The newly remastered CD of the Li'l Abner Broadway show has been released. Why am I telling you this? Because it's an excuse to run another picture of Julie Newmar on this site and every time I do that, I get a load of donations which I then blow on something really, really stupid on eBay. As good a reason as any. It's a darn good CD with a number of extra cuts, and if you click on this link, you can order it from Amazon.Com and this site will get a tiny percentage of your purchase price, which I will also spend to buy something really, really stupid on eBay. (And while I've got you here, some more thoughts on the Tony Awards: If the overnight Nielsens are to believed — and in the TV biz, they always are, especially when they show you winning — the broadcast drew about half the audience of the NBA Playoff and slightly outpointed the feeble competition on other networks. My chum over at CBS who read me the numbers wasn't sure if these will be considered disastrous ratings because, he says, "expectations are always so low." In other words, these are bad numbers but not as bad as some feared, so it could go either way. Those who are inclined to keep the Tony Awards on CBS for moral/cultural reasons may be able to spin them as encouraging, while those who think it's a drag on the schedule certainly have the ammo to argue their case.)
Bolstering the latter side, the preliminary numbers would also indicate that the audience skewed extremely old, though perhaps that's to be expected opposite a big basketball play-off.
Inherent in the Tony Awards, you have a basic problem, which is that various factions want the show to be different things. Those concerned with the heritage and artistry of Broadway decry the time constraints and the tendency to favor stars with TV and movie recognition. They'd like an open-ended broadcast over on PBS where Elaine Stritch can take five minutes to deliver her surly thanks. Against this, you have those more concerned with Broadway's box office who think it's an annual chance to "sell" the glory of Broadway to that large part of America that doesn't attend…and also doesn't know or care who Elaine Stritch is. Catering to them means a faster-paced show on CBS and trotting out Mary Tyler Moore and Alec Baldwin to present. Doing the first hour of the show on PBS was a compromise move that arrested the big complaints…though one occasionally hears grumbling from folks whose categories have been relegated to the less-watched part of the telecast.
But you know what the real problem is? It's a problem that infests all awards shows and much of television. It's that terror of allowing ten seconds of non-interesting material to occur, lest viewers grab up their remotes and go elsewhere. It's why, on all awards shows, it's become standard to have a voice-over announcer giving trivia facts about the winners as they make their way to the stage and having little pop-up windows on the screen showing you something more interesting than a happy person heading for the mike. God forbid we should lose your attention for half a second. Another manifestation of the same concern gives us those crawling headlines on all the news channels and even on some sitcom reruns, and it prompts Leno and Letterman to pick their reruns from not months but weeks back.
That problem works against the Tonys because so much of it doesn't matter to those who haven't seen the shows and, like I said before, I don't have a solution to this dilemma. That's becoming the nature of commercial TV and the Tonys seem to need commercial TV. And, of course, you have the other end of the problem, which is that commercial TV doesn't need the Tonys. Maybe the answer is for the Tonys to find something that's guaranteed to grab attention — like, say, pictures of Julie Newmar in her Li'l Abner outfit…