VIEWERS PROTEST END OF ‘OUR WORLD’ WITH BIG LETTER CAMPAIGN

The cancellation of the season’s lowest-rated prime-time TV program paradoxically has produced one of the year’s largest outpourings of protest mail.

“Our World” viewers may have been few in number, but they evidently were intensely devoted to ABC’s historical news magazine.

ABC reports that network officials and affiliated stations have received at least 7,300 letters since co-hosts Linda Ellerbee and Ray Gandolf signed off the final original program of the season May 28.

“It’s the largest response we’ve ever gotten for a news show that we know of,” said Sue Levkoff, coordinator for audience relations for ABC News. And the arrival of about 3,400 letters since June 15, Levkoff added, indicates that “the pace is picking up.”

Dorothy Swanson, director of Viewers for Quality Television, a grass-roots organization that is hoping to repeat history by convincing the network to change its mind and revive the series, said that she believes the figure will climb dramatically.

Her Fairfax Station, Va.-based group, which has been urging a letter-writing campaign on behalf of “Our World,” has received copies of 4,000 letters, she said. By comparison, she said, the group got only 600 of the thousands of letters that helped convince CBS to bring back “Cagney & Lacey” in 1983 and about 800 when it pushed for the restitution of “Designing Women” last season.

“I have never seen such a spontaneous outpouring of support,” Swanson said. “The people have never done this before--these supposedly passive viewers.”

However, ABC executives said that there are no plans to bring “Our World” back.

Richard Connelly, vice president of public relations for ABC, described the outpouring of support for “Our World” as “a responsive volume,” but said it still ranks second to the 9,000 letters the network received in 1981 after it shelved “Breaking Away,” a light-hearted series based on the movie of the same name, about life in a Midwest college town.

He said that ABC gets about “300,000 letters each year. . . . It’s part of being a national network.”

Swanson said that she suspects Connelly doesn’t see the full picture on “Our World” yet because letters may be scattered in departments throughout the network. “What I am getting is only a small indication of what the network is getting,” she maintained.

Many of the disgruntled viewers are questioning the wisdom of having scheduled “Our World” on Thursdays from 8-9 p.m. opposite the two most popular shows on TV, NBC’s “The Cosby Show” and “Family Ties.”

In her letter to ABC Entertainment President Brandon Stoddard, Helen Ward of Tracy, Calif., said, “You put the most interesting program you have come up with in years opposite the two top-drawing sitcoms on NBC and then whined because ‘Our World’ didn’t immediately create a bigger audience!”

“Did you really think it had a chance in the ratings against Cosby?” asked Cindy Gagnon of Lyndonville, Vt.

“I can understand the tough competition of ‘Cosby.’ What I cannot understand is why the network canceled instead of moving it to another night,” wrote Mary McBurney of Charlotte, N.C. “I know ‘Our World’ is one of the least expensive shows to produce, so in this day of network cutbacks, why not keep the quality programs and can the garbage before we, the viewers, are forced to watch it in the first place?”

It’s true that “Our World” was inexpensive to produce and was not intended to challenge “The Cosby Show” for ratings leadership, Connelly said. The problem, he added, was that it was so far behind, mustering an audience of no more than 9 million viewers compared to “Cosby’s” 63 million. “Our World” had the lowest ratings of the 104 series that aired on the three networks in prime time last season, hence ABC’s decision to move “Sledge Hammer” and “The Charmings” to “Our World’s” time spot come September.

“It was time to give our other new programs a chance to see if they could do any better,” he added. “Cosby has one (more) year behind him now. He can’t go on forever. If (and when he falters), we hope to have a program in place that is showing some growth.”

Co-host Ellerbee, who does not consider herself disloyal for disagreeing with management, said in a telephone interview last week that she thinks the network had a sound strategy in slotting “Our World” opposite “The Cosby Show” but that one year wasn’t enough to make it work.

“If they had left it there for three to four years,” she said, “it could have done what ’60 Minutes’ did (on Sunday nights), which went against the Disney juggernaut on NBC. It could have developed slowly as an alternative program without being in the ratings race.”

Although Swanson has vowed to keep the fight for “Our World” going through the summer, she questioned her organization’s ability to rewrite history for a third time. She said that the income she collects from $15 memberships barely allows her to keep pace with the cost of processing and answering about 300 letters a day.

And then there’s the danger of numbing the networks with too many letters: “People have the right to have their voices heard, but too much of this could ruin it” for other programs, she said.