TV renews its relationship with reading

Akron Beacon Journal - October 30, 2000

By R.D. Heldenfels

Literary references in programs help fight notion that television 'dumbs down' viewers

Exasperated as his wife, Debra, quoted yet another book on Everybody Loves Raymond, Ray Barone snapped, "All right! You can read!"

She's not alone among prime-time television characters, either.

Tomorrow night's episode of Once and Again has a bookstore where singles post their photographs along with a recommended book, then gather for a mixer.

The show is dotted with titles: Tracy Kidder's House, William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's 100 Years of Solitude, Ann Rule's The Stranger Beside Me, Frank Harris' My Life and Loves, Margaret Mitchell's Gone With the Wind, Kingsley Amis' Lucky Jim.

Then there's a recent episode of Judging Amy with two characters discussing a book of Samuel Beckett's work. On Gilmore Girls, a grandfather and granddaughter bonded over H.L. Mencken. (That also provided a rare chance to hear the word "chrestomathy" in prime time.)

Ed had a character quoting Walt Whitman. On Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy felt left out because her mother and sister were in a book club without her. Welcome to New York has thrown in a reference to John Steinbeck, The West Wing to Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb.

The Last Dance, a CBS movie last night, included quotations from Cicero and references to Herman Melville and Jane Austen.

Now, it's possible to, um, read too much into all this. Winnie Holzman, who wrote the Once and Again episode, hardly proclaimed a cultural dawning.

"From the beginning of the show we've had a bookstore," she said. "I wanted to do something with books that was interesting . . . and something that had to do with people finding each other."

The book talk does illuminate the characters -- when, for example, one woman's ex-husband and current lover separately declare their admiration for Truman Capote's In Cold Blood. But Holzman said the idea for the mixer didn't even start with a bookstore. She remembered a similar, but bookless, event held by a coffee shop in her old neighborhood.

Still, television seems to be eager to put aside the old notion that it dumbs down Americans, distracting readers from Dostoevsky and Dickens.

This year there are two productions of David Copperfield -- one already on PBS, a second coming to TNT. Oprah Winfrey's recommendation sends a book up the best-seller list. Bill O'Reilly, host of The O'Reilly Factor on Fox News Channel, has a best-selling book of the same name. C-SPAN 2 devotes its weekends to book-related programming.

Nor is TV's relationship with reading a new thing.

In 1951, when television was still a phenomenon for most people, there already were concerns that it was drawing audiences away from books. But a New York Times survey that year found TV may actually have stimulated reading among children, "especially Westerns and adventure stories of the type generously represented on video schedules." These days, when books by professional wrestlers become big sellers, you can see the same phenomenon at work.

Sure, television often looks as if it's made by people who have no interest in reading for an audience with the same sensibility.

Seinfeld once indicated a character was the complete opposite of Jerry Seinfeld by showing that the other character read. (Seinfeld himself seemed to have more cereal boxes than books.)

But Holzman argued that "television is what you make it. It's like marriage. It's like sex. It can be good, or it can be terrible."

And it can be a two-way street. The people making television know about books, and not just when news shows report some new print revelation about Jackie Onassis or Frank Sinatra.

We're talking about something in the spirit, an affection for writing that goes beyond the latest script.

Barbara Hall, an executive producer of Judging Amy, is also a novelist. So is Michael Connelly, one of the producers on Level 9. Then there's best-selling author Michael Crichton, an executive producer of ER.

Actress Jennifer Beals, seen in the recent Showtime movie A House Divided, first learned the story behind the movie from the biography of its main character, Amanda America Dickson. And she'd heard about the book from the director Darnell Martin (I Like It Like That). At dinner with a Showtime executive, Beals said the company should adapt the book -- and found the movie was in the works.

Director Gina Prince-Blythewood, at the helm of HBO's adaptation of Terry McMillan's novel Disappearing Acts, said she'd first read the book after her husband suggested it.

Sanaa Lathan, who co-stars with Wesley Snipes in the movie, said she first read the novel in 1991 and "I loved it. I told all my girlfriends about it and they all read it in two days."

Regina Taylor, who co-starred in the PBS version of Langston Hughes' Cora Unashamed, had read Hughes as a child.

"Coming back to this and reading it again, as an adult, is really wonderful," she said.


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