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The creators of network shows are getting a bit more leeway to toy with style as well. Characters on several series talk directly to the camera or convey their thoughts as ironic commentary on the action. Fantasy sequences and playfully exaggerated camerawork abound. Even routine sitcoms are striving for little stylistic flourishes. NBC's American Dreamer, starring Robert Urich as a newspaper columnist raising two kids, features Our Town-style narration. Working It Out, another NBC sitcom, with Jane Curtin and Stephen Collins as divorced people who meet cute at a cooking class, chronicles the start of their relationship in flashbacks from both points of view, as they confide in their best friends.
But despite these gimmicks and gewgaws, the new season seems dismayingly old hat. It's not just the proliferation of overworked characters and formulas: idealistic lawyers, precocious five-year-olds and family shows with interchangeably generic titles (The Family Man, Married People and Sons and Daughters -- try telling them apart). It is also the hollowness of the supposedly innovative stuff. The game this season is to grab the audience's attention, to make shows stand out from the crowd in some way. But the swatches of fuchsia and bright orange can't disguise the dingy old furniture underneath.
This is hardly a new complaint. TV critics earn their spurs by lamenting the lack of adventurous fare on network TV. Often the plea reflects a petulant idealism. One cannot expect weekly artistic innovations on a medium that churns out thousands of hours of entertainment each year. The stress on new and different, moreover, can lead to the hyping of bogus breakthroughs. Fox's new sitcom True Colors, for example, is the first to focus on a racially mixed family, while CBS's E.A.R.T.H. Force pits a team of scientist-crime fighters against a new foe: environmental villains. But no one should mistake these shows for anything but warmed-over variations on All in the Family and Mission: Impossible. The most audacious hits of the past few seasons -- thirtysomething, The Wonder Years, The Simpsons -- did not invent new genres, but at least they invested them with a distinctive style or voice. Even Twin Peaks did not depart radically from the conventions of TV soap operas: what the audience responded to was Lynch's idiosyncratic take on the format.
Distinctive voices are hard to hear this fall amid the din of the assembly line. Much of the new programming is slicker than ever. NBC's The Fanelli Boys, for example, about a quartet of Italian-American brothers who move back to their mother's house in Brooklyn, is cleverly written and brightly acted. But that doesn't compensate for its rancid rehashing of every Italian stereotype known to Hollywood. (One brother is a playboy; another a wheeler- dealer with a hint of Mob connections; a third almost gives Mom a heart attack when he brings home a Jewish girl . . .)