Show 1 ijwMta 4kS aJUs Auw u jL-- £ Variety is still the spice of life x - except on w xwt&avar iwr J TV prime-tim- e By JACQUELINE CUTLER TVData Features Syndicate The variety show once signaled summer as surely as the sound of an approaching tee cream truck And before they were summer fare variety shows dominated the airwaves For years a hit variety show brought stardom to performers from Kerimt the Frog and Miss Piggy ("The M uppet Show") to Sonny and Cher Last week's premiere ol "The Wayne Brady Show" in which the talented Brady sings dances and improvises could be the beginning of a resuigence for the genre depending on the half-hoshow's ratings Carol Burnett hopes so A day alter running into Brady Burnett praises him "I wish they would give linn an hour" she says "There they go again scared to death of the Indeed ABC publicists warned Brady against using the term "variety show" “To the average Joe when you say variety show they think of someone in a seqtiined gown and for the next act the juggling bears come out" he says "I preler to call this a show” h Brady is' excited to have met Burnett who was one of his early influences "I think of her and Flip Wilson and '(Your) Show of Shows' and Frnie Kovacs as an era when real actors and entertainers were born" he says Indeed Burnett was the queen of variety shows dominating the formal from 1967 to 1979 Long before she sang her signature song "It's Time to Sty Goodbye" Burnett was a fan of the genie And as a viewer she misses this type ol show "They were my first love" Burnett says "Just the term 'variety' says it all If you don't like column A there is column B coming up very soon" That alone is one of the problems says Don Mischer executive pioducer ol "The Wayne Brady Show" "People simply have less patience today" he says Mischer admits that like most people lie's quick with the remote "V ilh the advent of the clicker people create their own variety" Mischer says “I dare something to interest me for more than live minutes There is so much on television right now that il you take the time to scan 75 channels you create your own vanety" "V hen the first edition of our book came out in ’79 the average household could see six channels" says Earle Marsh coauthor ol “The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable 1 V Shows" “Today the average household can see 85 channels In 1979 the three major networks in prime time among them attracted over 90 percent of the total audience Today if you throw in Fox those four networks are to attract 45 percent” "Music is key in variety shows" Mischer says "In music our tastes have changed and become much more diversified There was a tunc in the '70s when an artist like Frank Sinatra or John Denver could capture half the country” "It seems like tastes have changed tremendously all around" says Mike Ludlum a former network executive and current professor of broadcasting at New York University "Tastes have evolved and gone away from what they were in the '40s through the '90s We're now getting the reality shows and there's Some People said rock 'n' roll was a fad speculation that it's a fad in the '50s and it wasn't Things tend to evolve” Change was inevitable says Bud Rukeyser retired alter 30 The man al the ore oj the new ABC series " The Wayne Brads' Show" calls hnnself "an oe might sat cess after Id years " The mnsicalcoined'-sketcslum airs at 7: JO p m Wednesdas v on KTVX Channel 4 h years as an NBC executive "The technology changed: the audience changed" he says "When it started the only people who could watch network television were the people who could afford what sets cost in those days In sociological terms the audience and the programming was designed to appeal to was high-enthose people It was also a live medium There was no videotape And variety was a natural thing to come over to television It was already available in vaudeville and theater and so on All anybody had to do was put a camera on it As technology changed the audience changed and more and more people could afford lelcv ision sets the programming had to change" Variety shows however hardly are lelies from TV's early days Marsh who also was once a network executive calculates that in the past 25 years network TV hosted 86 variety shows Of those 33 aired in the past 20 years A successful variety show requires people who can sing dance where rats and be hinny Judging by this summer's line-ucrawling over people passes for entertainment it would seem such talent is a thing of the past "I know people say there is nobody out there who can do them” Burnett says "Wayne certainly can So can Marty Short: they didn’t let him sail And I would even think Bette Midler (could too) Here is this woman who is so musical and so olf the wall outrageously funny but again I don't know if people can J do (now) what we did (then) " Burnett who has a special planned for this fall says she would never return to a weekly variety show "It's a dillerent climate out there and we happened at probably one of the best times in TV history" she says "It was before the suits started to think they knew how to write and you didn’t have any network d p hard-press- AUGUST 11 -- 18 2001 Standard-Examine- r 47 |