Word: cbs
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Each year television executives perform their own rites of spring. They hide away in dark screening rooms, watch dozens of hours of pilots for new shows, then emerge, red-eyed but exultant, to announce what the American public will see in the fall. Last week both ABC and CBS ended their ceremonies with the traditional flourish of self-congratulatory press releases; NBC was due to announce its schedule this week. This year, however, the ceremony seems more like a rehearsal than the real thing: Fred Silverman, the high priest of programming, has yet to make his entrance, and everybody...
...folks at CBS may not know from Ork, but they have noticed the success of ABC's own lovely earthlings. Among its eight new shows, the network has come up with two series that should be called Charlie's Angels II and III, but which it stubbornly insists on titling The American Girls and Flying High. The first features two beautiful researchers who work for a TV newsmagazine like 60 Minutes. Flying High really is, with three from the same mold posing as stewardesses. With the accent on comedy, CBS is also scheduling WKRP in Cincinnati, the saga...
...CBS's new schedule is any indication, the ABC formula for success-sex and comedy-is about to be copied by the industry. Even if the new shows fail, the pilots that are ready to take their place are only more of the same. "We're in the jiggle stage," says Dorkin, "and all three networks will be running girlie shows next year. The sex is more implicit than actual in those shows, and the titles are usually more titillating than the shows themselves. But people do watch them...
...HISTORIAN of the 21st century will have to go to his nearest Video Library and pull out the spliced-together copies of the Huntley-Brinkley report, of the CBS Evening News. He will need to watch the ARVN soldiers dangling from beneath helicopters on the retreat from Laos the way we did, watch G.I. s smoking dope in the barrels of M-16 s. He'll need to see the expressions on the children's faces as the cops in riot gear bash their friends. And to understand Richard Nixon, he'll have to study that damned upper...
...stumps with formula-like speeches about devotion to God, flag and motherhood. But lobbying for the draft has apparently gone on behind the scenes, taking the less obvious form of news documentaries, reports of "concerned citizens' groups," and the ever-present Pentagon predictions of an impending apocalypse. A recent CBS-TV documentary, for instance, focused on charges that the current all-volunteer army cannot find the crack troops needed to face any attack by the Soviet Union; the implication throughout the show was that the U.S. armed forces are not now in "a proper state of readiness," and may never...