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3.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting But Flawed History of TV Series, January 8, 2011
This review is from: Lou Grant: The Making of Tv's Top Newspaper Drama (Television Series) (Hardcover)
It's great that someone decided to tackle Lou Grant as the subject of a book--but Douglass Daniel was the wrong person to do it. The former college teacher and current flagrant liberally-biased AP reporter (who famously was caught distorting 2008 presidential campaign stories to make Obama look good) uses the same lop-sided touches in crowning the Lou Grant series the greatest ever about journalistic ethics. But how can a man with such low ethical standards do a fair job writing a book on the subject?
The book starts fine, with the history of journalists on fictional television. But even in the first chapter the author can't quite get it right. He lists what he claims are all the TV series about journalists through 1977, yet there are a number that are excluded. There is no mention of The Doris Day Show, Shirley's World, My World & Welcome to It, That Girl (probably the other longest-running series with a reporter with a weekly starring role), and even Superman. These are mostly comedies, so maybe he doesn't like that genre--or maybe he didn't want to include magazine reporters as journalists (which most of those others were). Yet he certainly included series that had wire service reporters that don't work for a newspaper, so these others needed to be included. Also, why did he stop at 1977 and not include more recent series (since the book was published in 1994!). From the start the book is incomplete and biased.
The author acts as a cheerleader for the program instead of objectively seeing the flaws in it. The simple premises of the series is so unbelievable that it's hard to swallow, that a failed TV newsman from a low-rated station in a city like Minneapolis would somehow return to print journalism as the city editor in Los Angeles. Lou Grant's character also changed from the sitcom to the drama--and the producers failed to make a credible transition. At the time it may have seemed creative to try it, but looking back Grant lacked the charm that he had on The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Some of the things the author praises the series for are the very things that make it look outdated today. The author goes overboard in emphasizing the cutting-edge nature of episodes, such as undercover journalists who lied to get a story or an editor's son becoming a member of Hare Krishna. But the way the stories were handled were extremely liberal and even politically incorrect (journalists should not be lying, the Krishna's were shown to be good in order to get their cooperation for the episode, etc.).
Numerous directors were used for the series and Daniel seems shocked by the fact that TV is not a director's medium, but a producer's medium (it always has been that way, yet he makes it seem like it was just peculiar to that time period). He says the producers wanted different directors so there would be different visual perspectives of the series--yet that again is one of the show's weakest elements, with oddball camera angles and no sense of visual cohesiveness from week to week.
Namely, Douglass Daniel doesn't provide an objective view of the strengths and weaknesses of Lou Grant. Instead he makes everything that the show did sound groundbreaking and positive. While it's true that the industry rewarded the series with Emmys, that only means that inside Hollywood they preferred the Lou Grant-style drama over the higher-rated prime time soap operas of that time period.
There is a somewhat interesting chapter on CBS's censorship department because the author was given access to many of the censor's notes on scripts. It, like everything else in this book, goes on too long and tries to push it's liberal agenda, but it's a fairly unique chapter for a television book.
The author also uses a chapter to discuss the charges that Lou Grant was cancelled after five years due to star Ed Asner's off-the-deep-end liberal politics. This is such a canard that it's hard to believe that people took the charges seriously, but there is evidence of some media critics and liberal organizations thinking it wasn't just the ratings that finished the series off. (There is zero evidence that it was anything other than low ratings and overdone writing killed the show.)
Asner even hired lawyers to prepare to sue CBS over the cancellation--and by then he had become what one critic called a "pompous bore." Asner had gone from the cuddly 1970s favorite of the Mary Tyler Moore Show to believing his new show's storylines making him a liberal crusader. The author deifies Asner in a way by not giving enough credence to the evidence that shows how foolish the star was.
The book's tone matches that of the series--kind of dry and dull. In retrospect the show was too serious and tried too hard to make points about journalistic integrity, which is similar to what this book is like. One of the Los Angeles Times consultants hired by the series made the point to producers that "the scripts lacked the wry humor of the newsroom and that the characters were stiff." That is probably the best analysis of the Lou Grant series--and yet he was let go after the first season. If his feedback would have been integrated into the program, the series may have done better in reruns. Instead no one is watching Lou Grant today and most people under 45 have never even heard of it. While it's nice to have a book discuss the subject, it's as uneven as the series.
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