So Now What’s on Los Angeles TV?

My hometown growing up in the 1960s was Boss Angeles. At least, that was what the babbling Boss jocks I listened to on the radio told me on Boss weekends listening to their Boss 30 lineup of songs.

Local televised entertainment meant Chuck Jones the Magic Man pouring milk from a seemingly empty pitcher, dance show sensation Lloyd Thaxton lip-syncing, acerbic talk show host Joe Pyne advising people to “go gargle with razor blades” and announcer Dick Lane shouting “Whoa Nellie!” when wrestler Bobo Brazil knocked an opponent out cold at the Olympic Auditorium with his signature “coco butt.”

In a city as vast as Los Angeles, these passed for shared cultural experiences. You were loyal to a radio station like a favorite sports team -- KHJ, KRLA or KFWB for top-40 radio -- except when tuning in KFI to hear Vin Sculley from Dodger Stadium. Later you might align with one of the rebellious FM stations such as KPPC.

The noise came through black-and-white Zeniths or car speakers from Earl “Madman” Muntz. The toughest challenge was trying to escape Ralph Williams pitching unbeatable offers from his Ventura Boulevard Ford dealership. You might not have known who painted “Starry Night,” but you sure knew that Earl Scheib would paint any car, any color, for $29.95.

These thoughts come to mind with the Federal Communications Commission set this week to loosen rules that would let big media conglomerates become even bigger. Cassandras warn that this will mean fewer TV and radio choices for consumers in cities such as Los Angeles, because big companies will be allowed to swallow even more little ones.

Yet as someone who has lived here for most of his 48 years, I don’t believe that choice is the relevant issue. There are plenty of choices on the dial -- by many measures, more than ever, despite all the corporate consolidation.

The West San Fernando Valley neighborhood of my youth had seven VHF channels over the air, where I’d tune into everything from “Bonanza” to “Twilight Zone.” Now, in the same area, you can get seven NASCAR channels alone, each showing a different driver’s view in a Winston Cup race.

In all, cable subscribers in my old neighborhood are offered 98 stations today as a basic package and can spring for nearly 400 more TV, video, music and radio channels, many of them pay-per-view. If you spent just two minutes on each channel, it would take almost 17 hours to make it all the way through.

But who can watch it all? And even more to the point: Who would want to?

The real issue isn’t too little choice, but too little innovation. And on this score, federal regulators are in no position to help. Los Angeles has never had broadcast and cable outlets as creative and alive as the city they’ve served.

Except for an occasional oasis -- some early 1970s FM radio, local TV news in the pre-happy-talk days and what is arguably a vibrant talk-show circuit on radio today -- L.A. always has been a surprisingly desolate media landscape considering that Southern California is to American entertainment culture what Olduvai Gorge is to early man.

What was the last great innovation on local TV? Los Angeles pioneered news helicopters. They are great for brush fires and earthquakes but, regrettably, also give us tonight’s live car chase.

The less-choice-for-consumers argument nostalgically suggests that there was a time in Los Angeles when TV and radio was a mom-and-pop business. It wasn’t.

Stations were owned by rich individuals -- actor Gene Autry, car dealer Earl C. Anthony and broadcasting tycoon John Kluge -- or major corporations, many already in the media industry. This newspaper helped start Channel 11 with CBS, and owned the station outright for 13 years. That explains its KTTV call letters, which stood for Times TV. KCOP’s call letters are similarly rooted in past ownership by the Copley newspaper family. (As part of its vote this week, the FCC is expected to allow newspapers and TV stations to be owned by the same company again, a matter pushed aggressively by The Times’ owner, Chicago-based Tribune Co.)

Meanwhile, the former KHJ Channel 9 (now KCAL), owned during the 1960s by a unit of General Tire & Rubber, for years fended off efforts to have its broadcast license pulled. Critics complained that it offered little more than reruns and commercials. You could watch the 1951 film “Jim Thorpe All American” every night and twice on Sundays on “Million Dollar Movie.”

Innovative efforts in Los Angeles were often killed by special interests. A 1964 launch of a primitive form of pay television by former NBC chief Sylvester “Pat” Weaver ran head-on into a sham ballot initiative to “save free TV” backed by threatened theater owners. A lot of what the service offered was high-brow programming, but it also included Dodger games. (On regular TV in those days, the only regular-season games broadcast were the ones played against the San Francisco Giants in Candlestick Park.)

My lasting memory of the debate was a political cartoon showing a guy in his armchair waiting breathlessly to see whether the long fly ball just hit was a home run, only to have the announcer order him to put another coin in his TV to find out what happened.

The measure was easily approved by voters, but later was overturned by the courts. By that time it was too late; the pay TV company had folded, and Angelenos had lost a shot at a future that it would take 10 to 20 more years to get with the advent of pioneering offerings such as Z Channel, ON-TV and SelecTV.

A Shaky Start

Los Angeles was the last major city to be wired for cable. Until the mid-1980s, it was handled by the same agency that regulated cab drivers and pipelines.

Early franchisees in Los Angeles often were questionable. Partners in one firm were embroiled in a stock-fraud scandal. Franchise bidders were generous political campaign contributors. One out-of-state company was awarded a franchise over a local group in a controversial eleventh-hour vote, then for years repeatedly failed to meet promised deadlines. Bankruptcies plagued some major operators. Service complaints about the old Century Cable system were so numerous that regulators repeatedly threatened to revoke its franchise.

When cable finally did arrive in full, franchise maps looked like a butcher’s diagram showing the various cuts on a side of beef.

That meant viewers here got less. New York’s cable franchisee, Time Warner Cable, for instance, today offers a local citywide cable news channel. But in Balkanized Los Angeles, local cable programming usually means camcorder-quality pictures, insufferably long government meetings and amateurish public-access shows.

Los Angeles’ fragmented cable system also led to an electronic redlining that brought cable late to African American neighborhoods in South Los Angeles. Eastside Latino neighborhoods suffered the same fate. Moctesuma Esparza, who wired East L.A. and Boyle Heights for cable, recalls that Latino areas were carved up into relatively small enclaves, making it hard to obtain the critical mass of subscribers needed to make things work financially.

“Latinos lacked the political clout,” he says. “There was a feeling Latinos wouldn’t respond to cable.” (That same feeling had pervaded broadcast TV, as well. Despite a centuries-old Latino population, Los Angeles didn’t get its first Spanish-language station until 1962.)

Other ethnic groups in Los Angeles also were ignored, except by UHF broadcaster KSCI, which for years has offered a buffet of multilingual programming. By some estimates there are as many as 100,000 to 600,000 Iranians living in Southern California, many of whom arrived here after the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Parvis Afshar, once described by the New York Times as the “Persian Johnny Carson,” remembers that when his first weekly talk show launched in Los Angeles more than 20 years ago he had to go on a radio station to inform local Iranians how to find it.

“I told people they had to go to Radio Shack and get rabbit ears,” he says.

That’s changing, largely because satellite TV is breaking cable’s stranglehold and forcing cable companies to offer digital services, expanding channel choices. T.C. Tang, who exports paper to Hong Kong, ordered satellite TV with a special Chinese-language package for his Rowland Heights home so that his 89-year-old grandmother, Lan Fang Tu, could watch her favorite programs that previously were available in sporadic chunks during the day.

“She would get up early in the morning and sit in the living room, waiting until 1 p.m. to turn on the TV,” Tang says.

Eddy Hartenstein, chief executive of El Segundo-based DirecTV Inc., grew up in Alhambra, graduated from Caltech and today still has his old black-and-white TV in his South Bay garage. He remembers when the Los Angeles television dial was “2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11 and 13 -- that was it.” Today, he says, “viewers have a hell of a lot of choice.”

Nothing to Watch

Sheer numbers make his a convincing statement. Harder to address is the feeling a lot of us have that despite getting 80 to 100 channels -- and sometimes more -- there’s nothing on worth watching.

Big media mergers aren’t likely to help much. Radio shows increasingly will become regional and national as companies such as Viacom Inc. and Clear Channel Communications Inc. make their investments pay off. Local television entertainment programming is almost extinct, having given way to “cross promotions” and “branding.” Look for lots more debates about the merits of Clay versus Ruben on “American Idol” or an analysis of the made-for-TV catfights provoked by “The Bachelor.”

Cable companies in L.A. have swallowed up each other in a succession of mergers, with viewers being passed from company to company. Says Susan Herman, the city’s former top cable regulator: “It’s like the Bible, where one begets another.”

Still, the big merger deals shouldn’t be a scapegoat. It’s hard to make a case that a myriad of quality, innovative choices will be taken away from us when they didn’t exist in the first place. The radio stations I listened to growing up have all changed formats. But you can still listen to hours of old recordings on Internet archives as a reminder of how bad they were the first time around.

During the 1970s, one former FCC commissioner summed up the programming of KHJ-TV as “qualitatively somewhat less than mediocre.”

He might as well have been talking about all Los Angeles airwaves yesterday, today and probably tomorrow.