Beauty and the Beast”-known in the trade as a ”high concept” (that is, preposterous-premise) series-plunges, artistically and geographically, into the lower depths.
Palmed off by CBS as a ”contemporary fable,” the program (7 p.m. Friday on Channel 2) is actually an exercise in sensitivity training for critics and general viewers alike. Ridicule this project, the producers seem to be saying, and you have the heart of a Minotaur. And, hoo boy, do they pull out the smarmy stops, down to the score, which sounds like outtakes from ”Camille.” As for the story line itself, it involves a case of uptown meeting underground. Catherine Chandler (Linda Hamilton), an attractive socialite/
attorney who is bored with corporate law, leaves a tony party in Manhattan and is abducted by three men who slash her face with a knife and abandon her in the night.
She wakes up in a bed that belongs to her unlikely rescuer, Vincent (Ron Perlman), who comes complete with a grotesque visage, the mane of a lion, fierce-looking canine teeth and clawlike hands. He is, we are assured, a man/ beast and not a free-agent linebacker for the Pittsburgh Steelers. Abandoned at birth, Vincent has been reared by his adoptive father (Roy Dotrice)-namely, appropriately enough, Father-a brilliant recluse who has given up the flash and dash of Manhattan for his secret, labyrinthine, subterranean domicile
(which, with its Tiffany lamps and garish statues, rather looks like a 19th Century bordello).
After being rebuked by Father for bringing a stranger home, Vincent nurses Catherine back to health and, in his soothing, reassuring voice, reads to her-symbolism alert-”Great Expectations.”
”You have the soul of a doctor,” she tells him and then one day removes her bandages and sees that he has the face of something else.
”I`ve never regretted what I am-until now,” says Vincent, who obviously has fallen in love.
”Vincent,” she replies affectionately before being returned home,
”your secret is safe with me. I would never betray your trust.”
Eight months later, after plastic surgery, Catherine finds herself with minimal scars and a new career as an assistant D.A. As she proceeds to track down the thugs who attacked her, we learn that because of Vincent`s extraordinary gift of empathic powers, he is able to tell when she is in harm`s way; and at the finale he hitches a ride on the back of a subway car and bursts in just at the right moment. After which he intones, ”I`m part of you, Catherine. Just as you`re part of me.”
Through all this, there is the constant, pounding, pretentious,
”Pilgrim`s Progress”-like message that life above the street level is cold and uncaring and that Vincent`s way is kind and compassionate.
As he had told Catherine earlier: ”I`ve seen your world. There`s no place for me in it. Your world is filled with frightened people. And I remind them of what they`re most afraid of-their aloneness.”
Wrong, big Vin. What you remind them of is how truly dreadful television can be.
`HARRY MCGRAW` ”The Law and Harry McGraw” (8 p.m. Sunday on CBS-Ch. 2) is the kind of program in which the rumpled private-eye protagonist sleeps on the couch in his pigpen of an office, dismisses Boston police officers as ”no-class flatfoots” (and is dismissed, in return, as a ”second-rate gumshoe”), gets gravy on his ties at a ptomaine-domain called Gilhooley`s and snaps out dialogue like, ”Did Jesse James rob banks?”
Jerry Orbach spins off his role of the title character, introduced on
”Murder, She Wrote,” and is joined by Barbara Babcock as Ellie Maginnis, the lovely, patrician widow who has taken over her husband`s law firm that, conveniently, is across the hall from Harry`s lair. This, of course, allows the two to exhange put-down banter as well as get in a little smoldering sexual tension, a TV relationship that is as formulaic as the tired series itself.
In the two-hour premiere-the series moves to Tuesdays next week-Harry is hired on by Ellie, representing a woman with a drinking problem who is accused of plugging her husband but actually was set up by the real killer, the deceased`s business partner.
The highly convoluted story line involves a fake kidnaping and blackmail and insurance scams and what have you. Which isn`t much. Orbach plays his part so broadly, he quickly grows tiresome, and the only plus is the presence of the classy Babcock, best known as the libidinous Grace Gardner on ”Hill Street Blues.”
In brief . . .
– At the top of ”Second Chance,” St. Peter (Joseph Maher) informs his latest client that he`s ”not good enough for heaven and not bad enough for hell. Let me put it another way: If you were music, you`d be Barry Manilow.” And if ”Second Chance” were poetry, it would be Edgar Guest.
The stultifying sitcom, which premieres at 8 p.m. Saturday on WFLD-Ch. 32, seems to be primarily a vehicle for slipping in heaven and hell and Judgment Day jokes (”I`ll be damned”; ”Yes, you probably will be”), basically told by the aforementioned Pearly Gates keeper, who eats Sno-cones and talks like Clifton Webb.
Other than that, Kiel Martin, who played J.D. LaRue on ”Hill Street Blues,” stars as a middle-aged crazy who bought the farm while speeding down the Santa Monica ”flyway,” and now will get, yes, a second chance by returning to Earth and trying to prevent the teenaged version of himself
(Matthew Perry) from making the same mistakes.
The deal is that he has to stay in his own past until both he and his younger self learn the difference between right and wrong. Or until Fox Broadcasting mercifully lets him rest in peace.
– ”Once a Hero” (7 p.m. Saturday on ABC-Ch.7), which premiered last week, also takes on the ”high concept.” In this case, it is two characters in an about-to-be-discontinued cartoon-strip, sappy-superhero Captain Justice (Jeff Lester) and cynical P.I. Gumshoe (Robert Forster) who cross ”the forbidden zone” into the real world-make that Los Angeles-to help resuscitate the strip and its dried-up creator (an embarrassing Milo O`Shea). Once there, they discover-it says here-that L.A. is no comic book.
