ECP 90s #1: NBC News Today (January 1, 1990)
A brief divergence to the 1990s, with the best of the 80s, the fall of communism, Gene Shalit's moustache, and of course ALF
What this is: As an occasional break from the main 1950s series, I’m taking a look at every easily accessible TV show from the 1990s, and theoretically onward. I recognized it’s going to be a long time (as in a few centuries) until we get to this period at the rate I’m going, and I do really like 90s TV.
There are a lot of other eras and decades I could do, and maybe I will, but the 90s seemed like a natural choice because a) it’s roughly halfway between 1950 and the present, rounding up b) this is the era where I was actually alive, even if a child, and c) the 90s is kind of a pivotal decade where American TV began transitioning from the three-network era that had reigned for decades into the panoply of options we know today. For the time being I’ll be doing one 90s episode per 1950 week, to break up the Wednesday and Thursday KFO episodes, but I could throw in some extras if I ever build up a backlog again.
What I watched: The January 1, 1990 episode of NBC News Today. This episode of the long-running morning show was hosted by Bryant Gumbel, Gene Shalit, and ALF (voiced and puppeteered by Paul Fusco.) Guests included Bryan Donlon, Bobby Rivers, Ruth Brown and Sammy Cahn. This episode would have aired on NBC at 7 am, and a New York broadcast of the show is available on YouTube.
What happened: We open on a very young-looking Bryant Gumbel and a very strange-looking Gene Shalit. Since they couldn’t get anyone else, they have a special guest: ALF. Oh, this project is already paying off. ALF sounds a little hung over and has some blue-leaning banter with the other hosts. Gumbel says they’re going to look back at the 80s and decide what the best stuff was.
They throw it to Bob Kerr for some more serious news. He shows us New Years Eve celebrations from New York, Seattle (where the Space Needle was attempting to brand itself as “Times Square West”), and Berlin, where the Berlin Wall has just fallen weeks before. President George HW Bush has sent Gorbachev a New Year’s message, while Manuel Noriega is holed up in the Vatican Embassy in Panama. David Dinkins has just been sworn in as mayor of New York.
There’s a video segment with Kenley Jones about a new anti-smoking law in North Carolina, “the heart of tobacco country.” The law will set aside a whole quarter of large restaurants for non-smokers. Crazy! The Titan-3 rocket, a commercial enterprise, successfully launches, while in the UK they’re trying to end a months-long coal strike. Also, the weather was cold.
We go back to Bryant, who is outlining the top 10 news stories of the 80s with a veteran news anchor. The top 3 stories are the Reagan presidency, Gorbachev’s reforms, and the “disintegration of communism”, and names Gorbachev the man of the decade. He also predicts Gorbachev will be the “man of the 90s”, which didn’t work out so well.
Bryan Donlon is back to describe the top 10 most impactful TV shows from the 1980s. He says the big thing in 80s television is the turn to “reality-based” television. I guess he’s not talking about the Kardashians just yet. Bryant is shocked when he names Star Trek: The Next Generation among his top 10. The top 3 are Hill Street Blues, M*A*S*H, and The Cosby Show, with Cosby as the person of the decade. Well, that one didn’t age well.
The show is interrupted by a local news break. This upload seems to be from New York or thereabouts, so we get footage of Dinkins’ swearing-in and a story about the MTA increasing fares. Bryant and Gene yuk it up with Alf a little bit more, and he says that the women on Melmec look like Rhea Perlman. So, beautiful? We get another news update, dealing with New Year’s celebrations in Atlanta, Panama and Romania.
The next top 10 list is about the top sports stories of the 80s, with Len Berman. I’m happy to see CFL legend Doug Flutie and the 1985 Villanova championship team represented. The top 3 are Joe Montana’s Super Bowl-winning drive for the 49ers, Magic Johnson breaking out for the Lakers, and the Miracle on Ice. Bryant objects to many of the inclusions on the list. Len names Mike Tyson, who was still undefeated, as the athlete of the 80s, with honourable mention to Wayne Gretzky.
After ads, it’s time for books, with Christopher Lehman-Haupt listing the most important books of the decades. Bryant says that 14 million books were sold in America in the 80s, which was fewer than the total number of books sold by E. L. James in the 2010s. One of the listed items is the first volume of Robert Caro’s biography of Lyndon Johnson, which is still unfinished today. The top 3 are Anne Tyler’s Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant, James MacPherson’s history Battle Cry of Freedom, and the Reader’s Catalog “book of books.” Probably the most recognizable book is Thomas Harris’s Silence of the Lambs, which was a year away from a film adaptation. John Updike is selected as the man of the decade.
Finally is music, with VH-1’s Bobby Rivers. Bryant continues to be weirdly confrontational, as Bobby comes off as a little too intellectual for this hour of the morning. The top 3 songs are “Material Girl”, “Fast Car”, and “Beat It”, with Tracy Chapman as the person of the decade. Can’t object to any of that. After some more banter at the top of the hour, ALF and Bryant go out in the hall to get a donut while Gene leads with some high-culture. Before that, we get another newsbreak, with reports from Romania and Latvia as they move to roll back dictatorial powers and the influence of the Soviet Union.
Gene introduces three guests from Broadway: actress Ruth Brown, songwriter Sammy Cahn, and critic Guy Flatley. They do a little singing from Ruth’s show Black and Blue, and Sammy’s hit “Three Coins in the Fountain” along with some other standards. It’s maybe a little magical. After commercials, Gene talks to movie producer David Brown, who worked on movies like Jaws and Patton. Gene leads a panel discussion on why there are no more musical films, a question we’re still asking 24 years later. Brown thinks that things will turn around, while Flatley speculates that the songs in the upcoming Dick Tracy could be the start of something. Another local news update tells us about the first baby born of the decade, ten seconds after midnight in Brooklyn.
Gene talks to David about his career as a producer, involving two hit musicals across the street from each other, and to Ruth about her career comeback after being an early R&B musician. Guy puts open the current state of movies, including Born on the Fourth of July, Driving Miss Daisy, Glory, and When Harry Met Sally. Gene also runs down movies that came out earlier in 1989, including Batman, Field of Dreams and Sex, Lies and Video Tape. Damn, it was a pretty good year in movies.
After the break, Gene asks David about why so many big movies come out at the same time. David says that movies have to be released soon after they’re finished to pay back loans. Nobody told David Zaslav that. He also complains that movies open up big and are either boom-or-bust, which hasn’t changed much. Brown claims that “there are no more studio movies”, which I’m not sure was true by 1990, and Gene praises Tom Cruise’s performance in Born on the Fourth of July. He asks the three guests for their new year’s wishes, and hopes that they’ll all be able to celebrate together in the year 2000. As far as I can tell, all four made it to the millennium.
Back at the desk, Bryant asks Alf how he plans to be a better lifeform in 1990. He makes a couple jokes about celebrities I don’t know. Bryant cites a poll that Alf was voted one of the top 20 TV personalities of the 80s. If that doesn’t tell you something about 80s TV, I don’t know what will. Gene bonds with Alf about being weird-looking. Bryant serves him a stuffed cat as payment for appearing on the show.
What I thought: As I’ve noted before, I’m not a morning show viewer, so this 2-hour block was a lot to take in as the first show of the 1990s. This was obviously a break from the usual format, and is given over mostly to interviews and a long panel discussion. In between it all, we have the weirdness of two generally-respected TV anchors interacting with a sitcom puppet in the form of ALF.
ALF was only a few months away from cancellation, and the show as a whole was the type of gimmicky 80s sitcom that would, if not fade out entirely in the 90s, at least give up ground to more urbane fare. So his presence here is something of a relic, a joke about how dumb 80s TV was. Still, he produces some decent banter about New Year’s Eve on Melmec, and it’s a fun way to make this show distinct.
The summaries of the arts and news in the 80s are interesting not so much as incisive history but as a statement of what the media valued in 1990. The news and music sections seem to generally math with our received ideas of the 80s, while sports has some notable divergences. The TV list is somewhat interesting, as it includes some series and TV movies that have been completely forgotten, but it does highlight some of the real trends that would be important to TV in the 90s: the rise of original programming on HBO (and cable at large), syndicated sci-fi shows, and shows with larger ensembles and more serialization.
Pop culture in the 90s may have no longer at the point where TV shows were making jokes about operas, but books were still at least a presence in the culture. The book panel is somewhat bizarre in its choices, but it shows that popular novels and non-fiction books were still something that even a fairly fluffy morning show could deal with. I can’t remember the last time I heard a talk show host interviewing an author or even talking about a bestseller, unless it was a joke about Fifty Shades of Grey.
The second hour of the show, where Gene Shalit hosts a panel about Broadway and musical films, also expects a certain amount of patience and sophistication from the audience. The performance by Sammy Cahn was by far the highlight of the show, a rare moment where it felt like the vaudeville review had been resurrected on the medium that replaced it. The resulting discussion is pretty decent, even if it’s a reminder of how many movies hyped up as Oscar contenders end up being pretty ephemeral (who remembers The War of the Roses?)
Probably the thing that surprised me most, however, was the amount of interruptions by local news. There must have been three or four per hour. Maybe that’s normal, or maybe it was specifically for the holiday edition. The version uploaded to YouTube is from the New York area, and the local news interruptions mostly focus on New Year’s celebrations around the world. There’s a surprising amount of detail for local news, including relatively lengthy reports on Romania and Berlin.
The big topic, of course, is the increasingly rapid disintegration of the Eastern bloc, and the advent of the 1990s provides a good enough excuse to opine on it. This was mere weeks after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and months after Tiananmen Square. Most people couldn’t predict the full extent to which the Soviet Union and its state-socialist alliance would fall apart, but it was obvious that things were changing. These reports are an example of how local news was perhaps more erudite a few decades ago, but still just as opinionated, freely stating the subtext about the fall of tyranny and the rise of freedom. The coming decade would present many challenges to those Cold War cliches, but that’s still a ways off.
And now, a word from our sponsors: This is New York, so there’s a lot of ads for Broadway shows, including something billed as “Russia’s first rock musical” (“Glasnost made it possible!”) the still-running Rockettes Christmas show, and of course CATS! There’s also commercials for a Super Bowl trivia book, a TV special just called DRUG WARS, and Total cereal, which I think was plugged by one of the actors from LA Law.
Coming up next: We return to 1950 for Kukla, Fran and Ollie, with Ollie taking on a new job as a model. They’ll eat him alive!