TV's Generation Gap

By Richard Zoglin

Woman walks into a bar. The regulars instantly size her up: "Uptown, East Side, college educated. Probably reuses her grocery bags. Charter subscriber to Working Woman magazine. Saw The Big Chill three times. Plays Trivial Pursuit on the weekends with friends. What's she doing here on a Monday? It's Murphy Brown night."

Man makes a lewd comment. Woman instantly sizes him up: "Is there a brain up there, or just one long episode of Studs?"

SCENES FROM BOTH SIDES OF TV's generational divide: the first, from Diane English's much anticipated new CBS sitcom Love and War, is hip, sophisticated, full of knowing media references (including one to English's own show -- and current cause celebre -- Murphy Brown). The second, from a less heralded new NBC sitcom called Out All Night, is brassy and in-your-face; its TV reference, appropriately, is to a salacious game show. Love and War is one of a potful of ( upscale, thirtysomething sitcoms served up by the networks this fall. Out All Night gives a good idea of what TV thinks of the younger generation.

Thirtysomething, ABC's trendsetting drama series, has been off the air for more than a year, but the show's angst-ridden spirit will be all over the dial this fall. In Love and War, a roughhewn Manhattan journalist (Jay Thomas) falls for a prickly, recently divorced restaurateur (Susan Dey). In Hearts Afire, two aides to a U.S. Senator (John Ritter and Markie Post) get together despite clashing political views. NBC's Mad About You focuses on neurotic newlyweds living in Manhattan, while ABC's Laurie Hill adds a five-year-old child to the trials of a busy two-career couple.

It's no surprise that thirtysomething shows are growing in popularity. They reflect, to a large degree, the experiences and life-styles of the people who create them. They attract the audience demographics that advertisers crave. They usually get applause from the critics -- or at least approving nods for trying to bring "quality" to a medium dominated by escapist drivel.

The escapist drivel, meanwhile, is going after a younger crowd. TV's hottest new genre is the twentysomething ensemble show. Melrose Place (a spinoff of Beverly Hills 90210), The Heights (about a group of blue-collar New Jersey youths trying to launch a rock band) and 2000 Malibu Road, a soap opera set in a California beach house, all drew strong ratings this summer. Coming this fall are NBC's The Round Table (young professionals in Washington), Fox's Class of '96 (students at a small Northeastern college) and a slew of youth- oriented sitcoms.

A generation gap could hardly be more clearly defined. TV's under-30s are, for the most part, shallow, fun loving, upbeat. They tend to live in communal groups and spend a lot of time in the sun. They are still young enough to be entranced with the idea of being on their own. One of the two bachelors who room together (while working at Patti LaBelle's nightclub) in Out All Night raves about their new apartment: "It's what we've always talked about. A place of our own, with no parents, no dorm directors -- just freedom!"

After the age of 30, however, life gets more complicated and troubling. TV's thirtysomethings are tense, introspective, concerned about relationships. They have pressure-filled jobs, and they usually live in big cities, where just getting to work can be a problem. "If we're not on the subway by eight, all the nonsticky seats are taken," says the husband rushing for work in Mad About You. They worry a lot about their future, and no wonder: if they're not careful, they could end up like one of the midlife losers of Middle Ages, CBS's downer drama that just opened for a five-week run. Take Peter Riegert, for instance, who plays a salesman trying to peddle computers to small-town Midwesterners, many of them old people who are still mystified by the little holes in steam irons. Willy Loman never had it so drab.

TV's younger generation, of course, has its troubles too, but they are usually overblown soap-opera cliches, and they seem to catch everybody by surprise. In Melrose Place, a naive young secretary is sexually attacked by her new boss, but only after warning signs that not even Senator Arlen Specter could have missed. In The Heights, a band member's girlfriend announces that she is pregnant. "I guess we'll get married. It's the right thing to do," says the boyfriend, who has apparently never seen an episode of Oprah or Donahue. The knottiest problems in The Heights are not personal but group related. The sole black member of the band gets razzed by his neighborhood pals for playing with a bunch of whites. "It's not a color thing," he replies. "It's a people thing." A blond waif complains that the band won't let her sing her own soulful music. "If you don't start taking me seriously, I'm going to quit the band!" she cries. Who said anything about taking people seriously?

Not all of TV's under-30s appear brain damaged. Beverly Hills 90210, the high school drama whose success launched the current spate of twentysomething ensembles, has always borne more resemblance to a thirtysomething show, with its brooding characters and relatively forthright treatment of teen problems. Going to Extremes, the new series from John Falsey and Joshua Brand (I'll Fly Away, Northern Exposure) and set in a Caribbean medical school, is a surprisingly bland concoction from that creative team. But at least it revolves around characters with minimum scores on the SATs and some awareness of the real world.

Nor are the older-targeted shows, for all their introspective angst, necessarily profound or truthful. Laurie Hill sets up a familiar problem: a two-career couple (she's a doctor, he's a freelance writer) trying to find time for each other and for their five-year-old son. But the day-to-day conflicts are too overbaked. Laurie's husband gets pouty when their evening at ) home is interrupted by her beeper. "You have a kid at home who's gonna be in college by the time the three of us get to have a meal together!" he snaps later. And what is the crisis that has called her away? A sick young boy whose test results show he is HIV-positive. So much for marital sensitivity.

Love and War is shrewder and funnier, but its therapy-session psychologizing tends to run amuck. Wally and Jack, the couple from opposite sides of the tracks, dissect their relationship in first-person comments to the camera. (He: "I have this feeling about her. It's like the first time I rode the Cyclone at Coney Island. I was strangely excited, and a little nauseous at the same time." She: "I've always found his type very attractive, but I'm in a dangerously vulnerable place right now.") Conversing with each other, however, they revert to adolescent stammering. Jack tries to ask Wally for a date: "Would you like to have dinner with me tonight? O.K., O.K., that was too much, too formal, too crazy. Want to eat with me tonight? I mean, I have to eat, you have to eat . . ."

The one subject in which conversation is blunt and unambiguous is sex. On their first date, Jack and Wally kiss briefly, then she suddenly blurts out, "Would you like to have sex?" They proceed to debate the possibility with all the emotional involvement of a discussion of tax policy on Wall Street Week. There are gag lines that must have had the show's writers in stitches ("Your condom or mine?"), but the whole encounter is contrived and phony, like too much of the show.

Love and War seems even more artificial when compared with Mad About You, the season's best new sitcom. Paul and Jamie (Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt) are Manhattan newlyweds with no cute eccentricities, no clashing political views, no comical disparities in social background. Their problems are the little ones that occur when even compatible people are tossed into the same house together for the first time. Just getting out of the apartment in the morning is a Feydeau farce: she rushes back to open the window (the dog needs air), he rushes back to close it (a burglar might get in).

Mad About You, like Love and War, is too self-consciously verbal on the subject of sex, but it has more self-deprecating wit. She: "It doesn't bother you that we haven't had sex in five days? What's going on with us?" He: "What's going on is that we're married five months and the sexual part . . . is over. I thought you understood that."

% Reiser, a former stand-up comic, has knife-edge timing and a full repertoire of nervous tics, and Hunt manages to be both charming and exasperating at the same time. One sign of a sitcom that cares more about its characters than its gag lines: when Paul and Jamie start to fight, they ask their dinner guests to leave the room -- carrying their potential wisecracks with them. Privacy is one concept that becomes more precious with age.