SHOW: DR. QUINN, MEDICINE WOMAN
TIME: SATURDAYS, 8 P.M. EST, CBS
THE BOTTOM LINE: The surprise hit of the season is treacly but has its old- fashioned pleasures.
Well, here's a fine how-de-do. The networks keep churning out trendy sitcoms and hip ensemble dramas in a desperate (and largely futile) attempt to attract young viewers. Then CBS trots out an old-fashioned frontier drama, slips it almost sheepishly into the little-watched Saturday-night schedule, and gives it the clumsiest title on TV, Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman. Darned if the homespun series doesn't catch on. Aside from coattail successes like Love and War (which follows Murphy Brown) and The Jackie Thomas Show (after Roseanne), it's the biggest new hit of the season.
An instructive hit too. The glut of youth-oriented shows seems to have created a viewer backlash. Matlock and In the Heat of the Night, two old- timers canceled by NBC last year, are back and doing well on new networks. NBC executives have acknowledged that they probably moved too fast to junk aging shows and replace them with youth-oriented sitcoms. It is no accident that CBS, the one network that has stayed aloof from the youthquake, is No. 1 in the ratings, with "mature" shows like Murder, She Wrote, 60 Minutes and Evening Shade.
) Those shows, however, look like MTV next to Dr. Quinn. Jane Seymour, queen of the network mini-series, stars as the graduate of an Eastern women's medical college who answers an ad and moves west to practice in Colorado Springs in the 1860s. The residents are surprised and dismayed to discover that their new doctor is a woman (her name, unhelpfully, is Michaela), but she quickly proves her skills. In the meantime, she takes over the care of three youngsters whose mother has died of a rattlesnake bite. "After my real ma went to heaven, Dr. Mike got to be my ma down here on earth," explains the youngest. "And she loves me just the same."
Treacle like that goes down easier when the storytelling is as confident and plainspoken as it is here. Unlike, say, the recent mini-series Queen, Dr. Quinn is hokum without an agenda, other than re-creating some old-time TV pleasures. The town characters -- a naive telegraph operator, a good-hearted prostitute, a smoldering hunk who hangs out with a pet wolf -- are colorful in the innocent, pre-Bochco sense of the word, and the series has sweep and moral heft. (For the opening credits, the screen is even masked at the top and bottom to simulate a CinemaScope epic.)
And for those who think the TV western is outdated, Dr. Quinn has plenty of Clinton-era updating. In one episode, Dr. Quinn sets out to expose a mill owner who is polluting the town's drinking water with mercury. In another, she fights with a bank officer who won't lend her money because she's a single woman. Indians in Dr. Quinn are not hostile, just misunderstood; a hawker of phony patent medicines turns out to be a surgeon who grew disillusioned after witnessing battlefield carnage during the Civil War. Seymour, as the town's doctor, psychologist, police force and environmental chemist rolled into one, is the biggest anachronism of all. But a right purty one.