Movies and mini-series are key weapons in the annual network ratings wars, and this fall ABC will enter the battle with a full array of them.
But for once they won`t be exclusively geared to the most valuable advertising demographic group, women 18 to 49.
Neither will they display the sort of rollicking raunch typified by Fox Broadcasting`s ”Married . . . With Children” and ”The Simpsons,” nor will the audience find exploitative docudramas about crimes produced almost before the ink is dry in the headlines they have made.
For ABC, the 1990-91 season will be a trend-bucking year, at least on the movie and mini-series front, as the network strives to close an already narrowing gap between its ratings and those of NBC, which has reigned supreme for five seasons.
”I`m moving toward a trend of original drama, movies that are emotionally grounded, stemming out of relatable situations people experience in their own lives,” said Allen Sabinson, executive vice president of ABC`s movies and mini-series, in an interview before he left for his network`s presentation at the TV critics` tour in Los Angeles. ”The docudrama will never fade out. It`s so firmly established, and it`s such fertile ground. At the other two networks, they may even be increasing, but I am moving away from them. We are doing a lot of true stories, but not true stories that occurred yesterday.
”It almost approached parody last season when every week, on one network or another, there was a true story from the headlines,” he said. ”It got to the point, I think, where the audience was saying, `They`re not going to tell me anything new.` There was a tendency to rely too heavily (on the docudrama) and I think the audience gets tired of a form. For that reason alone, we`re moving away.”
Sabinson`s slate of 27 movies and four mini-series backs his words.
Among movies scheduled for next season are ”Dillinger,” with Mark Harmon in the title role of the Depression-era gangster; a remake of ”What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” with the Redgrave sisters, Lynn and Vanessa, in the roles played in 1962 by Bette Davis and Joan Crawford; and ”Call Me Anna,” the life story of Patty Duke, in which Duke will star as herself.
On the mini-series slate are ”Stephen King`s It,” a horror story involving childhood friends who reunite as adults to battle the evil they faced and defeated as children; ”Separate but Equal,” starring Sidney Poitier as Thurgood Marshall in his fight to end school desegregation; and
”Son of the Morning Star,” with Gary Cole as Gen. George Armstrong Custer, who goes from the sort of adulation accorded rock stars today to ignominious death at the Battle of the Little Bighorn.
”Ideally, the right kind of movie is a film that has appeal on both levels,” he said. ”What I`m trying to do is program toward women and adults, with a little bit more of an eye toward the 50-plus viewer than I would have had in years past.
”For the last couple of years, ABC has had a younger, urban audience than the other two networks, and that`s the way I`ve been programming,” he said. ”I`m certainly not doing anything to push them away, but if you want to accumulate household ratings on Sunday night, you have to find a way to reach the 50-plus viewer.”
Sabinson said his movies and mini-series will have no part of the trend toward raunchy dialogue and shock for the sake of shock in a bid to compete with cable.
”There`s a place for frank language and the treatment of adult subject matter, but not for the sake of being on equal footing with cable,” he said. ”There is nothing in my slate that would require that.”
Well, almost nothing. Sabinson said he still is struggling to overcome
”problems with the estate” of the late Tennessee Williams to bring his fourth mini-series, a film adaptation of Kathleen Turner`s Broadway hit, ”Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,” to the screen.
”There is language in that play that is tough, but that`s language going back to an American classic,” he said. ”There`s a case where it`s justified, but I`ve found that in 98 percent of what we`re doing, there`s simply no need for it.
”There are tremendous numbers of children watching television,” he said. ”I am the father of two young children, and I police what they watch. But I have to look in the mirror in the morning, and I have to answer to my wife. I want to know why I`m doing something.”
`Salesman` 10:30 p.m. Wednesday, PBS
The non-fiction TV show ”Point of View” has proved itself one of the best bets on television this summer, and Wednesday (10:30 p.m., WTTW-Ch. 11)
it offers the first national broadcast of Albert and David Maysles` classic documentary ”Salesman.”
”Salesman,” a theatrical release during the late `60s, was a tremendous critical success. It`s a black-and-white chronicle of six weeks in the lives of Bible salesmen from Greater Boston who are peddling a $49.95 Bible in the neighborhoods of Opa-locka, northwest of Miami.
”Salesman” was the first feature film to use the ”direct cinema”
style that emerged in the early `60s with the advent of hand-held cameras synchronized with portable tape recorders.
