Sputtering into the Fall
By RICHARD CORLISS
New shows are scarce as the actors' strike continues
Will Mork return to Ork? Will Hawkeye Pierce ever be sued for malpractice? Who did shoot J.R.? With the actors unions' strike against the three major television networks grinding into its eighth week, viewers may have to wait another month for the answers.
Except for the actors, 85% of whom are "at liberty" in even the best of TV times, few will be hurt by the strike. The networks will not lose money, since advertisers "buy" seasons as well as individual shows, and the fall is a season of high viewership. Nor will the advertisers lose out; if the ratings plunge on reruns they will be compensated by next spring, when original programs are still running.
Both CBS and ABC are brazening out the strike. "We are just running repeats, made-for-TV movies, film features and sports," says an ABC spokesman. Only 20% of its series schedule, including Monday Night Football, will be new. CBS has 25%: new episodes of 60 Minutes and The Tim Conway Show, plus theatrical and made-for-TV movies.
Only NBC is in the chips because Fred Silverman, the network's president, long ago put his bet on "reality programming" like Real People, Games People Play and Speak Up America. It may be a dubious TV genre--mixing 60 Minutes with The Gong Show--but it is one unaffected by the strike. With such shows, plus the World Series, Magazine with David Brinkley, Disney's Wonderful World and new episodes of three old series, NBC can boast that through the end of October, it will air 75% new programming. The capricious god who filched the Olympics from NBC may now have decided to smile on Silverman, who last week was awarded an 18-month extension on his reported $1 million-a-year contract.
Two of the upcoming headliners:
SHOGUN (Sept. 15-19, NBC). As his opening bid in this high-stakes game, Silverman has scheduled the twelve-hour mini-series of James Clavell's novel Shdgun. This saga of an Elizabethan seaman's initiation into the ways of feudal Japan has sold over 4 million copies, and soon another 3 million will be on sale. The NBC version cost over $20 million, perhaps the most ever spent for a TV film.
In adapting this swashbuckler, Writer-Producer Eric Bercovici has largely ignored Clavell's panorama of Japanese political intrigue to concentrate on the low-key love story involving the pilot Blackthorne (Richard Chamberlain) and his interpreter, the Lady Todo Mariko (Yoko Shimada). It is just as well. Chamberlain possesses a star quality peculiar to television actors. Dr. Kildare has matured into a placid handsomeness. He is alert, restful, kind. He listens closely and makes love tenderly. Shimada has a grave, delicate beauty that dignifies the languorous pace of her affair with Blackthorne. Theirs is a passive passion, a love rooted in respect and loyalty, a meeting of hearts over bodies, a surrendering to the rhythm of Mariko's culture. As Blackthorne adapts to the Japanese language, so does Shdgun--and so must the viewer.
Ikiru toyota na harakiri sashimi rashomon ne kawa saki ima samurai mishima to nippon hai... Oh, so sorry, you do not speak Japanese? Then, despite the simplicity of the story, you may have trouble following Shogun. With kamikaze courage, Bercovici and Director Jerry London decided that the natives would speak in their own tongue. Much of the dialogue is in Japanese. Toshiro Mifune, who plays the warlord Toranaga, utters not a word of English, and neither do most of the other Japanese actors. Great dollops of dialogue go untranslated while Blackthorne looks on in rapt befuddlement. The unwary viewer may think he has tuned into a PBS Kurosawa retrospective without subtitles or even without the spectacular battle scenes. Instead of the climactic clashing of swords and samurai, Shogun offers Blackthorne's acceptance of his karma.
The film's own karma may be to remain to American viewers as mysterious as the Japanese: honorable, courteous and, above all, inscrutable.
THE WOMEN'S ROOM (Sept. 14, ABC).
Why would millions of American dial-switchers watch twelve hours of Shogun next week? Possibly to erase any mem ory of the three hours spent in The Wom en's Room the night before. Marilyn French's bestselling novel was a frontal assault on male piggery, narrative nuance and the English language. TV Adapter Carol Sobieski has treated this suburban gothic as if it were the gospel according to Jong. Every conversation is a sermon, every plot twist a warning, every shot an ideogram on the same theme: men stink.
They won't make love; they insist on having sex. They don't make enough money; they're too busy making money. They don't care for the children; they win cus tody of the children. They are not sons of Adam; they are serpents under the feet of every noble woman on earth.
Lee Remick plays Mira, the story's Joan of Archetype -- who passes through tract-house bondage in the '50s, through uneasy sexual freedom in the '60s, to some stature as a professor of women's studies in the '70s -- with a winsome spunk that falls somewhere between early Irene Dunne and middle-period Bonnie Frank lin. Remick is a resourceful actress, but no one can play such a loser, alternately smothered and squelched, for three hours without surrendering to the mannerisms of masochism. Finally Mira finds herself in the arms of the one decent man in America (smokes a pipe). She rhapso dizes: "Ben's lovemaking was the discov ery of a new dimension." Would that The Women 's Room had discovered a second dimension, if only to make the enemy -- men -- more human, and thus worthier of moral combat. As it is, The Women 's Room is enough to make the viewer wish the actors' strike had come months sooner.
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