Marvin Kitman, 93, longtime Newsday TV critic, dies: 'There was no one else like him'

Marvin Kitman, the former Newsday TV critic who was among the paper's best-known columnists over its 83-year history, has died. He was 93. 

His son, Jamie Kitman, said his father — who retired from Newsday after a 35-year run in 2005 — had been diagnosed with cancer two months ago, and spent the last month at the Actors Fund Home in Englewood, New Jersey, near his home in Leonia, New Jersey.

Prolific book author, TV commentator for WNYW/5, and even stunt candidate for president in 1964, Kitman had a colorful and expansive career beyond Newsday. But it was at Long Island's paper of record and in that column — "The Marvin Kitman Show'' — where he achieved renown and notoriety too. He produced some 5,786 of those as its so-called "executive producer" starting in 1969. From that bully pulpit he launched a slash-and-burn assault on bad TV, wrongheaded "weather-guessers," and idiotic local news "sweeps"' stories.

Kitman later noted that his first day at the paper (Dec. 7, 1969) was "a day that will live in infamy," and he wasn't entirely wrong either. Network TV executives, for the most part, loathed him while readers couldn't seem to get enough of him. Newsday and Kitman made certain of that. At one point, he was turning out a bylined column five times a week, which eventually became three times a week, although not for lack of material. 

Kitman's beat was confined to the three commercial networks, the local stations and public TV. He torched all of them, in a rat-a-tat joke-a-minute style that was inimitably his own. To his detractors, he could be mean-spirited, but to his fans — who far outnumbered them — he was a bracing tonic who laughed at the inanities pouring out of their TV sets every night. It was perhaps Kitman's misfortune to cover TV during the anti-golden years, when shows like "Three's Company" and "Charlie's Angels'' dominated.  At least he found endless material and mirth.      

"He was a distinct voice, an original, and whether you were put off by his work or loved him, he was one of a kind — funny, irreverent, perhaps insufferable on occasion but never dull," said former Newsday editor Howard Schneider, now executive director, Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University's School of Communication and Journalism. 

"He was unique in the TV fraternity of reviewers, and he gave Newsday something special that was distinct. There was no one else like him, and for much of those 30 years, he was part of the signature of Newsday," said Schneider. 

Tony Marro, who retired as editor and executive vice president of Newsday in 2003, said, "It's hard to understand in retrospect that so many others are now doing what he did, and he did much of it first. He did a lot of serious critiquing of daily television back when that was very rare. He was funny, witty, and could be nasty. One of the angriest calls I ever got was from Dan Rather, whom Marvin had called 'the Manchurian candidate' in some column — meaning [Rather] was playing a straight role [as CBS News anchor] while he was really crazed. I told him, 'Dan, it's a column! I don't agree with everything people write in columns and I don't spike them if I don't agree with them." 

Kitman's son, Jamie, said Thursday that his father genuinely "hated TV [which] was a defensible intellectual position in the '70s. 

"He was sure he had damaged his brain by watching television but I think he likened himself in his mind to being a war correspondent — that it's a dirty job, and he was on the front lines taking it so that you didn't have to. He was of the view that the depths knew no bottom, and that there was always some other horror to relate." 

Like all first-rate critics, Kitman knew when to throw spitballs, and knew when to heap praise. His taste, judgment and marksmanship were unerring for the most part. He championed classics as diverse as "Seinfeld" and "Monty Python's Flying Circus." He was a huge "M*A*S*H" booster — and not because Alan Alda was a friend and neighbor in Leonia. He became friendly with Jerry Seinfeld, Howard Stern and Bill O'Reilly — until he was not, after those relationships foundered on negative reviews or (in O'Reilly's case) a 2007 book about  the former Fox News commentator, "The Man Who Would Not Shut Up."

A few years after retiring, Kitman told a writer for the Bergen Record that on Long Island, "people were trying to find me to get their hands on me because I dared to attack 'Laverne and Shirley,' the kind of lousy program the public liked. I was the one telling the truth and they didn't want to hear it. Instead, it was 'How dare you say "Dallas" is a bad program. We love it!' " 

In fact, Kitman long used a shrewd rhetorical trick, which was braided into his columns — quotes from a regular stable of Long Island readers who had written to him about their own pet peeves or passions. Otherwise, he rarely ventured to Long Island or Newsday's offices there and in Manhattan, preferring instead to work out of a home office back when the "virtual commute" was unheard of. He told the Record that his presence baffled his neighbors. — "They had no idea what I did for a living," and were bemused by frequent Kitman sightings when he was wearing a bathrobe.

 "They thought I was in the witness protection program," he said, calling himself "the original Tony Soprano."

Born Nov. 24, 1929 in Pittsburgh, Kitman moved with his family to Bensonhurst when he was a child, later attending Brooklyn Tech, then CCNY. After marrying the former Carolyne Sibushnick in 1951, he was drafted into the Army, and was stationed at Fort Dix outside of Trenton. 

During the '50s, freelance work led to a regular job at a horse racing broadsheet called "The Armstrong Daily,'' where he wrote satirical columns. Those got the attention of a star editor and writer, Victor Navasky, who would go on to become publisher of the Nation; Navasky (who died in January) hired Kitman for his own new satirical launch, a periodical called Monocle.

The author and social historian Richard Lingeman — who was Kitman's colleague at Monocle — recalls that he "had what could be called an upside-down mind. He'd see things differently, or the reverse of other people. But he was more than just a humorist — he had substance to his humor." One idea was for Kitman to run for president during the 1964 campaign, as a sendup of Barry Goldwater's campaign. Kitman ran as a "Lincoln Republican," on Lincoln's platform in the 1864 race. Goldwater would eventually secure the nomination; Kitman secured one delegate. 

After Monocle went under, Kitman worked for another magazine called The New Leader as a TV critic and that's where he came to the attention of another powerful publisher — Newsday's Bill Moyers.   

In "Newsday: A Candid History of the Respectable Tabloid," Bob Keeler's authoritative history, Moyers — former press secretary for President Lyndon B. Johnson — said that "I knew from Washington that television had become the new campfire [so] one of the first things I did [as publisher] was to say, I want more pages for television, and I want some new writing about television." 

Kitman — by then the published author of a number of books, including his own autobiography, "The Number-One Best Seller" — was hired, and in the paper's story about the hiring, he promised that he would also review "commercials"' because he at least found those entertaining: "It's the stuff in between that needs improving."

His first column was about an Ann-Margret show on CBS (surprise — it was not a rave). His last run was April 3, 2005.

It began this way: 

"In the few moments I have left in the longest goodbye since Frank Sinatra's 395.4 farewell concert tours, I want to thank television for being so bad. It gave me enough to write about for 35 years."

He concluded by apologizing for bad TV, missed calls, the decline of "Saturday Night Live," the Emmys, and "I'm also sorry I said bad things about anybody [including] Aaron Spelling for being Aaron Spelling …"

"Worst of all, I'm sorry that I continually complained about the lack of originality on TV. What was I thinking?"

Lingeman said Thursday, "He was just a great human being who cared about life in his own unique way. He was a good friend. I hate to lose him." 

Kitman is survived by his wife, Carolyne, son, Jamie, 65, daughters, Suzy, 64, and Andrea (A.J.), 59; and three grandchildren, Ike Clemente Kitman; Ellie Beatrice Kitman, and Milo Finn Kitman.