Upstairs, Downstairs, U.S. Style

By RICHARD SCHICKEL

The new television season is still two weeks off but CBS is jumping the gun with BEACON HILL (Tuesday, 10 p.m. E.D.T.). The network does not merely admit that the series is based on Upstairs, Downstairs; it is positively insistent on the point. That is a sensible policy, since it is doubtful if the uninstructed viewer could perceive any connection between the engaging PBS bundle from Britain and its vulgar American cousin.

Beacon Hill is about an Irish family newly arrived at affluence and influence in Boston during the 1920s. Old Benjamin Lassiter (Stephen Elliott) was obviously suggested by Old Joe Kennedy: bootleg whisky and ward politics are his main concerns. The children, however, are not at all like the Kennedys. The only son, Robert, mopes around drinking mostly because he left an arm in Flanders fields. He does provide what passes for the central dramatic point of the first episode by leaving a formal dinner party to visit a cathouse. As for his sisters, they are an equally sorry lot: Fawn is a free spirit who seems to be modeling herself on Isadora Duncan; she is having it off with her singing coach. Rosamund is having a bit of a jounce with the chauffeur, and there is a granddaughter who quickly takes up with his replacement. In short, the Lassiters are a bunch of sex maniacs.

Obvious Situations. The Bellamys were by no means chaste, but they did have something else on their minds. In fact, most of the time, the viewer's interest was less in their romantic affairs than in the manner and circumstances in which they took place, which in turn shed a great deal of light on the conventions of Edwardian England. Much of the fun in Upstairs, Downstairs has been in seeing precisely how guests and hosts conducted a country-house weekend, for example, or how a solicitor maneuvered to blunt the family's democratic impulses and thus keep the class system intact for a few weeks more. That sort of dry, deft social management is nowhere present in Beacon Hill.

The downstairs crew at the Lassiters' seem very nearly a faceless lot. Mr. Hacker (George Rose) simply does not combine the piety and managerial skills of Mr. Hudson, and there are no equivalents of Rose or dear Mrs. Bridges. Finally, except for a few references to Prohibition, Beacon Hill betrays not the slightest concern with the world outside the Lassiters' door. There is little hope of the subtle interweave of historical issues and events with small domestic crises that has been the glory of Upstairs, Downstairs.

One might say that a successful drama of manners cannot be located in a highly mobile society. But that is probably overinterpreting the failure of Beacon Hill. More likely it is just a case of commercial television once again to trust the intelligence of its audience.

Richard Schickel

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