Category: TV & Radio

There is a God: Dr. Laura quits.

August 18th, 2010 · Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett · Hate crimes, TV & Radio 3 comments

Dr. Laura, who is to doctors what canned maraschino cherries are to fruit, is quitting her syndicated radio show.

She isn’t going to retire, she says, just extricate herself from situations in which she can be unfairly criticized for using the word,  “nigger” some 11 times in one radio broadcast.

Okay, Miss Klan-mouth, go find that place where you can say whatever you want, whenever you want, without anyone raising an eyebrow. It’s that place where the nice nurses lock you in, take your shoelaces and sedate you.

I guess there are a lot of white people in America who feel that if Chris Rock can say that word every 3 seconds, then we Caucasians should get to use it at least once a year. Or twice, if a black person cuts us off in traffic.

So, conversely, if black people stop saying it, these white people won’t want to either?

Yes, it’s all becoming clearer to me now.

(Postscript: A reader sent this video in response to my Dr. Laura post below. It rounds up some of the responses to the news that she is quitting her radio show when her contract ends. It isn’t objective (either is my post of course) — it’s informative. Check it out.)

Goodbye Senator Byrd. Be glad you missed the news today.

July 1st, 2010 · Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett · Death, Government, Ruminations, TV & Radio, The Press No comments

One of the faceless commentators talking during the solemn carrying of Senator Robert Byrd’s casket this morning observed that the most significant thing about the late Senator’s tenure is the enormous social change on his long watch.

Byrd himself exemplified that change, moving from membership in the Ku Klux Klan as a young West Virginian to a supporter of civil rights measures as a seasoned statesman.

The comment no doubt gave a lot of other people pause as it did me. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I would have thought longer and deeper about the thesis had the footage of Byrd not been followed by a live studio shot about the oil spill.  On the set was one of the new news-hotties stretching her long legs from a tall chair facing the camera, chatting with Phillipe Cousteau Jr, grandson of the revered Jacques Cousteau.

Yes, Senator Byrd lived a long life. Long enough to die on a day when “news” comes from a nitwit in snakeskin high heels schmoozing a low-wattage, high-ancestry bullshitter about one of the worst environmental disasters on record.

TV as role model.

April 5th, 2010 · Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett · Death, TV & Radio 2 comments

We boomers have a kind of television-show DNA that the generations before and after do not. Our parents managed to live lives free of the talking box; people born later have more technology around them than the Apollo astronauts did. The TV personalities and shows of our childhoods are a currency that spends across geographical and class lines.

Say “Beatles” and we think “Ed Sullivan.” Only recently have we discarded “Walt Disney” and taken up “Pixar” as the name that comes to mind for all-things-animated.

(Credit: SitcomsOnline.com)

News of actor John Forsythe’s death reminded me of this. Forsythe went to his reward being most remembered for his latter-day sex symbol role in “Dynasty,” a long-running series he starred in late in his long career.  (“Dynasty,” you may recall, is the show that made women’s dresses and jackets sprout shoulder pads the size of terriers.)

When I saw the obit for Forsythe I also remembered his brief role as a retired Air Force major running a private school for girls.  “The John Forsythe Show,” kept me riveted each week of the 1965-66 season that it ran. It convinced me that boarding school would save my life, and indeed it did a few years later.

Much is made of the mind-melting properties of too-much television. We all cluck and shake our heads when we read those stories about how many hours Americans–especially kids–spend in front of the tube. But now and then, an idea from a silly sitcom takes root and grows into something good. So, here’s hoping that Mr. Forsythe’s heirs live long and prosper with the fruits of his TV labors.

Old airwaves

December 3rd, 2009 · Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett · Business, History, TV & Radio No comments


Whenever I read big news in the TV industry, I think back to the wild predictions made by my father in the 1960s.

He’d gone from radio (“The Night Owl Show”) to local TV (“From the Esso Desk…”) to management of local TV (a station wagon emblazoned with the NBC peacock) and finally to the nascent cable business, which his fellow New Englanders regarded as just to the left of Edsel manufacturing.

The early days were not exactly glamorous. I have fond memories of driving around with him while he craned his neck, looking up at power poles and cables. When he spotted someone illegally tapped into his cable service, he’d knock on their door and tell them to Get up that pole and disconnect it before I sue your ass. It worked quite well.

He could spin quite a vision of the future:

Someday, we’ll all have hundreds of channels to pick from. (This was in the days when NBC, ABC and CBS were it.)

Television sets will get really, really thin, like wallpaper. (Almost there, Dad.)

Every town will have its business on its own little channel. (We call it “local access.”)

I’m not sure what he would have made of the news today that Comcast is buying up, among other things, his old employer NBC. That’s such a leap from the early days of the television business that even he might need a minute to catch up.

There’s not a perfect analogy, but it’s a little like a phone company providing your conversations. All Comcast is NOT doing these days is leading me to the recliner and handing me the remote.

Naturally, this big-business buying up big-media makes me nervous. But one thing does hearten me.

First, despite the too-high rates and the Byzantine channel structure, I have to say that I always get very good customer service from Comcast. I periodically call to whine about the cost of this or that, or question some pay-per-view listing. (Really, I’m sure I only saw ‘Mall Cop’ once.) Each time I’ve gotten an articulate person who figures out how to solve the problem. No small feat.

So, maybe there will be a Nordstrom effect — other media companies, wireless providers, utilities and the like will have to adopt the customer-service model because the big kid on the block is doing it. We’ll see.

Look what you started, Dad.

Just Ed

June 23rd, 2009 · Kimberly Marlowe Hartnett · Death, TV & Radio No comments

Get ready to read and hear the phrase “second banana” repeated a million times over the next few days. The death of Ed McMahon, the most famous sidekick in broadcasting history, is the reason.

The man McMahon sat next to for almost 30 years was my all-time favorite television figure. I mourned his death like a beloved uncle. To be honest, McMahon used to be a bit of a distraction. Any sentence he uttered meant that was one less I could hear from my hero.

But McMahon was an important part of the mix. On the rare nights that he was missing from the second chair, the show just wasn’t as crisp. When the joke was on him, as it often was, McMahon wasn’t a fall guy. He was a funny guy, and there’s a difference. It seems to me he deserves at least one obit in which he does not have to share billing with the Man behind the desk.

He was a hustler, McMahon was. He shilled for any number of brands and clients, from dog food to sweepstakes. He was a 1950s-era salesman at heart. He was also a type found in the early days of television: someone who came to the medium because he was a good talker, a clever wit and would grab any break that came along.

He was also a decorated combat veteran. In this and other ways that are less openly admired, he was a real survivor. He did work he loved, he did it well, and he did it for a long time.

Godspeed, Ed.