Must-See (Again) TV

By James Poniewozik With Reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles and Heather Won Tesoriero/New York

This spring in the famously youth-obsessed TV business, Botox is out and wrinkles are in. The reason: during last November's sweeps, the networks' triannual efforts to impress advertisers--a Carol Burnett reunion on CBS surprised everyone (not least of all CBS) by drawing 30 million people to watch a reel of bloopers. Now, virtually every TV icon with an AARP card and a pulse has been pressed into service.

The nostalgia specials planned this sweeps--roughly two dozen of them--include reunions of The Cosby Show, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Laverne & Shirley (itself a '70s nostalgia show about the '50s). We have bloopers from Bob Hope, dating back to when he entertained the troops during the War of 1812. There's a TV Guide special on ABC naming TV's 50 best shows, an L.A. Law movie and a tribute to game shows, as well as love letters to The Honeymooners, American Bandstand and--from the didn't-realize-we-missed-it department--That's Incredible! Fox is reuniting M*A*S*H, a show that not only ran on CBS but also left the air before the 15-year-old Fox network existed.

"As is true with all TV, we kill the golden goose," concedes NBC Entertainment president Jeff Zucker, whose network leads the back-to-the future pack, partly because of its 75th-anniversary celebration (NBC is counting its years as a radio network). But producers and stars insist the specials--most of which have not been screened for critics--aren't derivative clip jobs. Well, not total derivative clip jobs. Bill Cosby taped a new stand-up routine about family issues to integrate with clips and cast interviews. On the Laverne & Shirley get-together, Penny Marshall and Cindy Williams do a sketch in character in which America's favorite brewery workers audition for a reality show. Mary Tyler Moore, who co-produced her special, sat down for one-on-one interviews with co-stars including Ed Asner, Cloris Leachman and Valerie Harper. "I walked around for a couple of days with a major lump in my throat," Moore says. Mike Farrell, M*A*S*H's B.J. Hunnicut and a producer of the reunion, says he signed on "for quality control, to make sure it's not some exploitative piece of junk...[Fox] made it clear they were going to do a tribute to the show because they think it's a big ratings winner. That's all they care about, frankly."

The industry explanation for Burnett's surprise hit in November was a yearning for comfort culture after the Sept. 11 attacks, so this May is as much a test of Osama bin Laden's continuing legacy as Cosby's. "It's probably an oversimplification," says Zucker, "but the country seems to want to look back at an easier, simpler time." At least it did then, when U.S. planes were pounding Afghanistan and Americans were opening their utility bills with latex gloves. Now it may be the networks who are hankering for an easier, simpler time. Sept. 11 caused a brief return to their glory days, as viewers swelled the ratings of familiar sitcoms and network newscasts. But today the networks are bleeding viewers to cable again (one April Saturday, more people watched the Learning Channel's home-design show Trading Spaces than did ABC's fare).

The nostalgia craze lets the Big Three relive the days when they were the Only Three. The old hits had far bigger audiences than today's and so are part of our communal memory in a way that niche hits like MTV's The Osbournes may never be. Thus they have a better chance of reuniting that mass audience, as Burnett did. And given the networks' shrinking viewership, it's a smarter strategy to raid the clip vault than to spend, for instance, the roughly $85 million that ABC's upcoming Dinotopia mini-series cost.

Ironically, these specials owe a lot to cable's steady diet of reruns and where-are-they-now shows. "I couldn't be more thrilled that the networks are doing this now," says Larry W. Jones, the general manager of TV Land and Nick at Nite. "They're blowing our horn." TV Land and company may also have broadened the specials' demographics by bringing a new, young audience to them. Says Moore: "It amazes me how many people come up and say something to me about Mary Richards, whether they are 7 or 77 years old."

The core audience for the specials, though, tends to be baby boomers, the first generation nurtured on TV. "You have this population that's seeing themselves in the mirror differently than ever before, and they sense the time flipping by," says Harry Hamlin, who returns to his starring role in NBC's L.A. Law movie, in which the series' sexy solicitors return with a decade's growth of crow's feet and a new set of improbably quirky plot twists.

The networks are cannily letting their current shows bask in the blue glow of TV's past glory too. NBC, in full peacock-proud mode, is throwing itself a birthday bash May 5--chockablock with current stars--and toasting 20 years of must-see sitcoms in a May 20 special. It's also stunt casting Cheers alums on Frasier, St. Elsewhere docs on Scrubs and Hill Street Blues flatfoots on Third Watch (to make some arrests for impersonating a quality cop drama, we hope). CBS, meanwhile, canonized Everybody Loves Raymond with a nostalgia special at the grand old age of 6 and recruited Kevin James to play host at its Honeymooners encomium--implying that the King of Queens star is Jackie Gleason's long-lost outer-borough heir.

But as self-serving as TV's nostalgia jag may be, it also confers a kind of historical weight on a sometimes ephemeral medium. TV defines us, much as we may sometimes hate it for that: M.T.M. and Laverne & Shirley celebrated white- and blue-collar workingwomen for the feminist era; Cosby catapulted an upscale African-American family into white living rooms; M*A*S*H articulated our anxiety about the Vietnam War by way of Korea. At some level we know this, even if we're just tuning in to check out Corbin Bernsen's laugh lines.

The networks may trip down memory lane next fall too. The WB is thinking about a remake of The Lone Ranger (though a revival of The Fugitive bombed on CBS two years ago), and NBC is considering Rerun, on which classic sitcom episodes would be re-enacted by a troupe of actors--presumably, young, cute actors. But just to be safe, Buddy Ebsen, you might want to call your agent.

--With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles and Heather Won Tesoriero/New York