A Raisin in the Fun Fresno Cbs;

By Richard Zoglin

A band of Spanish explorers comes upon a California valley where grapes are plentiful. "The grape is good. It will sustain us," proclaims the No. 1 conquistador, ordering the group to put down roots right there. But wait: here come two more men with a load of grapes from the next valley over. The comandante takes a taste, then spits them out with a grimace. "You call these grapes?" he cries. "They taste like Fresno!"

A few city fathers may not appreciate the etymology lesson that opens CBS's new mini-series, Fresno. But Creator Barry Kemp (a writer-producer who has worked on Taxi and Newhart) could not help noticing that Fresno, the world's raisin capital, wound up last in a 1984 ranking of American cities according to quality of life. To be sure, the quality of life for the raisin-growing Kensington family has been drying up for years. The family patriarch was crushed to death 20 years ago in a dehydrator accident. Now his widow Charlotte (Carol Burnett) spends her time sipping Bloody Marys and being chauffeured around in a Chevrolet station wagon while the Rolls is being repaired.

Charlotte's eldest son Cane (Charles Grodin) tries to save the family $ business from the clutches of a rival tycoon (Dabney Coleman) by striking a shady deal with the local toxic-waste company. Meanwhile, his randy wife Talon (Teri Garr) roams the farm looking for bedmates; his younger brother Kevin (Anthony Heald) takes a vow of celibacy to protest the killing of sperm whales; an adopted sibling named Tiffany (Valerie Mahaffey) embarks on a search for her real parents; and a mysterious stranger (Gregory Harrison) shows up with his own dark secrets -- not the least of which is why he never wears a shirt.

Perhaps this is the place to note that Fresno is a spoof. In a prime-time soap- opera era of evil look-alikes, characters miraculously resurrected from the dead, and whole seasons that turn out to be dreams, it is hard to tell the parody from the real goods. Fresno tries to toss stink bombs at a genre that is probably impervious to anything short of nuclear annihilation. What's more, it does so in a format virtually unheard of on TV: a comedy mini-series. No multiparter has ever managed to sustain laughs for five consecutive nights. On purpose anyway.

Fresno boldly disdains a laugh track, and if it were not for the network's tongue-in-cheek promos, a casual viewer might miss the joke. The cast plays it expertly deadpan, with only an occasional wink at the audience. Satiric jabs at specific soaps are few and relatively tame. The California wines of Falcon Crest have puckered into raisins. The Southern accents (in California?) have migrated from Dallas. Garr's drop-dead wardrobe and a female catfight are straight out of Dynasty. And when Tiffany searches for her father at a costume party, she assembles all the men who are dressed as clowns and demands, a la Lace, "Which one of you bozos is my father?"

Most of the time, the show opts for subtler flecks of wit, often tucked into the edges and backgrounds of scenes. The restaurant where two characters meet (look fast) is called Ma Raison, and one of Cane's bright ideas to save the farm is something called a bran raisin -- no need to add cereal. Other, broader gags can be quite funny. When one character finds himself face to face with a loaded gun, he coolly dares the malefactor to shoot: "You're not scared, are you? . . . Maybe you're too used to having someone do your dirty work." Only this time the bad guy interrupts by blowing him away.

But if Fresno avoids the pitfalls of most TV parody -- gimmicks and overkill -- it errs on the side of politeness. The satire is too meek, there ^ are too many dead spots and blank expressions, and the dialogue often sounds like comedy writers' Muzak. (Grodin: "I'll see us all go to our graves before we lose this ranch!" Garr: "You go to your grave; I'm going to bed.") Burnett seems especially subdued, looking in vain for the precise parodic target that would launch her into an over-the-top lampoon of the kind she mastered on her old variety series.

Indeed, a few Carol Burnett Show writers, or just one of the Zucker brothers (whose movie Airplane! was a funnier and more freewheeling spoof), might have turned Fresno into the definitive takeoff it aspires to be. Fresno seems oddly overqualified: a parody that is better plotted, acted and directed (by Jeff Bleckner) than most of the shows it satirizes. Six hours without one ludicrous cliff-hanger or evil twin? This is a mini-series that could have used a bit less taste and a little more Fresno.