The New Season: Boomers and Humors

By Richard Zoglin

How tough are times for the networks? Just look at the plight of two of TV's most cherished stars, both returning in CBS sitcoms this fall: Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke. The pilot episode of The Van Dyke Show (in which Dick plays a Broadway star who helps his son run a regional theater) had to be scrapped and redone when the network decided it wasn't funny enough. Mary's comeback vehicle (she plays a divorced mother who marries a structural engineer with children of his own) also had to be reworked when the producers switched the actor playing Mary's husband. Even after Oct. 26, when both shows struggle onto the air, they will face the daunting task of competing against ABC's high-rated Growing Pains and Head of the Class on Wednesdays. Their prospects: doubtful at best.

When even big stars do not ensure big audiences, what's a network to do? Strike out in bold new directions, some would say. Play it conservatively, network programmers seem to be responding this fall. By late November, when the strike-impaired season finally musters a quorum of new shows, viewers will find little that is adventurous or likely to lure them back from the increasingly aggressive competition.

The season's most highly touted new drama may be its biggest disappointment. Tattingers, co-created by St. Elsewhere executive producer Bruce Paltrow, is set in a posh Manhattan restaurant. But while striving for Park Avenue glamour, this NBC show has picked up its plots from Gimbels basement. Super- rich restaurateur Nick Tattinger (Stephen Collins) returns from a stay in Europe and sets about reviving the fortunes of his eatery, fending off a developer trying to strong-arm him into selling out and attempting to smooth relations with his high-society ex-wife (Blythe Danner, one of several good actors wasted). "This town -- it just brings out the extremes in me," says Nick. And in Tattingers as well. The '80s genre of tony ensemble dramas, which started with Hill Street Blues and runs through L.A. Law, has finally crossed paths with Dynasty's low-road glitz.

Another new drama, CBS's Almost Grown, takes its cue from last season's yuppie success thirtysomething. The two-hour premiere chronicles three decades in the relationship of a New Jersey couple played by Timothy Daly and Eve Gordon. They date in high school during the early '60s (Motown music on the sound track), live together as rebellious college students (psychedelic rock), marry to satisfy their parents and eventually divorce. The bouffant hairdos and nerdy wisecracks lend fun to the flashbacks, but Daly and Gordon face such predictable life crises that one might be reading a textbook on the generic baby boomer. Almost Grown will not reach maturity until it addresses more individual, and compelling, problems.

Sitcoms, too, are playing it safe this fall; the ambitious "dramedies" of the past few seasons have mostly been supplanted by old-fashioned gag comedies. That isn't necessarily bad. The season's funniest new show, NBC's Dear John, hardly advances the art of the sitcom, but it surely restocks it with human-scale humor. Judd Hirsch stars as a divorced schoolteacher gingerly exploring the single life. On his first visit to a singles group, he meets a sly assemblage of oddballs, including a group leader fixated on sex and a hilariously sleazy skirt chaser (Jere Burns doing Dan Aykroyd's E. Buzz Miller). Executive producer Ed. Weinberger (Mary Tyler Moore) and Director James Burrows (Taxi) are masters at milking a gag till it comes out grade A, and Hirsch's deadpan timing has never been more acute.

Dear John is just one of a slew of new shows that focus on not-so-swinging singles. Single dad James Naughton copes (tediously) with a teenage daughter in CBS's Raising Miranda, and Richard Mulligan mugs (insufferably) as a middle-aged widower in NBC's Empty Nest. Meanwhile, Kate Jackson reprises Diane Keaton's role as a Manhattan yuppie trying to juggle a baby and a high- pressure corporate job in NBC's Baby Boom. The pilot episode plays too much like a Reader's Digest version of the movie (both written by Charles Shyer and Nancy Meyers). But this satire of motherhood in the fast lane can be clever: Mom tells little Elizabeth over the phone, "I'll be home in half a Sesame Street." The Big Band music and Woody Allen-like intertitles give Baby Boom a stylish, non-sitcomy sheen.

The main upholder of the traditional nuclear family this fall is Roseanne. Pudgy comedian Roseanne Barr plays a working-class mom grappling with a dull factory job, three hyperactive kids and her lazy but lovable porker of a husband (John Goodman). Barr's sullen sarcasm -- a cross between Erma Bombeck and Alice Kramden -- is a cry of revolt against years of cheery sitcom parents. Says Mom after the kids run out the door: "Quick, they're gone. Change the locks."

But beware exaggerated claims for this amusing, one-note series. The working-class ambience doesn't have the authenticity of The Honeymooners or the bite of All in the Family. And Barr, a veteran of comedy clubs, grins at too many of her own jokes. With its surefire time period (following ABC's hit Who's the Boss?), the show stands a good chance of success, but the days of whine and Roseanne could soon grow tiresome. R.Z.