TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/051490/0514250.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.1 KB | 181 lines

                                                                                VIDEO, Page 95

What a Waste of (Prime) Time


Seven days, four networks and one fast-forward button

By WALTER SHAPIRO


    Picture an America where friendly, funky, Cub-fan-fanatic
Chicago is the only inhabited spot between New York City and
Twin Peaks. Imagine that this mythical U.S. has become so awash
in racial sensitivity and tolerance that even drug dealers
practice affirmative action, yet, strangely enough,
intergalactic aliens are a far more visible minority group than
Hispanics. In this youth-obsessed culture, where children of
all races automatically come equipped with loving families, the
stork must have supplanted traditional biology, for there are
virtually no pregnant women.

    Other oddities abound. How can the economy remain prosperous
when half the work force lazes around luncheonettes and
broadcast studios swapping dirty-word-free double entendres,
while the other half consists of overworked and
underappreciated cops? And why are all these people so hazy
about their history? Is it not peculiar that no one ever refers
to an event that predates Elvis' appearing on Ed Sullivan?

    If such through-the-looking-glass images of an alternative
America seem eerily familiar, the reason is probably that they
are an impressionistic synopsis of a recent week's worth of
prime-time TV watching on all four broadcast networks. Why
would anyone voluntarily subject himself to nearly 50 hours of
sex-and-sass sitcoms, puerile police procedurals and yuppie
yammering about the meaning of life? Call it a census of sorts,
a time-slot-by-time-slot canvass of the nation's nightly
fantasy life, a solitary journey up the lazy river of the
collective consciousness armed only with VCR and fast-forward
button. The goal was to view television through the eyes of an
outsider and to pretend to encounter the Huxtables, Roseanne
and, yes, even the Simpsons for the first time. Alas, the
results were depressing, not only in the obvious vast-wasteland
sense but also more seriously as a reminder of the insidious
ways in which prime-time TV distorts America's sense of itself.

    Make no mistake, not even the most credulous couch potato
believes that, say, 16-year-old Doogie Howser, M.D., is for
real. But the easy affluence that is the birthright of Doogie's
family might seem representative enough, especially when on the
following ABC show (The Marshall Chronicles) the TV father was
dressed in a tuxedo for an evening of Manhattan night life.
Despite the pseudo-lower-middle-class realism of Roseanne and
Married with Children, the implicit message in much of prime
time remains almost effortless economic entitlement. For while
most of the nation resides in what bicoastal types call "the
great flyover," TV characters are never rooted in Toledo or
Omaha; instead, most spring to life magically equipped with
sprawling houses and apartments in glamorous cities like New
York and Los Angeles.

    Take last Monday night's prime-time schedule. Murphy Brown
and Capital News depict journalistic superstars strutting down
the corridors of power in Washington. Working Girl is climbing
her way into the upper echelons of New York corporate life;
next maybe Tess will be dating Donald Trump. In Atlanta the
Designing Women are even less likely than Scarlett O'Hara ever
to be hungry again. Newhart is living the yuppie fantasy of
owning a Vermont country inn. Even the downwardly mobile
Philadelphia lawyer of Shannon's Deal can still manage to take
a first date out for a $172 restaurant meal. Yes, one of My Two
Dads did abandon an oversize New York apartment during reruns
but only because he left his heart in San Francisco.

    On television, most real work is done by just four
occupational groups: cops, lawyers, gravediggers (funerals are
a dramatic staple) and the staffs of hospital intensive-care
units who are constantly battling to keep characters like
MacGyver alive. Everyone else is on a perpetual coffee break.
Most of the cast of Wings hangs out in the airport restaurant.
The office scenes in Working Girl and Open House were all
devoted to the workaday rigors of party planning.

    What scant vigor remains in American capitalism is mostly
due to the indestructible J.R. Ewing, who is still spouting
business maxims like "He's my kind of man -- bribable." Only
thirtysomething tries to replicate the real-life stress of
middle management, the ulcer-producing anxiety normally
reserved for commercials hawking business phone systems and
airlines. At a time when America needs role models of
scientists, engineers and factory managers striving to keep
ahead of the Japanese, all prime time offered were Elliot's
self-indulgent efforts to direct a public-service spot worthy
of Fellini.

    But the treatment of most social problems on the networks
cannot avoid being tinged with escapism and societal wish
fulfillment. With the best of post-Cosby intentions, television
seems determined to become the only place in the nation where
the black middle class is growing exponentially. Most black
sitcoms are like old-fashioned white ones except with better
music. On Family Matters, the Winslows all joined together to
perform in a rap video to help Eddie win a contest. The kids
enjoying a beach vacation on A Different World may be black,
but their primary identity seems to be boisterous middle-class
college students. Symbolically, of course, it is indeed a
different world when sitcom characters routinely wear T-shirts
that proclaim, MARTIN, MALCOLM, MANDELA, ME.

    But in their zeal to do the right thing, the architects of
prime time are largely masking the strains in race relations
and the social isolation of the black underclass. On most
shows, blacks are portrayed either as work buddies or in
comfortable middle-class roles like an art-gallery owner on
Father Dowling Mysteries. As a result, prejudice becomes an
abstraction to be preached against and overt bigotry all but
limited to a bizarrely menacing alliance between American Nazis
and skinheads on 21 Jump Street. So too does TV breezily
dismiss the crisis of the black family. On Bagdad Cafe, Whoopi
Goldberg plays a recently jettisoned wife whose son's only
adjustment problem is that working in the restaurant kitchen
interferes with his ambition to be a classical pianist. This
atypical dilemma is resolved in 1950s-sitcom style: Henry
Mancini decrees that the kid has real talent.

    Crime is the one arena where prime time drops its
Panglossian pose to pander to public hysteria. This is not to
argue that the narcotics squad on Nasty Boys should instead
pursue jaywalkers or that the cops on Hunter should stop
shouting, "Freeze. Police. Drop the gun!" O.K., so you cannot
have detective shows without serious crime. But why are sitcoms
also menaced by a crime wave that resembles New York City
during a blackout? In this single week, there was an interracial
team of angry drug dealers on A Different World, a psychotic
killer rudely intruding on an office camping trip on Perfect
Strangers, and that laugh riot -- a berserk gun-wielding busboy
-- on Sugar and Spice. Even when Suzanne and Julia of Designing
Women jetted off on vacation to Japan, probably the world's
safest nation, their luggage was promptly stolen in Tokyo's
Narita Airport. The thieves, of course, belonged to a criminal
class that now exists only on shows determined not to offend
anyone's sensibilities: American hippies.

    After seven days of total immersion in such prime-time
platitudes, other smaller, less socially significant mysteries
remain. Why was Grace, the tall, blond judge on L.A. Law, the
only person allowed to voice the all-American sentiment that
she hates her job? What happened to all the neighbors who used
to drop by for coffee on all the sitcoms, and why have they
been replaced by work groups? Why are there so few good meals
and so many bad restaurants on television? Why are there no
nostalgia shows reprising the '50s or '70s? And how about the
biggest puzzle: What ever happened to all those car chases?