Reality overwhelmed entertainment in 1991

What we saw in 1991 was the beginning of the fulfillment of an oft-made prophecy, that television would follow the path of magazines in this country with ABC, NBC and CBS playing the part of the big-circulation weeklies -- Life, Look, The Saturday Evening Post -- that fell victim to specialty magazines that took their ad revenue even when they could not come close to matching their circulation.

The closest thing we have left to those old mass-circulation magazines are the news weeklies that exploit the same interest in packaged reality that made Schwarzkopf and crew the TV stars of the year. So the networks, with their huge news operations, might be searching for ways to become the Time, Newsweek and U.S. News of the air. CBS was rumored to be interested in a nightly 10 p.m. version of "60 Minutes" that would incorporate its evening news.

But in the meanwhile, they might consider the one entertainment show that still does have people talking. It's the riskiest, most chance-taking show on television. No cheap jokes, no stupid dialogue. It's called "Northern Exposure" and it got on almost by accident in the summer of 1990.

The onslaught of reality caused most entertainment types to retreat, to offer an escape, a respite. But "Northern Exposure" steps up to reality and right through it, to the surreal.

And this turns out to be what the American viewers wanted in 1991, not to hide their heads in the sands of convention, but to open their eyes wider to the possibilities out there, whether in the sands of Iraq, the hearing rooms of Washington or on the streets of Cicely, Alaska.