Long Reach and Shortfall

By JAY COCKS

New shows add different strokes to old formulas

Firing squads, frozen toes and frenzy down at the firehouse. A standard seven days on network television. The fall season has worked no changes. While a few new shows are already feeling the tickle of the cancellation ax (The Devlin Connection, The Quest), others, like Newhart (CBS, Mondays, 9:30-10 p.m. E.S.T.), seem to be cozying up for the duration. Nothing remarkable about this: shows breeze off the schedule at this time of year like leaves from branches. What is striking is the familiarity all the shows share, old and new alike.

Newhart, featuring Bob, that drip-dry palladin of the beleaguered middle class, running an inn in Vermont with his wife (Mary Frann), could be in its sixth year instead of its sixth episode. Richard Crenna and Patty Duke Astin show up on It Takes Two (ABC, Thursdays, 9:30-10 p.m. E.S.T.) fighting the kind of lightly amusing skirmishes in the battle of the sexes, married division, on which the dust should long since have settled. A rich kid (Ricky Schroder) gives his dippy dad (Joel Higgins) lessons in modern maturity on Silver Spoons (NBC, Saturdays, 8:30-9 p.m. E.S.T), while the viewer, dazed by unwelcome memories of Trouble with Father, takes the lumps.

Family Ties (NBC, Wednesdays, 9:30-10 p.m. E.S.T.) offers two aging flower children (Meredith Baxter Birney, Michael Gross) raising a clan of three conformist offspring with wisdom derived less from Spock and Gesell than from Ozzie and Harriet. Gloria (CBS, Sundays, 8:30-9 p.m. E.S.T) brings back Sally Struthers from All in the Family and plunks her down in the sticks, with child, as an apprentice vet. Another show, The New Odd Couple (ABC, Fridays, 8:30-9 p.m. E.S.T.) has literally been here before. Oscar (Demond Wilson) and Felix (Ron Glass) are black this time around, but the new shading is poor cover for humor that is stale white bread.

Not even the best programs break the mold; they only burnish it. The shows that hunker down on the middle ground content themselves with switching standard characters and stories around, rearranging furniture in an old house that actually needs razing, not redecoration. Giving the stalwart Brian Dennehy a hunky dimwit (Michael Dudikoff) for a teen-age son and a young daughter (Kathy Maisnik) who is enjoying some success as a country-and-western singer does not make him measurably less like Archie Bunker, even if his brains are heavier and his social conscience a little lighter. In Star of the Family (ABC, Thursdays, 8:30-9 p.m. E.S.T.) Dennehy hangs around the firehouse, an easily irked captain, while his troop of fire fighters bring him the same kinds of problems the barflies import into Archie Bunker's place. Nor does it much matter, once past the initial shock, that the cast of Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (CBS, Wednesdays, 8-9 p.m. E.S.T.) can let fly with a little song in the midst of familial trauma and, when spirits are high, literally kick up their heels. The show still looks like the Waltons visiting Soul Train.

Regular network programming has become so regimented, and impacted, that the only direction left to move seems to be sideways. Cheers (NBC, Thursdays, 9-9:30 p.m. E.S.T), nimble and funny, if somewhat fussy about detailing its large cast of congenial nutball characters, takes place in a Boston bar owned by an ex-baseball player. This particular piece of sitcom real estate was developed by three Taxi production veterans, Glen and Les Charles and James Burrows, and their saloon seems like a nice place to settle in, snug and warm and safe. Too safe, perhaps.

In St. Elsewhere (NBC, Tuesdays, 10-11 p.m. E.S.T.) it is unclear whether the show's St. Eligius Hospital in Boston--known, not always with affection, as St. Elsewhere--is located near Cheers, but it is a safe bet that its local police force could be the Hill Street Blues. NBC's Hill Street Blues, fractured and jazzy, seems to be stuck in a slough of self-admiration at the moment, but it set a style for television drama that St. Elsewhere is emulating with considerable success. The new show is populated by a floating rep company of actors, including William Daniels and the extraordinary Ed Flanders, that may be the best on the box. The show has speed, humor and diligence about even the most melodramatic of its plots, and displays the same kind of unblemished idealism about the basest narrative hokum that Actor David Morse catches so nicely in his characterization of a young intern.

The people behind this show, Executive Producer Bruce Paltrow and a squad of four writer-producer-directors, want to tap into the vein of familiar everyday crisis that fuels all melodrama. What often sends them wide of the mark is a penchant for insipid shock value (a make-out scene in a morgue) and a sentimental streak as wide as an emergency ward. When James Coco and Doris Roberts appeared last week as two street derelicts, they seemed to bring everything in their ragtag baggage but a violin and a cup. Roberts, facing the amputation of both feet because her frozen toes had become gangrenous, was forced into a literally incredible choice between dismemberment, Coco and death that not even Ben Casey could have treated successfully.

As this week's television movie of Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song demonstrated, the networks will take the occasional chance. Whatever else may have been wrong with The Executioner's Song, and there was plenty, it did not suffer from a failure of nerve. Did General Sarnoff ever believe his network would show a psycho jailbird decking a girlfriend when she refused to have anal intercourse? The ultimate point of watching Gary Gilmore (Tommy Lee Jones) get ready to face the firing squad may have been right at the end of the rifle barrels, but it would be nice to think that the license NBC granted Producer-Director Laurence Schiller and Scenarist Mailer for their high-flown enterprise might extend down to the troops in the trenches. With just half of the same breathing space, St. Elsewhere could be three times as good as it is.

--By Jay Cocks

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