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."