Tuesday Night on the Tube

By Frank Rich

ABC's big hits use sex and kids to clobber the competition

There are few better ways to find out what is really going on in this diverse country than to watch the highest-rated series on prime-time television. Though network TV is never art and only sporadically satisfying entertainment, it is a fascinating barometer of the public's prevailing tastes in pop culture and social values. That is why the Nielsen winners are often more exciting to watch than better shows with low ratings. Turn on the hits and you get a fun-house mirror image of the nation's psyche. It is a picture that only television can offer.

These days that image can best be found on one network, ABC, on a single night, Tuesday. The schedule is the apotheosis of prime-time entertainment: viewers can spend three hours in front of the set without changing the channel and see the most popular series back to back. The evening begins with Happy Days, a sitcom about teen-age kids in '50s Milwaukee that is now No. 2 in the Nielsens. Next is TV's highest-rated series: Laverne & Shirley, a Happy Days spin-off about two female beer factory workers who also live in '50s Milwaukee. After that comes Three's Company, No. 3 in the Nielsens, another sitcom about two women roommates--only this time the women share their flat with a single man. The night concludes with Soap, one of this season's few new hits, and Family, an hour-long dramatic series that is a particular favorite with TV critics. Most of the time these ABC series leave the other networks reeling. They capture up to half the TV audience, or 45 million to 50 million viewers.

To the casual viewer, the appeal of ABC's Tuesday night hits may seem elusive at first. In many ways the shows look like well produced rehashes of the hoariest old TV formats. Unlike the Norman Lear sitcoms on CBS, ABC's shows do not pretend to deal with topical issues, and their premises are brazenly retrograde. Happy Days copies Dobie Gillis; Three's Company recalls Petticoat Junction and Love That Bob. Laverne and Shirley's slapstick antics-- usually built around wild schemes to earn money or meet men--are often indistinguishable from the adventures of Lucy and Ethel on I Love Lucy.

Upon closer examination, however, the new shows prove to be quite unlike the older ones whose formulas they borrow; plots and characters may be similar, but the message they deliver is not. ABC's blockbusters are downright obsessed with two subjects--youth and sex--that were never too important to earlier successful series. Obviously this twin fixation strikes a popular chord--for the Tuesday night hits win every age group in the Nielsen survey. The America they reflect is younger and sassier than the one that once embraced Lucy and Dobie. Happy Days'frantic pace is TV's equivalent of the erotic drive of Top 40 radio.

The young seem to have a monopoly on wisdom. The teen-agers of Happy Days and Soap, as well as the young adults of Laverne & Shirley and Three's Company, are forever outwitting their elders, whether parents or employers or landlords. This fantasy is not without its comic rewards. In the '50s, Father Knows Best concluded with an Eisenhower-like Robert Young counseling his children about the wages of maturity. Now the same sermons are delivered with far more panache at the end of Happy Days by Fonzie, the dropout greaser. Only on Family are parents still role models, but even they are challenged by strong children who keep the adults from getting too pompous.

ABC's treatment of sex is also slanted in favor of the young; indeed, the Tuesday night sitcoms are a giddy celebration of post-pubescent horniness. The kids of Happy Days are always trying to score with cheerleader types; the appealingly libidinous roommates of Three's Company spend so much time trying to turn their platonic menage `a trois into an orgy that the show has the dizzy ambience of a junior high coed slumber party. Adults do not have nearly as much fun. On Soap and Three's Company, impotent middle-aged characters are the butts of a major share of the jokes. The only sexual state funnier than menopause is homosexuality: "fruit" jokes fly fast on Soap, where there is a transsexual character, and on Three's Company, where the hero pretends to be gay so that the landlord will allow him to cohabit with two single women. When these two shows are followed by a Family episode about a lesbian teacher--as they recently were--one begins to feel that homosexuality is the hottest issue to sweep the country since Reconstruction.

For all the leering sex jokes on ABC, consummation is intriguingly scarce. Characters who want to have sex rarely do; double-entendre punch lines often trail off into pregnant pauses; Suzanne Somers, the blonde bombshell comedienne of Three's Company, never does fall out of her many scanty outfits. On those rare occasions when characters do philander--notably on Soap--a price is exacted, either in the form of acute mental anguish or Old Testament-style retribution. The conflict between current manners and old-fashioned values is powerfully frustrating; every time a show heats viewers up, it douses them with a cold shower.

ABC does not help resolve moral conflicts, of course; it just exploits them. Family aside, the Tuesday night hits encourage viewers of all ages to think of adolescence as the apex of human emotional development. Yet if ABC's shows are junk--as a CBS executive once labeled them--they are frequently far better than the junk on the other two networks. To see why, one need only look over at various knockoffs. On CBS, for example, a new show, On Our Own, and an old series, Rhoda, are both trying to emulate Laverne & Shirley--right down to the opening credits sequence in the case of On Our Own. The copies are so lugubrious that they make the original seem almost Shavian by comparison.

ABC succeeds where the others fail because Fred Silverman, the network's programming whiz, knows that audiences want to see characters on the tube. The people on ABC are often cartoon figures, but their outlines are filled in by talented and at times magnestic performers. Like Jackie Gleason and Lucille Ball before them, Henry Winkler and Laverne & Shriley's Penny Marshall can transform rampant silliness into laughter.

Sometimes ABC stars even do more than that. As Happy Days grows older the relationship between the bad boy hero Fonz and the good boy hero Richie (Ron Howard) is becoming TV's own pop version of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer. John Ritter of Three's Company has managed to make a popular sex symbol out of a refreshingly non-macho male. Soap, after a slow start, has begun to change its intially idiotic female leads (Cathryn Damon and Katherine Helmond) into believable middle-aged heroins. Though there is much to lament about ABC's blockbusters, they are not beyond hope--and neither, it is safe to assume, is country that settles down to watch them each Tuesday night.

-- Frank Rich

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