Newsday (Queens edition) Tuesday, August 27, 1996, Page B2 "Glued to the Tube" column, by Diane Werts "Getting Obsessive With Reality" excerpt (from start of article):
To be real. It's not just the catchy refrain of an old disco song, it's the mandatory mania for TV shows today. Authenticity is everything. Whether you're talking about forensic psychologists or "great pretenders" this fall, you'd better seem genuine in depicting them. 'Cause plenty of people are out there itching to inform you whenever your details are even triflingly faulty. It's not just because TV itself has ratcheted up the reality check by making apparent authenticity a selling point in shows like "NYPD Blue." It's also thanks to the Internet, where fans have turned detail-spotting into a gleeful computer game. TV-show newsgroups and Web pages are crawling with triumphant sightings of bloopers, slip-ups and ascribed motives. Critics are afflicted by this obsession, too. At our recent fall-season L.A. press tour -- three straight mind-bending weeks of tube talk and nothing but -- we actually reached the point where someone asked new "TGIF" star Melissa Joan Hart of ABC's comic-book sitcom "Sabrina, The Teenage Witch" how much research she'd done into witchcraft. Hart could only stammer, "I read some things about how witches did spells and how they flew, what they used broomsticks for." Are we happy now? No, wait a minute! How *did* Samantha twitch her nose? And when dotty Aunt Clara turned Darrin into a chimp, how did his clothes get smaller, too?! *"Bewitched" revealed, tonight on "Hard Copy"!*
Eric Last, November 8th 1996