A one-hour CBS drama premiering this fall will open with a moment of black humor: The dim-witted, cheery star anchor at a down-in-the-dumps TV station drops dead during a newscast.
A visitor from Chicago couldn`t resist asking the creators of ”WIOU”
about their expiring character`s surname: Curtis.
Any connection with Bill Kurtis, star anchor for WBBM-Ch. 2, Chicago`s CBS affiliate?
John Eisendrath and Kathryn Pratt, who just happened to have labored at WBBM, smiled as they sat in their austere Motel 6-like office at Culver City Studios.
”Ah, I guess we might just have a perverse sense of amusement,” said Pratt, the station`s health reporter from 1985 to 1987, when her contract wasn`t renewed.
Further, one learned from her partner, the younger brother of Chicago Ald. Edwin Eisendrath (43rd), that the name of his show`s aggressively slimy newspaper gossip columnist is not spelled Jo Fink but Jo Finc. Sort of like a Chicago newspaper gossip column titled Inc. that appears, ah, just a few pages from here.
Eisendrath and Pratt, a creative and romantic tandem, passed a hurdle by just making CBS` fall schedule. Now, they hope to avoid cliche and caricature with a weekly effort that, Pratt hopes, exhibits ”humor, heart and smart.”
Hollywood likes its exchanges of ideas brief, so the two ”pitched”
their concept as ”`The Hospital` in a TV newsroom,” an allusion to a rather gritty, sardonically funny George C. Scott film about a metropolitan hospital. CBS bought it, and its entertainment division`s daylong presentation of new shows to 200 CBS affiliates here Thursday was any indication, then the show is seen as a key component to the network`s attempt to revive its prime- time ratings. The entire one-hour pilot was shown (and generally liked), and former NBC President Grant Tinker, whose firm is producing it, addressed the assembled about the show.
The team is backed by Tinker and Orion Television Entertainment. The cast includes Mariette Hartley, Helen Shaver, John Shea, Dick Van Patten (as a buffoonish weatherman, if that phrase is not redundant) and assorted others portraying maniacally ambitious souls.
”The TV workplace is populated by eccentric personalities, and most people want to be good and do honest work,” Pratt said. ”But they get caught in conflicted situations, especially given the need for ratings.”
It`s why the opening hour includes Shaver agonizing over her discovery that the new school board president of this unnamed town, a supposed Mr. Nice Guy, raped a woman in college; or word that Shea, a self-styled idealist and the new news director, had a prodigious ethical lapse in his previous posting (so big, it`s amazing he could find work outside of a mob chop shop or Wall Street brokerage house).
Eisendrath, 31, is a native Chicago preppie (Francis Parker School, Brown University) and talented writer who worked for the City News Bureau and the Chicago Reader; as an aide (or ”legman”) to WBBM`s slayer of dozing Streets and Sanitation workers, anchor-pundit Walter Jacobson; and then for a tiny, influential political journal, Washington Monthly.
Pratt, 38, is a native of Kokomo, Ind., with a doctorate in psychology who worked briefly in California politics before turning to TV news. She was at stations in Monterey, Calif., and St. Louis before arriving in Chicago.
They met there and, three years ago, came here, soon joining the 3,457 people who suggested that some network do a local TV version of the film
”Broadcast News.” It didn`t fly, so they devised a syndicated health and fitness show, ”Body by Jake,” that did. They endured the 1988 writers union strike and did a few scripts for a CBS clunker, ”TV 101.”
Tinker`s firm, which did ”TV 101,” kept them on in ”development,” or what Eisendrath correctly tags Hollywood`s ”welfare for the rich.” You sit around and get paid for doing a little thinking and taking lunches.
Eisendrath managed his brother`s 1987 aldermanic campaign, which was marked by a Democratic primary in which Edwin and opponent Bob Perkins spent heavily. Last winter, he commuted on weekends to assist Edwin`s failed bid for Congress against octogenarian incumbent Sidney Yates.
The campaigns may be relevant to the show`s tone, since John harbors no small enmity toward the media`s coverage of them. He thinks that his brother and Perkins were victimized by shallow depictions of them as two rich kids trying to buy a public office. In the second campaign, he says, Edwin was buried by short-sighted reporters and zealous Yates allies during an admittedly hardball and effective Yates effort.
His magazine and TV pasts have formed him, too. Young, underpaid reporters at Washington Monthly ”are looking for Truth in the purest sense, more so than reporters in TV,” he said.
”The dilemma in TV is not that they don`t want to tell the truth, but they often have to compromise in favor of 30-second sound bites.”
Clearly, the pair`s Chicago experience will affect the initial 13 episodes that CBS has requested. And if one thinks that some of the characters come off as a bit outlandish, he cites the real-life eccentricities of some Chicago TV figures:
Among others, he mentions WMAQ`s alluring New Wave anchor Joan Esposito dating a musician for the rock group Styxx; WBBM`s charming, wise and cigar-chomping mobologist John ”Bulldog” Drummond dressing in his Damon Runyon garb and pursuing bad guys with weird nicknames; and WBBM financial reporter Terry Savage driving to work each day in her powder-blue Rolls-Royce.
But the intent, they assert, is decidedly sober. Which could bring decisions such as whether station WNDY, nicknamed WIOU because of creative and fiscal ills, should use footage of a state official blowing his brains out at a news conference, as happened in Pennsylvania four years ago.
Would their news director, with his high ideals, low ratings and flawed past, run it?
”He wouldn`t,” said Eisendrath, then assuring that one of the competitors would.
”And that`s why it will remain WIOU,” said Pratt.
When radio shows leave the studio, they tend to go to the county fair or an ethnic festival.
Ken Minyard and Bob Arthur, this city`s most popular morning ”drive time” hosts, were a bit more adventurous last week, taking microphones and crew to the Berlin Wall.
It was a relatively artistic, if not technical, success. Poor transmission the first day prompted the KABC-AM gang to head indoors for the rest of the stay. But their fax machine did work.
That allowed a guy in Berlin to tell the bumper-to-bumper crowd back home that it was 112 degrees in downtown Los Angeles the day before or to read an ad for $2 million condos on Catalina Island soon after an economist recounted the woes of the East German economy.
”The Ken and Bob Company” has been to Singapore, Australia and Scotland, always accompanied by a cadre of loyalists. This time, more than 100 listeners forked over $2,200 apiece for the weeklong trek.
The Los Angeles Times unveiled a six-day series on June 24 whose first part started on Page 1 and ”jumped” to six entire broadsheet pages inside. And what might justify such expansive treatment?
Was it disclosure that Mayor Tom Bradley covertly funneled city funds to the African National Congress and Nelson Mandela? That Fidel Castro was a CIA plant? How about conclusive evidence that an entire generation of reporters is suffering disabling nervous disorders because of video display terminals?
No, it was a four-years-in-the making investigation of the Church of Scientology and its founder, the late L. Ron Hubbard.
The effort by Joel Sappell and Robert Wilkos, reporters with good reputations, long ago became the butt of jokes among colleagues, and, for sure, it would have taken head-turning revelations to convince the skeptical troops. While what surfaced had its moments-notably in portraying Hubbard as erratic, deceitful and domineering and the church as most sly in seeking footholds in business and education and overreaching to intimidate foes-few heads probably turned.
The church has proven quite litigious, so sensitivity to winding up in court might help explain belated publication of the wearying endeavor. Clearly, there was sensitivity to something last week: Top editors wouldn`t discuss the matter, leaving a spokeswoman to issue a prepackaged statement to an inquiring mind:
”The Times frequently publishes in-depth reports on various subjects and the Scientology series is one such report. The series has been carefully prepared and is balanced and fair. We hope our readers find it interesting.” Left to speculate, one could wonder if the final product, said to have been essentially completed a year ago, spent too much time in the hands of too many editors and nervous-Nellie lawyers. Life seemed to have been sucked out of much of it.
Then again, one could have asked the paper why its generally splendid World Cup coverage had to include exclusive, and limp, analyses by Henry Kissinger, the noted locker-room observer.
