Not Playing It for Laughs

By Richard Zoglin

An elderly landlady is brutally murdered in her San Francisco apartment by an intruder. A man who may have been drunk at the wheel is killed when his truck swerves off the road and tumbles over a bridge. One character dies of AIDS, another is disabled by Alzheimer's disease, and a family watches in horror as their house goes up in flames. Typical scenes from a trouble-filled TV fall? Yes, but there is something different about this litany of prime-time woes. These are the comedies, folks.

Sitcoms are trying to make you cry until you laugh this season. A new term has even been coined to describe the hybrid form: dramedies. Three new series -- ABC's Hooperman and The "Slap" Maxwell Story and CBS's Frank's Place -- are ostensibly comedies, but they go for few jokes and have no laughter on the sound track. As for the more traditional sitcoms, they are tackling such heavy subjects as AIDS (Designing Women), Alzheimer's disease (The Golden Girls) and teenage drunk driving (this week's segment of Valerie's Family). On a recent episode of Kate & Allie, a middle-class mother of two (Jane Curtin) got a taste of what it is like to be homeless when she found herself stranded in Upper Manhattan without any money. The segment closed with a gallery of stark black-and-white shots of real homeless people. The producers wanted to add a public service announcement giving viewers a toll-free number to call for information about the homeless, but CBS executives drew the line at using such a documentary device. (Some local stations ran one, however.)

Mixing laughter and tears in one package, of course, is hardly a revolutionary idea. Hollywood movies have been doing it for decades, from Charlie Chaplin through Terms of Endearment. Some of TV's classic family shows, such as Father Knows Best, were as much earnest morality plays as laugh-out-loud comedies, and groundbreaking sitcoms like All in the Family and M*A*S*H demonstrated more than a decade ago that TV comedy is not incompatible with social commentary. Still, genre labels seem especially askew these days. Bruce Willis won this year's Emmy Award for lead actor in a drama series for Moonlighting, a show patterned after Hollywood's breezy romantic comedies of the 1930s. Michael J. Fox was named best actor in a comedy for Family Ties, whose most celebrated segment last season featured Fox's character in a spiritual crisis over the death of a friend.

Why has TV comedy become so glum loving? Part of it can be attributed to the medium's cyclical swings. When the provocative Norman Lear comedies of the early '70s went out of fashion, sitcoms retreated to escapist fluff; now realism and relevance are coming back into vogue. The networks, moreover, are fond of high-profile, easily promotable episodes that can draw attention to a series. ("Next week on I Love Valerie: a crack dealer moves into the neighborhood.") Equally important, many writers and producers, tired of feeding the sitcom gag machine, are looking for ways to stretch the old formulas. Says Hugh Wilson, creator of Frank's Place: "If you play Big Band all the time, every so often you want to improvise."

Unfortunately, the improvising can often sound tinny and unconvincing. In a September episode of The Golden Girls, Sophia (Estelle Getty) met an old gent on a park bench, then discovered that her new friend had Alzheimer's disease. Never mind that the series has stooped to making jokes about Sophia's own near senility; this case of Alzheimer's was so mild that the viewer hardly noticed it before the fellow was whisked offscreen.

Similarly, Kate & Allie's encounter with homelessness took on a difficult issue only by defanging it. After accidentally leaving her purse in a cab, Allie is faced with a six-mile walk back to her Greenwich Village home. Not easy on the feet, to be sure, but hardly a life crisis for a healthy Manhattanite on a nice fall day. Yet within minutes Allie is mournfully ogling the food in restaurant windows, panhandling for subway fare and discovering, at the end of her Odyssean trek, that she is "rich . . . compared to some of the people I saw out there today."

The new laughless comedies deliver their mixed messages more deftly, if not always more successfully. Hooperman, starring John Ritter as a San Francisco cop, is essentially a Hill Street Blues combination of crime-show action, broad comedy and "sensitive" character drama, slickly done but a bit overripe for its half-hour length. The Slap Maxwell Story, with Dabney Coleman as an oafish sportswriter, opts for a looser structure and more melancholy tone. Slap is a blustering loser who is constantly getting socked in the face, pushed around by his boss and dumped on by women; when his estranged son shows up for a visit, the reluctant dad has to poll co-workers for possible topics of conversation. Not exactly a fun guy.

Of all the new shows, Frank's Place seems to be walking most confidently the delicate line between comedy and drama. Set in a bustling New Orleans restaurant, the series at the outset looked like a routine ensemble sitcom in the Cheers mode, but it has grown increasingly audacious and appealing. In one episode, the family of a man killed at the wheel of his truck threatens to sue the restaurant for serving him too many drinks; a white lawyer travels into the black ghetto to discover that the victim actually committed suicide. In another show, Frank (Tim Reid) is courted by a high-class black men's club, which practices its own form of race discrimination. Prospective members are traditionally given a "paper bag" test: only those with skin lighter than the bag are asked to join. The messages are soft-pedaled, however, in favor of funky atmosphere, fragments of offhand humor and characters refreshingly free of sitcom shtick. No big laughs, but not Big Band either.