Prime-Time Fare

Thank you for the very interesting article on Fred Silverman’s quest for a more profitable and efficient paradigm in producing prime-time network fare (“Rethinking the Model of Production,” by Brian Lowry, Feb. 7).

Concentrating on increasing innovation and creativity is as certain to produce better product and higher profits as watering the flowers will produce flowers. I wish Silverman luck, because he is fighting a seemingly intractable problem: the unyielding desire of prime-time network minions to continue to throw their resources at some pretty bad techniques and formulas.

In network primetimeland, producers are in the business of business; it’s about holding the public’s attention to pitch cleaner soap and sexier cars. Period. That’s it. For real writers, directors and actors, the story is the thing. Period. That’s it. The business people and the artists are not in opposition, they are just completely different.

But primetimelanders have fused the two into something resembling Jeff Goldblum in the last part of “The Fly.” The result is “writing staffs” consisting of a round-table of half a dozen 28-year-old, overgrown adolescents who think that 22 minutes of banal quips and puns, mixed with a few sight gags and a toilet trick or two, is a story. It ain’t.

Networks, stop assuming that the television audience has an IQ lower in number than its body temperature. Trust me, we’ll all then be happy to sit through your silly entreaties to improve our sex lives with a purchase from a major corporation.

PETER COOK

Hollywood