• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, September 11, 2017

It was the review nobody read for a premiere nobody would get to watch.

It was for a new reality show scheduled to premiere that Tuesday evening on Fox called “Love Cruise,” in which a group of diverse singles were assembled on a luxury superyacht for a chance at finding romance on the high seas.

For some reason, I found this show pleasant enough to reward it with a “three-sail” review -- a play on our usual four-star rating system for new-show premieres. I wrote this review for The New York Post -- after watching the show on a videocassette -- on an innocuous Monday.

It was published the next day -- September 11, 2001. By the time our usual readership would have been idly perusing the Post’s TV section the next morning on the subway, the jets had already slammed into the Twin Towers, changing our world forever.

The contrast between that Monday workday -- in which I faced no greater challenge than watching “Love Cruise” -- and the days that followed could not have been more striking.

For many of us in the news business that day, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 would be the biggest story of our lives. For me, it meant watching the TV coverage of the attacks and their aftermath -- first for hours and hours and then for days and days.

The wall-to-wall coverage lasted at least until the following weekend. And certainly, on the all-news cable channels, it lasted a lot longer.

The story I co-wrote (with my then-colleague, Don Kaplan) on September 11 that was published the next day describes a day of TV like no other in the history of the medium.

Headlined “Blast seen 'round the world,” the story reported that all regular programming was preempted and news coverage was seen on more than 30 channels, including many that never had news.

For example, CNN coverage was seen on the Turner entertainment networks TNT and TBS. ABC News coverage was seen on the various ESPN channels.

Some channels simply went dark, according to the story -- including the Food Network and various home-shopping channels. TLC -- still known as The Learning Channel in those days -- picked up wall-to-wall coverage from the BBC.

The day was also marked by an unprecedented degree of cooperation between the normally competitive TV networks.

“The story was so big that all the news networks -- both cable and broadcast -- agreed in the middle of the day to share whatever videotape any of them had shot during the day and provide the footage to any news organization that wanted to use it,” the story reported.

Stories flowed in from TV journalists on the scene. “I thought I was going to die,” said Carol Marin, a correspondent for CBS News who was caught in the debris cloud when one of the towers fell and a firefighter flattened her up against a wall and protected her with his body.

“I could feel his heart beating against my backbone,” she said, according to a sidebar story Don and I wrote with the headline “Courage under fire.”

My cubicle at The Post was near the entrance to a long back hallway that ran like a spine from east to west in the building at 1211 Sixth Avenue. I will never forget coming upon a grizzled editor who was in the back hallway that day weeping.

On September 12, I wrote a column that may have been the most vicious I have ever written. It took the CNN publicity department to task for trying to publicize the size of the network's audience on the day of the attacks.

Since CNN was the only TV news organizations to promote its ratings that day, I blasted CNN's publicity efforts in no uncertain terms as unseemly, given the immensity of the tragedy.

I realize now that I was likely under a great deal of stress and probably overreacted. Thinking back on it, I also realize that the CNN publicists were probably under the same stress. If I had it to do over again, I would not have written it. But that’s the news business for you. Once it is published, you can't get it back.

In the days that followed the attacks, the Post TV department produced a number of stories about the ways in which the attacks were impacting TV that fall.

Among other things, the Emmy Awards, scheduled for September 16, were postponed until November 4. And at least one new show -- a CIA drama called “The Agency” on CBS -- had its premiere episode yanked because it dealt with a fictional terrorist attack on Harrod's, the London department store. (In the episode, the attack was foiled.)

So what happened to “Love Cruise”? Preempted on the evening of Tuesday, September 11, it had its premiere two weeks later (on September 25), lasted seven episodes, and was then cancelled. Alas.

Photo credit: Author’s collection of World Trade Center postcards