TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/072291/0722991.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 6.9 KB | 147 lines

                                                                                TELEVISION, Page 55

Beating the Summertime Blahs


Yes, the usual seasonal fare is rejects and retreads, but this
year the networks have come up with a few off-the-wall shows
worth checking out

By RICHARD ZOGLIN


    Summer television: the term alone is enough to conjure up
the hot-weather blahs. Viewers know the drill all too well by
now. Once the May sweeps are over, the network schedules become
almost wall-to-wall reruns, occasionally interrupted by new
episodes of series we thought we'd seen the last of and batches
of rejected pilots gathered into umbrella series with
disingenuous titles like Summer Playhouse.

    For network executives, that blah feeling has become a
recurring stomachache. Every summer the three-network share of
the TV audience shrinks further, as viewers flee to other
options on cable. (This year combined ratings for the Big Three
since mid-April are down 4% compared with last year. For the
week ending July 7, the three-network share dropped to its
lowest level in history.) Network programmers periodically make
noises about fighting back and introducing more fresh fare
during the hot months. From time to time they do. But the
financial realities -- airing repeats is necessary to help
amortize programming costs -- have kept the summer largely a
ghetto of rejects and retreads.

    Now for the good news. Even though summer pickings are
slim, they are getting more interesting. With the audiences
smaller and the stakes lower, the networks can afford to
experiment more aggressively than they do during the regular
season. So far this summer we've seen Norman Lear get religion
(in CBS's Sunday Dinner); a former Surgeon General, C. Everett
Koop, get a prime-time showcase (in five low-rated NBC
specials); and CBS News invade the courtroom for a new reality
series, Verdict. Three even more atypical offerings will debut
in the next two weeks. Each would probably be regarded as too
off the wall to be taken off the shelf during the cooler months.
But two of them are worth some attention in any season.

    Hi Honey, I'm Home represents a new trend in the TV
industry: cooperation between those instinctive rivals, the
broadcast networks and cable. The half-hour sitcom is being
produced for ABC by Nickelodeon, the children's cable network
(which will rerun the episodes on its Nick at Nite channel). The
gimmick: a wholesome 1950s TV family materializes in 1991 New
Jersey, where they find that their sweetness-and-light
television fantasy life (which they can revert to by switching
themselves into black and white) clashes with the real world of
muggers, homeless people and feminist single mothers.

    It's one of those ideas that sound cute until you see it
in action, at which point you wish you'd never heard of it. The
TV family members are portrayed so broadly that they go beyond
parody into the realm of condescending camp. Mom offers
everybody fudge and says "Oh, pooh!" when she gets upset. Dad
smokes a pipe and thinks a woman's place is in the kitchen. The
jokes are moronic: the '50s mom tries to use 1990s lingo with
malaprop results ("My, don't you look squirrelly," she says,
meaning "foxy"). And when the punkish '90s kid asks for a high
five, his '50s counterpart, who wears a Boy Scout uniform, gives
him $5. Oh, pooh!

    A much smarter media parody comes from Rob Reiner, the
former All in the Family co-star turned movie director. As
Reiner, who acts as host, explains at the outset of his new CBS
series, Morton & Hayes, Chick Morton and Eddie Hayes were a
popular comedy team of the 1930s and '40s. All their movie
two-reelers, however, were thought to have been lost in a
"tragic fire," until 100 of them were recently rediscovered in
a vault. Each week Reiner introduces one of these forgotten
chestnuts (with names like Society Saps and Daffy Dicks),
restored in all its black-and-white drabness.

    The whole thing, of course, is a put-on. Reiner has
shrewdly re-created the bargain-basement look and ham-fisted
style of those old comedy shorts: dawdling pace (with Hal
Roach-style music in the background), cornball jokes, elaborate
double takes, slapstick fights with the camera speeded up.
Typical gag: Chick, the skinny, acerbic one, tries to wake up
Eddie, the fat, dull-witted one. He shakes him, rings an alarm
clock in his ear and blows a bugle, to no avail. Finally, Chick
sits down and says, "That is a nice-looking piece of cake."
Eddie pops up and asks where the food is.

    Kevin Pollak and Bob Amaral, playing the duo, are a bit on
the bland side, and the show's amateurishness doesn't seem to
be entirely satire. Still, Reiner's In-jokish stunt has plenty
of funny moments and an appealing, renegade air. A
black-and-white parody of bad movie comedies? No network
programmer in his right mind could expect this to be a hit.

    Reiner is only the second biggest auteur to take a crack
at TV this summer. Stephen King's Golden Years, another CBS
offering, is the first TV series created and (in all but two of
its seven serialized episodes) written by the prolific author.
From the title, one might expect another of King's nostalgic
memory pieces, in the Stand by Me vein, rather than a grisly
horror story, a la Pet Sematary or The Shining. It turns out to
be neither. Golden Years is an old-fashioned science-fiction
tale with spy-novel trappings. And pretty nifty stuff.

    The series takes place in a secret, vaguely futuristic
government laboratory, where a mad scientist (Bill Raymond) is
conducting experiments on tissue regeneration. When his lab
blows up, a 70-year-old janitor (Keith Szarabajka), who is about
to be laid off because of failing eyesight, gets contaminated
by the chemicals. He survives, but with a difference: he begins
to grow younger.

    That premise might be enough for a lazier author, but King
has cooked up an array of subsidiary characters and plots to
keep things lively. There is the preening general (Ed Lauter)
who oversees the lab, his edgy chief of security (Felicity
Huffman) and a government investigator (R.D. Call) who has his
own mysterious agenda. King's mordant touches are everywhere:
an electrified fence surrounding the lab, which fries any bird
that lands on it; the bleakly regimented, 1984-ish atmosphere
of the plant. Except for the janitor and his wife (Frances
Sternhagen), every character who is introduced seems oddly
remote, sinister or just plain screwy. Not since the debut of
Twin Peaks has a TV series been so disorienting.

    Like one of King's long-winded novels, Golden Years takes
its sweet time unfolding. But the result is unusually dense and
evocative TV drama. At times the show recalls another TV
excursion into paranoid sci-fi: The Prisoner. That short-lived
cult hit came and went during the summer too.