‘20/20’ Celebrating a Breezy First Decade

ABC’s “20/20” rarely soars in the ratings like its older, better and more consistent CBS counterpart, “60 Minutes.” Yet it has accomplished what few series have by surviving a decade in treacherous prime time, a brash news magazine staying alive by being more entertaining than most entertainment programs.

The evidence arrives in a retrospective celebrating the 10th birthday of “20/20” at 9 tonight on Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42. It’s a swell two hours--nimble, clippy, visceral, with no lingering smells or tastes.

Although nothing on TV pins you to the screen like “60 Minutes,” “20/20” is no slouch either, in its own distinctive fashion. Compared with suaver “60 Minutes,” it’s a rouged-up, hip-swinging streetwalker in ankle-strap platform heels, flagging down viewers as ladies of the night do prospective clients. Showtime.

Sometimes the show is better than the journalism.

“At times, ‘20/20’ has done as good a job or better than ’60 Minutes,’ ” said Lowell Bergman, who spent five years as a “20/20” field producer before switching to “60 Minutes” in 1983. “But it’s the influence of those who want to sensationalize what is already startling information--and those who view the audience as the lowest common denominator--that stands in the way of ‘20/20’ reaching the level of credibility of ’60 Minutes.’ ”

“60 Minutes” is no shrinking wallflower itself, being hardly stodgy or pristine in delivering compelling TV. “But it does forsake the flashy format stuff, like making pictures spin and throwing in extra music and so on,” Bergman said. “ ‘20/20’ has done some wonderful stories. But it also does stories that are so light that it’s unclear why they just don’t fly off into the atmosphere.”

Both species--the wonderful and the flyweight--are evident tonight.

The nice thing about retrospectives is that they’re as selective as human memories--no clunkers, embarrassing goofs or painful segments to ruin the party. There’s no reference here, for example, to the debut of “20/20,” which was so disastrous that the show was completely revamped the next week and given a new host, Hugh Downs, who would later be joined by Barbara Walters.

Tonight’s topics range from Haiti to Michael Jackson (with an earlier face), from “Onion Field” killer Gregory Powell to an “obsessive-compulsive” woman who cleans her house until 3 a.m., from killer whales to killer defense budgets.

There, once more, is reporter John Stossel getting slapped around by an angry professional wrestler after charging that ring violence is faked. There again is the physician who prescribed all those pills for the presumed dead Elvis Presley (years before we learned that Elvis is actually alive). There again are some of those Walters interviews with world leaders and celebrities almost as famous as she is.

More than anything else, “60 Minutes” and “20/20” and their imitators have made a fine art of documentary shorthand--15-minute take-outs that have rendered traditional long-form documentaries all but obsolete on commercial TV.

They are valuable for what they are: less documentaries than extended news stories. As a stand-in for documentaries, however, they further feed the snippet-mindedness of today’s TV generation. Anything longer now seems intolerably dry and musty.

“60 Minutes” and “20/20” have also perpetuated the celebrity journalist--the messenger who becomes the message--none of whom looms larger or sheenier than Walters.

When Betty Ford emerges from a jet in a segment with Walters, Barbara is at her side. And so on and so on.

Moreover, we’re reminded by a narrator that Walters “has brought to ‘20/20’ many of the most talked about people of the ‘80s. As often as not, her interviews were exclusives, and just as many made news in their own right. How did she do it? How does she do it? Well . . . watch!” We hear more about “Barbara’s portfolio” of foreign heads of state and “enough royalty to fill a palace” and how often she “broke ground.”

Meanwhile, ordinary people profiled by “20/20” are updated, some of them conveniently telling the camera that exposure on “20/20” changed their lives for the better.

The program’s self-congratulatory tone comes across as overcooked even in a birthday tribute, but it is somehow part of the “20/20” tacky charm.

As intriguing as those stories excerpted in the introspective are others that didn’t make the program--because they never got on the air in the first place.

“For the premiere show (June 6, 1978), they wanted a story on Chappaquiddick,” Bergman recalled, referring to the controversial 1969 incident in which a young woman in a car driven by Sen. Edward Kennedy drowned when the car plunged off a bridge into a creek.

“One of the ideas proposed for the show was to run a car off the bridge at Chappaquiddick with a camera on the hood,” Bergman said. Yes, a bit gross. What’s more, the executives pushing for the story were unaware that the bridge had been rebuilt since the incident, Bergman said, so the simulation would have been as worthless as it would have been tasteless. In any event, the story never ran.

ABC News President Roone Arledge’s spiking of another “20/20” story on the Kennedy family in 1985 made big headlines. Arledge claimed that he killed the segment because its premise--about how Marilyn Monroe’s alleged affairs with John and Robert Kennedy made them vulnerable to Mafia blackmail--was unsubstantiated. Arledge denied that he killed the story because of his friendship with Robert Kennedy’s widow, Ethel.

Bergman, who won an Emmy for a “20/20” piece on Nicaragua, believes that “20/20” could have been a better series, journalistically, had it not been stunted by its own ambivalence. “One month we would have to have more animal stories because research said we needed more animals. Then the next month, it was Roone saying we need more investigative stories.”

When it comes to entertainment, however, “20/20” has always held its own. How did “20/20” do it? How does it do it? Well . . . watch!