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The trouble is that insults and oddballs do not wear very well. To survive for the long haul, most sitcoms have to reinvent themselves in more sympathetic terms. The regulars at the Cheers bar were originally a collection of funny misfits; now they're a family. Roseanne roared to the top of the ratings on the strength of its revenge-of-the-housewife wisecracks. Since then it has played down the gag lines and established a nice rhythm as TV's best domestic comedy.
This fall, however, battling and bickering are back in style. In CBS's Teech, a black music teacher gets hired at a snooty white boarding school, providing the occasion for a predictable batch of racial wisecracks. ("I am only reluctantly conforming to federal guidelines," sniffs the headmaster to his token hire. "Shoeshine?" offers the teacher.) NBC's Pacific Station pairs a hard-boiled police detective (Robert Guillaume) with a flaky new partner (Richard Libertini), who brews herb tea and spouts New Age psychobabble. Only the two stars' professionalism keeps this from being a match made in hell.
In Fox's Herman's Head, the discord has spread to the main character's subconscious. As a young magazine researcher plows through a typical day, his four inner "selves" -- representing intellect, anxiety, sensitivity and lust -- compete for control. The device generates some laughs but starts wearing thin before the first episode is even finished.
High concept goes totally over the top in ABC's Good & Evil, an outre farce from the creators of Soap. The title refers to two warring sisters. One (Margaret Whitton) is a medical researcher so good-hearted that she tests a new vaccine on herself rather than give it to lab monkeys. The other (Teri Garr), who is scheming to take over her mother's cosmetics empire, smears an experimental cream on her secretary's face to see if it makes the skin peel off. Among the other characters: a husband of one sister, who has just been thawed out after four years frozen in the ice on Mount Everest, and a blind man who totals a laboratory with his cane in the most gratingly ill-conceived bit of TV slapstick of the year. Maybe ever.
Not all the new families are as dysfunctional as the one on Good & Evil, but few seem very happy together, at least initially. In ABC's Step by Step, two single parents (Patrick Duffy and Suzanne Somers) marry and merge their respective three-child broods; the kids are at one another's throats instantly. In NBC's Flesh 'n' Blood, a yuppie lawyer (Lisa Darr) is visited by her long-lost brother (David Keith), a hillbilly layabout, and his two unwashed kids. Much to her dismay (and ours), they promptly move in. In CBS's < The Royal Family, Redd Foxx plays a sour Atlanta mailman whose sunset years with his wife (Della Reese) are interrupted by yet another band of unwanted relatives: their daughter and grandchildren from Philadelphia. It's hard to know which is more annoying -- these paper-thin pretexts for put-down jokes or the cavalier way they are tossed aside in a headlong rush for the heartstrings.