and general manager Donald Perris derided Turn-On as being "in excessive poor taste." Upon dropping the program, Perris sent to ABC president Elton Rule an angry telegram: "If your naughty little boys have to write dirty words on the walls, please don't use our walls. Turn-On is turned off, as far as WEWS is concerned."The Plain Dealer: "WEWS-TV Turns Off 'Turn On'", February 6, 1969, via Cleveland Classic Media's Facebook page. George Schlatter would later claim that Perris actively lobbied other affiliates prior to the broadcast to force a network cancellation after objecting to it replacing Peyton Place on the Wednesday night schedule. At the same time, WAKR-TV in Akron, Ohio—the Cleveland market's other primary ABC affiliate—did not drop the program nor receive any negative phone calls but their general manager criticized the show's "questionable taste". After seeing the episode, several stations in the later western time zones decided not to broadcast the show at all, including Portland, Oregon's KATU, Seattle, Washington's KOMO-TV, and Denver, Colorado's KBTV, which stated: "We have decided, without hesitation, that it would be offensive to a major segment of the audience". Viewers of Little Rock, Arkansas's KATV, which disliked the show but decided to air it, "jam[med] the station's switchboard" with complaints. Dallas, Texas ABC affiliate WFAA elected to air the show on the following Sunday night at 10:30 local time, to an overwhelmingly negative response. Both The New York Times and the Associated Press gave the show poor reviews. An ABC executive stated that "creatively, Turn-On didn't work". He compared the show negatively to the comedy of Dean Martin, Laugh-In, and the Smothers Brothers, which the executive described as "absolutely beyond belief ... awfully blue", but were popular and less controversial because unlike Turn-On, "they're funny". After Turn-Ons cancellation TV Guide called the show "The biggest bomb of the season". It stated that both CBS and NBC had rejected the show due to its perceived lack of quality, and that its sexual content was an important reason why viewers rejected the show. The magazine quoted a source who lamented Turn-Ons lack of a regular host or interlocutor: "(T)here wasn't any sort of identification with the audience -- just a bunch of strangers up there insulting everything you believe in." Conway said in 2008 that Turn-On was "way ahead of its time. I'm not sure even if you saw it today that maybe that time