(3 of 4)
Once past thirtysomething and A Year in the Life, TV's family album gets considerably bleaker. Fully assembled nuclear families are scarce on the season's new sitcoms; swinging singles and unattached parents are in. One new twist, however, is a trend to half-hour shows that eschew laugh tracks or live audiences and aim instead for the mixed moods of comedy-drama. The technique does not always work -- witness CBS's Frank's Place, a languid, unfunny variation on Cheers set in a New Orleans Creole restaurant. More promising is The "Slap" Maxwell Story, with Dabney Coleman as a self-centered sports columnist. Coleman, so delightfully rancid in Buffalo Bill, is more sympathetic here, his thick-skinned pomposity barely disguising the desperate character underneath. The ABC series, created by Jay Tarses (Buffalo Bill, The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd), is maybe too precious and in-jokish ("Six cliches in ten seconds," marvels a bartender after one of Slap's overripe monologues), but Coleman seems headed toward another memorable characterization.
The other quiet comedy this season is ABC's Hooperman, created by the L.A. Law team of Steven Bochco and Terry Louise Fisher. Starring John Ritter as a San Francisco police detective who inherits a run-down apartment building, the half-hour series plays like a scrunched together episode of Bochco's Hill Street Blues without the violence. The premiere segment made some jarring missteps (a running gag about a policewoman trying to seduce a gay cop) and lunged too hard for the emotional knockout (Ritter bursting into tears over the death of his landlady). But the engaging Ritter is adept at both ends of the comedy-drama spectrum, and Hooperman has possibilities.
While comedies experiment a bit, crime dramas this season have the smell of used goods. Among veteran performers starring in new series are William Conrad as a wily district attorney in Jake and the Fatman, Paul Sorvino as a police- department p.r. man who returns to the streets in The Oldest Rookie, Jerry Orbach as a private eye in The Law and Harry McGraw, and Dale Robertson as a crime-solving Texas billionaire in J.J. Starbuck. Only Robertson seems to be truly enjoying the work. NBC's Private Eye, created by Anthony Yerkovich (Miami Vice), is hipper but not much better. Star Michael Woods, as a disgraced cop who becomes a private eye to avenge his brother's murder, growls like a road-company Don Johnson; the stylized 1950s look is unconvincing, and the dialogue sounds like parody: "I can look at myself mornings, Charlie. Sounds to me like you're havin' problems in that department." For hard-boiled crime fighting, CBS's Wiseguy, with Ken Wahl as an undercover cop trying to infiltrate the Mob, is smarter and meaner.