It is not strictly true that David Caruso, one of the first red-headed men this culture has viewed as hunky, has come crawling back to television with Monday’s debut of his new series, “Michael Hayes” (9 p.m., WBBM-Ch. 2).
Limping back, perhaps, after a couple of movies that did at the box office what a Yugo would do at LeMans.
Caruso pretty clearly spurned his incendiary, first-season “NYPD Blue” work as Detective John Kelly in order to try to make it big on the big screen. Unfortunately for him, his vehicles happened to be “Jade” and “Kiss of Death,” two efforts that were seen on the small screen via Blockbuster, if they were seen at all.
People writing about Caruso’s film flops and TV fallback have adopted a tone not unlike a 3rd-grade bully’s braying after a classmate trips and breaks his glasses, never mind that the actor didn’t write the scripts and never mind that series television is regaining a magnetic presence.
But whatever element of surrender there may be in Caruso’s return — as a righteous, brooding, up-from-the-neighborhood federal prosecutor in a series that has more potential than emotional punch right now — it obscures that he is part of a trend where working on TV is becoming an entirely respectable career choice for an actor.
Once it was the kind of thing thespians seemed to do whilst holding their noses, if they did it at all. Actors became TV stars and then looked to get into movies. The ones that were able to do it successfully, a la Michael Douglas, Bruce Willis, Eddie Murphy and, more recently, Will Smith, stayed in movies.
Now even many who have had success in motion pictures are actively seeking out TV roles, from cable movies to guest-starring stints on shows to their own series. Witness Michael J. Fox and Ted Danson and Mary Steenburgen trying TV series last season, and Gregory Hines, Danny Aiello and James Belushi doing the same this year.
“The Gregory Hines Show” also makes its debut Monday (7:30 p.m., WBBM-Ch.2), and it brings the Broadway and sometime movie star into a pleasant little family sitcom. Rather than sneering at TV, Hines said he has been trying to find a series to do for most of the 1990s.
(Monday’s third new-series debut, the first-rate sitcom “George & Leo” — 8:30 p.m., WBBM-Ch. 2 — features Bob Newhart and Judd Hirsch, two long-term and almost exclusively television stars.)
When “Entertainment Tonight” talks about the various movies of the “Friends” stars, say, it does it as if movies are the grail and TV the grindstone. But the show is doing so more from conventional wisdom than modern reality.
The fact is that more popular television actors are taking the attitude of Jennifer Aniston, who told an interviewer recently that she will stay with “Friends” as long as there is a “Friends.” Ditto for most of the public comments of the “ER” stars. And Helen Hunt had a huge big-screen hit with the cartoonish “Twister,” but soldiers on in what has to be a far more satisfying project, the savvy TV comedy “Mad About You.” They recognize that to be part of a hit series is an extraordinary stroke of luck in these entertainment-drenched times.
The TV networks, desperate to break through the clutter and to fend off cable, are more willing to pay what it takes to land a “name” actor. “David Caruso’s return,” after all, is a story guaranteed to be told on the TV entertainment-news shows and in countless newspapers.
For actors who genuinely like plying their trade, as opposed to being stars, a television series makes perfect sense. The movie option means a lot of sitting around reading scripts followed by the occasional all-or-nothing gamble on a project, often for three months far from home. And don’t think that actors aren’t affected by such current notions as the wisdom of putting family on a par with career. A TV series offers a predictable schedule and a steady paycheck.
Even the numbers make television a smart bet. In a successful series, an actor will be seen in 20 million homes. Every week. A movie that 20 million families go see — one time — is a smash hit.
And television and the movies have both changed. Many of the biggest hit movies in the 1970s featured intricate, adult stories and meaty acting roles (the “Godfathers,” “Chinatown,” even “Saturday Night Fever”). TV had formula folderol like “Fantasy Island” and “The Love Boat” to offer visiting movie actors, clear signals that a career was on the poop deck.
There are, of course, scores of exceptions, but now the hallmark of modern movie stardom is big, dumb action and big, dumb comedy.
For women, the reality is especially cruel: Roles for an actress over 35 are rare, which is why TV viewers get to see someone of Christine Lahti’s talents regularly on “Chicago Hope,” to pick just one example.
Television, meanwhile, has become more like “Chicago Hope” and less like “Fantasy Island.” The medium is rich with dramas that focus on character development and on psychological exploration, the things that test an actor’s abilities. The most successful TV comedies, too, tend to be more thoughtful and character-driven than their film counterparts.
It used to be a cliche when an actor apologized for doing TV work by claiming that “all the best stories are being told on television.” Now, as David Caruso can attest, it is a truism.
