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Another quiz show currently exploiting TV nostalgia is Family Feud, whose host is the oleaginous Richard Dawson, formerly the scheming Cockney Newkirk on Hogan 's Heroes. This daily show has been featuring sitcom families such as the Bradys of The Brady Bunch and the Cleavers from Leave It to Beaver. During the program, the performers behave much as they did on their original shows, fostering the illusion that TV families never break up or die, but live on blissfully in real life as well as on reruns.
Everything on television begins and ends with commercials.
The evening news may present the doom and gloom; commercials are the good news, celebrating the joys of consumerism.
Bigger & Better TV's Greatest Commercials III (NBC) was rated only 28th last week, off sharply from its two top-ten-ranked predecessors. Nevertheless, it was a sponsor's dream, a video scrapbook celebrating the potent appeal of all those 30-second morality tales with happy endings. Among the "classics" shown: the new groom who, after consuming his wife's first meal ("Honey, I've never seen a dumpling that big"), tries to muffle the sound of Alka-Seltzer s fizzing. The show was a form of recall for the audience ("Hey, l remember that one!"), not only of the commercials but of performers who appeared in them 1 prior to becoming stars. A scrawny Sylvester Stallone hawked Rapid Shave; John Travolta sang in the shower for Safeguard; and a caLlow but ingratiating Dustin Hoffman crawled in and out of a Volkswagen, registering surprise at finding no engine under the hood. After an hour of this—interrupted of course by more commercials—viewers may have felt rather Like the man in another Alka-Seltzer commercial: you can't believe you watched the whole thing.
What is significant about these shows is that they are so insignificant. They are virtually without content, devoid of the most elementary dramatic interest. Ultimately, they are examples of what Media Scholar David Thorburn calls "television's genius for marketing banality." All of them represent aspects of a shared television culture, but they serve as reminders that the word culture also refers to something grown in an artificial medium. For instance, a virus.
—By Richard Stengel