Word: viewer
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...sitcom Full House, two would-be fathers frantically try to diaper a baby, using an electric fan, a roasting pan and a roll of paper towels. It is one of the dumbest scenes in one of the dumbest of the season's new shows, but a sharp-eyed viewer will notice a small breakthrough: the baby. Infants on prime-time TV are sometimes talked about, maybe even glimpsed from afar; yet with rare exceptions (O.K., Little Ricky), they have traditionally been nonpersons in a medium that prefers tots old enough to fire one-liners at the grownups...
...skeletons of Alexander Hamilton in his wig and Robert Fulton with his steam engine. Ruckus America is all one big pop-up book, done in an impressively resourceful, oompahing parade of stylistic parodies: corn-pone cubism, red- neck deco. The way buildings splay and their ground cants toward the viewer comes straight out of German expressionist cinema...
American broadcasters tend to consider British TV news programs professionally put together but low budget, low key and kind of boring. Instead of anchormen, there are news readers who do not thrust their personalities at the viewer. Only a few interviewers with outsize gall, like Sir Robin Day of the BBC with his signature polka-dot bow ties, are true celebrities (our unknighted Sir Ted Koppels and Sir Tom Brokaws must be content with honorary college degrees...
...guests in order to orchestrate a lively discussion. Each is given the works of the others well in advance and is expected to read them thoroughly. Current books are discussed along with older, often obscure works. "The show is intended to make people read," Pivot explains, "to trap the viewer by letting him know a little of what is in a book and then making him go out and buy it to learn the rest...
Late-night TV used to offer a simple choice: Johnny Carson or old movies. These days, the indiscriminating viewer gets Midnight Blue on Manhattan Cable's Channel J. One night this month, for instance, you could see sadomasochists play whipsie at the Hellfire Club. You could videotape a pornographic cartoon starring a trio of unflaggingly avid barnyard animals. You could catch perhaps a dozen commercials for call-girl "escort services" and for Steve, a gaunt guy who poses in his undies, gives his pertinent measurements and phone number and caters to all comers. You could hear the show's executive...