“In what part of the house is the fire now?”

November 1951

“Now let’s see, we’re tied up on Wednesday and Thursday, but I think we can make it on Friday.”

October 1957

“Just for fun I registered my dad with an online dating service. They matched him with a recliner and TV.”

September/October 2006

“We’re starting out with just the bare essentials.”

September 1955

“Thanks, honey.”

March/April 1994

“A glass of fine Chablis, a marvelous cheddar, and a Three Stooges festival. Cheers!”

November 1980

Cartoons: A Love for TV The Saturday Evening Post

Also: Meet Mad Men Creator Matt Weiner and catch up on details about the retro drama, life at home, and what made the writer aim so high.

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Mad Men-Era Advertising The Saturday Evening Post

Laugh-In football sketch. Alan Sues is the player. Dave Madden the coach.

Humor’s a funny thing.

Consider the joke that makes us roar with laughter today. Twenty years from now, audiences may hear it without even cracking a smile. Or consider the comedians we think are side-splittingly funny. Few will still be thought amusing a generation or two from now. Who now remembers Ed Gallagher and Al Shean, the headliners of the 1910s? Or Joe Weber and Lew Fields, the top comedy team of the 1890s? Or the most popular comedians of the late 1960s, Dan Rowan and Dick Martin?

Actually, many baby boomers will still remember Rowan and Martin, although their TV comedy program has been off the air for 40 years. Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In featured straight-man Rowan feeding lines to Martin, who responded with screwball responses that were a cross between Stan Laurel and Gracie Allen. This was followed by a wild assortment of unrelated skits and jokes. That formula may not sound so original now, but in 1969 and 1970, it was a breath of fresh air, and made Laugh-in the most watched program on television. It was, as a Post article put it, “Where TV Comedy Is At.”

Laugh-In was manic, relentless, and unlike anything we’d ever seen. It used nearly every comedy device known: short skits, one-liners, puns, slapstick, improvisation, and satire. Much of the show reworked ancient gags from vaudeville. It even offered a touch of burlesque with its leering close-ups of graffiti painted on bikinied women, most notably the then-sex-symbol Goldie Hawn whom the show turned into an overnight sensation.

But Laugh-In also brought innovations to TV comedy. It was the first show to fill an entire hour with comedy without a plot or theme. There were no singers, acrobats, or dance troupes—just comedians. And if the quality of jokes wasn’t all you might want, you couldn’t complain about the portion sizes. Laugh-In served at least 250 jokes every show.

We should add that these were not always ‘jokes’ in any traditional sense. One of the great laugh-getters—and we are not making this up—was the line “Sock it to me.” Just that. “Sock it to me.”

Celebrities lined up for the privilege of delivering that line on the show. Even Richard Nixon appeared in a September 1968 episode to speak it, though he stated it in the form of a question—“Sock it to me?” Hubert Humphrey, who was running against him for the presidency that year, declined an offer to go on camera and utter the phrase. And he lost the election, you’ll remember.

They Socked It To Us The Saturday Evening Post

It wasn’t always this way. Back in the early 1960s, many Americans were deeply concerned over what they saw as a lack of quality in television programming.

They had allowed television into their homes because it had promised them art, information, and entertainment. But after a decade of network broadcasting, most of what they got was mindless entertainment. Or so Newton Minow believed, and he was the head of the Federal Communications Commission. In 1961, he invited the country’s broadcasters—

“to sit down in front of your own television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day… Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland.”

Originally, that line in the speech read “a vast wasteland of junk.” That’s how Minow’s speechwriter, John Bartlow Martin, had expressed it after watching an entire broadcast day of a Chicago station. In those 15 hours, he saw little more than cheap, unimaginative programming and an endless torrent of advertising.

The commercials, loud and frequent and long, seemed stupefying. One commercial asked, “Would you prefer this kind of whiteness?”… [When another] inquired, “Is your bathroom guestroom-fresh? Just one light whizzer whoosh in your bathroom.…” nearly 3,000,000 of us watched.

[By mid-morning, I had] witnessed some seventy commercials.

In the preceding nine hours, except for the news broadcasts and two brief interviews on the Today Show, nobody on Channel 5 had discussed a single idea.

The game shows of the morning were succeeded by soap operas in the afternoon.

We were entertained by Young Dr. Malone, a somewhat mystifying program to a one-time watcher, because so much seemed to have gone before, and From These Roots, which presented the same difficulty, though it did contain one memorable line… “Why, I’m in better shape now than I was before my brain operation.”

By the time he reached prime time, he wasn’t enjoying anything, not even the program called “the hottest show in television”: Sing Along With Mitch.

Mitch said, “Hi. Here we are again—to stir up the fires of memory,” and invited us in 11,700,000 homes to join him in singing “By the Light of the Silvery Moon.” The author did not join him and has no way of knowing how many of his fellow watchers joined him. Mitch introduced elaborate production numbers, with costumed dancers and singers and what looked to be a live horse. He was sponsored by cereal, eye make-up, wine and a soda drink. Near the end he said. “At this point anyone out there who’s not clutching the hand of someone he loves has a cold, cold heart.”

Which, after 15 hours, was Mr. Martin.

After wading through the trite violence of detective shows and the vapid chatter of talk shows, he thought the shows well deserved the description of “junk.”

Many intellectuals think it may be making idiots of us and destroying American culture.

Parents and educators deplore its effect on children.

Denouncing television is a national pastime.

The quality of television was a serious concern to Americans who’d seen the influence of television grow like nothing before it.

In 1946, 8,000 homes had television sets. Today 47,000,000 homes have them. In addition 5,500,000 homes have second sets, and public places have 1,500,000. Television is virtually inescapable.

In one month this year the average American home television set was turned on for six hours a day. Maybe some of that time nobody is watching. Advertisers doubt it; they spent more than $1,5000,000,000 on television in 1959.

All that money, Martin suggested, was pressuring the networks to churn out programs with no merit other than to generate large clumps of viewers.

But Americans still expected the networks to live up to a standard of good taste and service that would earn them the license to use the “public airwaves.” But public good was being outweighed by the desire to attract advertiser with the biggest viewership possible.

"The Government to the TV industry; FCC Chairman Newton Minow said, in effect, 'Clean your house or I will.'"

From this arises the “tyranny of ratings.” The A.C. Nielsen Company… attached an electronic device, to television sets in each of 1200 homes… mintended to represent a true sampling of American families…

Ratings have been hotly attacked.

Critics complain bitterly that ratings are abused. Ratings determine which programs stay on the air
and which go off. An evening show whose rating falls below 17 is likely to be dropped—it simply is not reaching enough people. Yet critics point out that such a program reaches more than 8,000,000 homes—can such a program be called a failure? And many things affect a program’s rating—how many local stations carried it, what programs it competed with, what program preceded it, even the weather.

LeRoy Collins, president of the National Association of Broadcasters, has said, “Ratings are a maze of statistics built from scanty facts. And they are like dope addiction in this industry. There is too much equating with the public interest what interests the public.”

One network producer was still promoting quality of programs over quantity of viewers. Fred Friendly, who would later become president of CBS, thought the FCC should be concerned that television might become a “vast wasteland.”

[Television] will get like Times Square. Times Square real estate used to have great value. But today it’s all gaudy and trashy, with jukeboxes and popcorn and junk, and much of it has lost property value and gone down, down, down. And television could go the same way.

He couldn’t have known then how prophetic was his next statement:

“If you breed a generation of Americans that wants to see excitement and violence all night, that’s all the audience you’re going to get.

POST script:

Just how bad were the prime-time programs of 1961? Some critics now consider the wasteland year to be the golden age of television, e.g.,

• Ed Sullivan
• Jack Benny
• The Andy Griffith Show
• Cheyenne
• Peter Gunn
• The Rifleman
• Wyatt Earp
• The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis
• Wanted Dead or Alive (with Steve McQueen)

• Hawaiian Eye (with a young Robert Conrad)
• Wagon Train
• The Untouchables
• The Real McCoys
• Bat Masterson
• 77 Sunset Strip
• Route 66
• Leave It To Beaver
• The Lawrence Welk Show
• Have Gun—Will Travel

• Gunsmoke
• Perry Mason
• Bonanza
• Rawhide
• The Flintstones
• Walt Disney Presents
• The Dick Van Dyke Show
• Alfred Hitchcock Presents
• My Three Sons
• The Twilight Zone

The Vast Wasteland The Saturday Evening Post

Como died a few months later at the age of 88 on May 12th, 2001—and a few days later, I received the photo back with his signature on it. So I probably have the last autograph of Perry Como’s life—not that anyone cares. I recently bought a signed Perry Como record contract for $48 on eBay, and the people who know me know to buy me Perry Como stuff for my birthday: both because I love him and because it’s a really, really affordable gift.

2012 marks the hundredth anniversary of Como’s birth, and I would bet anything that this piece might be the only mention of it in the media. But it’s high time for a re-examination of his legacy—and a rediscovery of one of the greatest and certainly the most underrated male singers of the Great American Songbook.

Indeed it was Perry Como’s success with the Ted Weems Orchestra that played a key role in inspiring Frank Sinatra to leave the Tommy Dorsey orchestra in 1942 and embark on a solo career. “Mr. Como was with Ted Weems, a then-popular orchestra leader, and he is still such a wonderful singer,” Sinatra said. “I thought if I don’t make a move out of this band and try to do it on my own soon, one of these guys will do it, and I’ll have to fight.”

If Frank Sinatra, a man known for many things—the ease with which he was intimidated not among them, felt threatened by the prospect of a Perry Como solo career, it’s worth a second look at his work.

That is where problems begin: the greatest enemy of Como’s legacy has been, paradoxically, his greatest successes. His biggest hits mainly consisted of faddish novelty songs: “Hot Diggity Dog (Ziggity Boom),” “Papa Loves Mambo,” “Hoop-De-Doo,” and “Kewpie Doll,” and melodramatic septuagenarian pabulum ballads like “Temptation,” “Prisoner of Love,” and “If,” and his improbable 1971 comeback “It’s Impossible.”

It’s tempting to blame Como for his willingness to sing poor material, but the truth is that nearly every popular vocalist of the era did the same thing. No one talks about “Mama Will Bark”—a duet that featured Sinatra singing with Dagmar and the sound effects of a dog—because it flopped and most disc jockeys played the B-side, “I’m a Fool to Want You,” instead. But the public responded best to Como’s worst songs, and his legacy has suffered for it.

But even on his worst songs—and especially on his better album cuts, the artistry and genius of the Perry Como style is evident. It is so smooth, not in the slick, self-conscious way that Dean Martin sang but in the understated, too confident to show off manner of a true pro. Como is the dancer who is so talented and practiced that it looks effortless, while lesser performers grunt, sweat and wail their way through shows.

But one of the best parts of the Perry Como experience is that you can listen knowing that he lived his life with the same mellow warmth of his music.

He was married to one woman, Roselle Como until her death in 1998. They were together for 65 years and adopted several children together. Como did no club appearances for 26 years—the prime of his career. Instead, he focused on his TV show, recordings, and family. A 1957 Look magazine cover story asked the question: “Perry Como: Is He Really Mr. Nice Guy?”

“It is pointed out that Como is the only TV performer with a price tag of more than a million dollars a year who has no enemies and no embarrassing eccentricities and whose personal life has always been unblemished by gossip,” reporter Joe McCarthy noted.

“I’m not relaxed, I’m just tired,” Como told him.

Como was one of 13 children born to Italian immigrants in Cannonsburg, Pennsylvania. His father worked as a laborer at a tin-plate factory for $35 per week. By the time Perry was 10 years old, he was getting up at 6:00 each day to sweep the floor at a barber shop on his way to school; after class, he returned to shine shoes, heat towels, and sharpen razors. He had his own chair as a barber by the age of 13, and was a major contributor to his family’s finances.

He left the hair business to embark on a singing career. When not making progress, he returned to the barbershop for several years before he was lured back into show business with the offer of his own radio show. When a reporter suspected that the “singing barber” story was an invention of a record-company marketing department, Como responded by giving the reporter a free haircut.

In the 1950s, Como hit his stride as one of the most popular television show hosts of his era. The Perry Como Show ran in various incarnations into the 1960s, while he continued to record occasional specials.

It was during The Perry Como Show period that he recorded a series of albums for RCA/Victor. With the TV show providing Como with a built-in audience and rock and roll bumping the traditional pop vocalists off the radio, there was less pressure to focus on hit singles, and the best-recorded work of Perry Como’s career emerged.

While Sinatra was recording the concept albums that marked the rebirth of his career, Como was scoring steady sellers with titles such as So Smooth, We Get Letters (1957), Saturday Night With Mr. C (1958), Como Swings (1959), and 1961’s Young at Heart. Como’s albums provide the laidback counterpart to Sinatra’s hip Las Vegas sound.

If I could pick one song that epitomizes the Perry Como style at its best, it would be “Gypsy in My Soul,” the eighth track on Saturday Night with Mr. C. With light orchestration, Como just rolls through the song: “If I am fancy-free and love to wander, it’s just a gypsy in my soul,” he sings, letting the last word drift off into two syllables. The enunciation is understated and lilting, and the result is a song that is almost impossible to listen to without smiling.

The almost completely forgotten ballad “Toselli’s Serenade” is another of Como’s best recordings, this one from 1966. It’s a sad song (Dreams and memories/Are all that you’ve left me/Only lonely thoughts/About the one I worship and adore) out dreams and regrets is the perfect treatment for it. Mario Lanza, generally regarded as a superior vocalist, belts it into a dramatic power ballad. But Como’s version is both more enjoyable and more in sync with the lyrics.

In a business where leaving a distinct mark on each song is seen as a key to success, Como’s understated, unselfconscious performances set him apart. Ironically, it may explain why he’s forgotten; his style has been supplanted by belters. “Once you know a song too well, you start to fool around with it.” he said. “At the session, when the band’s working on the arrangement, I learn the tune right there.”

Como’s onscreen presence matched his vocals. Though his movie career at MGM was unsuccessful (his most well-known film being 1945’s Doll Face with co-stars Vivian Blaine and Carmen Miranda), his laidback manner could not have been better suited to the early days of television. With a sound and presence inoffensive and warm, Como was exactly what people wanted in their living rooms.

A 1954 12-city poll of 20-year-old women by Life magazine found that Perry Como was the most popular choice for a potential spouse even though the magazine noted, he “does not fit all the requirements nor all of the personal characteristics girls rate high. He is 5 feet 9 1/2 inches tall instead of 6 feet. His eyes are brown instead of blue and he is not 23. He almost never washes dishes.”

“I was always relaxed on camera when I sang, mainly because I’m not very high-strung or animated by nature.” he told Good Housekeeping in a 1990 profile. “Acting coaches in Hollywood were always telling me to use my hands and body more. But that was never me. I just breathe and sometimes it doesn’t look as if I’m doing that.”

One of the more interesting The Perry Como Show clips available on YouTube is a 1961 duet with 13-year-old Brenda Lee, who had recently had a major hit with “I’m Sorry.” In the video, they sing a medley including “Teach Me Tonight” and “An Apple for the Teacher”—a hit for Bing Crosby, who was Como’s biggest influence along with the long forgotten Russ Columbo. Ms. Lee appears nervous and flubs several lyrics. Como then flubs one, too, something he was not known for doing and this was, perhaps, an effort to put her at ease. Como’s posture is slightly stooped, and his manner is paternal.

When he died, RCA Records took out a full-page ad in Billboard that said simply this: “50 years of music and a life well lived. An example to all.”

Ultimately, Como’s unpretentious, warm, and light style was replaced, in some cases literally, by a more self-conscious, egocentric style of music and life: the building where he spent parts of two decades recording The Perry Como Show became Studio 54 and to the extent that he still gets any airplay at all, it comes during the holidays.

His recording of “Home for the Holidays” is still one of the more popular Christmas songs, although the less remarkable Andy Williams seems to be the crooner of choice for radio these days; Williams and Elvis Presley were the only artists to have two of the 25 Christmas songs with the most radio play in 2010, according to data from the monitoring service Mediaguide.

But Como likely wouldn’t care. An unabashed popular entertainer, he greeted his declining popularity the same way he greeted his rise to success. “I’ve done nothing that I can call exciting,” Como once said. “I was a barber. Since then I’ve been a singer. That’s it.”

On the 100th anniversary of Como’s birth, with the Great American Songbook enjoying a comeback thanks to singers like Michael Bublé and Rod Stewart, it’s time for fans of classic pop to give the best and nicest singer of the era another listen.

Why Perry Como Matters The Saturday Evening Post

Some cable networks air so many commercials in a half-hour slot that shows require heavy editing just to fit. Watching a rerun of Leave It to Beaver or Curb Your Enthusiasm on a commercial channel is an exercise in filling in the blanks. Wait? Who was that guy? Why are they mad at him?

If TV advertising were water, we’d all drown before The Today Show signed off. Yet we’ve somehow survived only to learn that those who covet our coin have put some new cartridges in their clip. They’re called “secondary events”—basically they are nothing less than electronic tumors superimposed digitally on the show as it’s broadcast.

Computer-generated events can be as simple as a trademark that occupies the screen’s lower righthand corner. These are sometimes called “logo bugs,” and a great many networks use them in the apparent belief that we’re too stupid to know which channel we’re watching.

A secondary event can also be a complicated visual message promoting an upcoming show or some other happening. It can occupy a quarter of your viewing area for 10 seconds or longer. The other evening, I recorded a Law & Order re-run on TNT. The next morning I counted its secondary events, a lonely exercise but one worth doing. If you’re a masochist.

The primary advertising hit in five bursts: at 4, 13, 23, 38, 50, and 59 minutes into the show. The five breaks contained a total of 42 commercials of varying lengths and amounted to 22 minutes of viewing, leaving Jack McCoy and the New York legal system only 38 minutes to convict the accused.

During most of the hour, the TNT logo bug squatted in my screen’s lower right corner. Twice, a promotional message for season premieres materialized at the bug’s immediate left and remained there for an average of eight minutes.

On eight occasions, a silent secondary event swept from left to right across the screen. Counting the sporadic appearances of the logo bug as a single happening, I had to watch no fewer than 12 secondary events.

Having worked at three national ad agencies, I quite understand advertising’s role in a free market. But enough is enough. And then some. If I behave like an obedient consumer and sit through 42 commercials in an hour, I have given the marketers sufficient opportunity.

Neither Elvis Presley nor I ever worked as a TV critic, but now that I’ve written this piece, we share non-professional credits in the field. As an amateur critic, Elvis was superb; when a program displeased him, he was known to fire a large-caliber handgun at his TV set. Describing one such incident, an Elvis sidekick wrote, “He just put down his breakfast, drew a gun, blew the TV out, and said, ‘That’ll be enough of that [expletive].’”

So far, I’ve restrained myself from going the Elvis route.

Aw, Shoot! The Saturday Evening Post

Dark Shadows… the top-rated daytime attraction with females between the ages of 12 and 34… has become something of a national fad. Barnabas Collins board games, posters, Halloween costumes, masks, capes, coloring books, and bubble-gum cards are being rushed on the market. One entrepreneur is even preparing Barnabas Collins plastic fangs, adjustable to any juvenile mouth.

Until the character of Barnabas was introduced last year, the program’s darkest shadow of all was a cancellation notice lurking in the wings. Surveys made early in 1967 showed that it was being watched in only 2,750,000 homes, as against a whopping 4,480,000 today. The story had originated as a straight “‘soap” with Gothic trappings and old, dark house on the Maine coast; a young governess menaced by unspecified evils, etc. Topping the cast was former movie actress Joan Bennett.

“We were really bombing,” admits Dan Curtis, the independent producer who packages the show, “so I figured, to hell with it. If I’m going to fail, I’ll at least have a good time. I went wild, tossed in witches and ghosts, you name it. But that vampire made the difference. Two weeks after he came on, the ratings began to climb.”

“That vampire” is, in reality, a 44-year-old Canadian actor named Jonathan Frid, a tall, attractively homely man with a face like a gardening trowel.

I first met him in the Dark Shadows studio.

Frid was in full costume: black Inverness cape; long hair plastered down in spiked bangs; tombstone-white skin; large, slightly cruel gray neyes. He was asked if he had any personal theories on why his character bad become such a success. “To be frank, I haven’t thought about it much.” he said in his somber, dramatic voice.

Paradoxically, his off-screen mannerisms—sweeping gestures, eyebrows arching almost to the hairline—are more florid than his acting style. Frid’s vampire is restrained almost to the point of rigidity, as if fighting to hold himself back from some dark, nameless act. “There is the fan mail, of course,” he went on. “It’s up to two thousand letters a week now, mostly from women. They even send me nude pictures of themselves.

“I suppose women see Barnabas as a romantic figure because I play him as a lonely, tormented man rather than a Bela Lugosi villain. I bite girls in the neck, but only when my uncontrollable need for blood drives me to it. And I always feel remorseful later. In the story,

I was murdered and turned into a vampire by a jealous witch back in 1796. Actually, my main interest is curing my condition. It’s even happened occasionally, like the time I was given massive transfusions by mistake. They made me a normal human. Unfortunately, there was a side effect—I actually looked 172 years old. It was either bite girls in the neck again or die of old age. , ,

The scripts of Dark Shadows are tailored to make Barnabas Collins sympathetic in spite of his more antisocial tendencies. “He does terrible things,” says Gordon Russell, one of the writers, “but we always give him a good reason ”

“Personally, the success of the show hasn’t meant all that much,” he said… “The trouble, I guess, is that soaps are rather subterranean. The people you want to impress are working while you’re on. Somehow, this sort of thing just isn’t real…”

If Jonathan Frid can’t quite come to grip with his offbeat celebrity, it’s understandable. Born and raised in Hamilton, Ontario, trained m his craft at London’s Royal Academy and the Yale Drama School, he’d spent nearly two decades as one of the hundreds of New York-based actors who, somehow, just never make it. Respected by other professionals, they fill out the years between Broadway roles in regional theaters, touring with road companies, playing small parts in Shakespeare summer festivals.

During the four days I’d followed the shooting, he bad been in virtually every scene, a feat requiring countless hours of rehearsal and memorization. “The worst part is that I’m a slow study,” he said, “You can’t always be looking at the Teleprompter. The audience notices.”

On Monday, after a weekend’s rest, be had delivered his lines with energetic authority. By Thursday, the accumulated strain showed in slurred or misread speeches and ill-timed movements. “I was awful today,” he said. “We never retape, no matter how many fluffs the cast makes. Not even when scenery falls over. Costs too much.”

He collapsed into an armchair. His face was still pale and haggard, his eyes shadowed. It was the first time I’d seen him without makeup.

He looked remarkably the same.

Next month, Johnny Depp will play Barnabas Collins in a movie version of Dark Shadows. Fans of the old soap opera—who, of course, don’t look nearly old enough to have been alive back then—will be measuring his performance against the high standards set by Mr. Frid.

Jonathan Frid 1924 – 2012 The Saturday Evening Post

Essentially the choice is between LCD and Plasma. (LED is a subset of LCD, but we’ll get to that in a minute.) LCD (liquid crystal display) screens are brighter and reflect considerably less light than plasma TVs, making them better for sunlit rooms. They’re the more popular choice and, for that reason, slightly more expensive. Plasma TVs, on the other hand, show more vibrant colors and deeper shades of black, and are often preferred by home theater buffs.

LED TVs are really just LCDs, but with LED backlighting. LED stands for light-emitting diode, but the practical bottom line is that LED TVs can be wafer-thin, often less than an inch thick. LED TVs also use less energy than regular LCDs. If cost is a factor—and when isn’t it?—you can get some great deals on LED TVs.

When shopping, you’ll also want to consider the “refresh rate,” measured in Hz (for hertz or cycles per second). A higher refresh rate means less blurring in action sequences. You want the highest refresh rate possible for sports, but it’s not so important for watching talking heads. Shoot for at least 120 Hz.

How to Buy a TV Today The Saturday Evening Post

Cheryl leads the way on a hike with contestants from "The Biggest Loser'"

Looking back, it’s easy to say we were pioneers in weight loss reality television—there are so many similar shows now. Though I’m happy our work inspired and continues to inspire so many, it’s bittersweet, because the obesity statistics are not going down.
 
Like the rest of “The Biggest Loser” medical expert team, my role was off camera but vital to the show’s success. Most of the air time was dedicated to the trainers, work outs, challenges, the occasional guest chef appearance (such as Curtis Stone) and, of course, the stories of contestants themselves.
 
What people didn’t see on camera was that I met with every one of the prospective cast members who flew to LA to vie for a coveted spot on the show. Each season, I met with approximately 75 finalists (who were culled from much larger pool of thousands) for a comprehensive nutrition consultation, which was one component of an entire week of medical and psychological testing before the final cast selections were made.
 
Once the cast was identified (anywhere from 12 to 50 people depending on the season), I shared a personally tailored calorie budget with each of them and instructed them on the eating plan for the show, which I co-wrote. I also taught them about shopping, measuring and weighing food, portion sizes, cooking tips and maintaining a daily food journal. From there, I tracked their food intake to ensure they were getting enough calories, protein, calcium, fiber and all of the other nutrients that comprise “The Biggest Loser” eating plan. And, over the course of 12 seasons, I shared my cell phone number with 250+ cast members and availed myself 24/7 if they had any food/shopping/nutrition/cooking questions, or if they just wanted to chat. 
 
I never had any regrets about that. In fact, former contestants still call me to check in and I love hearing from them. Though it was incredibly rewarding to watch their knowledge grow (while their waistlines shrank!), my biggest regret was that I was only able to reach a small fraction of the overweight Americans who really need my help. And those who need me most can’t afford to hire me on their own.
 

Cheryl with "Biggest Loser" Season 9 contestant Stephanie Anderson.

This is ultimately one of the reasons I decided to move on. Although I’m extremely proud of what I accomplished with individual contestants in 12 seasons, I felt that there could be a way to reach and help many more people. I also realized my focus was on only one segment of the weight loss spectrum—from the morbidly obese starting point to the point of maintenance (or almost there). At the end of each season I had to stop there and circle back to start over again with a new season, never having enough time to dedicate myself fully to those who had achieved the lofty goal of reaching their maintenance weight, and helping them to stay there.
 
This year, I look forward with excitement to reaching a larger audience, on-camera and off, in person and remotely and in print, with you, at the Saturday Evening Post. I look forward to sharing my nutrition and culinary expertise with you. Whether you have questions about weight loss, weight maintenance, or healthy (but scrumptious!) eating and recipes—I look forward to answering them all and to sharing my stories with you about the urban farm I’m building in Napa, California.
 
Thanks for reading, and I look forward to knowing you better.

Join us again in two weeks for nutrition advice from Cheryl.

 
Cheryl Forberg RD is a New York Times bestselling author and a James Beard award-winning chef. Cheryl co-wrote the eating plan for NBC’s “The Biggest Loser” and was the show’s nutritionist for twelve seasons. Her latest book is Flavor First, and she writes a blog of cooking and nutrition tips. Follow her on Twitter and Facebook for more tips and recipes. And continue to read the Saturday Evening Post website for more regular nutrition tips and features from Cheryl.
 
 
 
 

Beyond “The Biggest Loser” The Saturday Evening Post

Those two achievements belong to none other than Betty White, whose 1995 book was appropriately called Here We Go Again. “The original idea,” Betty wrote, “was to visit the earliest days of television while I could still remember them.” White assumed, understandably, that her career was pretty much behind her—she was, after all, in her seventies.

In 2010, in an updated forward to the ’95 book, she wrote, “Who could have dreamed at the time, that, fifteen years later, I would still be hanging in there, busier than ever before?” Now at age 90, her star burns more brightly than ever before, as she appears in the hit TV show “Hot In Cleveland” and has been nominated for a Screen Actors Guild award for Outstanding Performance by a Female Actor in a Comedy Series. ( She was nominated for the same award for the first time in 2011, at the young age of 89—and won.)

Indeed, 2010 was a crazy year for Betty, and it began with a sassy Snickers commercial, then morphed into a Facebook campaign to make Betty the oldest guest host on “Saturday Night Live” and “somewhere in here I agree to do a guest stint on a pilot for a new series” with the stipulation that “it would be only a one-shot deal.” It starred Valerie Bertinelli, Jane Leeves and Wendy Malick. An instant hit, there was an order for ten episodes. In spite of the agreement that she wouldn’t be involved, Betty ended up doing all ten, and then the series got picked up for twenty more episodes. “I have no business working this much at this age,” she said.

In the madcap year of 2010 she even showed up in the sitcom, “The Middle,” starring Patricia Heaton. She played a spiteful librarian who enjoyed making life hell for second-graders.

The Betty White Show, 1954

Born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1922, Betty was barely out of high school when she received her first big break—singing for an experimental LA television station. By 1953, she was starring in a series called “Life With Elizabeth” and she made regular appearances in the ’60s and ’70s on “Password,” hosted by her husband, Allen Ludden.

Her most famous roles were as the devious Sue Ann Nivens on “The Mary Tyler Moore Show” (1970–1977) and the hilariously ditzy Rose on “The Golden Girls” (1985-1992). But her list of credits even includes: “Mama’s Family,” “The Bold and the Beautiful,” and “Ugly Betty.”

Nabbing the popular actress isn’t enough; for some reason writers love putting her in unlikely situations—like throwing her in the slammer. They love having her say things you don’t expect to hear from a nice little old lady. The results are delightful.

Betty White and Mary Tyler Moore in a scene from "Hot in Cleveland." Photo Courtesy TV Land.

“I’m in freaking jail here!” she yelled last year on “Hot in Cleveland.” Betty plays the widow of a Mafioso who absconds, faking his death, leaving her to take the heat for sitting on stolen loot. Oh, actually, she doesn’t technically play a widow—although “dead,” he showed up this season—played by Don Rickles, no less. In jail for a couple of hours, she starts singing “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen” until her unseen cellmate tells her to knock it off. When the camera does show the snarling woman sharing the space, it’s none other than Mary Tyler Moore.

Leave it to Ms. White to make being a “senior citizen” fashionable. No doubt partly in deference to her age group, “Hot” has boasted a “Who’s Who” of guest stars, and many of them, like the beloved Moore, are older. What a treat to see Carl Reiner, Tim Conway, Orson Bean, Buck Henry, Hal Linden (“Barney Miller”) and John Mahoney (“Frasier”).

Betty White is not just about comedic timing. She’s just as famous for her passion for animals. She communes with elephants, giraffes and chimps, too, as trustee for the Los Angeles Zoo. She has tirelessly worked to raise funds for improvements to various areas of the Zoo, such as “the Red Ape Rainforest for our orangutans, followed by a great new home for our gorillas,” as she explains in her 2011 book, Betty & Friends—My Life at the Zoo.

It seems appropriate that Betty White, at the age of 90 has landed on the network “TVLand.” In spite of a wonderful film career, from “Time to Kill” in 1945 to “The Proposal” in 2009, the land of TV is where this always-delightful pioneer belongs.

Betty White Turns 90 The Saturday Evening Post

Cartoons: TV Times The Saturday Evening Post

In its youth, television was a chunky piece of furniture with a tiny, round screen showing fuzzy images of low-budget programs. Despite its shortcomings, it became popular. Between 1950 and 1963, the number of American household with a television jumped from 9% to 92%.

As the audience got larger, the technology got better. Television sets became more reliable through the ‘60s. The reception improved. The picture improved. The major networks started broadcasting programs in color.

Even greater improvements were coming according to Sanford Brown, who wrote  “Tomorrow’s Many-Splendored Tune-In” for the Post in 1967. Surprisingly, just about every prediction he made in the article became reality. For example:

All sets in the not-distant future will be color instruments, with black-and-white having long before gone the way of the windup phonograph.

Integrated circuits will make sets smaller, simpler, more reliable and less expensive, and may forever loosen the TV repairman’s grip on the U.S. economy.

(“Grandpa, what’s a ‘TV repairman’?”)

Smaller sets do not, of course, mean smaller screens. TV engineers expect screens to get much bigger … the screen of the future [will use] electro-luminescent panels embedded in the screen.

In fact, today’s flat screen TVs are able to create images without an enormous cathode ray tube by embedding small cells of ionized gases in the screen.

Three-dimensional TV is even farther away, if it is coming at all. There is some doubt that the public would be eager to pay for it, in view of the fairly tepid reception given to 3-D movies.

An even more important device will be the videograph, or whatever name is eventually coined for recordings that register pictures as well as sound. The price is still too high for the average consumer—about $400 for a player … and $20-$100 for each program cartridge, depending on length and content—but a vast home market would be in sight as soon as [the developers] brings the cost down.

But the technology with the greatest potential, according to Brown, was cable television, which was still in its infancy (only 2% of households had cable service that year.) With a cable connection to a national network, he said, “the passive TV viewer will be able to send back signals along the line.”

As he predicted, the future was highly interactive. It wasn’t cable television that gave Americans their electronic connection to the world, however. It was the internet.

Homes could be connected to a central computer for instant figuring of, say, income taxes

High-speed electrostatic printing devices could be attached to TV sets so the viewer need only press a button, then wait a minute before tearing off an electrostatic newspaper to read at breakfast.

Housewives could examine merchandise projected on TV screens and place orders by punching a couple of buttons.

Pollsters could obtain immediate reactions to TV show, or commercials, or even political candidates. Politicians could obtain an accurate consensus from their constituents on important public issues.

He even foresaw the virtual office and the digital workplace:

Using picture phones, instant memorandum printers, big-screen television for conferences, and computer circuits providing information at the touch of a button, a company could operate just as well as if everyone were in the same building. It might even operate better, since employees could live closer to work, in pleasant surroundings, and feel like members of team rather than cogs in a giant corporate machine.

For all the promise of this new technology, though, Brown saw no corresponding rise in the quality of programming. Maybe the picture on the screen was getting clearer and more colorful, but the sitcoms and westerns had barely evolved since the 1950s.

Brown quoted the current FCC chairman—”The future of television is no longer a question of what we can invent. It is a question of what we want.”—and then asked:

What do we want?

It may be that we will turn to TV for ever more exotic escapism and more titillating titillation and let it go at that, leaving its real potentials untapped.

If such is the case, it might be inaccurate to say that it is what we “want,” but it would not be unfair to say it is what we deserve.

Demonstrating the newest hazard that science has introduced to modern living. This night-clubbing husband, having told his wife that he was working late at the office, will have things to regret—including the invention of television—he instant he gets home." from "Be Good! Television's Watching" August 14, 1949.

A Clear Picture of Television’s Future In 1967 The Saturday Evening Post

The above was an anecdote from a 2004 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, written when Linkletter was a mere kid of 91. But the famous host wasn’t new to the Post by any means. The May 17, 1952, issue featured a story on Stalin’s First Lieutenant, Part 8 of a series on British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and an article about the almost forty-year-old host of radio and TV shows People Are Funny and House Party, one Arthur Gordon Linkletter, a gentle humorist we lost this week at age 97.

A graduate of San Diego State College with an A-minus average and every intention of becoming an English teacher, Linkletter “has been known to dumbfound whole boothfuls of hard-boiled Hollywood Brown Derby lunchers … by bursting into fourteenth-century verse in Chaucerian English,” the 1952 article reported. The same article reminds us that this man “has made a fortune out of slapstick.”

The most popular, and most remembered, segment of House Party were his interviews of school kids. In a three-part Post series in 1957 entitled “Kids Say the Darndest Things,” he discussed how his interrogation methods evolved.

“In the weeks before the curtain goes up, Junior is indoctrinated, coaxed, threatened and rehearsed by his family. Once we’re on the air, I attack this defensive position by asking, ‘What did your mommy tell you not to say?’” The answers, Linkletter wrote, “are wonderful.” Such as: “My mother told me not to tell any of the family secrets, like the time she dyed her hair blond and it came out purple.” Another replied “My daddy told me … no matter where it itches, don’t scratch anywhere.”

Perhaps even more intriguing was a five-part series entitled “Confessions of a Happy Man” that began in the August 27, 1960, issue. It is surprisingly revealing, since it begins by discussing the parents who gave him up when he was a few weeks old. It was a painful subject, but Linkletter forged ahead “because my experience may be of some comfort to an adopted child …”

He was equally frank about being indicted by a Federal grand jury during World War II for “falsely claiming to be a United States citizen – I was actually a Canadian,” and about his slow-to-rise but undeniable temper. When a young director blew up at children who accidentally wandered onto his set, Linkletter let him have it on the air, calling him “an arrogant young pup who is throwing his weight around.”

With friends like Clark Gable and Groucho Marx, he could, perhaps, be forgiven for lapsing into show biz “jargon and shoptalk.” He once passed his son Jack’s room and paused to listen to his bedtime prayers. “Thank you, God. Amen. Listen in again tomorrow night, same time, same station, for another in this series.”

Art Linkletter is survived by his lovely wife of seventy-five years (!), Lois, of whom he writes in “My Zany Rise to the Top.”

Read “Art Linkletter Says the Darndest Things!” by Patrick Perry, March/April 2004 [PDF]
Read “My Zany Rise to the Top,” by Art Linkletter. September 17, 1960 [PDF]

Art Linkletter Writes for the Post The Saturday Evening Post

If you are of the population not fortunate enough to have seen St. Elsewhere, it was the first of the modern ilk of medical dramas. What separated it from its predecessors was the reality with which it treated its subject matter. The television portrayal of doctors until that point was more in line with what we think of as super heroes. The patients always got better, the doctors never made mistakes, and everyone, as Garrison Keillor might put it, was above-average. The thinking of the time was, “Who wants to turn on their television only to be depressed? The advertisers certainly wouldn’t like that.” That strategy worked fine for many years, but it turned out not to work on the slightly-more-cynical younger generation. St. Elsewhere followed this new direction, and almost the entirety of the current hour-long medical genre owes its place on TV to “a show that ruined television.”

Welcome to the Multiverse

How does a show like this, with all the good it did for its craft, end up ruining television? The answer comes in two parts. The first is that St. Elsewhere was a very popular, and it continues to be well-respected among people who make decisions for television. The show did numerous crossover episodes where characters from one series appeared on St. Elsewhere or vice-versa. Crossing Jordan, Cheers, Boston Public, Chicago Hope, The Bob Newhart Show, M*A*S*H, and Homicide: Life on the Street are among the shows where this happened. Outside of this, there are shows that reference St. Elsewhere in a way that makes it clear they are intended to be in the same world. The hospital’s PA system on St. Elsewhere was used at various times to call doctors from other series, even though they were not appearing in that episode. The reverse of this was used on the Canadian show, Degrassi Junior High, where doctors from St. Elsewhere were paged through the school’s announcements system.

The crossovers don’t stop there, though. For example, you’ll notice that St. Elsewhere crossed over with Cheers at one point. This happened in an episode when characters from St. Elsewhere visited the Cheers bar. Cheers, being as successful as it was in its day, ended up creating crossovers with other series on its own. Cheers begat Frasier and another short-lived spin-off called The Tortellis. Since a crossover or spin-off is essentially a signal that the shows happen in the same television universe, all shows connected to Cheers in that way are also connected to St. Elsewhere. The same goes for all the other shows that St. Elsewhere crossed with. They are all, through common characters, happening in the same television universe.

In all, there are around 280 shows linked to St. Elsewhere. The oldest is I Love Lucy, which traces its lineage in this order: I Love Lucy, The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, The Danny Thomas Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Mad About You, Friends, Caroline in the City, Frasier, Cheers, and finally, St. Elsewhere. Current shows such as Lost, ER, CSI, Law & Order, and Heroes all have their own lineage tied to St. Elsewhere.

Life is but a Dream

The second part of the answer is the bit of trivia mentioned in the opening. In the final moments of the series finale of St. Elsewhere it is heavily implied that the entire series had been a dream of one of the characters. Dr. Donald Westphall discusses his son, Tommy Westphall, which includes this bit of dialogue:

“I don’t understand this autism thing, Pop. Here’s my son. I talk to him. I don’t even know if he can hear me, because he sits there, all day long, in his own world, staring at that toy. What’s he thinkin’ about?”

The next part, the answer to that rhetorical question, shows Tommy Westphall shake a toy snow globe containing a model of the show’s hospital, while real snow begins to fall over the real hospital.

This is the moment that may have ruined television. St. Elsewhere takes place in the same universe as over 280 other shows, and that universe was revealed to be entirely in the mind of Tommy Westphall. So the next time you watch I Love Lucy, Cheers, CSI, Lost, Heroes, The Andy Griffith Show, Law & Order, or any of the other shows connected to St. Elsewhere, keep in mind and take solace in the fact that they are at least two layers of fiction removed from our reality: They are the fictional creations of Tommy Westphall, an already fictional character. Most television, as it turns out, is more fictional than you would have thought.

If you’d like to explore Tommy Westphall’s multiverse on your own, this excellent site has complete documentation of the phenomenon that continues to be updated by contributors. You can take a look at the diagram of all the shows, and check the key to see exactly how they link together. If your friends are good enough at television trivia, you might be able to play a game of Six Degrees of Tommy Westphall.

The Show that Ruined Television The Saturday Evening Post

When Hollywood began filming Westerns, it offered a new, equally improbable style of hero: the strong, silent, shy cowpoke. He was a sturdy, fair-playing, boisterous cavalier who righted wrongs, laughed heartily at bunkhouse pranks, and carelessly broke the wills of stallions and the hearts of women. Despite his improbability, he drew the admired imitation of men and boys, who affected Gary Cooper’s drawl and Tom Mix’s contagious smile.

The high heroic standards of these cowboys seemed to leave little creative room for new heroes. Yet, such a hero emerged in the 1930s: a man who was so dedicated to righteousness that he abandoned his personal life and identity. The Lone Ranger donned a mask to become the champion of law (and spend a lot of time explaining why he dressed like an outlaw to serve justice).

The mask was necessary to keep the hero aloof from the everyday life. Folk heroes were required to live apart from the public. It explained to children why they didn’t keep bumping into Batman at the supermarket.

You have to consider certain rules of the fantastic and the practical when creating a hero. Trendle described these rules in 1939 when he told J. Bryan, III, how he invented the hero for a low-budget program on his Detroit radio station.

The Logic of the Fantastic

Hi-yo, Silver! by J. Bryan, III, October 14, 1939

“… the program had to be dramatic, because drama was inexpensive, required no-name stars, and could be home-cooked.

“Now follow his reasoning step by step: Drama, but what kind of drama—for adult or kids? For kids, because they are less critical, and therefore the program need not be so expensive or elaborate. Besides, Trendle believed that most parents buy advertised products because their kids coax them into it.

“What kind of kid drama? Trendle knew that kids’ favorites were crime stories and Westerns. He dismissed crime because he wanted his program to be completely wholesome. He also wanted one that would lend itself to premiums from future sponsors. A crime program admitted little more than masks, badges, and weapons, but a Western opened the field of costume and saddlery as well.

“Western drama of what period? Not contemporary, because the script writer would be cramped by having to defer to probability. Drama postulates a hero. What kind would this one be? Young or mature? Mature, because it is better to respect than to envy. Finally, how to distinguish him from a thousand other Western heroes? Trendle wasn’t sure about this.

“He unveiled [the concept] before his studio staff, in December, 1932. Their first objection was that the hero had no mystery and little romance. Why not make him a sort of benevolent outlaw and give him a mask? Fine! Then it was suggested that he needed something distinctive as an identification. How about a super-horse …?

“His first script was revised 15 times before Trendle gave it a trial broadcast, late at night, and unannounced except to the office staff and the sales force. They reported that they liked the story, but they didn’t like the Ranger’s way of talking; his language seemed to have an Eastern flavor. Trendle stood firm. The Ranger was an Easterner, he said. He might even be from Harvard. At least he was an educated man, and he was going to talk like one. The signature to this first script was: “Come along, Silver! … That’s the boy! … Hi-yi! (hearty laugh). … Now cut loose, and awa-a-ay! (Hoofs pounding harder and fade-out).”

The radio audience grew slowly until Trendle offered a free toy gun to the first 300 listeners who wrote the station. Nearly 25,000 children responded. (There were few opportunities for free toys in 1933.)

The publicity garnered much needed publicity, but the Lone Ranger was soon succeeding without giveaways. Kids admired his unswerving dedication to justice without a trace of personal flaws.

“No secular myth has ever grasped the popular fancy with such strength. It is hard to see why … The Ranger is carved from … cold marble. He has no vices; he hasn’t even any relaxations. He never laughs; he never even smiles.

“[The original] Ranger was a happy-go-lucky swashbuckler who laughed at the discomfited crooks as he rode off. Trendle saw him as a sterner character, ‘the embodiment,’ in his own phrase, ‘of granted prayer.’ So presently all suggestions of humor were erased; the Ranger never smiled again. Trendle didn’t like the “Hi-Yi,” either … History does not preserve the name of the genius who finally evolved ‘Hi-Yo!’ ”

The Lone Ranger’s radio program lasted from 1933 to 1954—2,956 episodes.

Sixty years ago, on September 15, 1949, the Lone Ranger debuted on television, running for 221 episodes more than eight years.

The Arrival of the Family Hero

Heroes Showing Up for Duty, October 31, 1942

In time, the stern, rigid character of the Lone Ranger was succeeded in popularity by more human heroes. A decade later (on September 12, 1959), the next generation of Western heroes emerged. The Cartwright family on Bonanza became the most popular show on television. (It was also remarkable that it was broadcast in color from its first episode.) The single father dealing with three cowboy sons had far less of the righteousness of the Lone Ranger, but public tastes had shifted away from the austere, masked figure. Bonanza appeared on NBC between 1959 and 1973, a span of 430 episodes.

Ultimately, the ideal of the lone dispenser of justice grew too distant from television audiences. Peaking in the 1960s, when horses galloped through most of primetime programming on all three networks, the cowboy faded into the sunset.

The return of the Western is repeatedly announced, but never arrives. The Lone Ranger lives on, though, in innumerable television heroes, who borrow his stern, unyielding quest for justice.

If he stages a comeback, he’ll need a stronger disguise than just a mask. We can believe almost any improbability in a hero, but in our globally networked world, a secret identity is unimaginable.

Click here to read “Hi-yo, Silver!” by J. Bryan, III, October 14, 1939 (PDF).

How Heroes are Made The Saturday Evening Post