Lest I ruin your New Year by starting it with a philosophical treatise on the meaning of TV-1992 (I, too, have been known to have a head too fuzzy for such deep thoughts on Jan. 1) I’ll leave it at naming Ross Perot as the TV Person of the Year and asking if you remember . . .
– January’s live CNN and Court TV coverage of the Jeffrey Dahmer trial and the attendant local media frenzy, including WBBM-Ch. 2’s Jay Levine taking us “live” to a cell very much like the very cell in which Dahmer was being held and showing us a toilet that had been recently used but, disgustingly, not flushed?
– My February columns in which I took a look at local news and decided that it was inconsequential? This caused an outpouring of letters from similarly distressed viewers, one of whom characterized one local station’s coverage as “a loosely assembled collage of sex, death and dancing bears.”
– March, in which the premiere of George Lucas’ first TV series venture, “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles,” was overshadowed by the debut of a Chicago cop named J. J. Bittenbinder? His show, a primer on how to protect yourself in the city, called “Street Smarts,” became a PBS sensation and spawned another, equally impressive recent effort.
– An April that saw Los Angeles burst into televised flames and vicious violence, while that paragon of family values, “The Cosby Show,” bowed out after eight justifiably successful (and lucrative) seasons? (And that in December, we’d learn that Bill Cosby’s new show, “You Bet Your Life,” would be a one-year wonder?)
– The month of May, in which Johnny Carson left with suitable fanfare and tears and Jay Leno glided smoothly in, and how easy the “Tonight Show” transition seemed then? This is also the month that Vice President Dan Quayle uttered this immortal statement: “It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown-a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid, professional woman-mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone and calling it just another `lifestyle choice.’ “
– If anything interesting happened on TV in June?
– That the nature of political conventions changed forever in July when the Democratic confab in New York was covered by the Comedy Central cable network?
– Chicago actress Laurie Metcalf winning a Supporting Actress Emmy in August for her work on “Roseanne”? What about the TripleCast, that three-channel feast of 24-hour-a-day Olympics coverage, which proved a financial and ratings disaster for NBC and Cablevision? And then there was the inimitable Charles Barkley, of the USA Dream Team, who when interviewed by Bob Costas captured the true Olympic spirit by saying, “I’m not here to make friends.”
– That, in September, less than 100 days after becoming the executive producer of “The Tonight Show with Jay Leno,” Helen Kushnick was fired?
– That October was when I looked at three new talk shows? They were “The Whoopi Goldberg Show,” “The Jerry Springer Show” and “Rush Limbaugh.” Who would have thought that the latter host would have a more interesting show than Whoopi? Also, in Jackie Collins’ “Lady Boss” miniseries a memorable bit of dialogue: A man returning to his police officer mistress after a reluctant interlude, says, “Long time, no handcuffs.”
– Robert Duvall as HBO’s November “Stalin,” of course, but who played Frank Sinatra in the fairly honest miniseries about his life? And how many actors played Michael Jackson in the whitewashed miniseries bio of the Jackson clan?
– Two of the baddest boys in the biz getting their own TV shows in December? Howard Stern started his interview show on E! Entertainment cable network and Tom Arnold got his “The Jackie Thomas Show” series running on ABC. Though many critics, myself among them, praised Arnold’s premiere effort, a few who didn’t received the wrath of Mrs. Arnold (Roseanne) in the form of vitriolic faxes.
Who said this job is without its perils?
