Office Follies

Sitcom zaps boardroom bozos

Some funny business is going on at Empire Industries. When Chairman Calvin Cromwell schedules an emergency board meeting, the vice presidents fly into a paranoid panic. The terrified executives are certain he has discovered their illicit affairs, embezzlement and Government bribes. A secretary prepares for the meeting by putting airsickness bags around the board table and supplying Valium and smelling salts. A ranting Cromwell finally tells his subordinates, "Someone on this board is responsible, and they're going to hang for it!"

Fortunately for the future of the U.S.

economy, Empire Industries is make-believe. The company's boardroom bozos, behaving like rejects from In Search of Excellence, cavort in a sitcom that CBS unveiled 3 last week. The show premieres Jan. 4.

The half-hour Empire will do nothing to improve TV's already dim view of the typical executive. Like J.R. Ewing of Dallas, most businessmen come off on the tube as antiheroes at best. A 1981 study by the Media Institute, a conservative Washington, D.C.-based group, found two of every three video businessmen were portrayed as crooks, conartists or clowns.

Employees at Empire, which manufactures microwave ovens that have caused consumers to glow in the dark, are sometimes all three. Viewers see Empire through the eyes of Ben Christian, the company's ethical but naive new vice president, who is portrayed by Dennis Dugan. In one episode Cromwell, played by Patrick Macnee, formerly of The Avengers, is enraged because the company is about to lose a contract to sell $350 mil lion worth of air conditioners to Kuwait.

When Cromwell puts Christian in charge of finding out who blew the deal, the new comer's colleagues connive against him.

Empire's security chief snips the brake line on Christian's car and later takes him on a terror ride in an elevator.

Lawrence J. Cohen and Fred Free man, the creators of the show, have invented a conglomerate that might better be called Bedlam Inc. The company's indecisive sales manager answers yes-or-no questions with a paralyzed "Nes" and blurts out unsolicited confessions. He tells his wife, "You know that huge Hawaiian barbecue pit we put in? Well, I didn't pay for it. I buried it in the Kuwaiti bid under market research." Cohen maintains that this is how companies really work. "This is a comedy and will treat business like Dr.

Strangelove treated the atomic bomb," he says. "It's funny, but it was an area that we felt deserved a sardonic look." This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.