Like last spring`s ”Morningstar/Eveningstar,” CBS` short-lived late-season replacement (orphanage burns down, kids take refuge in senior- citizen residence), NBC`s ”Our House” is another family drama that network executives obviously like to envision as being ”warm and wonderful.” It isn`t. What it is is maudlin and manipulative.
The hour-long series, which airs intially at 7:30 p.m. Thursday before moving to its regular slot on Sunday evenings, is also predicated on the generation gap. In this case, a family of four picks up and moves from Fort Wayne to California to move in with paternal grandfather Gus Witherspoon
(Wilford Brimley), a straight-talkin`, horseshoe-pitchin`, model-train buildin`, set-in-his-ways 65-year-old widower who worked years for the railroad until they kicked him upstairs. The cross-country transplants, who plan to stay under his roof only until they can get it together financially, are his recently widowed daughter-in-law, Jessie (Deidre Hall), and her three children: 15-year-old Kris (ShannenDoherty), 12-year-old David (Chad Allen)
and 8-year-old Molly (KeriHoulihan).
”Taking a woman and three kids into your house could be fatal,” warns friend and neighbor Joe Kaplan (Gerald S. O`Loughlin). ”These are modern kids. If it isn`t on a cassette, they don`t relate.” It`s not just any woman and kids–it`s family, Gus retorts. ”I know `family` may be an old-fashioned word, but I`m a little old-fashioned.”
Predictably, what Joe terms ”the invasion of the body snatchers” turns into a full-press exercise in attitude adjustment. The 12-year-old is miffed because he has been uprooted from his school and soccer team. The 15-year-old is unhappy not only because she has to room with her little sister (whom she calls a ”troll”), but because her new school doesn`t offer the honors courses she needs to get into the Air Force Academy and become an astronaut. The 8-year-old–who, of course, is precocious–grouses that she is being characterized as a troll and, in turn, refers to the future astronaut as
”Kleenex-chest.”
Jessie, on the other hand, is on edge because she is desperate to get a job after being out of the work force for 16 years (she winds up being hired as a secretary for a handsome boss who appears to be an architect), while Gus himself is just not used to hearing reveille in the form of hard-rock music and seeing his house turned into a collective garbage dump. What`s more, he was never informed about a late-arrival, a basset hound named Arthur. Gus, of course, is allergic to dogs.
There are other sources of friction–from the youngsters` being forced to eat liver to the mother`s not being consulted when the grandfather draws up a list of rigid rules–but nothing that can`t be worked out. Why, in the first episode alone, the kids are allowed to leave the table without cleaning their plates, Gus manages to get Kris transferred to a school that does have high-powered courses (after threatening an arrogant, sexist school board member with a class-action suit) and Jessie knows she has a, well, warm and wonderful place to stay because her father-in-law already has started to call her
”Pumpkin.”
Unlike ”The Cosby Show,” NBC`s family cash cow, ”Our House”–created by James Lee Barrett–plays too much on the heartstrings and not enough on the brain cells, while failing to find any kind of redemption in humor. (In one scene, Arthur spots a nasty neighbor who is about to cut down Gus` sap-dripping, 75-year-old tree, and, naturally, promptly uses her as a fire hydrant.)
Brimley (”Cocoon,” ”The Natural”) gives a solid enough performance in spite of the contrived crustiness-cum-compassion of his character, and is nicely assisted by O`Loughlin as they work out their somewhat testy relationship like old codgers in a Mamet one-acter. However, Hall (known to
”Days of Our Lives” devotees as Dr. Marlena Evans) plays the mother/
pumpkin, whose shaky emotional and economic situation supposedly has put her on the ragged edge, more like a perky fashion model about to take off for drinks at the Polo Lounge. As for the kids, they could very well have stayed back home in Indiana.
