Trail of Letters Leads to Fox, Moore and Me

On a shelf in my office, spilling onto the floor and making a terrible mess, are hundreds of letters from across the United States. And more are arriving daily. Passionate letters, angry letters, pleading letters, heartfelt letters.

These letters are not about me. They’re not about anything I’ve written. Nor are they about any of the pressing issues of television. Not about the latest epic mergers that dangerously consolidate influence and power in fewer and fewer hands. Not about sweeping telecommunications reform being shaped on Capitol Hill. Not about the V-chip that could dramatically reconfigure viewing in homes. Not about the digital revolution destined to sharpen picture clarity. Not about the warty ugliness of talk shows and what they may reflect in America. Not about the politicizing of anti-TV protests in an election year. Not about the shrinking of serious newscasting and its ethics on over-the-air TV. Not about the gridlock of proposed 24-hour news networks on cable. Not about the rising profile of infomercials. Not about TV cameras in the courtroom. Not about sex on TV, violence on TV, racism or any of the other “isms” that surface on TV.

The letters are about a TV series.

Not a blockbuster, but a series so obscure that it’s no longer on the air, a wee blip of a series so lightly watched in its two summers of slim life that its current prospects on Fox, the network where it last ran, may be nonexistent.

Addressed to John Matoian, president of Fox Entertainment, the letters are about Michael Moore’s “TV Nation.”

Moore sought to make “TV Nation” a small-screen spinoff of “Roger & Me,” his darkly witty and mischievous 1989 film detailing, documentary-style, his persistent pursuit of the chairman of General Motors to get answers about a plant closing that had dire consequences for Flint, Mich.

This time, Moore, a harmless-looking dumpling of a guy who seems to delight in being underestimated, had powerful allies. Among his collaborators on “TV Nation” was Crackers, the Corporate Crime Fighting Chicken (someone wearing an enormous chicken suit), whose prodding of big business to be more accountable epitomized Moore’s agenda of playfulness with a purpose.

Yet “TV Nation” left tiny tracks in the Nielsen ratings when it aired on NBC in the summer of 1994. And in seven airings on Fox last summer, despite later earning an Emmy for best informational series, it drew an average audience of about 3.5 million households, the kind of prime-time stats that network executives generally dismiss as “Nobody was watching.”

As the letter volume attests, though, somebody was.

How did I, while minding my own business, get inundated by mail for Matoian? Moore did it to me.

Using a mailing list of viewers who had sent him laudatory mail, Moore’s New York-based Dog Eat Dog Films late last month sent a letter to “TV Nation” faithful, advising them that Fox soon would be deciding the fate of the series and urging them to lobby Matoian to give it another shot this summer. And, oh, yes, to ensure that others know of “this massive grass-roots support,” Moore slyly advised sending copies of Matoian letters to three TV writers whom he named, one being me. Like, oh boy.

Fox has promised him a decision Friday on “TV Nation,” Moore said by phone from New York this week. He sounded confident. “They pay attention to these letters,” Moore said. But if they don’t, “TV Nation” or a similar series of his will find a home somewhere, he insisted.

Moore said he didn’t mobilize initial support for the show. “It started with people on the Internet who were having all these discussions about ‘TV Nation.’ We have our own thing on the Internet--a Web site and a fan club that people e-mail, and then we started putting out these notices [about how to save “TV Nation”] that people were putting on their bulletin boards.”

Then came last month’s mass mailing, and with one thing leading to another, Moore said, Matoian has been getting deluged via both e-mail and U.S. mail, to say nothing of phone calls.

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Most amazing about this crusade is that it appears much more intense than past rescue efforts on behalf of series with much larger audiences. Wondering what was on the minds of these “TV Nation” superfans, I called some at random.

“It’s like ’60 Minutes,’ but infused with an outrageous sense of humor,” said Judith Kay, a jazz musician in Ardentown, Del., who generally hates TV. “We’re tired of the same old pap. In these times of the Republican takeover, it’s nice to see a truly liberal point of view on TV.”

Another letter to Matoian was signed by 16 “denizens” of the Cherry Bean Coffee House in Salinas, Calif. “They’re all either artists or ex-teachers in their late 60s or early 70s who come in every day--they kind of remind you of ‘Grumpy Old Men’--and they say we need this show to keep things loose,” manager Gary Courtright said.

In Crofton, Md., former high school counselor Selma Goldberg, 65, said: “I’m knowledgeable enough to know that when programs are marketed, they’re looking for young adults in their early 20s or in their early 30s, and primarily not because they have the most expendable income, but because they have enough years ahead of them that they may be customers for life. But we don’t seem to matter.” We? “College-educated, upper-middle-class, mature adults,” Goldberg explained. “And I’m liberal.”

So is Connecticut state Rep. Mike Lawlor. “As a politician with a point of view, I look at ‘TV Nation’ as a wonderful balance to right-wing craziness,” he said from Hartford.

Like Lawlor, Wayne Grooms, a Lexington, S.C., sales agent who’s an avid reader, loved it when Moore pursued Newt Gingrich all the way to Cobb County, Ga., to report how heavily the GOP speaker’s congressional district relied on federal funds. “I learned a lot more than I learned from conventional broadcast journalism,” Grooms wrote Matoian.

“It’s the tweaking of the collective mustaches of government and industry that I love,” said actor Mark McCarthy of Kansas City, Mo. “It really just needs to be done in our current lax atmosphere, where we tend to ignore corporate crime and fill up our prisons with people who have been left behind by society while the ones who fleece the people just giggle yappily on their yachts in the Caribbean.”

Far from the Caribbean is Sapphire, a hamlet of 200 in the “culture-starved hills of North Carolina” where artists Jorma and Dennis Loss were fanatical viewers of “TV Nation,” adoring Moore’s caustic “in-your-face” journalism and pricking of the powerful. “We crank up our steam-powered TVs here,” Jorma joked. “These are the bear-hunting boonies. People up here are feudin’ ‘cause their chickens are getting up in other people’s yards.” In their 40s, Jorma and her husband are so politically liberal, she said, “we’re probably off the scales.”

Most “TV Nation” supporters I phoned were, indeed, not only well-educated and highly articulate but also avowed political liberals who felt alienated by the so-called Republican revolution. A dramatic exception was Elizabeth Oliverio, a high school physical education teacher who avidly watched “TV Nation” in, of all places, Virginia Beach, Va. Among other things, that’s Pat Robertson land.

“It makes me sing,” she said about the Moore series. “You know, he’s liberal, and I’m not. You put me in a room with someone else like that and we could easily end up at each other’s throats. But put me in a room with him, and I could talk his head off.”

Not everyone is talking. When I called Fox to learn from Matoian himself his feelings about the outpouring of support for “TV Nation” and whether the series had a future on Fox, I was told, “He’s unavailable.” Where are Michael Moore and Crackers when you really need them?