Shouldn’t Grant Tinker Get Some Credit?

Television’s memory is short, and so are memories about television.

First. . . .

Brandon Tartikoff surely put his brand on NBC. Yet much of the publicity about his stepping down as chairman of the NBC Entertainment Group to become chairman of Paramount Pictures has him sounding a bit like St. Brandon.

It appears they have the wrong saint, however. Obscured by media coverage of this high-level job switch is the reality: It was Grant Tinker who, more than anyone else, was the soul of NBC’s amazing resurgence in the 1980s.

As head of the entertainment division, Tartikoff was the network’s premier programmer. But it was Tinker, as NBC chairman, who set the tone before leaving in 1986 after five years. It was Tinker who found a way to balance class and clatter, whose reputation for nurturing and granting freedom to creative talent lured the best and the brightest to NBC and who counseled patience over cancellation when promising series were slow to attract audiences.

Never in the history of television, in fact, has a single person caused such a dramatic reversal of fortune at a network as did Tinker.

Second. . . .

The most popular segment on Fox’s “In Living Color” may be those lisping, sissyish, stereotypically gay movie critics--” Hate it!’--played by Damon Wayans and David Alan Grier.

But so much for originality.

I was watching some brilliant “SCTV” tapes from the early 1980s recently when on came “The Soren and Weiss Report,” with Eugene Levy and Martin Short as two smartly dressed, effeminate news commentators passing judgment on world affairs and one political figure after another: “ Hate him!”

The Wayans and Grier characters are flaming, the Levy and Short characters merely lukewarm. Nevertheless, both bits tap the same source for their cheap laughs. So for “In Living Color,” two snaps down for thievery.

Third. . . .

It’s unfair to judge a series by its description on paper. Fortunately, however, fairness falls outside the purview of this column.

So . . . of the many series pilots being considered by the networks for the coming season, two stand out as especially derivative:

NBC’s “Fifth Corner” is about a Native American who awakens in a foreign land with amnesia. Who is he? That’s the question he tries to answer, as each week he travels to a different locale searching for his identity.

ABC’s “The Craft” is about a woman who travels the country with her child, fleeing witches who want to take possession of the kid.

Both of these are variations of “The Fugitive,” perhaps the most-copied series ever, a loads-of-fun Quinn Martin hour starring David Janssen as Dr. Richard Kimble, “an innocent victim of blind justice.” Wrongly accused of murdering his wife, Kimble hit the road each week in search of the real killer, a one-armed man, with the relentless Lt. Gerard ever hot on poor Kimble’s trail.

Just as Javert’s pursuit of Jean Valjean in “Les Miserables” surely influenced “The Fugitive,” which aired on ABC from 1963-67 and is now rerunning on cable’s Arts & Entertainment network, so did the series become an overused prototype in the years that followed.

You almost need a calculator to total the times “The Fugitive” has resurfaced in one form or another.

The only clone that even approached the commercial success of the original was “Run for Your Life,” which lasted three years on NBC, with Ben Gazzara as a man who turned his life into an adventure/travelogue after learning that he was terminally ill. Although he regularly checked in with the doctor back home in case medical science had found a miracle cure to save his life, NBC made that moot when it canceled “Run for Your Life” in 1968.

Imitations of “The Fugitive” continued to roll, with ABC operating the longest conveyor belt.

Quinn Martin used the theme again in “The Invaders,” which lasted half a season on ABC in 1967-68. In this one, Roy Thinnes was an architect who traveled the land trying to persuade anyone who would listen that the planet was being infiltrated by aliens disguised as humans. The aliens tried to stop him from blowing their cover.

But the aliens had a weakness. When they needed regeneration, they glowed, which of course is always a dead giveaway.

ABC tried replicating the Janssen series again in 1968 with the fleeting “Man in a Suitcase,” in which Richard Bradford was a former American intelligence agent accused of treason. Each week he searched the European underworld for evidence of his innocence.

ABC even tried a Western clone in “The Guns of Will Sonnett,” with Walter Brennan an old man traveling the frontier with his grandson in search of an outlaw who was the old man’s son and the grandson’s father. They searched for two years, until ABC gave up on the series and canceled it in 1969.

Of all the clones, my personal favorite is “The Immortal,” which spent the 1970-71 season on ABC. In something less than a career-making role, Christopher George played a traveling race-car driver who had antibodies in his blood that immunized him to disease and aging.

Naturally his fluids were in demand, so much so that he spent his time eluding an evil billionaire and his thugs who wanted to drain his blood.

All of which proves that even with a series as moist and juicy as “The Fugitive,” you can’t squeeze blood from a turnip.