Word: whiz
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Under the aegis of programming whiz Fred Silverman, NBC has promised, with great fanfare, to improve its original programming. At ten, I caught a pilot of Mrs. Columbo, a detective series about the wife of the character Peter Falk played. So much for originality. The story, however, was a moderately entertaining formula television mystery--just substitute a new title character and rearrange a few details, and it would have been Barnaby Jones or McCloud...
Looking at a newspaper's entertainment page these days a reader might think the whole country had gone (POW! WOW! WHIZ!) comic crazy. Annie is S.R.O. on Broadway, Superman is the highest grossing movie, and prime-time TV looks like one vast kiddieland. The Incredible Hulk is breaking up the furniture, Wonder Woman is bouncing over buildings, Captain America is flexing his muscles, and Spider-Man is crawling up the wall...
Though such fatuous footnotes are graphically dramatized in the show, large events whiz by. Buzz words like Teapot Dome or League of Nations or World War I turn up in dialogue with little explanation of their significance. Political debates rarely figure in the action. The only ideology in Backstairs emanates from the series' writers. The show unthinkingly promotes such stereotypes as an all-knowing black matriarch (Olivia Cole) and a raucous Irish maid (Helena Carroll...
...owner's face (to which Felker is reported to have asked, "Who was that?"). In Murder, a Felkeresque press lord named Walter Foster loses his empire in an unfriendly takeover. Then, worse fate, he is displaced from his regular table at Elaine's by a younger publishing whiz, Rolling Stone's Jann Wenner, making a cameo appearance under his own name. After a long exile, Foster returns unexpectedly one steamy August night when the restaurant is mysteriously jammed with patrons who ought to be in the Hamptons. The lights go out, a shot is heard and Foster...
...commercial wisdom that would advise against that title. Costello hasn't completely given up on womankind, but his misogyny makes way for the paranoia here, and the music reflects the change. It's less straightforward, a bit less dynamic, and relies heavily on the work of studio whiz Nick Lowe...