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Take last Monday night's prime-time schedule. Murphy Brown and Capital News depict journalistic superstars strutting down the corridors of power in Washington. Working Girl is climbing her way into the upper echelons of New York corporate life; next maybe Tess will be dating Donald Trump. In Atlanta the Designing Women are even less likely than Scarlett O'Hara ever to be hungry again. Newhart is living the yuppie fantasy of owning a Vermont country inn. Even the downwardly mobile Philadelphia lawyer of Shannon's Deal can still manage to take a first date out for a $172 restaurant meal. Yes, one of My Two Dads did abandon an oversize New York apartment during reruns but only because he left his heart in San Francisco.
On television, most real work is done by just four occupational groups: cops, lawyers, gravediggers (funerals are a dramatic staple) and the staffs of hospital intensive-care units who are constantly battling to keep characters like MacGyver alive. Everyone else is on a perpetual coffee break. Most of the cast of Wings hangs out in the airport restaurant. The office scenes in Working Girl and Open House were all devoted to the workaday rigors of party planning.
What scant vigor remains in American capitalism is mostly due to the indestructible J.R. Ewing, who is still spouting business maxims like "He's my kind of man -- bribable." Only thirtysomething tries to replicate the real-life stress of middle management, the ulcer-producing anxiety normally reserved for commercials hawking business phone systems and airlines. At a time when America needs role models of scientists, engineers and factory managers striving to keep ahead of the Japanese, all prime time offered were Elliot's self-indulgent efforts to direct a public-service spot worthy of Fellini.
But the treatment of most social problems on the networks cannot avoid being tinged with escapism and societal wish fulfillment. With the best of post- Cosby intentions, television seems determined to become the only place in the nation where the black middle class is growing exponentially. Most black sitcoms are like old-fashioned white ones except with better music. On Family Matters, the Winslows all joined together to perform in a rap video to help Eddie win a contest. The kids enjoying a beach vacation on A Different World may be black, but their primary identity seems to be boisterous middle-class college students. Symbolically, of course, it is indeed a different world when sitcom characters routinely wear T shirts that proclaim, MARTIN, MALCOLM, MANDELA, ME.