WE'RE TURNING AGAIN

Hoo-boy! Had enough nostalgia yet? The May sweeps are finally over, and every network had Big Retrospectives to throw at us. I've been looking backward so much I have an ache in my neck.

Just by way of informing you, this is the arcane process by which "sweeps" work:

Ratings are measured for television and radio daily. That never changes. There is always a representative selection of people hooked up to Nielsen rating boxes. Sweeps are much more insidious. In television, we refer to the sweep period as "The Book." This is because several times a year, the Nielsen folks send out diaries to a much larger selection of reg'lar folk. These viewing diaries are "The Book," and for four-week periods of the year are the particular viewing diaries that are used industry-wide to set the rates that every broadcasting entity from the huge and powerful networks to your local low-power indie charge. That this kinda smacks of collusion we'll leave for another day...

So anyway, every year in November, February and May, everybody pulls out all the stops to try to lure as many people as possible to view as much programming as possible on a given nozzle of the broadcasting sprinkler. The more people who watch - the more people the sponsor can reach - the more money the broadcaster can charge to advertise on their air. Once again, it all comes down to money. Even PBS has tried to enter the ratings fray in recent years. Those days of being branded as a "sandbox for the left" took their toll. Less government funding meant finding a way to get more out of underwriters, and how do you do that? You try to reach more people.

You probably didn't know that there are viewing diaries in use many more times a year, and there's even a Book in July, though - and once again this is done "by convention" - the results of the July Book are usually discounted. May is the month when the networks in particular work the hardest. They get to have season finales for all their returning series, and they get to give the big kiss-off to the ones that are ending. And Big Specials, lots of Big Specials.

Nostalgia was beyond huge this May. It's been said probably too many times that the Baby Boomer generation is "the rat in the snake's belly." You're always going to see evidence of its presence until the last bit of it has been digested and passed through the system. Well, the First Generation Raised On Television has elevated the tribute show to positively dizzying heights. I caught several of the retrospectives, mainly because I smelled a column.

First I saw the Mary Tyler Moore Show Memorial on CBS. This was the hardest one for me to watch. There were, of course, lots of your favorite clips and nicely done segments on each of the characters intermixed with "conversation" segments between MTM and her various co-stars. And that was where this show got into trouble. The interviews felt contrived, even though they were purported to be impromptu. Also, as a cutaway during the interviews the production team used a very wide shot from a camera on a dolly. In the shot, we could see Mary and her pals talking in front of a draped fabric background. We could also see the lights and the other camera operators. It was one of those break-down-the-fourth-wall things that just didn't feel right. The fourth wall was inviolate to Mary and her pals back in the day. And I don't want to come off like some sort of Joan Rivers type, but Mary, who still looks pretty damn good, had one of those just-rolled-out-of-bed hairdos that's all the rage these days. It was a bad choice, I thought. But that's more niggling than curmudgeonly, so I'll move on.

The next one I watched was the M*A*S*H reunion show. The really, really weirdest thing about this one was that though M*A*S*H aired on CBS throughout its entire run of original episodes, the reunion show was on Fox. See, Twentieth Century Fox Television produced M*A*S*H for CBS, so Fox can claim ownership of the show, even though there was not even a Fox Network when M*A*S*H was on the air originally!

Curious as that may be, the M*A*S*H reunion was a lot more fun to watch than the MTM show. Just about every person still alive who was on the show for any length of time was in attendance all at the same time (except, possibly, Loudon Wainright III), and they seemed to be genuinely having fun together. The clip selection was top-notch, and the conversation segments were lively and funny. It was also cool that Larry Gelbart and other writers and producers of the show were there as well.

But then I saw the Gargantuan Spectacular that was NBC's 75th Anniversary, and I'm still trying to recover. NBC has been around longer than any other broadcast entity, and they just love to rub everyone else's noses in it. They did it for more than three hours a few Sundays ago, and the results were mostly pretty good. A show like this is always in serious danger of taking itself too seriously, and the folks in charge at 30 Rock wisely handed the project to good ol' Lorne Michaels. He in turn handed the writing over to people he's worked with for years on Saturday Night Live and other work. What they turned out was a show full of standing ovations and some very refreshing dashes of self-deprecation.

First of all, they did it live, which was pretty nervy. Next, they packed Studio 8H with a studio audience composed solely of NBC personalities past and present, which was extremely clever, I thought. Even Alf had a seat. Of course the reason that NBC can call itself seventy-five years old is that it began in 1927 as a radio network. Little mention was made of the radio years, as you might imagine. A few clips from old Jack Benny shows over rostrum camera moves of still photos was the only mention that the first twenty or so years of NBC's history got. Though there was some television before 1948, that's generally thought to be the year that tv really began to take hold as a mass medium.

As you might expect, there were clips segments from every decade, from the 50's through the 90's. These were fast moving and fun. There were strange, awkward moments, too. After an odd bit that ran just a bit too long wherein Kelsey Grammer "fielded questions" about NBC from the audience, he introduced the clip segment of 50's programming. After this was over, Grammer brought out Sid Caesar. Sid was walking with a cane and looked a little feeble, but the sparkle was still in his eyes. I waited for him to say something, but he never did. He just stood there while the standing O died. Then they moved on to the next thing. I thought, "Well, maybe ol' Sid is having trouble talking these days." But the whole thing seemed awkward to me. Then as the evening progressed, the casts of other shows were brought out and stood on the stage. They didn't say anything; they just stood there, like living wax museum exhibits. ("Oooh, look, honey. There's the cast of LA Law!!") Later on, Caesar showed up again, and talked like crazy. He did a funny bit using his unique ability to transform a sparse knowledge of a few languages into sounding as though he speaks the languages fluently. In a variety of bogus languages, he did a tribute to Imogene Coca, Milton Berle, and other great comic talents of those wild and wooly days when everything was live.

NBC was not without their tricks, too. Though Bob Newhart did all of his significant tv work over at CBS, he did a show for NBC in the 1961-62 season, so he was there and NBC used him extensively. Tony Randall and Jack Klugman did their series on NBC (Quincy and Love, Sidney) separately, but are best known for The Odd Couple, which aired on ABC. Nonetheless, NBC sat them next to each other in the audience.

One of the stranger segments dealt with tv show theme songs (three hours is a long time to fill, ya know) and was emceed by Martin Short. This portion of the show offered us the opportunity to see Short dry-humping William Shatner in his seat while singing the theme from Star Trek.

Bob Wright, CEO of NBC, introduced a funny segment on some of the blunders NBC has committed over the years, including the "infamous 'Heidi' football game" and handing the 2000 election to Gore on Election Night.

NBC pulled out any big guns they could, too. Helen Hunt, now a Big-Time Movie Star, showed up. One of the highlights of the evening for me was the appearance by Goldie Hawn. Remember, she got her start on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In. Anyway, Goldie, who still looks sensational, had on a dress that was . . . remarkable.

There was a great Live TV Moment, too. Barbara Walters, who surely had to ask permission from her bosses at ABC to appear, either didn't have a microphone, or the one she had wasn't working. For several seconds - an eternity when you're doing a live tv show - we could barely hear her speaking from some ambient mic somewhere. Then someone handed her a stick mic, and knocked something over while doing it. Then for a few moments, probably while the poor audio engineer searched all over the board for where that mic was, we still couldn't hear her. But then they got her mic and everything was okay from then on.

By far the most excruciating moment of the whole shebang came at the very end. After the good-byes, they cut to an exterior shot of 30 Rock, the venerable headquarters of NBC. The fireworks began to erupt from the building. I simply cringed. And I don't live anywhere near New York City. Maybe I'm too sensitive, but I have to believe I'm not the only one who thinks that it might just be a little to soon to be making buildings look as though they're exploding in Manhattan.

Maybe there was some sort of need for this kind of fit of nostalgia. Maybe it helps our healing process to have a fond look back at other times. Did the networks sense this need and happily accommodate the wishes of the viewing public? One of television's favorite things to do - and by "television" I mean the huge thing that is a massive fixture in the lives of nearly every human being on the planet - is to look at itself. There are retrospectives of one sort or another nearly every year. This year, it seems they were really heaping it on, though. I haven't covered all of the reunions and retros. I just couldn't watch 'em all. This is why I hope that this column will never be a "TV Critic" column. I'm trying not to let television dominate too much of my time.

More on that next month. Until then, never forget (and this was first said by some one far wiser than I) that the only reason there are shows on television at all is to fill in the time between commercials.

(C) 2002 - Karl Cable