The Novelty Is Only Skin Deep

By Richard Zoglin

Like the wind that whistled through the Douglas firs in the town of Twin Peaks, a fresh breeze seemed to be blowing across the TV landscape last spring. The success of David Lynch's wild-at-heart soap opera forced network executives to make a fast reassessment. Twin Peaks defied some of TV's most basic dramatic rules -- it was too murky, too slow moving, too coy about solving its mystery -- yet it attracted a fanatically devoted audience. Viewers, it seemed, were a lot more willing to sample unusual, challenging fare than anyone had expected. Just as All in the Family launched a trend toward taboo-breaking, socially relevant sitcoms and Roots ushered in the age of the mini-series, Twin Peaks was supposed to augur a new era of more adventurous, risk-taking network fare.

Sure enough, the new season has been trumpeted as the boldest in years. Faced with growing competition from cable, independent stations and the Fox network, programmers for the Big Three say they want to take more chances, to strike out in new directions. "Tried and true equals dead and buried," NBC Entertainment chief Brandon Tartikoff told a gathering of advertisers last spring. A heady sentiment. But watching the two dozen prime-time shows being unveiled by the networks this fall is a deflating experience. The creative revolution is still a long way off.

Not that there aren't a few quirky ideas, offbeat shows and modest gambles. The most unusual new entry by far comes from Steven Bochco, the impudent impresario who created Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law and Doogie Howser, M.D. This time, Bochco has combined song-and-dance numbers with a gritty police drama to create Cop Rock, TV's first musical cop show. The beat goes on in NBC's Hull High, a comedy-drama set in a suburban high school and spiced with MTV-style music interludes, and in the same network's Fresh Prince of Bel Air, which brings rap star Will Smith to prime time as a ghetto teenager who moves in with his ritzy Los Angeles relatives.

Another bold (or maybe suicidal) offering is NBC's Lifestories, a downbeat, documentary-style series about people going through medical crises. The show wedges bits of medical advice in between the personal stories and pulls few punches. In the opening program, a man survives a battle with colon cancer -- or so we think, until the offscreen narrator informs us at the end that his cancer reappeared one year later and he died. For this, viewers are supposed to switch away from America's Funniest Home Videos?

The networks are pushing the boundaries of language and subject matter more aggressively too. Uncle Buck, a CBS sitcom based on the John Candy movie, has already drawn fire for filling the mouths of its onscreen tykes with raunchy put-downs like "you suck" and "freckle butt." In the first episode of Cop Rock, the topic of urination is discussed no fewer than three times. ("I gotta pee," pleads a reluctant witness during a rough police interrogation.) CBS's The Trials of Rosie O'Neill, starring Sharon Gless as an attorney with midlife problems, features the season's most attention-grabbing opening line. In a conversation with her analyst, Rosie announces, "I'm thinking about maybe having my tits done."

The creators of network shows are getting a bit more leeway to toy with style as well. Characters on several series talk directly to the camera or convey their thoughts as ironic commentary on the action. Fantasy sequences and playfully exaggerated camerawork abound. Even routine sitcoms are striving for little stylistic flourishes. NBC's American Dreamer, starring Robert Urich as a newspaper columnist raising two kids, features Our Town-style narration. Working It Out, another NBC sitcom, with Jane Curtin and Stephen Collins as divorced people who meet cute at a cooking class, chronicles the start of their relationship in flashbacks from both points of view, as they confide in their best friends.

But despite these gimmicks and gewgaws, the new season seems dismayingly old hat. It's not just the proliferation of overworked characters and formulas: idealistic lawyers, precocious five-year-olds and family shows with interchangeably generic titles (The Family Man, Married People and Sons and Daughters -- try telling them apart). It is also the hollowness of the supposedly innovative stuff. The game this season is to grab the audience's attention, to make shows stand out from the crowd in some way. But the swatches of fuchsia and bright orange can't disguise the dingy old furniture underneath.

This is hardly a new complaint. TV critics earn their spurs by lamenting the lack of adventurous fare on network TV. Often the plea reflects a petulant idealism. One cannot expect weekly artistic innovations on a medium that churns out thousands of hours of entertainment each year. The stress on new and different, moreover, can lead to the hyping of bogus breakthroughs. Fox's new sitcom True Colors, for example, is the first to focus on a racially mixed family, while CBS's E.A.R.T.H. Force pits a team of scientist-crime fighters against a new foe: environmental villains. But no one should mistake these shows for anything but warmed-over variations on All in the Family and Mission: Impossible. The most audacious hits of the past few seasons -- thirtysomething, The Wonder Years, The Simpsons -- did not invent new genres, but at least they invested them with a distinctive style or voice. Even Twin Peaks did not depart radically from the conventions of TV soap operas: what the audience responded to was Lynch's idiosyncratic take on the format.

Distinctive voices are hard to hear this fall amid the din of the assembly line. Much of the new programming is slicker than ever. NBC's The Fanelli Boys, for example, about a quartet of Italian-American brothers who move back to their mother's house in Brooklyn, is cleverly written and brightly acted. But that doesn't compensate for its rancid rehashing of every Italian stereotype known to Hollywood. (One brother is a playboy; another a wheeler- dealer with a hint of Mob connections; a third almost gives Mom a heart attack when he brings home a Jewish girl . . .)

High on the networks' agenda this fall is courting the teenage audience, which has been wooed so successfully over the past few years by the Fox network, MTV and other competitors. NBC has come up with hip-hopping shows like Ferris Bueller and Fresh Prince of Bel Air. CBS is trying to get the youngsters who flocked to the theaters for comic-book extravaganzas like Batman to tune in for a lavishly produced fantasy series, The Flash. (Unfortunately, the show has been scheduled in the Thursday-night death slot, opposite The Cosby Show and The Simpsons.)

But the networks seem more comfortable pandering to baby-boomer parents than to their children. Yuppie characters and issues are proliferating, as usual, but with a new strain of self-criticism. The extended family that is the focus of CBS's Sons and Daughters includes a twentysomething couple trying to adjust to a new baby. Mom is exasperated at having to breast-feed so often, while her callow husband is more excited about his automatic tennis server. The same sort of problem seems imminent for the expectant parents of Married People, an ABC sitcom about couples in a New York City apartment house. She's a lawyer disgusted by her swollen ankles; he's a writer who seems happiest when he's listening to old records on his stereo, to nostalgic '60s music. The yuppie backlash comes into sharpest focus in CBS's sitcom Lenny. The head of this TV family is a blue-collar worker (played by stand-up comic Lenny Clarke) who grumbles like a 1990-model Ralph Kramden about everything from money troubles to his wife's use of yuppie buzz words. "Quality time?" he snaps. "You been watching thirtysomething again?"

Stars, of course, are one way of freshening up trite formulas. But the task is getting tougher. James Earl Jones brings his bearlike charisma to the role of an ex-con who becomes an investigator for a defense attorney in Gabriel's Fire. But the writers do him no service, with pretentious narration ("Where am I? I look around and it feels like a dream") and a predictable odd-couple relationship with the yuppie lawyer he works for (Laila Robins). CBS's Evening Shade, meanwhile, has recruited such veterans as Burt Reynolds, Hal Holbrook and Elizabeth Ashley to breathe some life into an overbaked Southern sitcom.

There are a few rays of light on the fall schedule, but most of them are reflected glory. NBC's Parenthood is funnier and cuts closer to the bone than most family sitcoms, largely because it does such a good job of duplicating the hit movie. Ferris Bueller, based on the John Hughes teen flick, is a fast- and-loose joyride, with Charlie Schlatter doing a good Matthew Broderick impression as the high school big shot. And in a season with an abnormally low population of crime fighters, NBC's Law & Order has a no-nonsense, almost clinical approach to the genre that makes it seem fresh again.

For viewers still hung up on innovation, hope rests mainly on those singing crime fighters in Bochco's Cop Rock. That's a heavy burden for a quirky series that will probably alienate as many people as it will attract. If the show catches on, however, even wackier concoctions could be on the way. A rap-music Western, perhaps? The Flash moves into Knots Landing? An animated version of 60 Minutes? No telling what the networks might try next season. Or how disappointed we might be once we see it.