THE LAST TV SHOW

By Richard Zoglin

It was a dull, sanitized-for-tv convention until that electric moment on Thursday night. Few knew that Bob Dole had injured his ankle getting out of the motorcade earlier. But he shook off the pain, courageously mounted the podium for his acceptance vault, completed the difficult 1 1/2 twist and stuck the landing. As he crumpled to the floor in pain, chants of "U.S.A.! U.S.A.!" filled the arena...

In your dreams. NBC's coverage of the Olympics may have been overly manicured for TV, but it was a riot of spontaneity compared with the Republican Convention. In an effort to put their best face on-camera, the G.O.P. planners jammed all their high-profile speakers into one hour each evening (catering to the networks, which had scheduled just one hour of coverage on most nights). And the networks, reluctant to air a four-night campaign commercial, tried to show as little of the official proceedings as possible. Yet finding any real news to cover--or, indeed, anything unplanned--proved fruitless.

The results didn't satisfy anyone. Network anchors obsessed constantly about the "tightly scripted" event they were forced to endure. Ted Koppel and the Nightline crew got so frustrated they left town. Republican officials grumbled that their TV extravaganza was getting short shrift from the network cameras. (Showcased speakers such as Gerald Ford and Christine Todd Whitman were largely ignored.) Ratings, meanwhile, were catastrophically bad: the combined three-network audience fell 25% from four years ago; just over 12% of the nation's TV homes tuned in.

The networks are unlikely to cut back for next week's Democratic Convention, if only to avoid charges of unequal treatment. But last week's experience has shaken up news executives into re-evaluating their approach in the future. "Assuming the candidate has been decided before the convention," says Lane Venardos, who oversaw CBS's coverage, "I can't imagine us going through this kind of rigmarole again." Jeffrey Zucker, his counterpart at NBC, points out that with such cable channels as CNN, C-SPAN and MSNBC providing full coverage, the broadcast networks are under less obligation to do so. "It's their party, and they can throw it the way they want to," says Zucker. "But that doesn't mean we have to cover it. And I'm not sure that in the future we will."

Viewers won't shed many tears. The Republicans' Stepford convention made for a spiritless, sadly anachronistic TV show. To their credit, the TV reporters tried hard to find blemishes in the happy face being presented, searching for any stray Buchanan delegate (or Buchanan himself) willing to complain. Usually, though, the displays of journalistic independence were pointless. NBC aired a few minutes of Kay Bailey Hutchison's speech on Tuesday night, then broke away so anchorman Tom Brokaw could summarize the juiciest lines for analyst Tim Russert ("She goes on to say that 'it's time to wake up to President Clinton and his high-taxing, free-spending, promise-breaking...'"). If it's worth quoting, isn't it worth showing?

Not that the podium show was any better. Speakers were whisked on and off the stage so fast it looked like the Tony Awards. San Diego not only marked the final metamorphosis of political conventions into TV productions; it also represented a low-water mark for political rhetoric. Susan Molinari, in her chirpy keynote speech, sounded like a PTA president urging more money for the school gym. Even Elizabeth Dole's acclaimed "Oprah-style" turn on the convention floor was the sort of motivational-speaker gimmick that plays better in person than on the TV screen; we've seen this act in too many infomercials.

The Republicans may have outsmarted themselves. By trying so hard to tailor their convention for TV, they drained it of most of the qualities--the old-fashioned theatrics, the contentious egos--that attracted viewers and journalists in the first place. Clinton aides are worried that they may suffer from the backlash. "It's just our luck that they went first," said a White House official who fears that "the networks will avenge themselves on the Democrats." To juice up their TV show, the Democrats are planning "more substantive presentations," a Clinton aide says. Will the last viewer turn out the lights?

--With reporting by J.F.O. McAllister/Washington

With reporting by J.F.O. McAllister/Washington