THE INDUSTRY
A student who mistakenly stumbled into U.C.L.A.'s Haines Hall might have thought that he was listening to a class in Double-Dealing and Back-Knifing 1. The university catalogue calls the course Network Television: The Facts of Life (Theater Arts XL 198A), but its professor, William Dozier, calls it The Jungle. This appraisal, he tells his class, is "not a pessimistic view but a realistic one. It is a jungle. Compared with television, Khe Sanh is the fairway of the Bel Air Country Club."
This grim Beverly Hills hyperbole is the characteristic verbal coin of a man who is the quintessence of...