Word Is Out: Television Needs More--and Better--Writers

“There’s just one other thing, sir.”

“Columbo,” right? Unmistakable.

Now try this one:

“Abracadabra, the guy’s a cadaver.”

The crazy rhythms of “Moonlighting,” of course. David Addison (Bruce Willis) speaking.

There are special cadences and stylized exchanges in TV’s classic series.

In the end, words, words, words are what make TV’s deals, deals, deals pay off, from “Dragnet” to “The Wonder Years.”

And the Hollywood landscape is being changed by the intensified wooing of wordsmiths.

It’s not just the big-money deals--the latest being Thursday’s long-expected announcement that Jim Brooks (“Terms of Endearment,” “The Mary Tyler Moore Show”) and his writer-oriented Gracie Films will create series for ABC.

It’s the whole climate--the fierce competition for talent as networks watch their traditional audiences shrink, defecting to new TV alternatives like cable and VCRs.

Can you imagine what fees and freedom Rod Serling and Paddy Chayefsky could command if they were still with us and were willing to give TV another chance?

Words. They’re everything to the TV shows we remember. Think of “MASH.” Think of just a few typical lines with that unique style that created a distinctive “MASH” attitude:

Item One, Hawkeye Pierce (Alan Alda) talking: “God forbid anything should be easy.”

Item Two, B.J. Hunnicut (Mike Farrell) speaking: “No good deed ever goes unpunished.”

These lines, and more than 1,000 others from TV shows, provide surprising pleasures in a book called “Primetime Proverbs,” compiled by Jack Mingo and John Javna.

We read the line, “As we say in the sewer, time and tide wait for no man,” and who else could it be but Ed Norton (Art Carney) in “The Honeymooners”?

We come across this passage from “The Wonder Years,” perhaps the best-written show on network TV: “Like women all over America, my mother confronted tragedy and death with cold ham and Jell-O salad.”

And we feel instinctively how perfectly it represents the tone of the series.

It made real sense when ABC struck a deal with Steven Bochco (“Hill Street Blues”) to create 10 series for the network. And the new TV climate--and competition--seems to make the unending Hollywood search for talented writers especially logical and appropriate.

Just the other day, Chad Hoffman, who developed “thirty-something,” “China Beach” and other series as an executive at ABC, disclosed that he was putting together a group of writers and producers at King Phoenix Entertainment.

He said he hoped to emulate “the creative spirit” of the earlier days of MTM, which nurtured such writers as Bochco, Brooks, Alan Burns and Gary David Goldberg.

It also seems quite logical in the current TV environment that Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner, whose company produces “The Cosby Show” and “Roseanne,” tried to persuade CBS last year to let them create a studio-like network operation in which the luring of writers and other talent would have been a priority.

For viewers, of course, the deals are secondary to the TV memories we retain. But it may be instructive to the deal-makers and writers as well that many of the best-remembered and best-loved television series stay with us because of their stylized dialogue that set them apart.

We can almost hear Mary Richards (Mary Tyler Moore) speaking when she says, “I’m an experienced woman. I’ve been around. . . . Well, all right, I might not’ve been around, but I’ve been . . . nearby.”

We can picture Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor) saying, “God don’t make no mistakes--that’s how he got to be God.”

Reading lines from “Dragnet” in “Primetime Proverbs” is a revelation because, even on paper, the words have a wonderful life of their own that totally reflect the series--one of the most stylized in TV history. Example:

Woman crook: “You can understand, can’t you?”

Sgt. Joe Friday (Jack Webb): “No, lady, we can’t. You’re under arrest.”

And then there’s Alfred Hitchcock. He is quickly in the mind’s eye when one reads this line from “Alfred Hitchcock Presents”:

“There is nothing quite so good as a burial at sea. It is simple, tidy and not very incriminating.”

Some characters seem to emerge as the most memorable representatives of a show’s style. In “Moonlighting,” for instance, David Addison had the best lines.

In “Taxi,” it often was Louie De Palma (Danny DeVito), the tyrannical little dispatcher, or Reverend Jim (Christopher Lloyd), the not-quite-there former hippie.

De Palma was just sleazy enough to get away with lines like: “There she was--dejected, desperate and stoned. Everything I could hope for in a woman.”

And Reverend Jim could weigh in with: “I’ve never felt closer to a group of people--not even in the portable johns of Woodstock.”

And then there was “Gunsmoke,” perhaps the most stylized and ritualistic of all TV westerns. Essayist John Leonard once wrote of a “Gunsmoke” episode: “The writing was as good as you’ll ever get in a western, gnarled, approximately Elizabethan, a language that was probably never a vernacular but in this instance on ‘Gunsmoke’ was so plausibly stylized--a lingual compost of all our ideas about the West.”

In the beginning was the word. And that’s the way it still is in the brainiest TV offices in town.