Midwinter Night's Dreams

By RICHARD CORLISS, Gerald Clarke, G.C.

Three new shows to lighten the cold-weather blues

HILL STREET BLUES (NBC) Being the network of Real People has its disadvantages. For the past few years, viewers have shown less interest in the exploits of the characters in NBC series than they have in the perils of its president Fred Silverman. While Silverman's face adorned the front pages, the network's ratings and profits plummeted. Now, though, as NBC finally unveils its new fare, Silverman may have something to crow about. Two shows--Flamingo Road, a sultrier Dallas, and Harper Valley P. T.A., featuring Barbara Eden in a smile and a wet T shirt--have already buoyed the network's ratings. A third show, which is being tested at 10 p.m. on Thursdays and Saturdays, offers even more. It is a comedy-drama called Hill Street Blues, and it is the best new series since Taxi.

In the '70s, TV opened its cyclops eye wide enough to recognize that Americans don't spend all of their time on the Ponderosa spread or in suburban kitchens. Some people actually work for a living, and those people became the focus for some of TV's finest series: Mary Tyler Moore, Taxi, Lou Grant, WKRP in Cincinnati (all by craftsmen who worked for, or had graduated from, MTM Enterprises). In Hill Street Blues (written for MTM by Steven Bochco and Michael Kozoll, and directed by Robert Butler), all is motion and commotion; for Hill Street is part of a nameless inner city, and the Blues are the men and women of the local police precinct. Each episode traces a day in the life of the precinct, as the Blues try to defuse street crime, play social worker at knife point, slip out of an octopus stranglehold of red tape, keep their private lives from ending in a singles bar or the divorce court.

Sometimes their allies are teenage gang lords who come on like Geronimo crossed with the Blues Brothers; sometimes their toughest adversaries are officers whose tensions threaten to explode in a one-man apocalypse. The show treats those on both sides of the law with respect for their crotchets and obsessions.

Sergeant Phil Esterhaus (Michael Conrad) is a ham-hock-faced man in his 50s with a gentle disposition, a teenage girlfriend and an absurdist's command of the bureaucratic vocabulary--"Be reminded: female officers will, according to policy, perform all in-depth searches of female suspects." Howard Hunter (James Sikking) is a SWAT man with a Patton complex; he shoots his way into liquor stores and out of toilet stalls, and warns his boss that "you wouldn't want to be accused of having a bunch of daisies where your cinch belt ought to be." Detective Mick Belker

(Bruce Weitz) thinks he's Serpico; everybody else thinks he's psycho. In charge of the carnage and chaos is Captain Francis Furillo (Daniel J. Travanti), a good, strong man breeding an ulcer while trying to do a tough job. At the end of every crisis-strewn day, each superb show, Furillo struggles home in an uneasy truce with his job, his willful woman (Veronica Hamel) and himself. Doubtless, he feels very much like Fred Silverman. Viewers will do him and themselves a favor by visiting Hill Street as often as possible.

--Richard Corliss

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW (PBS, Jan 26, 8 p.m., E.S.T.) It is a bad sign when a producer feels he must apologize for Shakespeare, but that is precisely what Jonathan Miller does at the beginning of this play, the 13th in the BBC's Shakespeare series. The Taming of the Shrew is sexist, he says, but it was, after all, written almost 400 years ago. Miller's patronizing tone may explain the flaw of this otherwise worthy production: it is not fun. The scenery is stunning, the direction fine, and Sarah Badel and John Cleese are engaging as Katharina and Petruchio, the shrew and her tamer. But more might have been expected of Miller, who showed his lively wit in Beyond the Fringe, and Cleese, mainspring of the Monty Python troupe. They may be doing a play from the 16th century, but they need not have left their sense of humor in the 20th.

-- Gerald Clarke

I REMEMBER HARLEM (PBS Feb. 1-4) Take the A train to 125th Street, and there it is: the black capital of the U.S., a city within a city. Harlem is not the biggest black community in the country, but it is the most important, and even today there are memories of the golden days when tourists came from all over the world for a night at the Cotton Club or the Apollo Theater. This four-part series is both a history and a celebration of those storied blocks of uptown Manhattan, a fascinating scrapbook of a lost and almost forgotten time.

Blacks found a haven in Harlem about the turn of the century and soon made it their own, displacing the other ethnic groups that had been there before them. By the early '20s, it was a lively center for writers, singers, dancers and composers: Langston Hughes, Ethel Waters, Josephine Baker, Eubie Blake and Paul Robeson. Bessie Smith occasionally dropped in, and there was enough talent, much of it unknown to the folks downtown, to fill the stages of a dozen theaters. The expansive, tree-lined streets were safe, and on a Sunday, Seventh Avenue was a promenade for strollers. That Harlem survived, more or less, through the '40s. Even the subsequent arrival of teen-age gangs failed to change things very much; the teen-agers were interested only in hurting one another.

The real decline began later, when the drug dealers and muggers came on to the scene, and it gathered frightening speed after the riots of 1964. The '60s and '70s also saw civil rights protests and parades and attempts to resurrect the lost spirit. Yet only now, on the cusp of a new decade, are there tentative signs of another Harlem renaissance.

William Miles, the Harlem-born writer and producer of the series (who was responsible in 1977 for the splendid World War I documentary Men of Bronze), is obviously in love with his subject. Instead of an ordinary documentary, he has fashioned a kind of oral and visual history, with long interviews with those who remember (including one ancient man who recalls the famous buzzard of '88). Occasionally the interviews take their own good time--and the viewer's--as Miles lets his oldtimers wander too far down history's obscure bypaths.

Miles' search through the film archives has uncovered many priceless scenes, however, and time has given a new perspective to both Harlem and the people who lived there. Malcolm X, the murdered black Muslim leader, once outraged or terrified many whites, but his statements here seem reasonable and mild. "Do you consider yourself militant?" a reporter asks him toward the end of the series. He laughs and replies: "I consider myself Malcolm."

--G.C.

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