On this day (June 6) in 1978, two notable magazine figures — Harold Hayes, the highly regarded editor of Esquire during its 1960s glory years, and Robert Hughes, longtime art editor of Time — made their network TV debut as co-hosts of a new ABC news magazine program, “20/20.”
It didn’t go well.
As the Washington Post observed, “Critics from coast to coast and from border to border exhausted a vocabulary of abuse.”
Indeed, the reviews were anything but mixed.
Jay Sharbutt of the Associated Press: “ABC should hang this show in shame.”
Tom Shales of the Washington Post: “an animated smudge on the great lens of television and probably the trashiest stab at candycane journalism yet made by a TV network.”
John J. O’Connor of the New York Times: “pointless…. dizzyingly absurd.”
Howard Rosenberg of the Los Angeles Times: “shallow, journalistically unsound and just plain dull.”
An anonymous NBC executive quoted by the Washington Post’s John Carmody: “the kind of show that gives bad taste a bad name.”
What got everybody so worked up?
Much of the criticism had to do with the rapid pace of the show and its jarring mix of fluffy and violent stories. As Sharbutt described it, the program “had greyhounds tearing apart rabbits, Flip Wilson crying, California Gov. Jerry Brown boring, a Greek tanker exploding, a former teen-aged nuclear extortionist reminiscing and some closing thoughts about the late Sen. Robert F. Kennedy.” Not to mention a claymation puppet of then-President Jimmy Carter lip-synching along with Ray Charles’s “Georgia on My Mind.”
The hosts, too, came in for some criticism, faulted for their stiff presentation and even their accents (Hayes being from North Carolina, Hughes from Australia). But while they seem to have been the least of the show’s problems, their talking heads were the first to roll. They were replaced for the second episode by the genial Hugh Downs, a familiar face to TV viewers.
At least one critic came to Hayes’s and Hughes’s defense. Sort of. Marvin Kitman of Newsday wrote that, “the firing of the anchormen completely overlooks the fact that the problem was content, not hosts. The stories with and without Hayes and Hughes seem to be just meaningless sensationalism: blood and gore and potential disaster for us all.”
Next time you have 57:48 to kill, you can see for yourself onYouTube. But be warned...
Hayes and Hughes both went on to other, happier projects before their deaths in 1989 and 2012, respectively. As to "20/20," it is now in its 41st season.
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