Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, August 27, 1994 TAG: 9408310019
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: S-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By JAMES ENDRST THE HARTFORD COURANT
DATELINE: HOLLYWOOD LENGTH: Medium
Actually, he has more than one, but they're all related to television.
The guy is so plugged into the medium, it would be shocking if he wasn't making a career out of it.
"If I'm in a room talking about a television show," he says, "that's a high point of my day."
A master programmer, Tartikoff left his most indelible impression on the medium as president of NBC Entertainment in the '80s, leading the network to a record-setting 68 consecutive weekly wins in prime time, six straight seasons at No. 1, and doing it with such classy and classic shows as "Cheers," "The Cosby Show," "Hill Street Blues," "St. Elsewhere" and "L.A. Law."
And the news media just couldn't get enough of him.
During Tartikoff's 11-year reign, many critics acted more like groupies, going slack-jawed in the glow of Tartikoff's entertaining takes on TV.
He left the business briefly in 1992, after a 15-month stint as chairman of Paramount Pictures, and moved to New Orleans where his daughter Calla Lianne, then 9 years old, was being treated for a serious head injury from a 1991 car accident.
But it wasn't long before he was, even from afar, back in business, producing low-budget TV shows in New Orleans (one of which was a kids' variety show for his daughter's amusement), and eventually creating Moving Target Productions in April 1993.
But it was as if the 45-year-old Tartikoff - now on the production end of the business as chairman of New World Entertainment - never left when he met the news media here recently to plug "Q & E!," a light-and-airy celebrity question-and-answer show he's producing for cable's E! Entertainment. (The show is scheduled to kick off Wednesday night.)
Tartikoff says he has more than enough projects to keep him busy and that are indicative of both his playful and savvy TV sense.
There's "The Steven Banks Show," the first sitcom ever produced for PBS (yes, that's right, a sitcom). Shot for just $70,000 an episode, Banks plays a grown-up guy with a little-kid imagination who puts on Soupy Sales-like shows for himself in his apartment.
In late night, Tartikoff is trying "Last Call" - a half-hour comedy-discussion group featuring one host, four panelists and a hip read on the news of the day.
Also on the way is "Op Center," a four-hour miniseries based on an idea by novelist Tom Clancy and headed for NBC, and "TV Guys," a sitcom for Fox about two guys in their early 30s - one white, one black - who are former stars of a '70s sitcom called "Slap Me Five."
To name just a few.
Not exactly classics in the making, perhaps, but Tartikoff has always taken a populist approach.
But that doesn't mean he doesn't, remarkably enough, take the medium very seriously, which is why he's still so often quoted.
"The audience is waiting to be woken up," he says. "And we still do these movies that are an endless parade of husbands killing wives, wives killing lovers, all that stuff. It's such a sad commentary on modern life, and we transport this all over the world."
His point of view can seem at odds with his programming, but Tartikoff has always said no one really wants wall-to-wall quality shows.
That's why it's so much fun to watch Tartikoff in action.
He makes you believe in television, even really bad television, because he believes in it.
In his programming executive heyday, he says, "I felt that it was rock 'n' roll, that you had to beat the drum and you had to get out there in front of it. Nowadays they do it with Kmart tie-ins and Sears giveaways and stuff like that. I don't think that's where the audience has ever been."
So where, one might ask, are they?
Well, you asked for it.
"I think what the audience is looking for more and more from the television set is for emotion and humanity," says Tartikoff, "because more and more of their life is becoming a computerized world. People are having less and less contact out there.
"The crime situation is such that after dinner people don't walk the streets, people don't have as much human interaction as they did 10 years ago.
"So I think it's incumbent on television to provide kind of a virtual human experience so viewers feel that people on TV are their friends, that there is a personality behind a network and that it's not just a faceless entity, that you really stake out an attitude, not just a catchy promotional tag line, but really stand for something and then convey that to the people and they say, `Yeah, I believe in that.'''
by CNB