clear-cut, life’s problems were manageable and the people in charge could usually be trusted to manage them pretty well.”

Then, according to Lichter, those awful leftist social reformers came along and ruined it all by attacking the Establishment, endorsing feminism, environmentalism and liberal sexual mores and “championing the victims of social prejudices from racism to homophobia.”

Actually, he makes TV sound much more enlightened and appealing than it is.

Not that any of this may matter, for it’s not only network executives who aren’t watching TV. If ABC Entertainment President Robert Iger’s theory is correct, prime-time dramas are being increasingly tuned out by impatient viewers using their remote-control devices to zap first and ask questions later. If so, this is severely hampering many of the allegedly left-wing programs cited by Richter.

It’s obvious: The remote control device is a weapon of the right-wing conspiracy.