Yeah, I know Alan. We're more casual acquaintances than friends.

"All television has improved...." I'm sorry, I can't believe anyone
actually wrote that sentence with a straight face. Overall, like the rest of
society, television has become *less* literate, *less* sophisticated than it
was in the early years. Sure, we can now make genitalia jokes on Married With
Children...but it that more sophisticated? Where I come from, sophistication
means smart, witty, urbane, worldly. That doesn't describe the majority of
contemporary TV.

The majority of current television programs produced currently are
sitcoms, the majority of which are, to me, unwatchable...I see very little of
the genuine humor of, say, the Dick Van Dyke show, or the sophistication of
MASH. A few -- Cybil, the Simpsons, a handful of others (and AbFab if you get
cable) -- are quite funny, but frankly, were it not for laugh tracks, I think
about 70% of sitcom writers would be out of business.

When it comes to drama...point out to me who out there is doing work on a
par with Reginald Rose or Rod Serling or Paddy Chayefsky...where on TV can you
find hour or 90 minute plays like "Requiem For a Heavyweight" or "Marnie" or
"Patterns?" Is there good stuff being done today? Yes, of course there
is...there's just *less* of it around in drama mainly because the networks do
all they can do dumb down a show to make it more accessible.

(A network suit actually *said* thsi to me: "Our operating philosophy
these days is that the people with upper or middle-class incomes, and an
education, are watching cable, or laser disks, or videotapes. So what we have
to do is to program for the rest of the audience, who may be under educated,
but don't have any other options." Scared the hell outta me.)

When I was working on JAKE AND THE FATMAN (no defense offered), I had a
script I'd written about a cop who's been trying to nail a certain bad guy for
the last 10 years. I had a line in that when they meet: the bad guy says, "I
suppose I should be flattered. Not every man has his own, personal Ahab." A
pretty spiffy line.

The network calls. "We think there's a typo; there's a character
referenced named Ahab, but we don't see him anywhere else in the script." My
exec tries to explain to the network suit...see, it's Ahab...Captain
Ahab...you know, MOBY DICK...a nut chasing a big fish...?" The network guy
says, "Look, I have an MBA [I think we already see part of the problem here -
jms] and if I don't know who Ahab is, nobody else is going to, so cut it out
of the script." And so it went, over my strongly stated objections.

Has some TV gotten better? Yes. Has some TV gotten worse? Most
definitely. But to say that "ALL television has improved" is, frankly, one of
the most astonishingly inaccurate statements I've seen in years. That means
there are no gaggles of talk shows parading our eccentricities in phosphor-dot
parades day and night; no infomercials; no "America's Goofiest Videos"....

There's more material out there, but as is the rule with just about
everything, 90% of everything is crap, to quote Sturgeon. If you have a pile
of 100 things, then 10 of them are great; if you have a pile of 1,000 things,
you can say there are now 100 great things where there were once only 10...but
one can also turn around and say that there are now 900 crappy things were
there were once only 90.

To the question uptopic about golden-age SF...I would be lying through my
teeth if I said I wasn't strongly influenced by the look and feel of golden
age SF, and that this has filtered into the show to one extent or another.

jms