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At any rate, Joe Flint of the Paley Center for Media has written a funny piece imagining a Lou Grant updated for our age (h/t Romenesko); on this show there’d be no need to cast the roles of a managing editor (Charlie Hume) and an assistant city editor (Art Donovan), since these days “we all need to do more with less” and Lou Grant would be doing their jobs too.
My problem with Lou Grant back then was that the Tribune, serving a vast metropolitan area, seemed to consist of roughly two reporters (Rossi and Billie Newman) and one photographer (the “Animal”), who covered all the big stories. Now I realize that the Tribune was simply 30 years ahead of its time. Back then I teamed up with my friend Scott Jacobs — both of us refugees from the Sun-Times — to submit to the show a script we called “Rossi Crosses the Street.” In the course of the hour, Rossi, who spends most of the program whispering into the phone, wrangles a job for more money from the competition and then wrangles his way back to the Tribune for even more money. The producers, failing to realize that this was the most realistic script they would ever get, turned it down.
