TV Review : TV Hall of Fame: It’s the Presenters’ Show

In 1984, when the Television Academy Hall of Fame named its first inductees, Milton Berle led the list. Ten years later, the new inductees include Phil Donahue and soap opera scribe Agnes Nixon. This TV institution is beginning to resemble not so much a Hall of Fame as the Walk of Fame down Hollywood Boulevard.

The Hollywood Walk, however, is much more exciting than the 90-minute taped broadcast of the awards, presented in late 1993 at, of all places, Walt Disney World. You want something, something to happen during what should be an emotional occasion honoring, along with Donahue and Nixon, Dick (“American Bandstand”) Clark, NBC News’ John Chancellor, Bob Newhart and, posthumously, game show maestro Mark Goodson and Jack (“Dragnet”) Webb.

Something does happen: Clark sobs so uncontrollably that he must step away from the podium to compose himself--an extremely rare break in the “Bandstand” man’s famously cool demeanor. But Clark opens the show, and it’s mostly downhill from there.

The speechifying is split up by video tribute clips so banal that viewers too young to know these Hall of Famers will wonder what the fuss is about. (The clips for Nixon, the first female writer inductee and creator of “All My Children,” “One Life to Live” and “Loving,” cruelly display just how atrociously bad soap writing and acting can be.)

Only the archive footage of Chancellor’s career suggests a man trying to do something meaningful with the medium, and the clips of Webb deadpanning with Harry Morgan on “Dragnet” are priceless, if far too brief.

Oddly, the presenters are often more memorable than the honorees. Marlo Thomas shows she has thoroughly maintained a sense of class so long gone from husband Phil’s show it’s hard to recall when it left. Donahue’s other presenter, former Soviet apologist and current Donahue partner on a CNBC chat show, Vladmir Posner, actually salutes “America’s First Amendment.” And, a little sadly, Newhart is totally upstaged by the show’s funniest moments: Don Rickles, at his acerbic best, and Tim Conway, in the kind of routine of which only real Hall of Famers are capable.

* “The Television Academy Hall of Fame Special” airs at 8 tonight on ABC (Channels 7, 3, 10 and 42).