The new TV series are all crossbred, and the strains show
The Deal may be the classic Hollywood art form, but crossbreeding is the way to an audience's heart. In the entertainment industry, nothing "new" succeeds like last year's success, with a twist. Star Wars? It is like 2001, but cute. E.T.?Disney meets Alien. Flashdance? MTV with a plot. The same, but different. In network television, with its older, more sedentary and conservative audience, the emphasis is on same. Virtually all of the 22 series making their debuts on ABC, CBS and NBC in the next month are clones or hybrids of other TV shows. To hit it big, you just have to know which strains to breed. The trouble is that in most of this fall's premieres the breeding does not show, only the strain.
With the exceptions of AfterMASH (CBS) and Bay City Blues (NBC's major-league series about a minor-league baseball team, from the producers of Hill Street Blues), the new shows find their role models not in TV trailblazers but in the Lowest Common Dreck. I Dream of Jeannie inspired Just Our Luck (ABC); Mister Ed begat Mr. Smith (NBC); Bewitched gave birth to Jennifer Slept Here (NBC). Webster (ABC) is Diff'rent Strokes with a foster mother. The Rousters (NBC) is more dudes of Hazzard. Lottery$ (ABC) is The Millionaire after inflation. Two shows, Cutter to Houston (CBS) and Trauma Center (ABC), could be called The Mod Squad Goes to Med School. Manimal (NBC) is a menagerie of ripoffs, and It's Not Easy (ABC) is a rip-off of manages. We Got It Made (NBC) is Three's Company with a sex change.
Movies and pay cable may brandish their R-rated license, but none of the saltier four-letter words has yet passed the lips of a prime-time hero. No sitcom vixen has bared so much as a nipple. In the new shows one can detect a struggling within the mass-media straitjacket of language and sex. Prime time is like a twelve-year-old tentatively imitating his big bad brother: sneaking a cigarette, practicing a curse word, miming an open-mouthed kiss. Sex can only be suggested, of course, but it may also be suggestive; one smoldering glance can steam up any innuendo. Extract from the pilot script for Emerald Point N.A.S. (CBS), a Jacuzzi-hot soap opera set on a naval base: "PAN FROM the clothes on the floor TO a man's jeans and Levi jacket draped over a chair. From just [off screen], little bleating sounds of passion, at once ladylike and sensual. Now PAN ON OVER TO the bed and FIND Hilary and a young man locked in naked and breathless embrace. As Hilary is swept... from passion to frenzy that approaches violence, biting and clawing at the young man in bed with her, GO TO [a jet plane] firing up with a great, pulsing roar."
Emerald Point's producers call their show, which stars Dennis Weaver as an admiral with three lubricious daughters, "a modern King Lear." (Then what's Dallas? Oedipus Tex?) This and the other new dramas offer the easy thrills of a paperback bought at a bus terminal; even the season's best sitcoms, Just Our Luck and Mr. Smith, are no more demanding than a vintage comic book in Dad's attic. Still, trash has its charms. Herewith a look at ten fall shows, good, bad and same-different: