Indianapolis Station Won’t Air ‘Son’

The largest NBC-TV station in Sen. Dan Quayle’s home state has pulled the plug on the network’s “Favorite Son” miniseries.

The Los Angeles producer of the program is upset. NBC seems to be taking it in stride. And Republican campaign officials are a bit surprised at all the fuss.

WTHR-TV in Indianapolis notified NBC this week that it will not air the six-hour miniseries on Sunday, Monday and Tuesday nights because, according to a statement by station general manager Michael Corken, a broadcast so close to Election Day would be “an aborgation of our responsibility to operate in the public interest.”

Corken’s statement, which was published in Indianapolis papers Tuesday, said the management was especially disturbed by an assassination attempt in the miniseries and its portrayal of “everyone in government as morally bankrupt.”

The station, which is the only one of NBC’s more than 200 affiliates nationwide not planning to air the miniseries, also said entertainment programming “shouldn’t try to influence how people vote.”

“Favorite Son,” which finished filming in July, has taken an odd partisan twist in its journey to air--an association with Quayle, whom many in the country had never heard of before his August nomination as George Bush’s running mate.

The tie-in began with NBC’s promos for the miniseries that ran during the Olympics in September. They showed actor Harry Hamlin as “a handsome, young charismatic senator” campaigning for the vice presidency with a lovely, sexy woman in the background and the question: “You think a man should be vice president because he looks good on television?”

Republicans saw some potentially worrisome parallels, and Bush-Quayle campaign officials registered a complaint with the network about the promo. NBC officials--who say they made up their minds before they heard from the Republicans--dropped it.

Until Monday, that was pretty much all there was to the contretemps.

Then WTHR came on the scene.

The Indianapolis station, which is not affiliated with Quayle’s wealthy newspaper-publishing family, is owned by the Wolfe family of Columbus, Ohio. The Wolfes publish the Columbus Dispatch newspaper, own a CBS-TV affiliate there and are, according to Forbes magazine, an “extremely influential Republican force” in Ohio.

WTHR said its decision not to air the miniseries had nothing to do with the Quayle parallels--only the timing of the broadcast.

“I’m so flabbergasted by this I can’t believe it,” executive producer and writer Steve Sohmer said Tuesday. “My 75-year-old mother called me up yesterday and said, ‘I thought there was supposed to be free speech in this country.’ It bothers me.”

NBC spokesman Curt Block said WTHR has every right not to carry a network program, but that NBC will try to place the miniseries with another station in the Indianapolis market. He said the network would know in the next day or two if another station will broadcast the show.

Bush-Quayle campaign officials say the program, which they have never objected to, is a non-issue to them. “We haven’t given it a minute’s thought,” said campaign spokesman Mark Goodin in Washington. “It hasn’t even registered on the scale.”