Fatally Wholesome: Jilting TV’s ‘Christy’

High on a bluff in Pacific Palisades, in a cottage overlooking the jagged coast, lives a television producer named Kenneth Wales. He is not famous or fabulously wealthy, but he has more fan mail than he can answer.

Thousands of letters are crammed into box after box in Wales’ garage. There are typewritten missives and passionate queries on pretty pink parchment paper. There are crayon notes from children, the words endearingly misspelled, and laments from old people, their penmanship shaky.

The postmarks are pure heartland, about as far from the Palisades as one can get. Three Forks, Mont. Brentwood, Tenn. New Harmony, Ind. In Hollywood, they call this “flyover territory.” Yet in these small towns and quiet cities, Wales has made his mark.

The letters share one sentiment: “The finest and most wholesome TV program that I know of,” says one. “This will help bring back the morals and important family values that our country needs,” declares another. “At last,” reads a third, “a program I can let my children watch that has value.”

The praise was for the CBS series “Christy,” which Wales created. The story of an idealistic young teacher who traipses off to Appalachia to educate poor mountain folk, “Christy” was widely regarded as revolutionary, breaking a Hollywood taboo by treating religion as an ordinary part of life. The show generated more fan mail than any other in recent CBS history. For Wales, a minister’s son, it was the culmination of an 18-year dream.

Despite the outpouring, “Christy” didn’t make it. A change in management at CBS, new rules concerning network syndication rights, ratings that were stunning at the outset but drifted downward, and a Hollywood culture that rewards raciness and cherishes instant hits conspired last year to push it off the air. “That we managed to have what we did,” Wales says now, “is a miracle.”

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At a time when the nation is immersed in a discussion of values, the story of “Christy” speaks volumes about the mercurial nature of network TV and why family shows have such a difficult time surviving despite an intense outcry from some politicians and parents who say they want more of them.

Most Americans are convinced that their country is in a moral slide. Unwed mothers, absentee fathers, the failure of schools to teach character all pop up as culprits in polls tracking the national psyche.

Of all the fingers being pointed in the values debate, the longest may be the one directed at the media and its perpetuation of what New Yorker writer David Denby calls “the avalanche of crud.”

The backlash against Hollywood is sweeping, and it is driving political talk as well as real change.

Last year, GOP presidential candidate Bob Dole blasted the entertainment industry as “one of the greatest threats to American family values.” This year, President Clinton challenged Hollywood to create movies, TV and music “you’d want your own children and grandchildren to enjoy.”

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In Congress, a bipartisan coalition is pressing the television networks to voluntarily revive the “family hour” at 8 p.m. Dole, meanwhile, went to the movies last week to give Hollywood a pat on the back for films like “Babe” and “Independence Day.”

Change is coming. The V-chip, which will allow parents to block certain TV programming on their sets, is soon to become a reality. A TV rating system is on the way. And the executives of the nation’s four major networks, under intense pressure from the president, agreed last Monday to air three hours a week of educational programming for children.

“It looks like the big boys are getting the message,” said Brent Bozell, president of the Media Research Center, a conservative watchdog group. Amid the outcry, television is reconsidering whether values sell.

Families who abandoned the networks in favor of such cable TV outlets as the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon are slowly returning, drawn back by shows like ABC’s “Second Noah,” about a couple that adopted eight children, and CBS’s “Touched by an Angel,” in which two angels are sent by God to grapple with real-life problems, such as a mother dying of AIDS.

The success of these shows has been a surprise, and at least one network, CBS, is making changes as a result. CBS will recast itself in the fall as “the family network,” devoting the 8 o’clock hour each night to what Leslie Moonves, president of its entertainment division, calls “feel-good shows.” If that definition of family programming sounds murky, Moonves has another at the ready: “A show that an adult would have no problem watching with their son or daughter or mother or father.”

It makes business sense, but it is also a smooth political move. “You’d have to be an idiot,” Moonves said, “not to hear what is going on in this country.”

Martha Williamson could have predicted the backlash. The executive producer of “Touched by an Angel” offers an eloquent criticism of the industry in which she works.

“Hollywood,” she says, “has made the mistake of deciding that it knows what America is, forgetting that there are an awful lot of good people in America out there who are trying to live right.”

But Williamson is cautious about a seeming shift in programming tides. She knows that family shows will always face an uphill battle on network TV. Her own series nearly was taken off the air before it became a hit. And there is another show she is familiar with that faced the same struggles and lost.

It was a show Williamson has high praise for, a pioneering series that reached “good people” with beautiful cinematography and acting that merited an Emmy nomination, even after it went off the air. It was this show, many in Hollywood agree, that opened the door for an overtly spiritual series like “Touched by an Angel.”

The name of that show was “Christy.”

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The headline in the April 6, 1994, Los Angeles Times read: “CBS Chalks Up a Winner in Christy.” The story went on to say that the two-hour Easter Sunday premiere, which drew higher ratings than “60 Minutes” and tied with “Seinfeld,” had “generated hundreds of phone calls to CBS . . . from grateful viewers.”

This was Wales’ shining moment. In the slicked-back world of Hollywood, Wales, 58, sticks out like an oasis in the desert. He is the gray-haired guy next door in khaki pants and a crisp plaid shirt, driving a Lincoln Town Car in a land of Corvettes. He is gracious to a fault, a true believer in turning the other cheek--a trait that can be a liability in his business.

“I don’t know that I’d put Ken Wales in Hollywood,” said Barney Rosenzweig, the executive producer of “Cagney & Lacey” who co-produced “Christy” with Wales. “Ken is a minister’s son. He is the kind of guy who, when you scratch the surface because you think this is too good to believe, the more you scratch, the deeper you go, you find out it’s just him.”

Wales has a long, quiet history in Hollywood: bit-acting parts in the ‘50s, including a stint as the boyfriend on “Father Knows Best”; a 15-year partnership with director Blake Edwards; a year as a vice president at the Disney Channel.

He has done a lot of thinking about the power of the electronic media, and he believes that movies and TV can and should be used to impart values. Common values, Wales says, like honesty, integrity, responsibility and faith.

“That is how I approached ‘Christy.’ ”

Based on the 1967 bestseller by Catherine Marshall, “Christy” tells the saga of 19-year-old Christy Huddleston, who in 1912 left her wealthy parents in Asheville, N.C., to teach in the impoverished town of Cutter Gap, Tenn., deep in the Great Smoky Mountains. The heroine perseveres despite hardship, relying on her faith.

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Wales’ “Christy” odyssey began in 1976, when he heard Marshall speak and set out to make a film of her book. In Marshall, Wales found a kindred spirit. They developed a deep friendship that lasted until her death in 1983.

It took 18 years and $300,000 of Wales’ own money to bring “Christy” to the screen. The man ultimately responsible was Jeff Sagansky, who in the early 1990s was president of CBS Entertainment.

Sagansky’s wife, Christy, had loved the book; and Sagansky was convinced there was a TV need that was going unmet. “I felt very strongly about it,” he said. “We do a lot of studies, and whenever you see what’s important to people’s lives, they’ll tell you family No. 1, and No. 2, relationship with church and God. And yet it was missing from television.”

When the ratings came in that Easter Sunday in 1994, Wales was euphoric. All signs pointed to a hit. So many people called to congratulate him the following day, he never got out of his pajamas.

“It was joyous,” he said.

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But the ecstasy would not last.

In the lexicon of television, there is a derogatory term for family shows: “soft.” Shows that are hip, shows that are racy, shows that are bound to become instant hits and sell ads, those shows have “edge.”

“ER” has edge. “NYPD Blue” has edge. “Christy” did not.

“There was an inherent mistrust of a show like ‘Christy,’ ” said Williamson, “because it naturally was going to be labeled soft. Soft is considered by executives as a liability and a weakness.”

Soft shows require patience and nurturing in an industry that offers little of either. It is an axiom of Hollywood that soft shows take a long time to build an audience. But once the audience is developed, these “slow-builds” can last for years, becoming extremely profitable--witness “The Waltons” and “Little House on the Prairie.”

In the days of “The Waltons,” when there wasn’t so much competition from cable, TV executives could afford to take a chance on soft shows. These days, the stakes are higher.

“It’s a very competitive and volatile landscape in prime time,” said Brandon Tartikoff, the former president of NBC Entertainment. “Because all the networks are in a tighter horse race, [it is difficult] to put on a family show and know that you are not going to get ratings in that time period for maybe a year or a year and a half. . . . That’s a heavy hit.”

The premiere of “Christy” seemed to defy these odds. The show was given the 8 p.m. slot on Thursdays. It faced tough competition: “Mad About You” and “Wings” on NBC and “The Simpsons” on Fox.

The show did reasonably well, often ranking second in its time slot and once ranking first. But when the ratings were examined closely, a striking trend became clear: “Christy’s” fans were in small cities and towns.

“This was a show,” Rosenzweig said, “that did major business in Omaha, Neb., major business in Minneapolis, Minn., unbelievable business in Louisville, Ky., but didn’t sell in Miami, Fla. In Miami, the Weather Channel outdrew us.”

For CBS, this was a considerable problem. Television is, after all, a business. Someone once joked that the programs are only there to fill the space between the commercials. TV shows live and die on whether they can sell ads.

Shows that survive are those that draw the most “eyeballs,” in TV parlance. But not all eyeballs are equal. City eyeballs are better than rural eyeballs; there are more of them, and they spend more.

As executive vice president of planning and research for CBS, David Poltrack’s job is to track and predict hits. He says there is another reason networks favor shows that do well in big cities: The networks own the TV stations in urban markets and reap the “double benefit” of both local and national advertising.

“If the network had the choice of two programs, both with the same size audience but one urban and the other suburban or rural,” Poltrack said, “it would take the urban one.”

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All this might not have had an impact on “Christy” had Sagansky not left CBS. But in the spring of 1994, he went to Sony Corp. CBS was lagging in the ratings, and Sagansky’s replacement, Peter Tortorici, was given a mission from the top brass: Turn the network around, and do it fast.

“There was tremendous pressure from the corporate side to do something about the demographic profile of the network,” Tortorici says. Tortorici needed to make CBS younger, more hip, more urban. His target audience: 18- to 49-year-old men, the kind of eyeballs that make advertisers froth at the mouth.

This was not a “Christy” crowd.

Wales, sensing danger, launched a massive public relations campaign, drumming up support from church groups, speaking on radio shows in towns where the “Christy” audience was strong.

Letters from fans began pouring in to CBS, nearly 100,000 of them.

“These were letters of sometimes three and four pages, typed on a manual typewriter,” Poltrack said. “Essentially, this was an advance guard for this whole idea that television was no longer a moral rallying point, where the whole family could get together and feel good about watching with their children.”

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“Christy” barely survived, returning in the spring of 1995 as a “midseason replacement.” Meanwhile, there were massive shifts affecting the industry, as the federal government abandoned rules prohibiting networks from having a heavy financial interest in shows they also syndicate.

The absence of the “fin-syn” rules gives network-owned shows an edge. “Christy” was not owned by CBS. But “Touched by an Angel,” which was also struggling, was a network property.

The last episode of “Christy” aired on Aug. 2, 1995.

Wales still hopes he can revive his show, even though the cast and crew have moved on to other projects. “Anything that is worthwhile is going to take a struggle.”

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In network TV, the formula for success is elusive. Programming swings like a pendulum: Someone makes a hit--a racy show like “Friends”--and everyone copies it. Then a hit from a different genre emerges, and everyone copies that.

“It is the confluence of timing and something that is really well done,” Tortorici said, “that creates the rare phenomenon of a hit.” By all accounts, “Christy” was extremely well done. Its timing, however, was a mess.

But it did serve as a wake-up call for Hollywood, that there is an America between the coasts that is not getting what it wants.

It is an America, Williamson says, “of people who get out of bed on a rainy day and vote. These are the people who teach your children. These are the people who survive on yearly salaries that are less than most Hollywood people pay for their cars. We cannot forget that we have a responsibility to these people.”