Word: cbs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...endless war for the hearts and channel selectors of America's bleary- eyed morning viewers, CBS has never even won a battle. From the day in 1954 when Walter Cronkite and a puppet lion named Charlemane went up against Dave Garroway and J. Fred Muggs on NBC's Today, through the late '70s and early '80s, when such CBS heavyweights as Hughes Rudd and Charles Kuralt were battered by ABC's Good Morning, America, the network rarely finished higher than last place...
What could be worse than an honorable failure? An embarrassing failure. Nine months ago CBS invented one: The Morning Program, a relentlessly cheery farrago of entertainment and information that featured stand-up comedy, personal ads and an intrusive studio audience. Scorned by critics, the show plummeted in the ratings to a record low (10% of the morning audience). Prior to the show's debut, says one longtime CBS producer, "everyone thought we had the lowest ratings you could have in the morning. The Morning Program proved us wrong." Indeed, its abysmal numbers were hurting the following shows of affiliate stations...
...show's demise provides CBS News with one more chance to produce an early-a.m. winner. The network brass had raised hackles last year by handing this potentially lucrative time slot to a new production division. Since then, CBS News has been bedeviled by budget cuts, layoffs, a writers' strike and erratic ratings for the Evening News. Now the network's news executives hope that the recapture of this breakfast beachhead will boost morale. Says News President Howard Stringer: "I see this as the starting gun for a more productive, happy period...
Tour of Duty, CBS's ambitious Viet Nam series, should have been smarter and better timed. This cleaned-up-for-TV look at an American platoon in 1967 might have just passed muster a couple of years ago, before the recent surge of Hollywood interest in Viet Nam. After Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, it just won't do. When a battle-hardened sergeant (Terence Knox) grills a group of new recruits in search of "winners, survivors" for his platoon, he rules out marijuana users right away: "If you're smokin' dope and gettin' high, you're not listenin...
Sometimes TV does better when it forgets about reality altogether. In CBS's new fantasy series Beauty and the Beast, a young New York attorney (The Terminator's Linda Hamilton) is accosted after a party by some thugs who slash her face. She is nursed back to health by Vincent (Ron Perlman), a deformed, leonine creature who lives in abandoned tunnels beneath the subways. After she has recovered -- her scars miraculously removed by surgery -- this underground Equalizer becomes her benefactor and partner in fighting crime. The first episode had some inept action sequences and could have used more fanciful detail...