Crosby v. NBC

Esther Williams was fed up with television--too much crawl, not enough free style--and she said so in a newspaper interview, complaining that talentless network executives had all but foundered an aquatic show she had done for NBC earlier in the summer. It didn't even matter to her that the show had won one of the highest ratings of the summer: its mediocrity pained her. To Critic John Crosby, this was his cup of chlorine, and last week he took over where Critic Williams had left off. In his New York Herald Tribune column, he expanded the argument into a general indictment of recent NBC network policy under President Robert Kintner and Board Chairman Robert Sarnoff.

"NBC is a mess of colossal proportions," wrote Crosby, recalling better days under the "visionary" regime of Pat Weaver and citing the network's decline in quality during the gradual transition from good dramatic shows like Philco Playhouse to dreary series like Riverboat. Moreover, said Crosby, the network profits were falling off sharply. And in five years, by the ratings, it had sunk from the No. 1 to the No. 3 network.

Calling Crosby's column "vindictive" and "distorted," Sarnoff, Kintner & Co. objected that he is "not informed, hates television, and uses his column as a springboard to bounce quips off." He was unfair, they said, to compare today's programing with the show spectrum of the Weaver era, since ABC had meanwhile emerged as a third major network, and it was competitively necessary to match its frank and potent mediocrities. What really bothered the NBC brass was not Crosby's charge of mediocrity but his suggestion that the network is not making money. As part of the parent RCA, NBC's profit-loss figures are never released, but management insisted that NBC as a whole is doing better financially than ever.

Critic Crosby stuck to his guns, bolstered by Madison Avenue critics who claim that 1) network profits have indeed fallen off over the last few years; 2) in their pro tests and handsome profit claims, the harried executives were evidently referring to the entire NBC company with all its properties--notably the money-coining owned-and-operated stations--to disguise the poorer returns from the network operation as such. "I will now retire from the financial page," said Crosby, "but, by God, I am right. The real point I was trying to make in that column was that being mediocre has not helped NBC."

Meanwhile, poor Esther Williams presumably still could not fathom it all, still may be wondering if she could ever "find a man I can lean on who knows his job. I don't think that's possible in the world of mediocrity known as the television industry."

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