Television: Truth and Consequences

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Like all chronicles of life's vicissitudes, they sometimes must confront death (though not always: Larry Blyden continued to appear on pretaped half-hours of What's My Line? for months after he died). Indeed, there are few TV spectacles more gripping than the dying throes of a game. A current example is CBS's Whew!, which is showing all the signs of imminent demise: in the past few weeks, this show has altered its rules, retitled it self Celebrity Whew! (among the first celebrities: Carol Wayne), and lost five minutes of its air time to the CBS Midmorning News. Such radical surgery, by TV standards, is as desperate as a Laetrile cure.

Even so, Whew! is not suffering as much pain as NBC's Celebrity Sweepstakes did three seasons ago. When that show's ratings slipped, the celebrities were suddenly deprived of their scripted gags and forced to give actual replies to real quiz questions. As Carol Wayne, Joey Bishop and the other panelists deliberated over weighty subjects, Celebrity Sweepstakes trailed off into ghostly stretches of silence.

No doubt NBC was mortified, but for viewers it was the eeriest TV drama since The Twilight Zone.

—Frank Rich