The national undies are in a bundle about television and the family. Bob Dole, in a populist election-year gambit, turns his attention from farm subsidies to cultural criticism. He laments, in essence, that we don’t have all “Waltons,” all the time, on TV and at the movies. Then he actually goes to a movie and says that the film “Independence Day,” about reducing aliens to space pulp, will do too.
President Clinton, in a different version of the same ploy, takes the bold stand of backing the V-chip, a device intended to help parents turn televised unpleasantness into test patterns. This, he tells Americans during the Democratic National Convention, is one of his great accomplishments, never mind that for several years, until all the hard- and software is in place, it will have little more impact on TV watching than the P-chip, for potato.
It is hailed as a stirring victory for families when, over the summer, the Clinton administration browbeats the networks into promising to show three scant hours of educational material per week. Left open is the question of what is “educational.”
And the American Medical Association, just last week, sees fit to pronounce that TV can strain your eyesight, so you shouldn’t watch in the dark. No, that wasn’t it. That TV can irradiate you so you shouldn’t sit so close. No, not that either. That the association has had it up to here with doctors on TV having silly haircuts, like George Clooney’s. Wrong again.
The AMA’s actual pronouncement, deciphered by a helpful team of pharmacists, was that TV violence is harmful and Americans are sick from it and sick of it, and so are doctors. This made the front page of the two largest Chicago newspapers and many others, as well. It wasn’t news, per se, that the AMA is concerned about the effects of depictions of violence, but it did happen to tap into the zeitgeist and, you know, they’re doctors.
Though the motivations in some cases are suspect, all this concern about making TV a friendlier rendezvous point for families is not misguided. Write about television for any length of time and you will soon realize that parents, even relatively tolerant, smoked-pot-in-the-’70s parents, are seething over the violence, yes, but even more so over the difficulty in finding something not entirely rancid on the crudity platter that prime-time television often seems.
Series television has actually gotten pretty good about depicting violence as unglamorous and rife with consequence. As for sex and innuendo, though, many parents, and others who just can’t stand their jokes cheap and stupid, wouldn’t mind plugging its mouth with a bar of soap.
Lost in the cultural static, though, is that prime-time network TV–the dominant portion of the television universe and what most people have in mind when they complain about “TV”–has been taking halting steps since about January toward reconciling with parents, or at least offering them havens here and there.
This is especially evident in the new fall season, which brings a raft of new shows aimed at the family, including a gentle family drama from Aaron Spelling (!) on the upstart WB network (“7th Heaven”), and three that premiere Tuesday. “Promised Land” (CBS), “Life’s Work” (ABC) and “Something So Right” (NBC) come out of the box with different degrees of polish, and hitting different marks on the class-to-crass scale, but they share a desire to address issues faced by the full families that comprise their characters.
Eyeing the middle
CBS, especially, has shifted its entire strategy to make older viewers and, by implication, their impressionable issue more comfortable with what they see.
Last year, CBS’ marquee new series was “Central Park West,” a soap opera that seemed to take as inspiration the advertising of Calvin Klein.
This year, CBS builds its marketing around “Cosby,” the benign new Bill Cosby vehicle, and its star publicly criticizes another new CBS program, the police sitcom “Public Morals,” for using foul language. The squeaky-clean surprise hit “Touched by an Angel,” about two celestial creatures who answer prayers of the desperate, moves to a more prominent time period, from Saturday nights to the 7 p.m., post-“60 Minutes” spot on Sundays.
And “Everybody Loves Raymond” (Fridays), a new show about a sportswriter and his wife trying to raise twins and another young child, is the season’s most promising new sitcom, built on jokes such as the dad (Ray Romano) shuffling the twins as in a shell game and trying to make their sibling guess which is which.
But perhaps CBS’ boldest move is giving “Promised Land,” the “Touched by an Angel” spinoff, the hourlong slot leading off Tuesday nights (7 p.m., WBBM-Ch. 2). This is determinedly old-fashioned television, about a family headed by a laid-off worker (Gerald McRaney) that meanders cross-country in its Airstream, doing good deeds.
Tuesday’s first stand-alone episode was not available for preview, but the pilot, which ran Sunday in the “Touched by an Angel” slot, demonstrated a show that got you a little misty-eyed in spite of yourself.
The creators say they are trying to use this series to do for America what “Angel” has done for God. (We won’t dwell on the notion that a TV show thinks it can do anything for Earth’s most powerful nation or the cosmos’ Supreme Being.) In service to that hubris, “Promised Land” ladles out a lot of talk about the nation’s spirit and about the kind of place it used to be and still can be, with people like McRaney’s family roaming the highways and home-schooling their kids.
There is a creepy political undertone to this show, though, that quickly vanquishes what sentiment it manages to stir. McRaney, when the series begins, is mad because he’s “followed all the rules . . . and it all just fell apart.”
One of his triumphal moments comes when he gets to chew out a black woman, given a medical scholarship by his hometown and using it to get rich in Sodom, er, New York. “You’re not living the American dream, lady,” he all but spits at her. “All I see you making is money.”
His family is itself desperate for money in the pilot episode, but there is not one line of dialogue spent on the idea that McRaney’s wife (Wendy Phillips) or teenage son (Austin O’Brien) might take a job. In the good America, don’t you know, supporting families is men’s work.
So while parents contemplating watching this series with their kids will be pleased with the beneficent themes on display, they will have to answer for themselves whether they want to further its retrograde view of life. “Promised Land” is one title for this show; another I’ve suggested is “Touched by an Angry White Male.”
A slightly different road
“Life’s Work” (WLS-Ch. 7) and “Something So Right” (WMAQ-Ch. 5), both premiering at 7:30 p.m., are more realistic and more typical of the family fare TV is offering up today. Mom and dad remember the sexual revolution and can still be a little bit bawdy. The kids, if they’re teenagers, do things like accidentally walk in on their gorgeous stepsister in the shower. And family life is depicted as barely controlled amid the crowded calendars of parent and child alike.
The better of the two shows, by far, is “Something So Right,” on NBC. That it’s also less lurid is surprising because NBC has claimed its current first-place status on the strength of suggestive yuppie sitcoms like “Mad About You,” which precedes “Something,” and “Seinfeld,” which delights in writing an entire episode about oral sex.
But this year, NBC also picked up the relatively gentle “Jeff Foxworthy Show” from ABC for its Monday lineup, and added “Mr. Rhodes,” a show about a cool teacher which is offensive mostly in terms of how bad it is.
In “Something So Right,” Mel Harris (“thirtysomething”) and Jere Burns (“Dear John”) are newly married and trying to blend their separate families.
The first episode contains, to a fault, every stereotype about life in the era of easy divorce: Her son (Billy L. Sullivan), to cite one example, says he is having Sunday dinner “with my dad and Heather and her ex-husband and his stepkids.”
And there are a couple of unnecessary jokes about Harris not needing her batteries anymore–nudge, nudge–and an old neighbor pining for restored virility.
But it also captures much of the frantic nature of two career families–he’s a teacher, she caters–with teen kids and a trail of emotional baggage. When Harris’ ex-husband tries the “I am still her father” line, Harris shoots back, “Only in the eyes of science and Toys R Us.”
The series’ best running bit is the teen boy who’s so freaked out to suddenly have the hottest girl in school for a sister that he starts doing things like preparing her snacks and wearing cologne.
Speaking of perfumes, ABC could use some to cover up the odor emanating from “Life’s Work.” Lisa Ann Walter, apparently a standup comedian, stars as a mom and wife who has gone back to law school and is starting work as a Baltimore prosecutor.
ABC has long been the most family-friendly network, and it is trying this season to rejuvenate its “T.G.I.F.” Friday block of innocuous and simple-minded comedies by adding “Clueless,” based on the movie, and “Sabrina, the Teenage Witch,” based on the comic book. It also kept the bland but fairly tasteful family drama “Second Noah” around for a second season, despite mediocre ratings.
“Life’s Work” is not likely to have similar luck. The idea, apparently, for this post-“Roseanne” time period, is to try to capture some more of the true family grit that “Roseanne” depicts, often with great poignancy.
“Life’s Work,” though, has the feel of trying too hard in every facet, beginning with making Walter do a hoochy-coochy dance in the first scene and saying to her husband (Michael O’Keefe), “when I’m givin’ it to you I’m thinking of Mel Gibson.” All of this keeping-the-flame-alive business takes place in front of the kids, the oldest of which is arguably old enough to comprehend something tawdry has just been said.
When the show tries to push its feminist theme–she needs to work, and she needs to succeed–it goes overboard there, as well. It’s not enough that there’s a yuppie guy in her office set up as a rival; he has to drink cappuccino, talk about rowing and try to undermine her constantly and in the most obvious ways.
The officemates are a generally amusing bunch, especially standup Larry Miller as her boss and a young bald actor in a riotous turn as a spacey office manager.
Matters aren’t helped, however, by Walter, who is little more than tolerable in the role, and O’Keefe, who doesn’t even make that grade. In their hands, a show-closing bedroom argument that is supposed to dissolve into laughter and a family hug instead plays like a first reading of the script.
ABC touts this as a worthy successor to the shows built around Roseanne, Ellen DeGeneres and Brett Butler. But those series, even when they touch on sex, tend to do it in a way that older kids, at least, can learn from. “Life’s Work” manages to go over the top and below the belt at the same time.
Spin control: ABC’s “Spin City,” which also premieres Tuesday (8:30 p.m., WLS-Ch. 7) and marks the return of Michael J. Fox to series TV, does not aim to be a family comedy.
It’s relatively adult and sophisticated and, more important, flat-out funny, as Fox, as a New York City deputy mayor, tries to keep together the political career of his boss, his live-in relationship with his City Hall reporter girlfriend and the city itself.
Yes, he’s got deft timing and boyish charm, still. But what makes Fox so exceptional as a comic actor is his ability to convey, through mannerism and inflection, the struggle to maintain order.
“Spin City,” which opens with the mayor insulting gays and Fox inviting a gay leader to join the administration to smooth things over, gives him ample opportunity to do so.
“Spin City” is also notable because it is the first TV project from the vaunted DreamWorks troika (Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg, David Geffen) to succeed on creative terms.
NEWSHOWS FOR TUESDAY
–“Something So right”
NBC (WMAQ-Ch. 5), 7:30 p.m.
It’s not “The Brady Bunch,” but it is a blended family as a teacher with one daughter marries a caterer (Mel Harris, above) with a boy and a girl.
–“Life’s Work”
ABC (WLS-Ch. 7), 7:30 p.m.
Move over, “Homicide,” it’s another show set in Baltimore, this one with a laugh track. Lisa Ann Walter plays a wife and mother starting a career as a prosecutor.
–“Promised Land”
CBS (WBBM-Ch. 2), 7 p.m.
Who needs triple-A when you’ve got Gerald McRaney and family, do-gooders roaming America’s highways, in this “Touched by an Angel” spinoff?
–“Spin city”
ABC, 8:30 p.m.
Back to the future goes Michael J. Fox, who returns to TV-land in this comedy about a New York City deputy mayor.
