There’s So Much to Fill You In On During One Busy Viewing Year . . .

Christmas, 1988.

Greetings to everyone. We’ve had such a busy year, and there’s so much television to fill you in on since our Christmas, 1987, newsletter.

Our family surely did enjoy watching the presidential election campaign evolve on TV throughout almost the entire year.

Well, enjoy may be overstating the experience just a bit. Endure is more like it, as candidates played to the cameras and cameras played to the candidates, raising TV involvement in election politics to perilous and inflationary new levels.

Camera-processed caucuses and primaries led to camera-processed conventions that nominated camera processed candidates who conducted camera-processed campaigns that included camera-processed debates and camera-processed commercials that were assessed and analyzed by camera-processed reporters in camera processed studios.

The latter stages of the campaign were accompanied by lots of media self-appraisal and second guessing, so be assured that TV’s decision-makers are on top of the situation and making sure that the excesses of 1988 do not recur.

Until 1992.

Speaking of camera power, our family also watched with great interest as the Palestinian uprising against the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip became a regular feature on the network news.

The perspective was narrow. True to form, TV captured the action and surface conflict, but little of the underlying emotional suffering of either side in the conflict. There were dramatic nightly pictures of stone-throwing Palestinians--most of them children--facing heavily armed Israeli troops in what became an extended public relations coup by a Palestinian people that previously had been largely faceless in the West and thus easy to dismiss.

Was American TV fair? There were exceptions, as always. Yet for the most part, the coverage was essentially unbiased--despite charges to the contrary coming from the Israeli government and some segments of American Jewry--and, for once, it accurately mirrored violence without feeding or provoking it.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was one of TV’s overseas pictorials in progress. The greatest one, however, was Mikhail Gorbachev’s Soviet Union, where seemingly fundamental changes in the fabric of life continued to occur in a tense environment of bureaucratic resistance, economic decline and social and political unrest.

Although nuances of the long-evolving Soviet metamorphosis were not to be found in 22-minute network newscasts, the broad strokes of change--epitomized by the forceful media personality of Gorbachev himself--surely were.

Far from being just another waxen, puffy, thick-lidded Kremlin face, here was a gleaming Soviet leader who seemed instinctively to understand the Western media and how to woo and exploit the camera with smiles, charm and a Western-style wife.

Here, finally, was a nice Kremlin couple you could have over for dinner without worrying about them dozing off at the table before dessert. These were Continentals. Didn’t we see them on TV during those remarkable summits, with Mike eclipsing even affable Ronnie, and the iciness between fur-frocked Raisa and Nancy making headlines even in the Enquirer? It was all so . . . American.

Extensive TV pictures of the socializing Gorbachevs surely helped soften American public opinion toward them and, not incidentally, toward possible nuclear deals with the Soviets.

Yes, friends, what a time we’ve had watching TV.

We began the year seeing poor, bumbling Jimmy (The Greek) Snyder lose his CBS Sports job when his clumsily articulated theories about blacks in sports in an impromptu TV interview were misinterpreted as being racist. Although guilty only of strangling himself with his own tongue, he was immediately fired by CBS, which bellowed moral outrage without improving the status of blacks on its own premises.

We sat rapt in front of our set, meanwhile, as NBC managed to squeak through the Olympics in volatile Seoul without a serious incident, but not without being accused of creating commercial gridlock and being dull.

Excessive commercials, yes. Dull, no. Unlike ABC in 1984, NBC left the jingoistic juicers and salivating Old Glories at home. Anchored by Bryant Gumbel, the coverage was crisp, efficient, journalistic and all that it should have been, letting the event--including that flap over steroids--speak for itself.

Had the nation become so accustomed to hot-dog announcers and sportscast hyperbole that anything without mustard seemed bland and inadequate in comparison? If so, our heat lust was soon satisfied by The Story That Devoured the Airwaves.

Yes, it was that all-consuming video tapeworm, the odyssey of Mike Tyson and Robin Givens. It turned us into captivated voyeurs for a while, until becoming The Story That Wouldn’t Go Away, at once ridiculed and reported, with some sportscasters seeming to worry only that Tyson would injure his hand on Givens’ jaw.

From Mike and Raisa to Mike and Robin, we were obsessed with couples, weren’t we? And don’t leave out the pouting Bakkers, Jim and Tammy. Their ongoing public miniseries have been matched in the community of electronic preachers only by those of Jimmy Swaggart, the great tin plate passing master of the quivering lip who was done in by revelations of his sexual adventurism. Swaggart was last observed sinking into the sewage of his own hypocritical words, a TV showman to the very last.

Yes, we had an appetite for the bizarre, and the name for what we were watching was Tabloid TV, which swept across the medium this year like an unstoppable army of ants, leveling all in its path. From “The Morton Downey Jr. Show” to “Geraldo,” the brainless to the brazen, they surged forward, leaving a trail of shattered eardrums and broken noses. Many more such shows may be on the horizon, and if they also have an enormous impact, it could be only a matter of time before the values of tabloid TV also invade TV news.

Our family looked forward to local newscasts. Who would have thought that KABC-TV Channel 7 at times would actually look stuffy compared with its competitors at KNBC-TV Channel 4 and KCBS-TV Channel 2?

You could easily confuse some Channel 4 newscasts with the Comedy Store. And Channel 2 newscasts are now younger by design, with John Schubeck being dropped, Kevin O’Connell darkening his gray hair and young Jim Lampley and young Steve Kmetko appearing to be the same person. Meanwhile, rumors persist that young Keith Olbermann buys his sports material from Dr. Mengele.

It was a tough year for writers in general and, like everyone else, we were saddened by the writers strike that crippled the TV industry and enveloped the fall season in confusion. CBS’ cancellation of “Frank’s Place” was no fun either.

We found prime-time highs, however, and none higher than ABC’s extravagantly expensive--but also extravagantly bold and enthralling--”War and Remembrance,” an especially remarkable achievement in a season of such chaos.

It was romantic. Yet more than any other TV drama, “War and Remembrance” also captured elements of the awesome tragedy of World War II and the sheer unthinkable macabre of mass annihilation.

How ironic that a medium so frequently emersed in the vacuous and mundane should also be so adept at powerfully conveying tragedy, whether through scripted drama or real-life horror.

Horror--that’s the word for those TV pictures from the Armenian earthquake. The deaths and suffering of those people touched us deeply and created a bond across the seas. We felt aching sadness, too--for the Armenians and for those aboard the Pan American jet that crashed just north of Scotland, filling TV with roaring fires and the anguished sobs of the victims’ families.

Let’s not forget Max Robinson either. Robinson, the nation’s first black network anchorman in an industry that still lags terribly in meaningful employment of minorities. Robinson, a troubled man buffeted by clashing worlds. He died Tuesday of complications from AIDS.

No one said Christmas would be perfect.