What Was Lucy's Baby's Name?

By Richard Stengel

TV focuses on TV, a subject that is all nostalgia and no content

No wonder they call television a medium, Comedian Ernie Kovacs once observed, since it is neither rare nor well done. Moreover, no matter how it is cooked, television often seems to consist of leftovers. Never more so than in the past few weeks, when a persistent recipe served up by the networks has been television about television. After more than 30 years, it appears, television has discovered that it, too, has a "usable past," a peculiar history that can be exploited in every sense of the word.

Consider, for example, three recent specials--two of which soared in the ratings--as well as an upcoming special and a long-running game show. All have been designed for the TV generation, people whose personal history is intertwined with that of television, whose memories flicker with the shows they watched as children and teenagers.

Life's Most Embarrassing Moments (ABC), featuring John Ritter of Three's Company as host, was the No. 1-rated show in the last week of April. Notwithstanding its title, the show was not about Life's most embarrassing moments but television's. It took its place in a long television tradition of ritual humiliation: programs that deliberately embarrass their victims to the mingled amusement and relief of the audience. Shows like Candid Camera tried to catch unwitting people in mortifying circumstances, while The Newlywed Game prodded one spouse to air the other's dirty laundry. Most of the clips on Life's Most Embarrassing Moments were outtakes and slip-ups from TV shows such as Three's Company and Soap. Although the "embarrassing moments" were meant to be backstage revelations, somehow more "real" than the smooth, neatly edited programming they disrupted, they seemed instead to be unabashedly calculated.

TV's Censored Bloopers #5 (NBC), rated ninth in the same week, was a virtual clone of Life's Most Embarrassing Moments, but with a salacious twist. The word censored in the title was intended to turn viewers into video voyeurs. The host, Dick Clark, slick and eternally adolescent, sniggered as clips were shown of an elephant's trunk probing a zoo warden's crotch and an overly affectionate orangutan tweaking a newswoman's breast.. On a clip from Hollywood Squares, the late Paul Lynde replied to a question about what can make a monkey cry: "Learning that Tarzan swings both ways." This was hardly a blooper, and considering the double-entendres that Lynde regularly got away with, it is hard to imagine why this was censored in the first place.

Originally, television quiz shows Like The $64,000 Question tested arcane knowledge known only by the overeducated few. This week's special called The I Love TV Test (ABC, May 19, 8 p.m. E.D.T.) tests a knowledge of television history so superficial that even the most desultory viewer should score at least a B-plus. It is a multiple-choice TV trivia quiz that is merely trivial. Sample question: What was Lucille Ball's baby's name? 1) Little Desi, 2) Little Lucy, 3) Little

Ricky. Any viewer who does not guess Little Ricky should be sentenced to six months on Gilligan's Island.

Another quiz show currently exploiting TV nostalgia is Family Feud, whose host is the oleaginous Richard Dawson, formerly the scheming Cockney Newkirk on Hogan 's Heroes. This daily show has been featuring sitcom families such as the Bradys of The Brady Bunch and the Cleavers from Leave It to Beaver. During the program, the performers behave much as they did on their original shows, fostering the illusion that TV families never break up or die, but live on blissfully in real life as well as on reruns.

Everything on television begins and ends with commercials.

The evening news may present the doom and gloom; commercials are the good news, celebrating the joys of consumerism.

Bigger & Better TV's Greatest Commercials III (NBC) was rated only 28th last week, off sharply from its two top-ten-ranked predecessors. Nevertheless, it was a sponsor's dream, a video scrapbook celebrating the potent appeal of all those 30-second morality tales with happy endings. Among the "classics" shown: the new groom who, after consuming his wife's first meal ("Honey, I've never seen a dumpling that big"), tries to muffle the sound of Alka-Seltzer s fizzing. The show was a form of recall for the audience ("Hey, l remember that one!"), not only of the commercials but of performers who appeared in them 1 prior to becoming stars. A scrawny Sylvester Stallone hawked Rapid Shave; John Travolta sang in the shower for Safeguard; and a caLlow but ingratiating Dustin Hoffman crawled in and out of a Volkswagen, registering surprise at finding no engine under the hood. After an hour of this--interrupted of course by more commercials--viewers may have felt rather Like the man in another Alka-Seltzer commercial: you can't believe you watched the whole thing.

What is significant about these shows is that they are so insignificant. They are virtually without content, devoid of the most elementary dramatic interest. Ultimately, they are examples of what Media Scholar David Thorburn calls "television's genius for marketing banality." All of them represent aspects of a shared television culture, but they serve as reminders that the word culture also refers to something grown in an artificial medium. For instance, a virus.

--By Richard Stengel This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.