Television: Panic Buttons

On a Los Angeles street corner last week, solicitors for Audience Surveys Inc. invited passers-by to a free “evening of entertainment” at a theater on Sunset Boulevard. The entertainment consisted of previews of two new television series, and all that the survey company asked of its audience was that each guest manipulate a rheostat-like dial during the show—twist it counterclockwise toward “very dull” or clockwise toward “very good” as the mood struck. On both coasts, CBS’s Program Analyzer Unit conducts similar screenings, except that CBS’s sample viewers operate not dials but buttons—pushing the green one when they like what they see, the red one when they don’t. This week the previewers will also be wired for sounding. Audience Surveys Inc. will start using a device that measures reactions by electrodes attached to the fingers; the electrodes measure basal skin resistance, and if a sampler is relaxed and enjoying the show, there is literally no sweat.

Petticoat Slip. Such pseudoscientific testing of off-the-sidewalk critics has a great and growing impact on network programming decisions. Actress Chris Noel was dropped from CBS’s forthcoming comedy series Pistols and Petticoats, with the explanation that she “pretested” badly. Every time blonde and buxom Chris came on-camera during the screening, there was an inexplicable plunge in the graph line that records the composite reaction of the button pushers. Similarly, negative readings caused the jettisoning of an entire subplot from Pistols and Petticoats, and the replacement of ten other projected series performers. The previewers have even assumed script control over ABC’s new That Girl. Bowing to the graphs, producers have ordered rewrites that will emphasize the heroine’s acting career and change her boy friend from an American Indian named Don Blue Sky to a reporter named Don Hollinger.

TV people call the electronic pretesting gimmick “The Machine”—when they can’t think of something worse. Chris Noel, who lost $20,000 in other TV offers while waiting for the machine’s verdict, says bitterly: “It’s one thing to have been a bad actress, which I know I wasn’t, or to have someone like the producer tell me he didn’t like me. But why should some jerk they dragged in off the street have the right to push a button and say whether or not I should play in the series?” Veteran Producer Herbert (The Defenders) Brodkin wonders: “How you would enjoy a Broadway show if at every moment you were conscious of having to push a button or turn a dial?”

Mortality Reduction. Defenders of the system contend that it is economically unavoidable. Pretesting, they say, is in effect prerating—a means of anticipating and then eliminating the shows likely to fail. This year 40% of the 1965-66 shows went down the drain, and the development price of replacement programming costs a budget-breaking $50 million. Audience Surveys officials claim that their system is 92% accurate; that is, their pretesting weeds out all but 8% of the shows that are destined to be unpopular. Yet most scriptwriters, performers and directors echo the sentiments of Producer Brod kin, who argues that the system is “devised for idiots by idiots.”

The random samplers sometimes have more influence over TV-series casting’ than the producers, more editing control than the directors, and more say on the story line than the writers. Considering the crucial nature of their decisions, the sidewalk critics ought to be paid at least as much as the creative geniuses of the network programming departments. Actually, they do their work for free. Their only satisfaction comes from knowing that they, with the programming professionals and the 1,200 Nielsen families whose TV sets are monitored by the ratings service (see following story), share responsibility for the uniformly poor quality of network TV series.