TIME: Almanac 1995

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<text id=94TT0259> <title> Feb. 28, 1994: The Arts & Media:Television </title> <history> TIME--The Weekly Newsmagazine--1994 Feb. 28, 1994 Ministry of Rage:Louis Farrakhan </history> <article> <source>Time Magazine</source> <hdr> THE ARTS & MEDIA, Page 60 Television Murder, They Wheezed </hdr> <body> Starring in sitcoms may get too strenuous, but in prime time you're never too old to solve a whodunit By Richard Zoglin--With reporting by Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles Alexander Scott, the globe-trotting secret agent played by Bill Cosby in the 1960s series I Spy, made a return visit to his old top-secret agency a couple of weeks ago. And no one was more surprised than the security guard who had to inspect his outdated photo ID. "Long assignment?" she asked skeptically. "Sick leave," he replied. It may be too harsh to call them the over-the-hill gang. But TV's newest batch of prime-time detectives are, let us say, not the sleuths you'd feel most comfortable hiring to follow an armed robber down a dark alley. Cosby, now 56 and with a No. 1-rated sitcom under his (expanding) belt, not only resurfaced in I Spy Returns on CBS but also played a police crime consultant in The Cosby Mysteries, the first of a planned series of NBC movies. Dick Van Dyke, now an avuncular 68, portrays a crime-solving physician in the CBS series Diagnosis Murder, and Gene Barry, 74, is back in Burke's Law, a new version of the '60s series about a millionaire police detective who tools to crime scenes in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce. In yet another TV revival, Robert Wagner, 64, and Stefanie Powers, 51, returned last week in Hart to Hart: Home Is Where the Hart Is, an NBC movie based on their decade-old series about high-living husband-and-wife detectives. George C. Scott and Louis Gossett Jr. are among the stars who will join the old-codger crime-fighting brigade later this spring. Add to these such veteran TV sleuths as Angela Lansbury in Murder, She Wrote, Andy Griffith in Matlock and Peter Falk in occasional Columbo movies, and you've got enough votes to block Clinton's Medicare reforms. Detective shows are the low-impact aerobics of network programming. To an aging star for whom feature-film roles have dried up and sitcoms are too demanding, a detective show can be a comfortable sinecure. For viewers tired of raucous sitcoms and hard-charging magazine shows, these TV whodunits provide easy-to-take, low-decibel entertainment. Murder, She Wrote, in its 10th season on CBS, is still a Top 10 hit; ABC's Matlock is a solid success in one of the week's toughest time periods; Diagnosis Murder and Burke's Law, new this season, have given CBS its best Friday-night ratings in years. Even so, the genre has had to struggle to get back into network favor. The audience for these shows tends to be older, at a time when advertisers seem obsessed with targeting the young crowd. A recent Nielsen survey found that Murder, She Wrote, despite its high ratings, gets less for a 30-second commercial than its low-rated (but younger-skewing) Sunday-night competitor SeaQuest DSV. Yet by the same token, the shows offer counterprogramming to youth-oriented sitcoms, plus a way to lure back the broad-based family audience that has drifted away from network TV. "Every segment of the audience has value," says CBS Entertainment executive vice president Peter Tortorici. "The better job you do of connecting them so you can get them to watch together is, ultimately, the best use you can make of the medium." Viewers from eight to 80 have little trouble recognizing the unwavering formulas of these arthritic whodunits: murder discovered, suspects questioned, red herrings introduced, culprit finally tripped up and exposed. Not every show is as hokey and mechanical as Burke's Law, which routinely ends with a scene in which Burke gathers all the suspects and eliminates them one by one until he fingers the guilty party. The better shows at least try to bring their criminology into the '90s: the key to the solution of Cosby's first mystery--Who is murdering a corporation's top executives?--was the redial feature on a victim's car fax. Compared with the hard-nosed crime fighters in more realistic police shows like NYPD Blue and Law & Order, these detectives are easygoing dilettantes. For many, the job is just a sideline, sometimes a reluctant one. "I don't want to work," whines Cosby's character, who is trying to retire after winning the lottery. "I just want to stay here and sleep and play my clarinet." Van Dyke works in a metropolitan hospital, yet he seems to have unlimited time to run down clues in an effort to clear people falsely accused of murder--people who, far too often, are old personal friends. (With friends like these...) Happily, these graying gumshoes are, for the most part, spared the indignity of fistfights, car chases and other demanding physical stunts. Typically, they have a younger partner who does most of the heavy lifting. (Both Barry and Van Dyke, for instance, are teamed with sons on the police force; Van Dyke's is played by his real-life son Barry Van Dyke.) Yet even the few spurts of physical action can be discomfiting: last week's Hart to Hart revival brought back Lionel Stander, now 86, as the Harts' Man Friday, then forced the poor fellow to pursue a suspect (played by Alan Young, 74) over a rocky New England beach. Ben-Gay, anyone? Though classic TV escapism, these shows may be filling a societal need. "They put an `entertainment grid' on the explosion of crime that's really happening out there," suggests William S. Link, co-creator of Columbo and Murder, She Wrote as well as The Cosby Mysteries. "Today's crime rate is the highest in history. People want to see some sort of control, and you get that with fiction. On TV, the heavies are always caught." The heavies, moreover, are considerably less frightening than those in real life. Murders on these shows are nearly always committed by well-groomed, well-to-do white people, and the deeds are neat, bloodless, imaginatively staged. In recent weeks we have seen a magician drown in a tank of water when his escape trick is sabotaged (Diagnosis Murder); a late-night TV host electrocuted by his microphone at a Friars-type roast (Burke's Law); and a manic-depressive book editor driven to near madness and pushed off a building roof to feign a suicide (Murder, She Wrote). Murders are never random or accidental or committed in the heat of passion; they are carefully planned by people with clear, easily understood motives. "One of you here tonight is a murderer, and I'm going to prove it," Van Dyke announces just before exposing the magician's killer. What's nice about TV mysteries, as opposed to real-life ones, is that the culprit is always "here tonight." Which may be one reason why the Nancy Kerrigan-Tonya Harding story has struck such a chord. Kerrigan's attacker was not, as most people assumed at first, a crazed fan or a random nut. The crime appears to have been--just like TV!--an elaborately plotted effort by another skater's camp to eliminate a rival. Any fan of Murder, She Wrote can recognize the motive. And not even Columbo could have cracked the case faster. </body> </article> </text>