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Which is why ABC's thirtysomething, the season's best new series, has the ring of authenticity. The protagonists, Michael and Hope (played attractively by Ken Olin and Mel Harris), are a young married couple with a nine-month-old daughter and a batch of friends who are pulling them in different directions. Gary is a long-hair '60s leftover who wants them to loosen up and go backpacking. Ellyn is a childhood friend of Hope's who feels abandoned now that the baby has arrived. Elliot, Michael's partner in a small ad agency, is a practical family man who urges that the agency agree to a big client's demand for a campaign that rips off someone else's ideas.
One can smirk at the show's blatant appeal to the yuppie audience and at some of the cliched relationshipspeak ("It's too hurtful"). But Creators Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz invest what is potentially banal with conviction and wit. The dialogue is sharp but not showy (Michael, complaining about a near sleepless night with the baby, asks Elliot, "Do you get used to having, like, no REM periods?"), and the small crises are credible and not overblown. Michael and Hope quarrel about whether to hire a baby sitter so they can go on a camping trip. Michael, after some soul searching, does agree to that ad campaign he wanted to turn down, simply because the agency can't afford not to. Imagine! A character we are meant to identify with actually compromises his principles and doesn't get a moral lecture for it. Thirtysomething is not just grownup; it is honest.
NBC's A Year in the Life, based on last season's Emmy Award-winning mini- series, has a broader scope, encompassing three generations of an upper- middle-class Seattle clan headed by a widowed businessman (Richard Kiley). But the show intersects with thirtysomething through Kiley's four grown children, who are in various stages of marital happiness or disarray. Indeed, the new parents played by Adam Arkin and Jayne Atkinson have an argument over baby sitters -- Mom is reluctant to leave the tot with a stranger for the first time -- that is virtually identical to Michael and Hope's.
The difference is that here the problem is turned into familiar jokes: the couple hires a housekeeper who speaks no English but is so efficient that Dad feels left out and spends the day spying on her. A Year in the Life is well acted (especially by Kiley) and tries to be unsparing in its dissection of a typical American family. But it resorts too often to contrivances and soap opera. When a divorced mother is asked out on her first date after the split, her two teenage youngsters help their nervous mom prepare for the big evening. What she doesn't tell them is that, at the last minute, the guy has called to cancel. All dressed up with nowhere to go, she spends the evening at a Marx Brothers movie -- and then in bed, guiltily, with her ex-husband. A week in the life of this family is probably enough.