Word: cbs
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...WIOU (CBS, debuting Oct. 24, 10 p.m. EDT). Yet another network series about TV's favorite subject: itself. John Shea plays the news director of a struggling station, where a pompous anchorman (Harris Yulin) paws female reporters under the desk. Lou Grant would have furloughed them...
Network programmers like to think of themselves as wacky guys. Just look at the shows they put on the air. In NBC's The Fanelli Boys, four grownup brothers move back to Brooklyn to live with . . . their mother! In CBS's Evening Shade, a man is nonplussed when his wife tells him she's pregnant; he's already had a vasectomy! (Rim shot.) In Fox's Good Grief, Howie Mandel plays a nutty guy who does TV commercials for (hold on to your hats) a mortuary...
Comedy is the gasoline that keeps the networks' engines humming, but the octane level seems especially low this fall. Of the 17 new sitcoms introduced by CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox, not a single one ranks in the Nielsen Top 30. Is there a comedy glut? Or, more likely, are viewers simply recoiling against network packaging that has grown so boringly rote and predictable that all signs of life have drained out? If so, relief is at hand: increasingly offbeat shows are cropping up in out-of-the-way places on the dial. Some deserve their obscurity. Others might shrivel...
...POLK CONSPIRACY by Kati Marton (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $22.95). The former newswoman and wife of TV anchor Peter Jennings uncovers new information about the 1948 murder of CBS journalist George Polk in Salonika bay, Greece -- and fresh evidence of a cover-up by the Greek and U.S. governments...
Warning of an "alarming trend," CBS sportscaster Lesley Visser drew national attention to another reporter-player clash: a summer rebuff of Detroit Free Press reporter Jennifer Frey by Detroit Tigers pitcher Jack Morris when she requested an interview. Said Morris: "I don't talk to women when I am naked unless they are on top of me or I am on top of them." Tigers . president Bo Schembechler admitted that Morris' comments were out of line, but said in a letter to the paper that sending a woman into the locker room showed a "lack of common sense...