By Gene Mahoney

Jan 04 - Plug Away: Back on November 8th I went to a show at SOMARTS put on by a former advertiser of mine named Joseph S. Domingo, who’s one of San Francisco’s top fashion designers (josephdomingo.com.) Photos were by Dina Scoppettone (dinascoppettone.com) and the show was sponsored by The Maxwell Hotel, Noodle magazine, Filipinas magazine, and some folks from winebrats.org, who were pouring this tasty red wine from Sonoma called EccoDomani (visit eccodomani.com for info.) They also had a sparkling fruit juice there called essn which enables you to “hydrate your spirit” (visit skylarhaley.com for more info.)

One of the guys pouring Merlot and Chianti turned out to be this really interesting chap named Keith Taylor, a 28 year old Special Forces Marine who’s presently filming a documentary about Hollister (just south of San Jose) -- where, back in the ‘50’s, bikers really did take over a town as portrayed in the old Marlon Brando flick The Wild One (visit 1supermedia.com for more info on Keith’s film)....  Zen City Records present Sonic Meditations every Wednesday 10pm to 2am ($5 cover) at Cloud 9, 34 Seventh Street @ Jessee. Zencityrecords.com....

The best damn salsa sauce I’ve had in a long time? That would be at Casa Manana Taco Shop, 85 Bolinas Road in delightful Fairfax, Marin County (415-454-2384). Amelia’s in downtown Redwood City comes in a close second.... The Whitney Young Cultural Center Mansion is celebrating its first full year as a civic minded event space and is the only gallery that gives 80% of the profits to artists and saves the other 20% for children’s art programs. It’s at 1101 Masonic (between Haight and Page) in SF....

Don’t forget to go to SF Herald Night at Zebulon (83 Natoma off 2nd Street between Mission and Howard), 7 to 10pm the second Tuesday of each month. If you’re a poet, writer, comic, musician or whatever and want to perform, contact me at editor@sfherald.com. Make sure you type “Zebulon” in the subject line or I may think it’s spam and delete it...

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A few months ago I was driving through downtown Half Moon Bay when I noticed an art gallery reception, so I pulled over to get some free food and drink, but was pleasantly surprised when I actually enjoyed looking at the work being displayed. It was a series of oil paintings by a talented young artist named Clifford Bailey depicting jazz musicians in a cool, cartoon-ish style, kind of like if Hieronymus Bosch was alive today as a hipster. Check out the Borsini-Burr Gallery site (borsini-burr.com) for more info.

Making the scene there was this Bay Area icon I’ve been wanting to write about for a long time named Pete Douglas, who owns the Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society up Highway One, a few feet down from the Historic Miramar Inn Beach Restaurant. Since the paintings at the gallery were of jazz musicians, I should have known Pete would be there. Jazz is his life, and nearly every Sunday afternoon you can see some of the finest musicians in the world play at his beachfront house (when there’s no concert he just throws a potluck party all day until sundown.) “This is the kind of environment you should see jazz played in,” he says. “Not in some concert hall where you’d see a symphony.”

As you would likely deduce, Pete despises today’s pop music scene, but it isn’t just Britney Spears and Eminem he frowns upon. “Elvis Presley was the beginning of the end for western civilization. “ He’s a jazz man all the way, although he looks down upon today’s jazz scene as well, bemoaning the local jazz festivals headlining “the same old hack players from years ago who are well past their prime.”

He bought his place in 1957. “Back then it was a little beer joint which didn’t even look liveable. But immediately I had this image, like all the ‘50’s beatniks, that I could run a little fringe coffee house and play chess and actually make a living or something. This was a farming community back then -- mostly farmers and Portuguese fishermen and a few outcasts from society like me. I wanted to live on the beach and do my thing like all the other oddballs. I never wanted to become respectable and join the Rotary in Redwood City.” He hangs different flags out front, and on occasion they’ve drawn attention. “When I first started some cops drove by and asked me if I was flying a communist flag. I told them ‘No, man -- this is the flag of Turkey. They’re an ally.’ So they said ‘Oh’ and drove off.” He recalls a more heated confrontation with the police: “One night in 1959 two cops busted in here at about 2 in the morning. It was packed -- six musicians and 40 other bodies crammed into that tiny little room. The policeman said, ‘You’re serving liquor after hours,’ and I told them, “This is not a commercial place, this is my home. We’re having a party.’ Then the band started playing the theme from Dragnet and every other damned police tune they could think of.’” The cops took off.

Over the years the police and surrounding community have grown more accepting of Pete, who used to be a parole officer and got fired for chewing gum in court. One of the biggest laughs he gets is by showing people a letter from 40 years ago, written by a prominent San Mateo County employee (a judge or someone, I forget) demanding that Pete be fired, accusing him of being drunk and on drugs all the time. “I got this after I totaled one of their cars they had me drive! Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha!”

By the way, why does Pete call his venue the Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society? “Back in the early ‘60’s, some guy had brought some dynamite to set off on the beach, and meanwhile we had the stereo blasting into the street, playing jazz and popular music for dancing. After a while I got a little bored with that and put on Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos. Someone said, ‘Hey, that’s a good 4/4 tune -- let’s dance to it.’ So we were dancing to Bach, the dynamite was going off, and a slightly inebriated high school teacher coined the term when he said, ‘Obviously this is the Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society.’ It was a joke, but a few months later I hung out a sign with the name on it, and it stuck.”

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Gene’s TV Memories: This is a new addition to the Society Page and I hope you’ll like it (heck, maybe you could even identify with it.) Like most people, I grew up watching too much television -- and I’ll bet you did, too. Some of you out there are probably denying it, but I don’t buy it. Anyway, I thought I’d use this space to relive some TV memories of my youth -- the good, the bad, and the ugly. Oh, and the irrelevant, too; like what I’m writing about this month: a show called Number 96. I don’t know why I’ve been thinking about this show lately. Maybe because I can identify with it (it was supposed to be successful but never amounted to anything.)

This program had Fred Silverman’s M.O. all over it. For those of you who don’t know who Fred (or Freddy) Silverman is, he was a TV programmer known as “The Man With the Golden Gut” -- because of his instinct for what TV shows would be ratings hits. His network career started off at CBS, where he stunned network execs (and viewers) by axing popular shows like Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies because they were watched by folks in Alabama and Louisiana, not by people in New York and California, who generally had more money to buy things advertised on the shows’ commercials. At CBS he replaced these shows with intelligent, quality ones aimed at a more urban (and urbane) audience. Shows like Mary Tyler Moore, Bob Newhart, All in the Family, The Jeffersons, M*A*S*H, etc. I used to watch the CBS Saturday night lineup featuring these shows, and let me tell you, that was quality entertainment.

Bored commanding over the Tiffany Network’s huge ratings dominance, Freddy wanted a challenge. So in 1975 he left for ABC (which had trailed miserably behind CBS and NBC in the ratings race for nearly 25 years), soon turning it into the number one rated network with shows like Welcome Back, Kotter and Charlie’s Angels. He made a ratings king out of ABC with what became known as jiggle shows -- shows where the plots enabled scantily clad beautiful women to run around, jump up and down, and generally jiggle their ample bosoms before millions of viewers -- whether it was Suzanne Somers, Farrah Fawcett, Jacqueline Smith, Cheryl Tiegs, Tanya Roberts or whoever -- ABC could have been called TNA. Remember, this was the late ‘70’s, before every home had 500 channels and 24 hour pornography. Watching babes in bikinis in the background of a Love Boat episode was a big deal to the average male back then.

But it wasn’t just jiggle shows that made Freddy’s ABC so successful. Remember, he had the Golden Gut, and hence, the Midas Touch. When he came to ABC he convinced Garry Marshall to switch the focus of the series from the bland Richie Cunningham to THE FONZ, which shot the show’s numbers through the roof, making it the number one rated show on TV.

Then he got Marshall to spin off a series based on a Happy Days episode which featured two ditzy chicks on it. Yes, that show was Laverne and Shirley, which soon surpassed its parent show for the number one ratings crown, only to be overtaken eventually by another Silverman pick Three’s Company (based on a British sitcom called Man of the House.) Every time one of the characters delivered a punchline of a sexual nature (which was all the time), the studio audience would let out a big “Woooe!!!!!!” I used to imagine that along with flashing signs that read “Applause” and “Laugh”, the studio audience was also shown one that read “Woooe”. Anyway, it was a smash hit. If you looked at all these ABC shows like Starsky and Hutch, Fantasy Island, etc., they all appealed to a younger, hipper audience than what Freddie was aiming for at CBS.

In 1978, NBC hired him for a million dollars a year to rescue it from the ratings cellar. But man, talk about ‘when you’re hot you’re hot, when you’re not you’re not’...

Freddy immediately started flooding NBC’s schedule with ABC-style idiotic shows like Supertrain and Pink Lady and Jeff. Supertrain was a heavily hyped cross between The Love Boat and a cop show, kind of a fluffier version of the movie Silver Streak starring Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor. It took place on a nuclear powered train so big it had a swimming pool and took up two rails. Anyway, it lost half its audience the second week it was on the air and continued to lose viewers until it got the sack a few weeks later. Supertrain commonly used washed-up celebrities like Peter Lawford and Steve Lawrence as guest stars, just like The Love Boat did.

Pink Lady and Jeff was a variety show featuring this extremely untalented Japanese hot chick singing duo (who couldn’t speak English and were big in the Land of the Rising Sun but unknown here) teamed up with this awful Catskills-style stand-up comic named Jeff Altman (who is still trying to make it in show biz -- you’ll see him pop up in beer commercials and similar fare once in a while.) Commonly regarded by TV critics as one of the worst shows ever, it got the ax after a few weeks.

Besides Silverman’s programs not being very good (or any good), a lot of the shows had trouble finding an audience because the audience had trouble finding the shows. Apparently he thought all of America read Variety so he shifted the nights and time slots for programs constantly. And if a show didn’t score big ratings on its premiere, he’d cancel it a week later.

Another reason for Freddy’s troubles at NBC was just plain ol’ bad luck. Silverman had his hopes up for a youth oriented sitcom called Brothers and Sisters (a toned down Animal House rip-off about frats and sororities) which he planned to debut right after Super Bowl XIII. As you know, the Super Bowl is the TV event of the year -- the ratings jackpot. Whereas the World Series and the NBA Championship divide their audience over seven game playoffs, the Super Bowl is a one game showdown that has all of America glued to their sets.

And Super Sunday on January 21, 1979 was no exception. As expected, Super Bowl XIII placed a dominant number 1 in the Nielsen Ratings, but Brothers and Sisters placed a distant number 35! The network was promoting the hell out of Brothers and Sisters day and night (even buying ad time to promote it on non NBC stations as I recall), it was RIGHT AFTER the game, and the show lost almost all of the Super Bowl lead in audience! This was unheard of in television history! And it happened to the show that Silverman was promoting as the smash hit NBC so desperately needed.

Then the biggie: NBC paid a phenomenal amount of money to air the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow -- a sure fire ratings bonanza. But then, a few months before the Olympics, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, prompting then-President Jimmy Carter to boycott U.S. participation in the games. So instead of dominating the ratings that summer, NBC was forced to air reruns of its low rated programs. The Olympics debacle, network infighting, and savage criticism of low rated shows (like Hello Larry) prompted Silverman to tell a stockholders’ conference, “If NBC had Dallas, whoever shot J.R. would have missed.”

ABC was using Silverman’s hits there to spin off new series that also ended up becoming hits (like Three’s Company spawning The Ropers.) Silverman wanted to do the same for his new network, but at one point NBC didn’t even have a show in the Top 20!  So he had to spin off shows from programs that weren’t even popular (like B.J. and the Bear spawning The Misadventures of Sheriff Lobo.)

Think of it. Not even one show in the Top 20. And this was before Fox, UPN, the WB, and everyone having cable. There were only three networks!

Prime Time was a disaster for NBC, but at least they were still the king of late night. Well, even that was looking bad. 1980 was the scariest year for NBC’s late night programming ever. Johnny Carson, NBC’s then biggest star, almost left The Tonight Show around this time, but Freddy managed to hang on to him. They gave him more money, trimmed the show from 90 minutes to 60 and Johnny showed up, like, maybe once a week to host it. Then Saturday Night Live creator/producer Lorne Michaels left the show. An entirely new cast was selected by new producer Jean Doumanian, who botched everything she possibly could and 1980 went down as the worst season in the show’s history. Ratings for it plummeted and the show didn’t recover until Silverman was long gone from NBC.

Adding insult to injury, The Today Show, which used to eat its competition for breakfast, continued to lose ground to ABC’s Good Morning, America.

Silverman did manage to place a few hits, though, like Diff’rent Strokes (a family sitcom starring former California Gubernatorial hopeful Gary Coleman, the troubled Todd Bridges, and the late Dana Plato) and Real People (the genesis of “reality shows” that even Silverman regrets having started), but as 1980 rolled along, it looked like Freddy’s Golden Gut had let him down. He was doing about as well at NBC as the Soviets were doing in Afghanistan. Saturday Night Live even had skits with John Belushi portraying Silverman as a double agent secretly working for ABC. The irony is that whatever show Freddy placed on NBC got its ass kicked by a hit show he had already placed on ABC. Silverman was kicking his own ass!

Sometimes you had to wonder if this was the same Fred Silverman who enjoyed so much success at CBS and NBC. Maybe the Saturday Night Live skit was true after all. ABC’s slogan for its fall schedule was “Still the One” (only the number one network got to use “one” in their slogan.) CBS had “Turn us on, we’ll turn you on”.

Silverman unveiled NBC’s new slogan: “Proud as a Peacock”. (He brought back the “This program is brought to you in living color” peacock logo that NBC used in the ‘60’s to inform viewers that their shows were no longer in black and white.) The slogan (and new updated version of the old peacock logo) soon became a national joke, being viciously lampooned on NBC shows like SNL and Tonight. If you listened to the “NBC, Proud as a Peacock!” jingle the network played, it sounded as if the singers were embarrassed singing it. The agency NBC hired to write and sing the “Proud as a Peacock” jingle (Joey Levine Crushing Enterprises) wrote a satire of it called “Loud as a Peacock” that managed to get out (rumor has it that Don Imus almost got fired for playing it on his radio show.) Go to tvland.com if you want to read it.

So where does Number 96 fall into all of this? Why single out this show when I could write about any number of Freddy’s NBC bombs -- like Whodunnit? (a 30 minute murder mystery where guest stars like Eric Estrada and Jack Klugman played characters getting whacked and the studio audience would try to guess who the killer was.) Well, I don’t know, but I’ll try to figure it out.

 

Number 96 was another highly hyped NBC show that went absolutely nowhere. Billed as “The Series They Tried To Ban In Australia!”, it was an hour long sitcom with an unknown cast, except (maybe) for Greg Mullavey, who played the husband on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and Ellen Travolta, who had a famous last name thanks to her brother John.

The U.S. show was an hour long sitcom, but Down Under Number 96 was a prime time soap opera that received plenty of controversy, and huge ratings, most likely due to its penchant for full frontal nudity of men and women, lots of sex scenes, and TV’s first openly gay character not played for laughs. Though a smash hit, the Aussie producers wanted to make it even more successful by killing off some of the show’s less popular characters with a plotline involving a bomb going off in the apartment complex (Number 96 Paddington in Sydney.) This backfired when they got carried away and killed off some popular characters as well. The show began a ratings nosedive, finally ending its 6 year run in 1978.

I remember Thanksgiving 1980, watching a football game on NBC with my dad’s side of the family at my grandmother’s apartment in Queens. A promo for the American Number 96 came on that showed an attractive woman in a bikini, sitting in a hot tub, seductively telling the camera about how wonderful her husband is. Then she smirked and said something like, “That’s him over there” and it cut to a guy making out with another woman (a nice thing to watch with your Irish Catholic grandmother.)

Anyway, like I said, NBC kept hyping the soon-to-be-aired program, insinuating it was sexier than anything Silverman had placed on ABC. This American Number 96 didn’t have a plotline involving a bomb -- to use football terminology, this show was THE BOMB, the Hail Mary Pass -- it was Silverman’s last desperate attempt at a smash hit (hell, even a minor hit) he needed to keep his job. This was a year after the sinful ‘70’s, and the show took place at a swinging singles apartment complex (Number 96 Pacific Way in Southern California), so viewers were supposed to excitedly tune in to see the sexcapades.

But they never did.

This next paragraph (taken from jumptheshark.com) really sums it up:

"The end of NBC’s 1980-81 season was the lowest point in the network’s history. Every new show it had come up with had bombed and even the ratings of its returning shows like Little House on the Prairie were starting to crumble. Every week it had survived, Number 96 was NBC’s lowest rated show. Out of curiosity I had turned it on in the hopes of seeing the sitcom equivalent of a 30 minute car crash but I was SHOCKED to find the show pretty funny! The details of one episode I saw escape me twenty years later but I remember one of the guys was trying to impress a woman in his high rise apartment building by hanging outside her window holding a sign that read “Please forgive me!” or something. What I will never forget was the LACK of advertisements. Nowadays even the lowest rated show on TV is packed with ads so this may be hard to believe. The show’s ratings were so low, NBC couldn’t even GIVE AWAY this show’s slots. NBC’s overall ratings had dropped so low, it couldn’t guarantee advertisers decent “make good” slots later in the season when advertisers saw that no one was seeing their ads, so advertisers simply pulled out every last one of them. NBC filled these empty minutes with promos for their other 1980 season catastrophes while local slots were filled with public service announcements. I hoped that maybe the show could make an end of the season rush at the ratings (god knows it wouldn’t have taken much to be a NBC hit that season) but NBC pulled the plug on Number 96 the very next week."

So, despite a highly publicized premiere on December 10, 1980, Number 96 disappeared from television on January 2, 1981. Maybe because it was so hyped then and now it’s so forgotten, maybe because on paper it should have worked but failed miserably, well, maybe that’s why, if I had to use a television show as a symbol for my life, in my darker moments I’d be tempted to use Number 96.

His victories in the ratings war at CBS and ABC a distant memory, NBC had become Silverman’s Waterloo (or Soviet Afghanistan). Not only had he not taken NBC from last place to first place in the Nielsen Ratings, audience share for the network during his tenure had actually hit an all time low. NBC affiliates were defecting in mass for the other two networks. In 1981 Fred Silverman was replaced as head of NBC programming by Grant Tinker, ex-husband of Mary Tyler Moore and the producer of her critically praised and high rated classic sitcom Silverman placed on CBS a decade earlier. Tinker nurtured shows like Cheers and St. Elsewhere that were critically acclaimed, weathering the initial low ratings and standing by them until they became hits. Critically praised programs like Family Ties and The Cosby Show were soon all over NBC’s schedule and the network became the ratings leader.

Ironically, Silverman’s most successful NBC show was one that premiered with little fanfare. Apparently he never expected this show to be very successful. He never hyped it the way he hyped Supertrain or Number 96. It just quietly went on the air, received tremendous critical praise, slowly developed a large dedicated audience, set a record for most Emmy nominations in TV history, and lasted six years after he left NBC. It was called Hill Street Blues.

His programming days behind him, Silverman became a successful TV producer with Perry Mason starring Raymond Burr, In the Heat of the Night starring Carroll O’ Connor, Jake and the Fatman starring William Conrad, and Diagnosis: Murder starring Dick Van Dyke. (The first three stars died so when Dick goes I don’t know what Freddy is going to do.)

There was a time, in 1980, when I was a 15 year old kid, and thought that before 2004 rolled around, I’d be sitting at the desk old Freddy boy used to sit at, an hour from my Long Island home, at 30 Rockefeller in Manhattan, where NBC is, making all the big programming decisions.

But, like most dreams, it got canceled. Canceled like one of NBC’s flop shows from 1980. I had high hopes for that dream, but it met the same fate as Number 96. It met the same fate as Supertrain. It met the same fate as Pink Lady and Jeff. It met the same fate as Brothers and Sisters. It met -- okay, you get the point. Actually, I wish I knew how to end this column. I wish I knew why I even wrote it in the first place. Turn it off.

Click.

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Gene can be emailed here