Word: dann
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...Joel Segal, senior vice president of the Ted Bates advertising agency. "The theme will be dopey broads and handsome men. Women mostly control the tube, and NBC's hope is that enough of them will spot one of their pretty men and stick around." Adds TV Consultant Mike Dann: "The trend is toward fantasy. There is more flesh exposed, but there really isn't much sex." It is a pattern that Silverman, who started it all when he was chief programmer at ABC, is not likely to change; S-Day may really stand for the Same, over...
...wants TV shows about blacks to turn into the stolidly heroic tableaux of socialist realism. The problem, says Michael Dann, a TV consultant and former head of programming at CBS, lies partly in the nature of drama and comedy. In dramatic series, good, responsible characters can be developed and portrayed by blacks, intermixing them with whites; in comedies, the producers are highly tempted merely to satirize black family life, exaggerating and distorting it. Every harassed, desiccated TV writer knows how to get a laugh with a bellowed insult or ostentatiously jivy dialect...
...until then. That would deprive NBC of his programming cunning during the next 4½ months, when most of the key decisions will be made about next fall's schedule. "The longer ABC can keep Freddie from going to NBC, the better off it is," says Mike Dann, TV consultant and Silverman's longtime mentor. "By June ABC will have set up its plans until 1981, and NBC will be sinking-and sinking badly...
...Dann is not exaggerating, and NBC is listing so badly in the ratings that the joke on Wall Street is, "What's the difference between the Titanic and NBC? Answer: the Titanic had an orchestra." Indeed, the malaise is so well diagnosed that NBC itself carries jokes about its incompetence. When President Carter's translator flubbed in Poland, Johnny Carson told his Tonight show audience that "later on Carter's Polish interpreter will be out here to explain why he was just made head of programming at NBC." Though NBC was second for much...
...aerial dogfight above Sixth Avenue ABC will certainly have the edge for the rest of the 1977-78 season-and perhaps for the rest of the decade as well. "The ABC powerhouse has clearly established itself as the General Motors of the business," says Mike Dann a TV consultant who for seven years was CBS'S chief programmer. "It might develop that we'll have one General Motors and two American Motors...