Crankier Critics of the Tube

New breed of TV writers throws beanballs, not puffballs

Mid-afternoon at the Century Plaza hotel in Los Angeles. A group of newspaper television critics have assembled to talk to the stars and producer of CBS's The Dukes of Hazzard, a misbegotten rip-off of Smokey and the Bandit. The questions are relaxed, the answers as washed as California light. Finally, Ginny Weissman, editor of the Chicago Tribune's weekly television guide, has had enough. "I thought your show was in very bad taste," she says. "I kept wondering, why is it necessary to spit on the windshield? Why so much tobacco juice? Why such high sexual content? The camera seemed to focus a lot on men's behinds."

At 29, Weissman is typical of a new breed of sharp-tongued television writers who showed last week that the docile, fluffy and often self-serving TV coverage of the past is fast disappearing. Their forum was a notorious newspaper junket, the semiannual network extravaganza to unveil new shows. Fifteen years ago, when such "press tours" were inaugurated, only two of the 40 television writers came at their papers' expense. This time upwards of 60% of the more than 80 critics were listed on network master sheets as POWS, an ironic acronym for paying their own way. (For some East Coast publications the bill will top $1,500.) Pressured by the Television Critics Association, which was founded in 1978 to resist the industry's publicity steamroller, network representatives submitted to rigorous grilling. Explains the Pittsburgh Press's Barbara Holsopple, 34, the group's vice president: "We want to ask real questions. We don't want to sit down with television executives and ask how they like their jobs and how many kids they have."

To a large degree they were successful, but there were still some star-struck writers in attendance. A reporter for the Santa Ana Register, for example, asked CBS Correspondent Charles Kuralt for his autograph. Though the networks probably spent $200,000 on the ten-day publicity binge, the gifts (rugby shirts and overnight bags) and entertainments (trips to Tijuana and harbor cruises) of past years were notably absent.

Long a journalistic backwater populated by tired rewrite men, television criticism did not really become a respectable calling until the beginning of this decade, when newspapers belatedly began to see that they were giving pitifully short shrift to the country's most important cultural phenomenon. No-nonsense reporters and respected critics were assigned the beat, and sharp, analytical commentary soon came to the TV page. Critics like Tom Shales, 33, of the Washington Post, and Marvin Kitman, 49, of Newsday, are masters of the lampoon. The new breed can also level their targets with sheer ferocity. One recent example from the Boston Globe's William A. Henry III: "RKO General has run Channel 7 with such greed, arrogance and contempt for the people of Boston that we all ought to stop watching."

If the new TV criticism has one failing, it may in fact be that overfondness for the jugular. Yet even the most contentious critics, like Gary Deeb, 33, of the Chicago Tribune, are closer than their predecessors to the journalistic ideal of accuracy and informed judgment. Whether they have any real impact on television is less certain, but none of them doubt the seriousness of their subject. "It's our principal medium," says Shales. "Television is more important than theater or film. It's a shared experience unlike anything people have ever known."

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