Treacle-Down Theory

By James Poniewozik

It is a fall ritual as timeworn as buying spiral notebooks and neglecting to vote: asking how much lower TV's moral limbo dance will go. Is TV becoming a nonstop Mardi Gras of skanks flashing themselves for trinkets? Is any broadcaster still interested in programs that a whole family can watch? The answers are yes--and yes. The former is obvious if you have seen the pixelated nudity on Big Brother 3 and Dog Eat Dog. But a sizable minority of the fall's new programs are, shockingly, about families working out problems with love and clean dialogue.

You can thank, in part, advertisers, who have complained that raunch has driven away some viewers and their wallets. The result is less a return to the paternalistic family hour than a recognition that the family viewing audience still exists, as one niche among many. And one series that TV's moneymen believe will cash in on the hunger for wholesome is the WB's Everwood (Mondays, 9 p.m. E.T.). New York City neurosurgeon Andrew Brown (Treat Williams) is obsessed with his career until his wife dies in a car crash on her way to their son's piano recital, which Brown was too busy to attend. The doctor packs up 15-year-old Ephram (Gregory Smith) and 9-year-old Delia (Vivien Cardone) and moves to Everwood, Colo., a picturesque burg his wife once passed through and fell in love with. There, he grows a Grizzly Adams beard and sets up a free practice for the quirky folk that Picket Fences and Ed have taught us small towns are full of, while trying to reconnect with his kids.

We've seen this before: man escapes the amoral city to rediscover his humanity in the country, where decent folk live. (Didn't David Lynch and South Park kill that canard?) It would be forgivable if the show were better written, like the WB's wholesome but sassy mother-daughter comedy Gilmore Girls. Most unfortunate is Everwood's narrator, the town school-bus driver, who's in the Bagger Vance tradition of the wise black man put on earth to comment on the white stars' spiritual healing. And for every flash of Gilmore-esque zippy dialogue, there's a groaner. When Brown proposes the Colorado move, Ephram says, "That's Harrison-Ford-in-Mosquito-Coast crazy!" Brown responds, "You say crazy; I say"--all together now!--"it might be the sanest thing I've ever done."

Fathers (or father figures) also try to connect with their kids in ABC's 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter (Tuesdays, 8 p.m. E.T.) and the WB's remake of the 1966-71 Family Affair (Thursdays, 8 p.m. E.T.). Both sitcoms' pilots were funded by the advertisers' group Family Friendly Programming Forum (F.F.P.F.), which sponsors "uplifting" series and also underwrote Gilmore Girls. (Two other F.F.P.F.-funded series will debut later in the season.) And both are gooier than a Krispy Kreme. Rules casts John Ritter as a suburban dad with two teen daughters (a hot one and a plain one), whose problems he solves in the pilot in two maudlin scenes. In one the plain daughter asks him, "Do you think I'm pretty?" and in the other he watches the hot one get thrown over by a guy and has a vision of her as a scared, lost toddler. As in the original, Family Affair has wealthy Manhattan bachelor Uncle Bill (Gary Cole) taking in his brother's orphaned kids, who are such old-fashioned wide-eyed waifs, it's as if Bart Simpson had never been drawn.

These shows aren't complete throwbacks. Family Affair is helped by Tim Curry's updated take on the butler, Mr. French, whom he plays as a crank who knows and cares nothing about children. ("I also have a great deal to learn about wolves and dirigibles," he snarls, "and little interest in learning it.") And on each we see how "family friendly" has changed. The hot daughter in Rules walks around with visible bra straps and thong straps; on Family Affair, after the kids ruin Uncle Bill's date, he sees them jumping on their new bed and says, "Testing out the bedsprings? I was hoping to do that myself." But all appeal to a timeless anxiety: that you too wish to get closer to your family. These shows just might help you do that, if only because they give you incentive to turn off the TV and talk instead.