<p> Carol Anne, a spacey housewife with overactive hormones,
grabs her husband one morning while he is shaving. "Guess who's
ovulating," she chirps enticingly. Janice, a single mother who
tells anyone who will listen that she hasn't had sex in three
years, agrees to go out with a motorcycle cop who has been
pursuing her. Just a casual dinner date at the local hotel, he
promises. "Get a room," she says. Desmond, the longtime butler
to a wealthy industrialist, makes a confession. Years ago, the
boss's third wife found out about his philandering and used
Desmond to take revenge. Guess how.
</p>
<p> No TV executive has ever underestimated the power of sex to
sell a show. But NBC's new sitcom Grand is a clanging symphony
of suggestiveness. Set in the fictional town of Grand, Pa.--whose chief industry, a piano factory, has fallen on hard times--the series introduces a clutch of socially diverse characters
and stirs vigorously. Atop the class structure in this
small-town version of Upstairs, Downstairs is the piano magnate
Harris Weldon (John Randolph), attended by a faithful but
acerbic manservant (John Neville). At the bottom is the
chain-smoking Janice Pasetti (Pamela Reed), who lives in a
trailer with her chubby daughter and works as a maid. Somewhere
in between is Weldon's niece (Bonnie Hunt) and her upwardly
mobile husband (Michael McKean), who has an idea for saving
Weldon Piano Works (make golf clubs instead) and a yen for the
maid.
</p>
<p> Among the slew of network mid-season replacements, Grand is
a good bet for hitdom. Its executive producers are Marcy Carsey
and Tom Werner, the team responsible for three of TV's five
top-rated shows: Roseanne, The Cosby Show and A Different World.
Despite a misfire last fall with Chicken Soup, the duo are as
hot as TV producers get. CBS even talked to them in December
about taking over the network's programming division. (The
negotiations fell through.) Perhaps because of their clout,
Grand has been given a near indestructible time period: the
half-hour following Cheers on NBC's powerful Thursday-night
schedule. That means Grand is probably in for the long haul--good, bad or indifferent.
</p>
<p> Mostly it's bad. Though Carsey and Werner are not exactly
groundbreakers, their shows have brought a less frenetic, more
naturalistic style to the sitcom genre. But Grand (created by
Michael Leeson, who wrote The War of the Roses) is packed with
plot twists and gag lines, most of them leeringly lame.
("Desmond, have you ever been intimate when the two of you knew
you weren't in love?" "I've been intimate when the three of us
knew we weren't in love.") The show strives to be a wacky
send-up of soap operas, but it lacks the deadpan wit of Mary
Hartman, Mary Hartman or the bomb-throwing audacity of Soap.
</p>
<p> Potential hit or not, Grand debunks any notion that Carsey
and Werner have a magic touch. Their shows until now have been
driven by stars with well-developed comic personas. (Chicken
Soup failed because it never created a plausible milieu for its
star. Jackie Mason as a social worker?) Grand depends instead
on an ensemble cast, which seems adrift with characters thrown
together as arbitrarily as passengers on a lifeboat. Joel Murray
has some funny moments as old man Weldon's flaky son, and Reed
gives off sexy sparks as the trailer-park mom. But they don't
