Banner Graphic, Volume 16, Number 119, Greencastle, Putnam County, 3 January 1986 — Page 13

The TV year:

Cosby ‘therapy’ reigns as Mary Lou Retton frolics

By 808 WISEHART c. 1985 N.Y. Times News Service NEW YORK Good old 1985 was just one thing after another, wasn’t it? Or was that 1984? Anyway, in no particular order, here are my choices as the best and worst of the TV year. 1. Bill Cosby became the national daddy. Some 70 million Americans gather in front of their TV sets on Thursday nights to watch “The Cosby Show,” a kind of national therapy of shared family problems in which Cosby uses the trivial pursuits and traumas of family life to give parents and children the hilarious shock of recognition. And it’s funny, too. 2. It had to happen someday and in 1985 it finally did: The amount of news media at last exceeded the amount of news. Hordes of reporters reeled from the TWA jet hijacking in Beirut to the Achille Lauro sea jacking in the Mediterranean to the earthquake in Mexico City to the volcano eruption in Columbia to the summit meeting in Geneva. They paused briefly to touch down at the AIDS epidemic before checking out events in the presidential colon and on the presidential nose. NBC showed how rigorous life in the trenches can be. It revealed that its 150 staffers in Geneva consumed 300 jars of mustard, 450 pounds of sirloin, 24 bowls of chocolate mousse, 7,200 eggs, 2,000 croissants, 1,500 pounds of potatoes, 20 Norwegian smoked salmons and 1,714 Coca Colas. Well, somebody’s got to do it. 3. After decades of Olympian detachment high atop their Manhattan skyscrapers, the networks were overwhelmed by outsiders with the urge to merge. ABC, NBC and CBS were bought, sold or dickered over like used cars. In March, Capital Cities Communications cut a deal to buy ABC for $3.5 billion, the first network ownership change in 30 years. Then Ted Turner launched his campaign to buy CBS, which successfully fought him off but spent $1 billion doing it. To recoup its losses, CBS had to sell one of its TV stations and shove hundreds of employes out the door to early retirement or unemployment. Turner then moved to acquire MGM-UA, a film and TV company, for $1.5 billion. To raise a few bucks, he tried to bring NBC in as part owner of CNN, his all-news cable service, but turned down the network’s $250 million offer. NBC swiftly moved to start its own cable news service. Finally, earlier this month, the General Electric Co. revealed that it will buy the RCA Corp., which owns NBC, for $6.28 billion. 4. Thanks to “Miami Vice,” a city once known as a geriatric Mecca became the Casablanca for the ’Bos. Starring Don Johnson and Phillip Michael Thomas, who previously would have been lucky to get a berth on the “Love Boat,” the show is an exercise in sensory overload. See it on TV. Hear the music on the radio. Buy the album. Ogle the fashions. Read that Johnson’s unshaven Yassir Arafat look is in. What more can be said about a show whose characters have a stronger attachment to their wardrobes that to other human beings? 5. As usual, by the time the year ended TV had made us sick of people we liked when the year started. True, we didn’t see anything of Michael Jackson, 1984’s most omnipresent figure, but we did see too much of Hulk Hogan. Our vision was blurred further by Mary Lou Retton and her hundreds of gleaming teeth as she sold everything from cereal to batteries. But with an end-of-the-year surge thanks to football season and his role as commercial spokesman for half the gross national product, John Madden edged Retton to become the person we’d like to see take next year off. 6. With the Live Aid. global rockathon from Lon-, don and Philadelphia, the institutionalized

BILL COSBY: Puts the juice back in TV comedy

adolescence or rock music joined forces with TV’s raiders of the fast buck for a unique day of selflessness. The musicians returned to their mondo-bondage videos and TV went back to making addled sitcoms, but for a brief and shining moment they had a point and a purpose. 7. Actor Stacy Keach made an adroit career move by getting himself arrested in England on a cocainesmuggling charge. CBS had planned to cancel Reach’s “Mike Hammer” series anyway and promptly did. But Keach was more popular in jail then he ever was out of it and was bombarded with offers upon his release, including a “Mike Hammer” TV movie. 8. Steven Spielberg’s “Amazing Stories” didn’t set TV on fire, but the most successful filmmaker in history could not help but improve a medium where a variation on a car crash passes for creativity. With Spielberg’s lead, anthologies were all over the place. NBC picked up “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” as a companion for “Amazing Stories” while CBS revived “The Twilight Zone” and the short-lived “George Burns Comedy Week.” 9. Phyllis George, for many years not very good at reporting sports for CBS, was even worse at news. When George was hired as co-host of “The CBS Morning News,” she hit the air fumbling and never stopped. CBS and George soon agreed she should get off the show and the network, in the process of impoverishing itself in the fight with Ted Turner, agreed to pay George for the duration of her 3-year; $3 million contract. 10. People watch shows, not networks, but NBC’s rise to he top of the ratings was significent because it came as a result of alliances with the best available creative talent. NBC’s patience was rewarded with ‘The Cosby Show,” “Family Ties,” “Cheers,” “Night Court,” “Hill Street Blues,” “St. Elsewhere,” “Golden Girls,” “Amazing Stories” and “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” among other fine shows and patience , even, became a trend, qf sorts:,-Iq other triggerhappy times, slow-starters like “Cagney and

Lacey” (CBS) and “Moonlighting” (ABC) wouldn’t have had a chance. 11. Howard Cosell became a multi-media lout when he trashed everyone he’d ever worked with at ABC in his book, “I Never Played The Game.” ABC responded by canceling his show, “Sports Beat.” 12. The options available to viewers exploded as the intials VCR became almost as universally recognized as TV. Video-cassette recorder sales in the ’Bos rivaled the growth of TV itself in the ’sos as the space-age gizmo that didn’t exist 10 years ago is in more than 25 percent of the nation’s homes and is the cornerstone of a $3.3 billion industry. 13. When retired Gen. W’illiam Westmoreland slapped CBS with a $l2O million libel suit as a result of a documentary that claimed he lied in his official reports during the Vietnam War, his lawyer bragged that the nation was about to see “the dismantling of a network.” But after an 18-week trial Westmoreland withdrew the suit only days before the trial would have ended anyway. After receiving neither a financial settlement nor a verbal concession from CBS, he simply declared a great victory and went home. 14. The National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences voted Tyne Daley another Emmy for “Cagney and Lacey,” which left co-star Sharon Gless, who Daley didn’t bother to mention in her acceptance speech, shut out once again. According to low-placed sources who don’t know anything and should never be trusted, the show will be renamed “? and Lacey.” 15. With a remarkable two-pronged attack, the versatile Sally Field was the easy winner of the year’s crashing bore award. Field’s acceptance speech after winning the bestactress Oscar for “Places in the Heart” “You like me! You really like me! ” ranked somewhere between fingernails screeching across a blackboard and acid indigestion. Later, her hectoring pitch during the “Live Aid” rockathon for Ethiopia.made jus loug for the days when she was just another flying nun.

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