The original opening credits of “Lou Grant,” the late-1970s, early 1980s TV series about the newspaper business, are of a particular time but also timeless.
The credits montage for the first season shows a bird sitting in a tree, trees being chopped down and turned into newsprint, the reporters and editors of the fictional Los Angeles Tribune gathering news and writing stories, rolled-up newspapers being thrown into puddles and onto roofs and, finally, the newspaper being used to line the floor of a birdcage.
The life of a newspaper – and a newsroom, for that matter – is very different now than in 1977. To be sure, print editions are still produced and delivered, sometimes, hopefully, not into gutters and snow drifts. But digital news reigns.
One thing that has not changed since 1977 and those early credits is that the demand for news has never been greater, but the method of putting that reporting and editing and images in the hands of readers is still a challenge.
That’s a roundabout way of saying that, for a series that debuted when “Star Wars” had been in theaters for only about four months, “Lou Grant” is dated but still relevant.
The series was and is something of an oddity. I can’t think of another instance when a situation comedy, even a classic one like “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” spun off a character into a drama. Ed Asner’s Lou Grant, after his stint as the news producer at Minneapolis TV station WJM resulted in unemployment, got a job city editor at the Trib, working for old friend Charlie Hume (Mason Adams).
The two of them work for Trib publisher Margaret Pynchon, played by Nancy Marchand in a warm-up for her “Sopranos” role as an intimidating matriarch. Pynchon is a cross between Los Angeles Times publisher Dorothy Chandler – you might have heard of her pavilion – and Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham.
Lou oversees a slightly less odd collection of newsroom staffers at the Trib than at WJM: Joe Rossi (Robert Walden) is an arrogant hotshot; Billie Newman (Linda Kelsey) is a rookie with a lot to prove; photographer Dennis “Animal” Price (Daryl Anderson) somehow managed to cover all of SoCal by himself; Art Donovan (Jack Bannon) was the city editor and a dead ringer for one of my editors at the time.
You see, I entered the newspaper business right after “Lou Grant” debuted, beginning years of freelancing in high school and college less than a year after the show first aired on CBS.
At first, I didn’t like “Lou Grant” much. I eventually realized it was as accurate in its depiction of the newspaper business as any TV series would ever be.
Not that TV and movies hadn’t tried to mine the fertile ground of the news business before.
Lou Grant and the Case of the Notorious Nazis
From “The Front Page” to “The Paper” to “The Post,” the newsroom has appealed to filmmakers. There are many fewer distinguished examples of newspaper TV series. Sure, the journalists of “House of Cards” made an impression but the show was firmly grounded in newsmakers, not news reporters. The season of “The Wire” that focused on Baltimore’s beleaguered newspaper is probably the grittiest treatment of journalism ever
“Lou Grant” is assuredly not the grittiest newspaper story ever told. But it told its stories well and kept audiences invested for five seasons.
In a recent re-watch, I was startled by how well the series told stories that would prove to be relatively timeless
There’s some “story of the week” feel to “Lou Grant.” The episodic nature of television at the time meant that few storylines would be continued week to week. We didn’t find out in the middle of the first season that Art Donovan abused substances, only to see him bottom out in the second season and return to the city desk in the third season, slowly working to regain his bosses’ trust. (This would have been a gritty, and also true-to-life, newspaper storyline.)
There were ongoing stories for the main characters, particularly for Billie Newman, who took a chance on marriage and stayed in a profession that isn’t always kind to out-of-office life. Likewise, Lou’s three daughters figure into the series and they share some resentment over how much time he spent away from them over his career.
The heart of the show was about two things: the news business and how the men and women in the business do their jobs. The great (and gritty) “Hill Street Blues” didn’t debut until 1981, and “St. Elsewhere” didn’t come along until 1982. The hourlong dramas of the fall of 1977 were more “Hardy Boys Nancy Drew Mysteries,” “Little House on the Prairie” and “Charlie’s Angels” and less “The Rockford Files.” There’s not as much character development for the Los Angeles Tribune staff as we’d see today.
But there were great stories, and “Lou Grant” excelled at telling the stories behind the stories.
The Hardy Boys never took on neo-Nazis (correct me if I’m wrong), ceding that task to “Wonder Woman” and the reporters of the Los Angeles Tribune. In a very early episode of “Lou Grant,” a small group of brownshirt-wearing white guys disrupt a group of Jews holding a service in a Los Angeles park. There’s a scuffle and the Nazi leader gets a bloody scalp wound, making for good photos by Animal.
But back at the Trib newsroom, the editors debate whether they should cover the Nazis at all. In an editorial meeting that has been re-enacted in many newsrooms since 2015, one editor suggests it’s a bad idea to give the neo-Nazis attention.
“What do you think this is, World War II?” one asks Lou.
“Maybe about 10 years before World War II,” Lou replies.
Arguing that “the news is the news,” Lou wins the debate and assigns Billie to track down and write about the leader of the local Nazis, played by the future “Robocop” himself, Peter Weller. (Another Nazi is played by Brian Dennehy.)
In a development that seems hard to believe until you remember almost any news story from the past decade about false-faced, self-serving politicians, Billie finds that the Nazi is Jewish. The revelation shifts the focus of the story and of the episode, as Weller’s character threatens the journalist, then pleads that his past not be exposed.
The twist has the unfortunate effect of making the Nazi sympathetic, but I’m grateful that CBS, the Tiffany network, chose to expose neo-Nazis in any way short of giving them their own weekly series.
Newsrooms and dark humor
One of the best things about “Lou Grant” is how it portrayed the news business more realistically than before or since.
And one of the biggest newspaper truisms was the dark, often inappropriate, humor in the newsroom.
When I was a reporter and editor, talk in the newsroom about many topics would eventually work itself around to ideas expressed through dark humor. There’s no darker humor than humor about the news business itself.
At some point, someone in “Lou Grant” notes, “Mrs. Pynchon is very interested in endangered species,” prompting Lou to reply, “Sure, that’s why she owns a newspaper.”
In the second season, Charlie Hume goes to talk to a high school class and isn’t prepared for the students to be informed and ask relevant questions. “They wanted to talk issues and I gave them pencils,” he moaned.
Not all the humor in “Lou Grant” would be accepted as appropriate today, as in the episode where a reporter dies in a cheap hotel during an affair and Lou clumsily tries to cover for the man with the reporter’s wife.
That’s not the only time some of the stories display outdated attitudes. In one episode in particular, Billie is writing a sympathetic story about a sex worker played by “Cujo” and “The Howling” actress Dee Wallace.
Lou and Charlie scoff at Billie’s idea that the woman is more than just her job at a massage parlor.
When Lou runs into Billie having lunch with her story subject but doesn’t know who she is, he concludes that she’s “a nice girl” who reminds him of his daughter.
The nature of the show and a lot of television and a lot of fiction, for that matter, is that most of the stories show a lot of personal involvement on the part of the reporters and editors. Luckily, it’s not the personal involvement and huge ethical lapses of the reporters in “House of Cards,” for example, but it makes for good drama when Billie is so personally invested in the sex worker she’s writing about that she helps her study for a real estate exam.
No good stories or bad stories – just stories
The little notes of realism in “Lou Grant” really spoke to those of us in the business, even if the general public didn’t understand. The way the police scanner squawks from a shelf near Lou’s desk strikes a nerve with all of us who ever worked through the scanner’s constant chatter.
It was very realistic how Lou and the other editors would quickly reject cliché or substandard stories. The first season Christmas episode in particular has a scene of them quickly dismissing awful seasonal story ideas.
“Lou Grant” did a nice job in portraying the gradual changes in the industry. By the final season, in 1982, the newsroom typewriters are being replaced with word processors, just as they were when I started in the business. And just like when I started in the business – and still today – the staffers lived in fear of the system crashing and dumping a just-finished story.
For critics of the news business and those who work in the business alike, we could do a lot worse than remember Lou Grant’s response when someone in the newsroom says they just don’t have anything to write about at the moment.
“There is no such thing as a slow news day,” Lou says.
I’d add to that something I overheard my friend David Penticuff say once when someone on the phone had asked if he was going to write a “good story or a bad story.”
“I don’t write good stories and I don’t write bad stories,” we heard Dave reply. “I just write stories.”
It sounded like something that Lou Grant would say.
