The Man in the Grumbleseat

The Public Arts: Man in the Grumbleseat: The TV Critic's Eighty-Hour Week Author(s): Patrick D. Hazard and Mary Hazard Source: The English Journal, Vol. 48, No. 9 (Dec., 1959), pp. 548-549 Published by: National Council of Teachers of English

Network programmers should not try to get critics to hawk their unsold specials. That's the reaction of Harry Harris, six-times-a-week critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer (600,000 daily; 1,000,000-plus Sunday) to NBC's sneak-previewing the Laurence Olivier Moon and Sixpence for critic John Crosby. (Mary Mannes also praised the unsold and unseen Robert Herridge CBS series, "Theater for a Story," in a recent Reporter piece.)

Harris stated his opinion on this new trend in preview criticism in a recent lecture on television at the University of Pennsylvania. He is one of ten speakers in a series on "The Mass Media in America" jointly sponsored by the Department of American Civilization and the new Annenberg School of Communications at Penn. The general theme of the talks is the impact of TV on the other mass media: books, newspapers, magazines, films, and radio.

Harris felt it was a mistake for networks to "leak" a tape of the Maugham show to Crosby on the chance of a good "preview," for the critic's function is neither to sell programs nor to build audience for good ones. The critic's first responsibility is to the newspaper that pays him; to it he owes an amusing and sprightly column that will keep his feature as highly read as most TV columns are.

Harris pointed out that TV material had replaced sports writing as the copy with highest readership. Just as those who go to the ball game are the most avid readers of the baseball roundup in the next morning's paper, so TV viewers like to compare what the critic felt with their own reactions. When he began to write criticism for the Inquirer, the only injunction from the management was to write a column that husbands and wives would open the paper to read at the breakfast tableto see which one Harris agrees with.

The TV critic's responsibility to industry is to provide it with qualitative responses to qualify the meaning of quantitative ratings and to act as a conscience for the industry. Harris also feels that talent abhors video's vacuum of silence, and that the TV critic's reactions in part make up for the invisible audience. The question of judging local Philadelphia productions (of which he is at the same time a strong advocate and frequently vehement critic) is a tricky one: He finds himself in the acrobatic position of bending over frontwards to keep from bending over too far backwards in his judgments on people he knows and admires personally.

There are other complications in the life of a TV critic, namely, that his wife has to clear their social life against the evening's viewing, that he often feels like he's shouting down an empty barrelexcept when he gets mad mail from tweaked partisans of Godfrey, Welk, or Liberace, not to mention the semiliterate frenzy of crossed Fabian or Presley fans. His mail runs from thirty to forty letters a week.

Harris clocks from seventy to eighty hours a week in front of the boob tube to prepare and write his five daily columns and Sunday feature. He averages about three hours a day viewing, seven days a week. Sunday is his "worst" day because of the preponderance of good shows; he logs six to seven hours on the Sabbath. One of the strongest features in Harris' column is "Viewers' Views," a platform for taste other than his own to be heard from. It also gives him a welcome breather from the daily pressure of a column.

Harris is an omnivorous reader, scanning ten daily papers and twenty weekly magazines for background and for inserts into his "TV Digest." He gave a lively picture of the pressure a TV critic for the morning paper can undergo by describing how he reviews a "Playhouse 90" show. He writes about two-thirds (on other subjects) of his 700-800 word column ahead of time so that he can do a review between 11:00 and 11:15 p.m. to make a 11:30 closing. (His home teletype is connected with the Inquirer plant in downtown Philadelphia.)

In spite of this pressure, Harris hardly ever has morning-after regrets on his late night judgments--although embarrassing phrasing, even bad grammar, does slip through to his dismay. Harris is about as experienced a TV critic as it's possible to be, having started TV reviewing in 1951 with the opposition Philadelphia Bulletin, then being associate editor at TV Guide for two years, before taking over at the Inquirer in 1955.

To Jackie Gleason's jibe that the TV critic is in the position of reporting an accident to the victim, Harris points out that critics have been able to bring great shows back (e.g., "Playhouse 90's" quality summer repeats, Kraft's "A Night to Remember" and the Fred Astaire special) and under certain circumstances to keep shows from being cancelled, e.g., "Father Knows Best" and "Mr. Peepers." Harris counts as one of the high points in his career as a critic his share in keeping "Captain Kangaroo" on the air through a network mail campaign-a feeling that doesn't jibe completely with his idea that a critic shouldn't build audiences for good shows.

Harris is skeptical about the value of previewers like Steve Scheuer's "TV Keys" and Dick Kleiner's NEA pre-selections. These unsigned forecasts give the institutional authority of the local paper to private prognostications, and the previews also attempt to preempt the function of the critic.

He feels that previews frequently keep viewers from seeing good shows, and that anyway he has as good a batting average with the "Highlights" it takes him five minutes a day to prepare as the previewers have from their laborious screening of films and scripts and attendance at dress rehearsals. Still in spite of discouraging moments, like the letter from a viewer who wanted to know why the network replaced "M Squad" and "Thin Man" with the Fred Astaire special, Harris expects to go on encouraging excellence on the medium in his own way -by aiming in his writing about TV at the "aristocracy of those who care."