Where To Watch
Fugitive creator Roy Huggins was critical of other TV shows
He was thought his own work could be better, too.
You just can’t account for taste. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and quality is up to the viewer. There’s no hard-and-fast rule for what is and isn’t good. While networks can quantify television using ratings and market research, there’s still no equation for calculating what makes a series great.
Someone who put a great deal of thought into the quality of TV programs was Roy Huggins. Throughout the 1950s, '60s and '70s, Huggins was the influential writer and creator of several hit series. Exciting dramas such as Maverick, The Fugitive and The Rockford Files were all Huggins-assisted productions. He was a highly effective screenwriter who knew how to hook audiences and keep them tuning in.
However, Huggins went on record stating that television was nowhere near as good as it could be. He believed the medium never quite lived up to its potential. With such impressive credentials, Huggins knew what he was talking about. In 1963, as a guest columnist for the Los Angeles Times, Huggins outlined his thoughts on the quality of shows then airing on television.
"I have never watched a show of my own, on the air, without noting a number of ways in which it could have been better," Huggins wrote. He then went on to list three primary reasons television, as an art form, was suffering.
The first reason Huggins cited was time. To him, a great character was as driven by deadlines as a newspaper. However, producers of any given show are rarely, if ever, given sufficient time to plan ahead and avoid rushed scripts. Sometimes, to deliver the best product, creators need more time than studios are willing to allow.
The second reason Huggins listed was money. He noted television was an efficient—but costly—way for advertisers to reach customers. Producers, in turn, often spend more money than is available to shepherd a project onto the air.
"Putting a show together," Huggins said, "is a continuum of compromise from the purchase of the original material to the casting of the actors."
The third and final reason Huggins gave for the supposed sad state of television was social pressure. He first pointed out how expansive the TV-viewing audience had become. Every segment of the population was accounted for.
The audience "is so enormous, and devotes so much time to viewing, that television’s content cannot be ignored as a social force of some significance," he wrote.
"At present, the tendency among conscientious and influential groups is to overestimate that significance. They tend to deal with concepts that assume the audience to be a passive mass acted upon in one context or tranquilized in another by television. There is no professionally accepted evidence that television is having a measurable effect on the attitudes or development of the millions who make up its many audiences. There is professionally accepted evidence that the relationship is the other way around: that people use television, and have a measurable effect on its development. I believe there is truth in both views, but the far greater weight is on the side of the latter."
Huggins’ opinions, however, were not widely held by his television peers. As a result, executives often made decisions out of fear and compromise, leading to programming that underperformed.
Fortunately, Huggins stayed in the TV business, continuing to produce high-octane, character-driven series that thrilled audiences for decades to come.
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