Word: cowans
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...supposed to do. "I guess we'll know it when we see it," one network censor told a writer. By the time the court hands down a ruling in the Writers Guild suit, everybody's trying to dump off the idea on everybody else. You almost wish that Cowan's side had lost the case. Maybe his weak-kneed call for "more modest regulatory reforms" would have more punch to it. Cowan tells us that "while it would be technically simple to establish a system that relied less heavily on advertising, the opposition from advertisers and the broadcasting industry would...
...Cowan spent his summer vacations running around the West Coast, meeting Elvis Presley, Donna Reed and eating dinner with Desi Arnaz at the Brown Derby. (I'll bet he didn't even order the cobb salad.) "Probably none of this should have impressed me," Cowan says. But it has. Although the book is no defense of his now-dead parents, it is tinged with their memories. If anything comes out of all this, its that Cowan doesn't really care about the structure of the network system. He'd rather gossip in gory detail about the promotional practices...
...violence. He just can't seem to extricate himself from the subject which he's writing about. In 1975, as a communications law expert at UCLA, Cowan served as a legal consultant to Norman Lear and the Writers Guild of America. He worked on the Guild's Family Hour--that self-imposed beast the networks adopted promising they would not air "entertainment programming inappropriate for viewing by a general family audience "between 7 and 9 p.m. Cowan tries to use the lawsuit as the background for a discussion of censorship on television and the unique problems the medium faces...
...VIOLENCE. Cowan was born and raised on television and "creative community." There's no questioning the basic concept at the core of the television industry: programs all drawn from the same group of companies which crank out anything the networks can sell to advertisers. How can we believe Cowan when he categorizes events as B.L. or A.L.--before Lear and after Lear. Saint Norman: the man who brought reality to television. Struggling mightily to make sure his programs aren't toned down by the Family Hour, Lear upholds the constitution and continues the never-ending struggle in quest of freedom...
...violence. The best parts of the book are about just that. Some anecdotes are buried in Cowan's tortured prose. He describes one scene in "Born Innocent," the show about a girl's reform school. Linda Blair is thrown to the floor of the shower room and "raped" with the long wooden handle of a Jonny mop. (At a screening for NBC executives, one was so pleased that he murmured, "This is great stuff.") The network executives changed their minds a month later after a nine-year-old girl was raped with a beer bottle on a San Francisco beach...