The Fox Trots Faster

By Richard Zoglin

In this corner . . . the champion. TV's No. 1-rated show for four straight years. Slipped to No. 2 last season, but still a powerhouse in the ring. Has the experience, the moves, the fan loyalty. The only uncertainty: most of its victories have come against weak competition. Can it still take a punch?

In this corner . . . the challenger. Television's fastest-rising new hit, a frequent finisher in the Nielsen Top 10 just eight months after its premiere. Its unorthodox style has thrown opponents off balance, but experience is a question mark. Can it go the distance against a wily veteran?

Few battles in TV history have generated as much anticipation as the one being joined this Thursday. That's when The Simpsons, the Fox network's enormously popular cartoon family show, moves from Sunday nights to the time period opposite NBC's blockbuster, The Cosby Show. The scheduling ploy caught most of the TV industry by surprise when it was announced last May. With their audiences steadily shrinking, the networks are more likely to be found in a protective crouch these days, not lashing out with wild uppercuts.

Fittingly, the big swing comes from Fox. One could hardly imagine a better way for TV's burgeoning fourth network to dramatize its bid for parity with the Big Three. Bart Simpson, TV's bratty underachiever, goes head to head with the medium's most famous father. Fox, the upstart outsider, launches an attack on the very symbol of the network establishment. Whatever the outcome, notice has been served: where once there were three contenders on the network battlefield, now there are four.

The winner of this clash will not be clear for several weeks, since both shows are still in reruns. (The Cosby Show will have its season premiere in / late September; new episodes of The Simpsons will probably not arrive until October.) Most network handicappers rate Cosby a slight favorite. One reason: Fox's weaker affiliate lineup (133 stations, including a number of UHF outlets, compared with 200-plus for each of the Big Three) puts the network at an automatic disadvantage. Fox executives are trying hard to lower expectations. "We are hoping to come in in second place," says programming chief Peter Chernin. "((We're)) on such a different playing field that it's tremendously unlikely that we can beat them." But the time seems ripe for an upset. The Cosby Show, about to start its seventh season, has passed its peak. Simpsons mania has swept the nation, and the show has done better than Cosby in several weeks this summer. Notes a TV executive, who picks The Simpsons: "You don't see kids wearing Cliff Huxtable T shirts."

Even if Bart Simpson doesn't succeed in making TV's top dad cry uncle, the face-off marks a milestone for Fox. The network was launched, to much industry skepticism, in 1986 by Australian-born media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who had just bought 20th Century Fox studios and a group of independent TV stations. Fox entered the prime-time arena with a single night of shows in the spring of 1987, and they sank instantly to the bottom of the Nielsen pile. By this past season, the network had expanded to three nights and developed three major hits: The Simpsons, Married...With Children and its new satirical comedy, In Living Color. Even lower-rated Fox shows (and most are still near the back of the pack) draw a high proportion of young viewers, the kind that appeal to advertisers. The network has sold more than $550 million worth of ad time for the coming season, up from $300 million last year, and turned a profit of $33 million for the fiscal year ending in June. Some analysts predict that a year from now Fox will be making as much money as the No. 3-rated network, CBS.

Fox's expansion is shifting into high gear this fall. The network is adding nine new shows and two more nights of programming (series fare on Thursdays through Sundays, plus a movie night on Mondays). It will introduce a slate of children's shows on Saturday mornings and weekday afternoons and launch a national news service for its affiliates early next year. The network, meanwhile, is looking to improve its affiliate lineup; talks are under way with cable operators about getting their channels to carry Fox shows in areas the network does not yet reach.

Perhaps the most telling sign of Fox's success is the degree to which its once scornful rivals are taking notice. Gone are the days when NBC Entertainment chief Brandon Tartikoff could dismiss the fledgling program service as a "coat-hanger network" (referring to the homemade antennas used to bring in weak UHF stations). This summer Tartikoff moved up the premiere dates of several of NBC's fall shows to late August because he feared being beaten to the punch by Fox. (The first of Fox's new shows will debut on Sept. 2.) At a press conference in July, CBS/Broadcast Group president Howard Stringer acknowledged that Fox, with such taboo-busting shows as the raunchy sitcom Married...With Children, has opened new boundaries for all of TV. "We could not have put Married...With Children on the air when it started," he said. "Now we can."

Guided by chairman Barry Diller, the steely former chief of Paramount Pictures, Fox has made its mark through a mix of experimentation, counterprogramming and luck. From the start, the network pursued two main tactics: go for younger viewers and take more chances. Fox provided a home for the offbeat sketch comedy of The Tracey Ullman Show and the Pirandellian zaniness of It's Garry Shandling's Show. It tried cerebral science fiction with Alien Nation and ersatz cinema verite with Cops. With In Living Color, Keenen Ivory Wayans' rowdy, occasionally hilarious sketch comedy that debuted in April, Fox has brought the spirit of the original Saturday Night Live into prime time.

But Fox's successes have not always traveled the high road. Married...With Children, Fox's longest-running show, straddles the line between wicked satire and toilet humor. Shows like America's Most Wanted and The Reporters have resorted to tabloid sensationalism, while Totally Hidden Video is a tacky knock-off of Candid Camera. The network is already drawing critical derision for one of its fall newcomers: Babes, a sitcom about a trio of overweight sisters.

A peek at Fox's new lineup reveals a network-like mix of formula fare and the marginally offbeat. Among the shows are D.E.A., a drama about drug cops; Against the Law, starring Michael O'Keefe as an unorthodox, system-bucking lawyer (yes, another); and True Colors, a sort of interracial Brady Bunch. Parker Lewis Can't Lose!, a sprightly, freewheeling comedy about high school life, is a bit fresher -- at least for those who have never seen a John Hughes movie (Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Sixteen Candles).

The network's most unusual new offering is American Chronicles, a documentary series from David Lynch and Mark Frost, the creators of Twin Peaks. Good pedigree, bad miscalculation: the pilot episode, a film essay on the Mardi Gras in New Orleans, is larded with over-fancy camerawork and pompous narration. The most promising of Fox's fall entries is Get a Life!, from ex-David Letterman writer Chris Elliott. The sitcom, about a 30-year-old underachiever who works as a paper boy and lives atop his parents' garage, is a deadpan (sometimes too deadpan) send-up of the genre. Typical gag: after Dad finishes a heart-to-heart lecture, son has a blank look. "Oh, I'm sorry," he says with a start. "I wasn't listening."

Fox's march toward the network mainstream has not come without some stumbles. The fledgling operation made its first splash in 1986 by hiring Joan Rivers to act as host on a late-night talk show. But it fizzled in less than a year. Fox tried fruitlessly to come up with a successor, and even let its most promising replacement, Arsenio Hall, slip away to a competitor. In prime time, Fox showed an early preference for sappy, network-like sitcoms (Mr. President, Down and Out in Beverly Hills), most of which failed quickly. "The problem was that typical network programming would not succeed on Fox," says Garth Ancier, the ex-NBC programmer who became Fox's first program chief at age 28. "We had to do shows that demanded your attention, that yanked you by the throat to get you to change the channel."

Eventually, Fox found them. The network hit the teen audience dead center with 21 Jump Street, about a band of high school undercover cops. With America's Most Wanted, Fox scored an unexpected hit with the novel idea of enlisting viewers to help track down dangerous criminals. Nothing, however, matched the ballistic success of The Simpsons, Matt Groening's animated family comedy that began as inserts on The Tracey Ullman Show and made its series debut last January.

A try-anything underdog, Fox has cultivated a reputation as the network most receptive to new ideas and willing to leave producers alone to develop them. The reputation may be somewhat overblown, especially now that such networks as ABC are developing shows like Twin Peaks. Some insiders contend that Fox executives are, in fact, more intrusive than the other networks'. "They are overaggressive in terms of what they want," says the producer of one Fox show. "They've got to relax a little." Yet Fox remains more willing than the Big Three to test the boundaries of permissible content. In Living Color has aired such eyebrow-raising sketches as "Riding Miss Daisy" (a parody of the movie in which the chauffeur and his employer couple in the back seat) and a recurring bit in which a pair of gay entertainment critics snicker over titles like Moby Dick. Says producer Tamara Rawitt: "There's a real Wild West feeling at Fox, and they sensed the same thing in Keenen."

Fox's success could create new problems. Some observers contend that the network, having expanded to five nights of programming, is spreading itself too thin; Fox reportedly has few backup shows ready to replace any fast failures. What's more, as it grows, Fox risks acquiring more of the trappings of a traditional network -- bureaucracy, caution, arrogance -- and losing what made it distinctive.

A more tangible roadblock could come from the Federal Government. Until now, Fox has been free of restrictions that limit networks from having a financial stake in the lucrative syndication market. But this fall Fox will surpass the minimum amount of programming -- 15 hours a week -- that triggers those restrictions. Last May, Fox was given a one-year exemption from the rules. If the waiver is not extended or the rules are not changed, Fox will have to make a tough choice: either separate the network from 20th Century Fox's production and syndication arm, or scale back the network to keep it under the 15-hour minimum. "We could fully program prime time," says Diller, "but we couldn't do children's programming. We couldn't offer national news programs. We couldn't expand in all the areas that give the network fiber and depth."

For now, expansion is proceeding full steam. A sixth night of prime-time programming will be launched next fall, and a seventh in 1992. "I could see Fox becoming the third network, not just the fourth," says Paul Isacsson, executive vice president of Young & Rubicam. The Big Three, of course, are still dominant in the important areas of news, sports and daytime programming, and they have the resources to fight back fiercely against the new challenger. But Fox has proved it can handle the heat. Now it's up to Bart Simpson to handle Mr. Cosby.

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CAPTION: PRIME-TIME SHOWDOWN

With reporting by Richard Natale/Los Angeles and Linda Williams/New York