Viewpoints: Life on the Prairies

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

TIME'S review of the new situation comedies two weeks ago was the first in a series on this season's television offerings. In future issues, "Viewpoints " will cast a critical eye on crime shows, the nostalgia programs and other series, as well as occasional specials. This week's subject is TV's serialized epics about families in the wilderness.

The success of The Waltons has created a new television genre that might be termed extended family entertainment. These are shows that encourage the members of the modern nuclear family (all 3.4 of them) to gather round the electronic hearth and envy the lot of the poorer but more populous rural families of yesteryear. The prairie families are envisioned by television as infinitely more caring, more loving and free of neurosis than we dare hope to be. Pop, who is nearly always out of work and thus has a lot of time on his hands, is always willing to explain anything from the sex life of the squirrel to the nature of the universe. Mom spends most of her time shelling peas and chatting it up across every imaginable communications gap. The stranger at their door, though generally troubled, is rarely dangerous; his problems are readily soluble through immersion in the pot of tolerance, good will and homely wisdom always asimmering on the back burner of the old wood stove.

There is obviously only one criterion for entertainments of this kind, namely that an adult can live with them on the same regular basis as the kids do. The prairie programs offer young viewers an irresistible opportunity to make secret, invidious comparisons between the fantasy figures on the television screen and those sulky representatives of the reality principle, their parents. The old folks, in turn, must defend themselves against the saintly phantoms of a lifestyle that never was while counting the minutes to bedtime.

By this admittedly primitive standard, Little House on the Prairie (NBC, Wednesday, 8 p.m. E.D.T.) seems the best of a highly domesticated breed. It is true that Star-Producer Michael Landon looks as if he just stepped out of a unisex beauty salon on the Strip rather than 430 episodes of Bonanza. His unwillingness to express anything but for bearance as he struggles to wrest a living from his farm also strains credulity. On the other hand, his problems often lead the Ingalls family into livelier action sequences than competing shows offer. Best of all, the show eschews the nostalgic and moralizing narration that is the most obvious of the many trials The Waltons inflicts on viewers. Like the Laura Ingalls Wilder children's books from which the show derives, Little House genuinely seems to be striving for a simple, straightforward style, minimizing both melodramatic and sentimental excesses.

Just how difficult this is to do is demonstrated by the Larsen family's travails on The New Land (ABC, Saturday, 8 p.m. E.D.T). This series is based vaguely on Jan Troell's beautifully photographed, movingly understated and intensely serious films about a family of Swedish pioneer farmers working the Minnesota prairies about 20 years before the Ingallses arrived there. Yet the atmospheric authenticity that sustained Troell's movies is apparently impossible to duplicate on a television snooting schedule. Worse, in contrast to Little House, which keeps a tight focus on a single family, thus stressing its isolation and exemplary independence, The New Land is crowded with people--a whole farm community--none of whom has yet emerged as a genuinely interesting character. This mob's efforts to imitate Swedish accents are occasionally laughable but mostly ponderous, further slowing what may be the new season's longest hour.

The most desperate effort of modern times to extend a family is that of Joy and George Adamson, who have this pet lioness--as well as an ark's worth of other African fauna--instead of children running around their game preserve in Kenya. The world could well have been spared yet another rendering of the Born Free legend, but it must be admitted that NBC'S new series (Monday, 8 p.m. E.D.T.) at least avoids the queasier questions raised by Mrs. Adamson's elaborate efforts at surrogate motherhood. Elsa, the Adamsons' lioness, has turned into a kind of feline Lassie, roaming the remoter reaches of the green hills of Kenya, where she can weekly rescue or be rescued by the guest stars. As the Adamsons, Diana Muldaur and Gary Collins provide the discreet exposition linking Elsa's exploits together. Muldaur is also required to voice-over a narration that weekly spells out whatever moral Elsa's behavior has pointed up. On these occasions, one cannot help wishing that Mr. Ed, TV's departed talking horse, could somehow have been worked into the series. He was much better--and funnier--at this sort of thing than any of his human successors have ever been.

qed Richard Schickel

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