Out With the Gurus, In With Humility

New year, new hopes.

It’s always appropriate to reflect on television, which has not only mirrored popular culture in the last half of the 20th Century but also shaped and defined it. So...

Where is television going in 1995? Where should it be going? We can all agree that television is pretty darned terrific the way it is. Why else would we watch it so exhaustively, making TV viewing as much a common denominator as death, sex and taxes? Television is so close to perfection, what’s to complain about?

Yet ... yet ... here are 10 items that need fixing in the coming year:

Sam Donaldson’s Hairpiece: Oh, c’mon, you know it’s true. Donaldson is frequently faulted for being pushy and abrasive, but that’s never been the problem. It’s that ... thing , that flat, brown pancake that sits atop his head and dips toward his vaulted brows, that undermines his credibility as he co-hosts ABC’s “PrimeTime Live” or pontificates Sunday mornings with George Will and David Brinkley. (Why doesn’t he take it off occasionally, like Willard Scott?) All the while, it’s the top of his head that transfixes you, if only because what’s there seems never to have moved--ever--raising suspicions that Donaldson’s hair is painted on.

I asked a house painter for a second opinion. “I’d say, it’s an oil base,” he said. “Semi-gloss.”

“Circus of the Stars”: The only way to repair this CBS fixture--most of which is merely benign idiocy--is to drop the animal acts. Let the stars get in touch with their inner Walter Mittys on the high wire or the trapeze. Just lay off the animals. If the brilliantly imaginative Cirque du Soleil and other animal-less circuses can do it, so can these chumps.

The recent “Circus of the Stars Goes to Disneyland” was a case in point, the denigration of beautiful, intelligent creatures--whether the gargantuan pigs placed at the disposal of Phyllis Diller or the big cats doing their “act” for ersatz trainer Kelly Packard of “California Dreams”--was as ugly as television gets. Some stars, who are sensitive to the incompatibility of animals and circuses (and like-minded venues), refuse to take part in this series of specials.

“Do you know at what point the cats respected you?” the giggly Packard was asked during the show. The cats respect her? Oh, please. In the ring, she and the tigers and lions were accompanied by scary animal-act music and a voice-over by host Leslie Nielsen, who spoke of “4,000 pounds of snarling ... beasts,” with “very real, very lethal fangs and claws.”

But enough about the producers.

Guru Talkers: Specifically, such syndicated series as “The McLaughlin Group” and “The Capitol Gang,” in which journalists (most often of the print persuasion) share their great wisdom of the moment on political issues via wisecracks and smirking sound bites, giving new meaning to instant analysis. To say nothing of media cockiness.

“The Capitol Gang” adds another unsavory component, a sort of inside-the-Beltway coziness that finds news reporters addressing Congressional newsmakers by their first names as both sides unite in the palsy-walsy cause of putting on a good show. A show is exactly what it is.

Irritating People: Mr. Blackwell, for example. Who is this guy, where did he come from, why is he famous and why should anyone care what he thinks about anything, let alone the wardrobes of the rich and famous?

At least MB is low-key offensive. Even harder to take are the up-tempo irritants who just will not shut up. There should be a moratorium on these creeps, four of whom immediately come to mind: Personal injury lawyer Larry H. Parker--he can get you a zillion bucks for a fender-bender--of commercial fame; Dick Vitale, the overbearing ESPN basketball commentator who never met a game he couldn’t overshadow with his self-obsessed constant verbiage; Tony Little, the ponytailed, grating, revved-up little big man of fitness infomercials, who makes even Vitale sound like he’s on downers, and ... Richard Simmons. He’s everywhere. Show this feel-good diet maven a fat person and he starts weeping, with so much sincerity that it’s probably on the cue cards. And what is it with the tank tops? With all the money he’s making, doesn’t Simmons own even one shirt? Enough, already. Is it too much to ask for this guy to take a little vacation from television? Like 10 years?

Grief-Related Incursions: Journalists would find even the heartbreak of psoriasis irresistible. Thus, courtesy of television news and some newspapers (such as the Los Angeles Times) the public regularly gets peeper’s-eye views of the grief-stricken, whether in breaking stories involving mayhem-related tragedies or as part of funeral stakeouts.

With newspapers you get only pictures, fortunately. Worse still are the sounds added by television, the anguished sobs and wails of those who have just lost loved ones, but are granted not even a corner of privacy in which to express their emotions.

Even on those occasions when media are summoned or given permission to be present at a funeral and take pictures, that doesn’t mean everyone attending has relinquished his or her right to mourn privately. On the one hand, it’s healthy to pause over death and humanize victims. Despite the tenor of the times, however, everything and everyone are not fair game. The people’s right to know does not give the media a right to abuse.

Televised Car Chases: They’re ba-a-a-a-ack! Precipitated in Los Angeles on a large scale by KCBS-TV Channel 2 “Action News,” the phenomenon began a couple of years ago when local news choppers took to the air in waves, like British fighters protecting London during the Blitz. Only this time, the goals were trivial--live coverage of every freeway chase involving police, no matter how insignificant.

Happily, the practice stopped. But lately, perhaps with visuals of O.J. Simpson’s widely viewed freeway flight traveling through the empty regions of their brains, station executives have resumed their old ways to some extent. Only recently, several stations instinctively preempted regular morning programming to give live chopper coverage to a guy fleeing from cops, some of them apparently not even knowing what they were covering. As one anchor said, “Tune in at 10 and we’ll be able to tell you what this was all about.”

Televised College Bowl Games: The lure of television money has created more college football bowls than there are teams qualified to play in them. Cereal bowls have more snap, crackle and pop.

Nearly half of the 1994 campaign’s 19 postseason bowls are a sham, the sheer weight of their redundancy tending to trivialize the entire process and dishonor the teams that are worthy.

There was a time when postseason play was a reward for excellence. Now, it’s often a reward for mediocrity. To wit: Nevada Las Vegas “went” to the Las Vegas Bowl with a 6-5 record, the same record that earned Oklahoma a spot in the Copper Bowl and Illinois a bid to the Liberty Bowl opposite East Carolina (7-4). Texas Christian was welcomed to the Independence Bowl with a record of 7-4, identical to the records that earned Baylor and Washington the Alamo Bowl.

Meanwhile, Wisconsin (6-4-1) plays in the Hall of Fame Bowl, and Notre Dame, excluded from the nation’s Top 25 rankings, takes a 6-4-1 record to the prestigious Fiesta Bowl, invited to play powerful Colorado (10-1) there only because it is Notre Dame. Texas Tech brings a 6-5 record against unremarkable USC (7-3-1) in the Cotton Bowl, and the combined record of Carquest Bowl opponents West Virginia and South Carolina is 13-10.

It won’t happen, but what’s needed is a curtailment of televised bowls, and a return to a time when each of them truly meant something beyond millions of dollars for the participants.

Transsexuals and Transvestites: Nothing personal here, but you’d think that daytime talk shows could think of more clever ways to titillate viewers during ratings sweeps than to repeatedly parade the Double T’s in front of the camera. From watching these shows, you’d get the impression that half of U.S. males become females, and the other half wear their clothes.

Infomercials: Sometimes the word itself is an oxymoron, especially regarding those half-hour commercials that really do attempt to exploit the naivete of some viewers by pretending to be what they aren’t--actual programs. Some of the more devious infomercials do indeed have the look and bearing of actual talk shows, to the extent that the fleeting paid-advertisement disclaimers that accompany them are insufficient to alert viewers to the real intent.

These paid infomercials mean lucrative profits for local stations and cable networks, so fat chance that they will demand more responsible behavior from those that are purposely deceptive. So it’s up to the Federal Trade Commission to impose such regulations as stronger and more frequent IDs. Again, fat chance.

Arrogance: A college journalism student mentioned recently that a project she was working on for a public relations class required her to learn from a certain Los Angeles station the strategy it had employed in dealing with an image problem. The student called the station’s PR department for assistance. She was rejected.

In fact, calls regularly flow in from viewers claiming to have been treated rudely or cavalierly by stations when calling to complain about programming. It’s that level of arrogance--as if broadcasters owned the airwaves--that must end if television is to fully earn the trust and respect of the public.

Letters to the editor would help.

They would give viewers the opportunity to sound off on the air (by having their mail read in newscasts, for example) just as they do in print publications. That nearly all broadcasters always give themselves the last word is indicative of their disdain for everyone else.

A little humility would help, too.