1993 Year in Review : TELEVISION : The Top--and Bottom of the Barrel

What did 1993 bring television viewers in Southern California? Our search was both thorough and relentless. We looked high and we looked low, and this is what we found.

High--The ouster of John Lippman as KCBS-TV Channel 2 news director on April 30, after lasting less than a year. Recruited from Seattle, Lippman was a catastrophe, managing to alienate or enrage much of his staff while guiding the trickiest, trashiest, most irresponsible, least trustworthy local news coverage in memory. Under his tumultuous tenure, there was hardly a scam that Channel 2 wouldn’t deploy to sucker viewers into watching.

Lippman did all of this, presumably, with the blessing of his CBS corporate bosses, whose own integrity and journalistic blurriness are reflected in the fact that Lippman was kicked out primarily because of his ratings, not his behavior or tactics.

Low--The hiring of Mark Hoffman as KNBC-TV Channel 4 news director on March 1. Operating in a manner so Lippman-esque that he deserves to be dubbed Son of Frankenstein, Hoffman has used tabloid techniques--dishonest teases, screaming graphics and a preponderance of titillating sleaze news a la Michael Jackson and Heidi Fleiss ( see related story, Page 5 )--to transform a bad news product into an infinitely worse one. Call it Son of “Hard Copy.”

In advertising titillating upcoming stories, Channel 4 has redefined the word next as meaning in a future millennium. Meanwhile, a reader sent in a snapshot that visually captures the low road that Channel 4 news has traveled under Hoffman. In the foreground is a KNBC billboard that boasts: “When it happens at Mission and Central, it happens on 4.” In the background is another billboard--for a nude girlie bar.

High--”Prime Suspect 2.” Arguably, the best American television of 1993--and without a doubt the best miniseries--was British, as the very gifted Helen Mirren reprised her role as tough, ruthless Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison in this gripping, complex thriller that PBS aired as part of “Mystery!”

Mirren and her supporting cast were extraordinary, as were Allan Cubitt’s script and John Strickland’s direction in this powerful Granada Television production that interwove racism and sexism through a tale of crime and intrigue. Tennison addicts take heart, for 1994 brings “Prime Suspect 3.”

Low--”Daddy Dearest.” You feel like using coat hangers on the creators of this mercilessly bad, first-season mongrel, and on the Fox executives who endorsed it. Richard Lewis is the suffering son and Don Rickles the trash-talking father who has moved in with him. An extension of the Cro-Magnon insult rantings that made him a popular performer in the Stone Age, Rickles’ raunchiness here is the sitcom version of a flint tool being scraped across a blackboard.

High--Brian Lamb’s “Booknotes” interviews with authors on C-SPAN, Sundays at 5 p.m. In an age when the ghost-assisted author of a pamphlet on liposuction can get camera time, this is book-talking heads at their addictive best, for four reasons:

(1) Generally related to public affairs, the books discussed on C-SPAN are meaty and worthy of dissection.

(2) There’s no rush, for time on C-SPAN is seemingly endless.

(3) Lamb, who is C-SPAN’s chairman and CEO, appears to have actually read what the authors have written.

(4) Lamb’s utter lack of pretentiousness diverts attention from the host to the author. A revolutionary concept.

Low--Howard Stern’s book tour. Oh, that’s what it was. Not only is Stern peerless at offending the multitudes, but he also has a gift for self-celebration that rivals even the narcissism of that other UFO of the airwaves, Rush Limbaugh. Stern’s autobiographical “Private Parts” has at once made him a best-selling author and a regular on the TV talk show circuit in a promotional blitzkrieg whose ultimate message is that, when it comes to the camera, a micro dab of Stern can last a lifetime. After all of this, is there anything left to know about Stern? And if there is, does anyone really want to know it? Beam him up, Scottie.

High--Charlayne Hunter-Gault’s recent lengthy interviews with Israelis and Palestinians in the occupied Gaza Strip and West Bank on that PBS centerpiece, “The MacNeil/Lehrer Report.” Remarkable for their balance and intelligence, these candid sessions provided insights into the thinking of ordinary people on both sides of this conflict and insights into why Hunter-Gault herself is so quietly good at what she does.

She was sensitive and informed, carefully listening to responses and asking pointed follow-up questions while never--ever--occupying center stage. A TV messenger smaller than the message? Utter heresy, and also an impressive performance from an impressive journalist.

Low--The Great NAFTA Debate on CNN’s “Larry King Live” with Ross Perot and Vice President Al Gore. Although King now insists it “turned NAFTA around” for the Clinton Administration, the only thing that this chaotic fiasco turned for certain was your stomach.

Your opinions of Gore and Perot depended on your predisposition. It was much easier to objectively view King, an overanxious-to-please, virtual absentee moderator who offered himself as a red carpet that his two heavy-booted guests tramped across, leaving heel prints on his face--and on each other--turning this alleged debate on free-trade policy into an acrimonious battle of personalities instead of ideas.

High--Live coverage by local stations of the recent fires that ravaged Malibu, Laguna Beach and other chunks of metropolitan Los Angeles. What television does best--cover spot news--was vividly on display here.

Because getting out is often harder than getting in, some of the later coverage dawdled long after there was a major story to cover, preempting regular programming for no valid journalistic reason. Yet the initial live coverage was spectacularly good, from panoramic chopper footage to reporters giving smoke-wheezed reports from the field. Even if potential arsonists were, indeed, turned on by footage of flames, the fire story was simply too enormous for television to soft-pedal.

Low--Live coverage of just about everything else. You arrive, you’re live. In other words, in an era when technology rather than news validity increasingly drives policy, “live” for the sake of “live” continued to clutter most local newscasts in 1993.

That meant having reporters do fleeting live stand-ups to open and close videotape packages, merely to create the illusion of news being more immediate than it is. And for the same reason, having reporters go live to deliver stories that are many hours, if not days old. On breaking stories, live coverage is perilous, forsaking judgment for speed. On non-breaking stories, it’s merely absurd: And now, this live report on World War II . . . .

High--”Homicide: Life on the Street.” Given its poor ratings, this is surely a minority opinion. Yet this briefly aired first-season NBC series from Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana proved to be the most stimulating U.S. cop show in years, written, directed and acted in ways that elevate it above a crowd that includes even ABC’s more popular, more controversial “NYPD Blue.”

When “Homicide” returns to the air at 10 p.m. Jan. 6, viewers will have a chance to redeem themselves and keep a great series on the air.

Low--”The Chevy Chase Show.” To hardly anyone’s surprise, this late-night series on Fox lasted just six weeks. It was terribly conceived, sloppily executed and painful to watch. Its seemingly disinterested star could not deliver monologues or interview guests. And those were its good qualities.

High--”Late Show With David Letterman” premiering on CBS. Although the pre-transition saber rattling was a world-class drag, the ultimate outcome was not. Now opposite Jay Leno’s “Tonight Show” instead of following it, Letterman is as funny at 11:35 p.m. as he was all those years an hour later on NBC, and a lot more accessible to boot.

Because comedy tastes are so subjective, Letterman’s appeal is hard to define. One advantage his show does have over others, though, is a scent of danger and unpredictability. A little bit of meanness, too.

Before ending his appearance on a recent Letterman show, Larry King took off his tie and presented it to the host as a gift. Letterman thanked him profusely. After King departed, though, Letterman gave the tie to another guest.

Low--TV’s talk show glut. So little to say, so little to communicate. Yet on and on they came in 1993, and will continue to arrive this year, becoming TV’s version of the zombie march in “Night of the Living Dead.” Or, depending on time slots, Day of the Living Dead.

High--The TV violence debate. It’s healthy to examine and hash over the content and impact of an influential medium that we too often take for granted and allow to wash over us and our children without giving it much thought. Thinking about it is exactly what the public should be doing.

That surely applies to violence, whose pervasiveness both in the streets and on TV continues to terrorize many Americans. Three important words--”the public good”--are Latin to many top industry executives. Only when there is a loud debate do they take heed and consider their responsibility to the public as well as to their stockholders.

Low--The TV violence debate. Don’t be surprised to hear soon that Beavis and Butt-head were behind the rise of that scary Russian radical Vladimir V. Shirinovsky. It’s so very easy to cling to a popular issue and make TV violence a scapegoat for a smorgasbord of problems. Members of Congress make speeches. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno makes speeches. Everyone makes speeches.

Although the industry is almost begging for it, there’s no question that government regulation of TV content would be calamitous, a sure way to kill the patient along with the cancer. Yet the threat looms. The problem is that when confronted by a bandwagon, Capitol Hill politicians have this incredible compulsion that they’re helpless to resist. They just have to jump on it.

So what to do? Well, even the dim bulbs who control TV from their executive suites are occasionally visited by clarity. So you can bet that if there were no significant audience for TV violence, they wouldn’t air it. Do you see them airing opera?

Thus, instead of summoning government’s iron hand, the public would be advised to consider a radical, but much better means of erasing violence from TV. Stop watching it.