A ROUT OF `QUALITY' PROGRAMS
The Verdicts From The Powers That Be
Newsday, 05-13-1993
By Diane Werts. STAFF WRITER
KEYWORD HIT THE NETWORKS' fall schedules are being announced this month - which accounts for the crying you're hearing from hardcore viewers around the land.
Fans of "Homefront" and "The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles" got their bad news from ABC on Monday, and the other networks are readying their cancellation lists.
Judging from ABC's wholesale ax-wielding - also out are such critics' pets as "Civil Wars" and "Sirens" - viewers devoted to so-called "quality" TV are expecting a repeat of two seasons back. That's when "thirty- something," "China Beach" and other serious dramas were canceled. Hopes for the kind of network patience displayed last season, when "I'll Fly Away" and "Brooklyn Bridge" returned despite low ratings, weren't all that strong, anyway.
"It's gonna be a massacre, I'm afraid," said Dorothy Swanson, who's been heading Viewers for Quality Television for eight years now. Her grassroots group of 2,500 tube watchers votes to "endorse" programs they feel offer rewarding viewing, and also tries to "educate the viewing public [that] the networks need to know about their support before they cancel a show, not after."
The group has helped create a generation of viewers who think of themselves as an integral part of the programing process. They lobby networks, sponsors and TV critics to let programers know what they want to see. The group provides pointers on how to do that, but in many cases fans of specific programs have organized themselves.
"Quantum Leap" devotees, for instance, engineer their activities through "Leap" fanzines and computer bulletin boards. They've been inundating NBC for months with mail, newspaper ads and rallies outside network offices. Even though NBC has announced that last week's "Leap" was the last after five seasons, fans are still working hard.
"I heard [NBC] had to shut down their faxes one day because we were jamming them," says "Leap" fan Heidi Sanchez, a 38-year-old teacher's aide from Bethpage. "At this point, we're enjoying just annoying them." They're also hoping the outpouring might result in future "Leaps" in the form of periodic network movies (like "Columbo") or a cable revival (repeats already air weeknights at 7 on USA).
It also doesn't hurt to have friends in high places. ABC's midseason entry "Where I Live" may have been renewed this week only because the producers lobbied such prominent blacks as Jesse Jackson and Bill Cosby to pressure the network. Ads in black-community newspapers encouraged viewer letters in support of the Harlem-set sitcom.
That tactic had proven itself last year: When ABC's period drama "Homefront" looked like a cancellation candidate after its freshman season, Dear Abby columnist Abigail Van Buren filled an entire column with letters from readers who loved the show as much as she did. "The rumors were that it was on tenterhooks or ready to go under, and I couldn't believe it, that something that good would be dropped," she says. After she printed ABC programer Robert Iger's address, "he got 20,000 letters the first week. Of course, he was furious with me, but even I didn't expect such an avalanche."
"Homefront" was renewed then. But when it seemed likely to die this season, Abby decided not to lead another campaign. "Mr. Iger," she says, "would just send a squad after me."
Cancellation doesn't necessarily mean the end of viewers' dedication these days, anyway. Three years after the demise of CBS' "Beauty and the Beast," for instance, fans still get together. "What's really funny is I never watched the show until it had been canceled," says Lee Minoff, a 46-year-old bookkeeper from Dix Hills. But since then she's gone to Orlando for a "BATB" convention, hosted local meetings and lobbied TV writers to write about the show's repeats (early Monday at 2:35 a.m. on WNBC / 4 and Saturday afternoon at 2 on WLIG / 55).
"Quantum Leap" fan Sanchez devotes about an hour a day to the series, chatting with other fans over the show's forum on the Prodigy computer network. "On one level, you can say it's just a television show, but on another level, it's only because of that that I've made so many friends. And that I've learned to write letters to a network, that you can do something," she says. "If nothing else happens from this, I won't lose that - that feeling of being empowered, that you can make a network listen."
Sometimes you can. Many fans will have to make do with their friends and their fanzines if, as Swanson sadly predicts, just half the shows endorsed by the viewers' group survive this month's cut. "`The airwaves are public, and I think the networks owe the viewing public some shows of substance, even if they're low rated," she said.
Diane Werts, A ROUT OF `QUALITY' PROGRAMS The Verdicts From The Powers That Be. , Newsday, 05-13-1993, pp 112.