To call what is happening in prime-time television early Friday nights a war is to summon memories of that same term being used to describe our armed forces’ sojourn on the island of Granada.
The stakes there, after all–and I realize I’m being geopolitically insensitive when I reduce it to this–were a few American medical students destined to end up as your HMO’s only available primary-care physicians.
In the skirmish on Fridays, the stakes are that subset of the American populace that still sits down to watch the color box as a family, and on a Friday night at that. In other words, people whose kids do not yet have bedroom-based TV sets (despite their constant whining), who lack board games and whose social calendar is not threatened by ink poisoning.
But to the two combatants, major networks CBS and ABC, it is an important struggle and a matter of pride. It is a question of the latter trying to hold territory it has long held with its “TGIF” cluster of gentle and broad comedies, the former trying to wrest it away by such devilish methods as hiring the kid from “Jerry Maguire” and kidnaping Urkel and adjusting his inseam.
For those to whom Friday-night television is as familiar as Monday-morning perkiness, I will explain that Steve Urkel, from the long-running sitcom “Family Matters,” is the ultranerd, a character played with enough low-comic gusto by Jaleel White that he has entered the pop-culture lexicon.
CBS snatched Urkel and his show, nominally about a Chicago cop and his family, away from ABC and this season is mounting its very own version of “Thank Goodness It’s Friday,” something the CBS marketing whizzes call the “Friday Night Block Party,” or, in the perhaps not inevitable abbreviation, “FNBP.”
One way CBS has drawn attention to this move has been to announce that Urkel’s notorious high-water pants will move an inch or two closer to the ground. Fashion magazines aren’t the only places where hemlines are followed with breathlessness.
This turf tiff again shines light on the question of family television. If you believe all the blustering congressmen and guardians of the national morality, it is a lost cause, subsumed by an avalanche of bawdy, adult- and teen-intended comedies in the 7 to 8 p.m. hour that some believe was once a pristine garden bearing endless versions of “The Waltons.”
However much that view puts a shawl on the shoulders of the truth, it is true that 7 p.m. now is more likely the province of shows like “Friends,” where sex is treated as if it is constantly on the minds–if you can believe this–of young, single people in their 20s.
But despite all the handwringing, “family TV”–the idea of programs that can be watched without provoking questions that force an unprepared parent to initiate “the talk”–has not really disappeared and is mounting something of a comeback.
The main networks have learned that the most money is to be made by trying to attract the 18- to 49-year-old audience, so they mostly target that. But even ABC has held to its family strategy on Fridays. And even more aggressive has been CBS, which offers inoffensive fare every night of the week, though how much of it is appealing to kids is questionable.
CBS now serves up shows like “Touched by an Angel” and “The Promised Land.” It offers the relatively benign (and fairly funny) “Cosby” and “Everybody Loves Raymond” hour on Monday. It presents “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” on Saturdays. All lead off prime time for CBS, and all have contributed to that network’s resurgence.
Some of the family slack has been picked up by WB and UPN, which offer sitcoms about charming teenagers and super brainy subteens, and “7th Heaven,” a drama about a minister and his large family that aims to be a modern-day “Waltons.”
And the truth, too, is that with the expansion of cable has come, as with every other genre of television, an expansion of family fare.
So the fact of two networks sparring for family eyes on Friday is perhaps not so startling as it might first seem.
In addition to “Family Matters” (7 p.m., WBBM-Ch. 2) the CBS block consists of another former ABC Friday show, the unclever (and fairly crude) family comedy “Step by Step” (8:30 p.m.), and two newcomers–“The Gregory Hines Show” (8 p.m.), a more earnest than amusing sitcom featuring the veteran hoofer as a widowed Chicago book editor raising a teenage son, and “Meego” (7:30 p.m.), starring the aforementioned Jonathan Lipnicki along with Bronson Pinchot as his alien nanny, a k a Mork from central casting.
ABC meanwhile, fights back with two startups of its own, “Teen Angel” (8:30 p.m.), a promising sitcom from two former “Simpsons” producers about a teenager whose best friend dies eating an ancient hamburger and comes back as his buddy’s guardian angel, and “You Wish” (8 p.m.), a show that saddles a single mom and her family with a genie whose powers to transform are exceeded only by his powers to annoy.
Rounding out the ABC troops are the lightweight “Boy Meets World” (7:30 p.m.) and one of TV’s better sitcoms, “Sabrina the Teenage Witch” (7 p.m.), a show whose ultraclever writing, thoroughly liberated attitude and charming lead performance by Melissa Joan Hart manage to engage even people who aren’t likely to be watching with kids for another half-decade or so.
The advantage goes to ABC, because two of its four shows keep `insipid” off the list of family TV values.
