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High on the networks' agenda this fall is courting the teenage audience, which has been wooed so successfully over the past few years by the Fox network, MTV and other competitors. NBC has come up with hip-hopping shows like Ferris Bueller and Fresh Prince of Bel Air. CBS is trying to get the youngsters who flocked to the theaters for comic-book extravaganzas like Batman to tune in for a lavishly produced fantasy series, The Flash. (Unfortunately, the show has been scheduled in the Thursday-night death slot, opposite The Cosby Show and The Simpsons.)
But the networks seem more comfortable pandering to baby-boomer parents than to their children. Yuppie characters and issues are proliferating, as usual, but with a new strain of self-criticism. The extended family that is the focus of CBS's Sons and Daughters includes a twentysomething couple trying to adjust to a new baby. Mom is exasperated at having to breast-feed so often, while her callow husband is more excited about his automatic tennis server. The same sort of problem seems imminent for the expectant parents of Married People, an ABC sitcom about couples in a New York City apartment house. She's a lawyer disgusted by her swollen ankles; he's a writer who seems happiest when he's listening to old records on his stereo, to nostalgic '60s music. The yuppie backlash comes into sharpest focus in CBS's sitcom Lenny. The head of this TV family is a blue-collar worker (played by stand-up comic Lenny Clarke) who grumbles like a 1990-model Ralph Kramden about everything from money troubles to his wife's use of yuppie buzz words. "Quality time?" he snaps. "You been watching thirtysomething again?"
Stars, of course, are one way of freshening up trite formulas. But the task is getting tougher. James Earl Jones brings his bearlike charisma to the role of an ex-con who becomes an investigator for a defense attorney in Gabriel's Fire. But the writers do him no service, with pretentious narration ("Where am I? I look around and it feels like a dream") and a predictable odd-couple relationship with the yuppie lawyer he works for (Laila Robins). CBS's Evening Shade, meanwhile, has recruited such veterans as Burt Reynolds, Hal Holbrook and Elizabeth Ashley to breathe some life into an overbaked Southern sitcom.
There are a few rays of light on the fall schedule, but most of them are reflected glory. NBC's Parenthood is funnier and cuts closer to the bone than most family sitcoms, largely because it does such a good job of duplicating the hit movie. Ferris Bueller, based on the John Hughes teen flick, is a fast- and-loose joyride, with Charlie Schlatter doing a good Matthew Broderick impression as the high school big shot. And in a season with an abnormally low population of crime fighters, NBC's Law & Order has a no-nonsense, almost clinical approach to the genre that makes it seem fresh again.
For viewers still hung up on innovation, hope rests mainly on those singing crime fighters in Bochco's Cop Rock. That's a heavy burden for a quirky series that will probably alienate as many people as it will attract. If the show catches on, however, even wackier concoctions could be on the way. A rap-music Western, perhaps? The Flash moves into Knots Landing? An animated version of 60 Minutes? No telling what the networks might try next season. Or how disappointed we might be once we see it.