Old Habits, New Formats
By Richard Zoglin
From Archie Bunker's weekly tantrums to J.R.'s endless scheming, familiarity on TV has usually bred contentment. TV viewers are creatures of habit--or so, at least, network programmers have staunchly believed since Lucy's heyday. As the new fall season gets under way, however, that time-honored maxim is being challenged. The reason is the sudden re-emergence of a format virtually left for dead a couple of decades ago: the anthology show.
During the 1950s, TV series without continuing characters or story lines, such as Playhouse 90 and The U.S. Steel Hour, provided some of prime time's most illustrious moments. In 1985 this kind of liberation from a rigid weekly format offers viewers a new and welcome sensation: the feeling that on any given week, they might be shaken from their easy chairs by the sight of something totally unexpected.
Indeed, three of the season's four new anthology shows deal explicitly with the unexpected, the strange and the fantastic: Steven Spielberg's eagerly awaited Amazing Stories, a new TV version of Alfred Hitchcock Presents (both on NBC), and CBS's reincarnation of The Twilight Zone. CBS is premiering a fourth series, George Burns Comedy Week, which will feature a different comedy segment each week, linked by Burns, who acts as host, and the creative oversight of Co-Executive Producer Steve Martin. Each of these anthologies has enlisted a notable array of directors and writers who rarely or never do TV. Network programmers will be watching the results closely. If one or more of the newcomers do well in the ratings, TV may have taken a significant step toward creative diversity. If they flop, well, it's back to the sausage factory.
As if to stress the danger of the latter possibility, much of the networks' fall schedule is devoted to uninspired formula fare. Of the 19 new shows, nine will feature crime fighters of various kinds, from an ex-Government agent who offers his services to people in trouble (CBS's The Equalizer) to a quartet of oddball superheroes in NBC's Misfits of Science. Comedy, meanwhile, has gone back to the basics: three of the five new offerings revolve around wholesome nuclear families--two of them black--in an obvious effort to duplicate the recipe that made The Cosby Show last season's runaway hit.
The fate of the anthology shows is difficult to predict. Spielberg's Amazing Stories has wowed the TV world with big weekly budgets and top-drawer directors. But TV's newest mogul is keeping his series under tight wraps to heighten the suspense until its Sept. 29 premiere, leaving both critics and viewers to wonder whether its giant-size ambitions will enhance, or merely overwhelm, the small screen. Alfred Hitchcock Presents, which will follow Spielberg's show on Sunday nights, will consist largely of remakes of old Hitchcock episodes. That ploy worked surprisingly well in a TV movie last spring that spawned the series, but it could grow tiresome as the nostalgia wears off.
The Twilight Zone, by contrast, will offer mostly new segments (two to three per hour) based on stories by such writers as Stephen King, Ray Bradbury and Arthur C. Clarke; the directors include William Friedkin, Joe Dante (Gremlins) and Robert Downey (Putney Swope). The show has the difficult task of living up to Rod Serling's classic series, but the early signs are encouraging. A segment in the premiere show features Melinda Dillon as a harried housewife who has the power to make her noisy world stop dead in its tracks. The tone of antic irony, however, leaves the viewer unprepared for a bleak and jarring denouement. Better realized is a future segment starring Comedian Robert Klein as a man who is plunged into a world where words have inexplicably changed their meaning. It is a nifty premise, directed in lucid, economical style by Wes Craven (A Nightmare on Elm Street). The episode is a little gem.
The opener of George Burns Comedy Week also gives cause for optimism, if not wild enthusiasm. Catherine O'Hara, a talented alumna of the SCTV comedy troupe, plays a mental patient who slips instantly into whatever role is suggested to her. Mistaken for a clerk in a stereo store, she becomes an expert on audio equipment; when police confuse her with a member of the bomb squad, she proceeds to defuse an explosive device planted in a store basement. It is the sort of loony conceit that could be sunk by heavy-handed treatment. With the delightful O'Hara and just 22 minutes to tell the story, it floats along amiably.
On more conventional turf, the old formats are at least being enlivened this fall by new settings. Following the lead of NBC's hit Miami Vice, a number of action shows have gone on location to spice their tales with big-city ambience. Chicago is the locale for ABC's Lady Blue, a hard-edged cop show about a female homicide detective who shoots first and asks questions later, a sort of Dirty Harriet. Red-haired Jamie Rose wields her .357 magnum like a pro, and Danny Aiello is fine as her exasperated boss. The series is scheduled to be replaced in November by Dynasty II: The Colbys, a spin-off of the hit soap. But if it maintains the quality of its exciting two-hour pilot, Lady Blue deserves assignment to a permanent beat.
In ABC's Spenser: For Hire, based on Robert B. Parker's popular detective novels, the sleuthing moves to Boston. Parker's hero is a "sensitive" private eye who quotes Shakespeare and Wordsworth, dabbles in gourmet cooking and drives a 20-year-old Mustang. Unfortunately, straitlaced Star Robert Urich seems more at home with TV dinners and spy novels, and the pace of the two-hour pilot is plodding. This show seems as dead as the Red Sox's pennant hopes.
Our Family Honor, also on ABC, is a more ambitious undertaking. Kenneth McMillan and Eli Wallach co-star as former boyhood pals who are now the patriarchs of families lined up on different sides of the law. The location filming in New York City lends the true grit of authenticity, but the show is out of balance. Too much time is spent on McMillan's police family (among them a granddaughter who has just joined the force), while Wallach and his criminal clan are tossed off in cut-rate TV cliches.
ABC's lengthy roster of new crime fighters is, if nothing else, diverse. Robert Wagner is leaden as ever as a high-living investigator for an insurance company in the dreary Lime Street. The Insiders uses a rock score to enliven the weekly adventures of a hip free-lance reporter and his partner who go undercover for stories. The apparent model, again, is Miami Vice, but the show looks more like an '85 version of The Mod Squad. The season's biggest howler is Hollywood Beat, another Miami Vice-influenced show about a pair of undercover cops who patrol seedy Hollywood Boulevard. Creator Aaron Spelling's vision of Hollywood's "raw underbelly" features a ludicrous gallery of street folk (good-hearted prostitutes, a "cute" bag lady and a caped wacko called Captain Crusader) who could be refugees from a Walt Disney version of Freaks.
The street life is marginally more persuasive in NBC's Hell Town, in which Robert Blake plays a convict-turned-priest in a ghetto neighborhood of East Los Angeles. Like Michael Landon's Highway to Heaven, which it will follow on Wednesday nights, the program is unabashedly upbeat and sentimental. Nevertheless, Blake's righteous fervor and the campy, 1950's-style opening credits (the title is actually filled with flames) give the show some tabloid zip.
On the short list of new sitcoms, most of the advance enthusiasm has focused on NBC's The Golden Girls, about a trio of unattached women in their late middle years, searching for husbands in Miami Beach. Bea Arthur plays an acerbic substitute teacher, Rue McClanahan is a fading Southern belle, and Betty White is one of those blank-eyed ninnies who exist nowhere except in TV sitcomland. In a typical exchange, Arthur laments that she is growing old: "I looked in the mirror and caught a glimpse of myself and almost had a heart attack. There was this old woman staring me in the face." White, after a pause: "Who was it?" Writer-Producer Susan Harris (Soap) created this dehumanized joke machine, which manages to get through its entire 30-minute pilot without a single credible moment.
A better bet is NBC's 227. Marla Gibbs, the wisecracking maid on The Jeffersons, plays Mary Jenkins, a housewife who spends her days sitting on the front stoop of her inner-city apartment house, gabbing about the things real people talk about, like when the garbage will be picked up and why the landlord is such a grouch. Gibbs' hangdog cynicism is funny, and the writers have a good ear for dialogue. In one scene Mary's 14-year-old daughter tries to sweet-talk Mom into letting her and a friend go to the movies. Mary figures out the ruse and turns them down. "Told you it wouldn't work," says the daughter as they stalk out of the room. Snaps the friend: "Well, you set it up wrong." TV's First Father himself, Bill Cosby, might admire the family insights displayed in the season's best new sitcom.
Two other Cosby imitators are easily disposable. In CBS's Charlie & Company, Flip Wilson and Gladys Knight cope with standard TV family dilemmas in substandard comic fashion. And in ABC's Growing Pains, Alan Thicke, the former talk show host, plays a psychiatrist who sets up an office at home while his wife (Joanna Kerns) goes off to work and his children attack him with lines like "You can't hit me, you're a liberal humanist." The only comedy to venture out of the house this season is CBS's hourlong Stir Crazy, based on the phenomenally successful 1980 movie starring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder. The pilot episode is cluttered with subplots and juvenile slapstick. But the show has a pair of appealing stars (Larry Riley and Joseph Guzaldo), brisk direction and more laughs than at least half of the teen films released last summer. Stir Crazy's challenge, like that of all the network newcomers, will be to keep it up every week and try to become a new habit.