Banging Away at the Piano Works

By Richard Zoglin

GRAND; NBC; Thursdays; 9:30 p.m. EST

Carol Anne, a spacey housewife with overactive hormones, grabs her husband one morning while he is shaving. "Guess who's ovulating," she chirps enticingly. Janice, a single mother who tells anyone who will listen that she hasn't had sex in three years, agrees to go out with a motorcycle cop who has been pursuing her. Just a casual dinner date at the local hotel, he promises. "Get a room," she says. Desmond, the longtime butler to a wealthy industrialist, makes a confession. Years ago, the boss's third wife found out about his philandering and used Desmond to take revenge. Guess how.

No TV executive has ever underestimated the power of sex to sell a show. But NBC's new sitcom Grand is a clanging symphony of suggestiveness. Set in the fictional town of Grand, Pa. -- whose chief industry, a piano factory, has fallen on hard times -- the series introduces a clutch of socially diverse - characters and stirs vigorously. Atop the class structure in this small-town version of Upstairs, Downstairs is the piano magnate Harris Weldon (John Randolph), attended by a faithful but acerbic manservant (John Neville). At the bottom is the chain-smoking Janice Pasetti (Pamela Reed), who lives in a trailer with her chubby daughter and works as a maid. Somewhere in between is Weldon's niece (Bonnie Hunt) and her upwardly mobile husband (Michael McKean), who has an idea for saving Weldon Piano Works (make golf clubs instead) and a yen for the maid.

Among the slew of network mid-season replacements, Grand is a good bet for hitdom. Its executive producers are Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner, the team responsible for three of TV's five top-rated shows: Roseanne, The Cosby Show and A Different World. Despite a misfire last fall with Chicken Soup, the duo are as hot as TV producers get. CBS even talked to them in December about taking over the network's programming division. (The negotiations fell through.) Perhaps because of their clout, Grand has been given a near indestructible time period: the half-hour following Cheers on NBC's powerful Thursday-night schedule. That means Grand is probably in for the long haul -- good, bad or indifferent.

Mostly it's bad. Though Carsey and Werner are not exactly groundbreakers, their shows have brought a less frenetic, more naturalistic style to the sitcom genre. But Grand (created by Michael Leeson, who wrote The War of the Roses) is packed with plot twists and gag lines, most of them leeringly lame. ("Desmond, have you ever been intimate when the two of you knew you weren't in love?" "I've been intimate when the three of us knew we weren't in love.") The show strives to be a wacky send-up of soap operas, but it lacks the deadpan wit of Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman or the bomb-throwing audacity of Soap.

Potential hit or not, Grand debunks any notion that Carsey and Werner have a magic touch. Their shows until now have been driven by stars with well- developed comic personas. (Chicken Soup failed because it never created a plausible milieu for its star. Jackie Mason as a social worker?) Grand depends instead on an ensemble cast, which seems adrift with characters thrown together as arbitrarily as passengers on a lifeboat. Joel Murray has some funny moments as old man Weldon's flaky son, and Reed gives off sexy sparks as the trailer-park mom. But they don't keep the boat from sinking.