TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/093091/0930992.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 7.4 KB | 158 lines

                                                                                TELEVISION, Page 78

The Way We (Maybe) Were


Against conventional network wisdom, three new shows hark back to
the warm, fuzzy glow of the past

By RICHARD ZOGLIN -- With reporting by Deborah Edler Brown/
Los Angeles


    The sound track serves up a luscious, Big-Band rendition
of It's Been a Long, Long Time. On the screen, black-and-white
photos dissolve one into another: soldiers coming home, couples
embracing, homey shots from Main Street. "In the autumn of
1945," a female narrator intones, "America was invincible. The
countertops at the soda fountain were still made of marble.
Sodas cost a nickel. And Coke -- well, it only meant cola."

    In a nostalgic mood yet? If the opening of ABC's Homefront
doesn't get you, try CBS's Brooklyn Bridge, a fond look back at
growing up in Brooklyn circa 1956. NBC's I'll Fly Away,
meanwhile, paints a moodier watercolor of life in a Southern
town in the late '50s, just as the civil rights movement was
gathering steam. In a medium that is usually more comfortable
with the here and now, the timely issue and the hip wisecrack,
three of the most ambitious shows of the new season are harking
back to the past.

    Period pieces have never been a TV favorite. True, the
western was once a network staple (and the genre has made a
modest comeback recently, with such shows as Paradise and The
Young Riders), and a small handful of hit series have been set
in the past. But these shows were mainly interested in using the
past for its symbolic or mythic value. The Minnesota frontier
of Little House on the Prairie and the Depression-era South of
The Waltons were essentially the same locale: an all-American
Everyplace, where ethical issues and family dramas could be
worked out against an idealized backdrop, far from the messy
moral ambiguities of modern days.

    In the new crop of nostalgia shows, by contrast, a
particular period is re-created precisely and dwelt on lovingly.
In a sense, these shows are about the past -- a past, moreover,
that most viewers personally remember (or, thanks to the media,
think they remember). And though none of these eras are
portrayed as totally idyllic, they give off a warm, comforting
glow. Their problems seem more manageable when viewed in
hindsight. We know how everything came out.

    The sudden popularity of prime-time nostalgia is hardly
surprising. Oldies radio stations are thriving; TV tributes to
Ed Sullivan and All in the Family drew blockbuster ratings last
season; Natalie Cole hit the top of the charts by bringing back
her father's old songs. For David Jacobs, an executive producer
of Homefront, the current fascination with the past is
reminiscent of fin-de-siecle Europe a hundred years ago. "The
last decades of a century are always reflective," he says. But
Jacobs and his fellow TV producers insist there is more
involved. Says Gary David Goldberg, who has based Brooklyn
Bridge on his own childhood: "If the show is an exercise in
nostalgia, it will be a brief exercise. The truth of the family
has to come out."

    In fact, Goldberg's autobiographical series cuts closer to
the bone than any of his previous sitcoms (which include most
notably the long-running Family Ties). Bridge focuses on
14-year-old Alan (Danny Gerard) and his extended Jewish family,
headed by a nosy, domineering grandmother (Marion Ross). Filmed
with more attention to detail than most sitcoms (and with no
studio audience), the show revels in '50s icons, from mah-jongg
games to Brooklyn Dodgers memorabilia to the inevitable
rock-'n'-roll oldies on the sound track.

    At its best, which is very good, Brooklyn Bridge rings
with fresh and funny childhood observations. Alan's grandmother
forces him to choose his dinner from frozen foods in the
refrigerator even before he finishes breakfast. A school hood,
taunting Alan and his friends in the rest room, demands to know
if they are Jewish. "Not if you don't want us to be," one
replies. Sentimentality gets the upper hand only in the show's
"big" scenes: when Alan's nine-year-old brother (Matthew Siegel)
meets his Dodger hero, Gil Hodges, or when Alan has to choose
between a popular club and his dorky best friend. Grandma, the
Robert Young of this series, is a bit too refined and
understanding, and Alan is too much of an obvious winner. Leave
it to a TV writer to remember himself as the cutest kid in
class.

    The memories are equally warm and fuzzy in Homefront. In
this postwar soap opera set in a small Ohio town, mothers greet
their returning soldier boys with "your favorite pie" and chide
their kids with quaint cliches like, "You move as slow as
molasses in January." Not that there isn't trouble in this
paradise. One veteran comes home to a sweetheart who has fallen
in love with his brother. There are stirrings of race and sex
discrimination as well. A black veteran applies for work at the
local factory but is told the only opening is for a janitor. A
widowed mother is fired from her factory job to make room for
the returning vets. Her boss's advice: "Find yourself a
husband."

    Homefront is a slick, satisfyingly busy soap opera, which
suffers mainly by comparison with the show it has replaced on
ABC's schedule: thirtysomething. Next to that complex and very
contemporary drama, Homefront seems a throwback in more ways
than one. The characters are drawn in primary colors and the
confrontations hyped for melodramatic effect. This is the sort
of TV drama where a girl puts on her wedding dress, races to the
train station to greet her returning beau and meets -- who else?
-- the war bride he has brought home but never told her about.

    Where Homefront is loud and brassy, I'll Fly Away is quiet
and relentlessly sober. Sam Waterston, with his somber mien and
drooping shoulders, plays Forrest Bedford, a liberal-minded
prosecutor in a small Southern town who is raising three
children on his own. (His wife has been hospitalized after a
nervous breakdown; Forrest, meanwhile, is growing friendly with
a rival lawyer, played by Kathryn Harrold.) The family has just
hired a new maid, Lily (Regina Taylor), who becomes the focus
for an exploration of changing race relations at a crucial
historical time.

    The echoes of To Kill a Mockingbird and The Member of the
Wedding are hard to miss, and the show's two-hour pilot moves
as slowly as, well, molasses in January. Yet producers Joshua
Brand and John Falsey (St. Elsewhere, Northern Exposure) have
created a drama of rich texture, few tricks and much truth. The
racial issues are sketched in deft, understated strokes, from
the way Lily quietly eats her dinner separately from the family
she has just served to her six-year-old charge's innocent
questions after a bus ride ("How come me and you had to change
our seats?").

    I'll Fly Away rises above mere nostalgia, but it doesn't
avoid romanticizing the past. The Bedford children are a bit too
precocious in racial matters (15-year-old Nathaniel is bold
enough to visit a black juke joint to listen to the music) and
Lily too poetically noble. The town's first racial protest,
moreover, is a sit-in that might have been a model for Gandhi.
To protest the verdict in a case that Forrest has prosecuted,
demonstrators gather slowly on the courthouse steps. They sit
motionless, hushed, intense -- almost holy. The way it was? Or
the way TV would prefer to remember it?