Word: tinkering
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Last-place NBC derails Silverman and hires Grant Tinker...
...thrills, laughter and tears. But last week, after a chaotic three-year run on NBC, The Fred Silverman Show was canceled. Silverman, 43, resigned as president of NBC when his new boss, RCA Chairman Thornton Bradshaw, 63, refused to guarantee him a free hand. Fred's successor: Grant Tinker, 55, whose MTM Enterprises has produced such classy fare as Mary Tyler Moore, Rhoda, Lou Grant and NBC's own Hill Street Blues. Says TV Consultant Mike Dann: "Tinker has the best reputation in the industry. He's also the first network head in 30 years...
...president of Atlantic Richfield (Arco) oil company for 16 years before replacing Edgar Griffiths at the helm of RCA, is known as the Mountie of American corporate chiefs: he always gets his man. This spring he was headhunting for a successor to Silverman. In May he had lunch with Tinker, whom he had never met, at Perino's in Los Angeles. "My impression was that Bradshaw was just doing his homework for his new job, getting the feel of the medium," Tinker recalled as he relaxed last week at the Hôtel La Voile...
Says Grant Tinker, head of MTM Productions, who took full-page ads in the trade papers denouncing the TV Guide articles: "The blizzard is exaggerated. With the affluence around, I'd guess there's the same amount of use on Capitol Hill and Wall Street." That is not necessarily a comforting defense. Protests Jeff Wald, Helen Reddy's manager and husband, himself a former heavy cocaine user: "I've never seen coke used as a means of barter or a way of making a deal...
Although Shales is often acerbic about what he sees on TV, he is not contemptuous of the medium. This distinguishes him from other tart-tongued TV critics -and redeems him hi the eyes of many industry honchos. "He wants TV to be better," says M.T.M. President Grant Tinker (Hill Street Blues, WKRP in Cincinnati). Explains Shales: "People who respect TV are the ones I respect. It's the ones who wipe their feet on it whom I probably write nasty things about...