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                                                                                TELEVISION, Page 68

TV'S Generation Gap


The new fall programs are rife with angst-ridden baby boomers
and fun-loving 20-year-olds. Some shows are witty; many are
drivel.

By RICHARD ZOGLIN


    Woman walks into a bar. The regulars instantly size her
up: "Uptown, East Side, college educated. Probably reuses her
grocery bags. Charter subscriber to Working Woman magazine. Saw
The Big Chill three times. Plays Trivial Pursuit on the
weekends with friends. What's she doing here on a Monday? It's
Murphy Brown night."

    Man makes a lewd comment. Woman instantly sizes him up:
"Is there a brain up there, or just one long episode of Studs?"

    Scenes from both sides of TV's generational divide: the
first, from Diane English's much anticipated new CBS sitcom Love
and War, is hip, sophisticated, full of knowing media
references (including one to English's own show -- and current
cause celebre -- Murphy Brown). The second, from a less heralded
new NBC sitcom called Out All Night, is brassy and in-your-face;
its TV reference, appropriately, is to a salacious game show.
Love and War is one of a potful of upscale, thirtysomething
sitcoms served up by the networks this fall. Out All Night gives
a good idea of what TV thinks of the younger generation.

    Thirtysomething, ABC's trendsetting drama series, has been
off the air for more than a year, but the show's angst-ridden
spirit will be all over the dial this fall. In Love and War, a
roughhewn Manhattan journalist (Jay Thomas) falls for a prickly,
recently divorced restaurateur (Susan Dey). In Hearts Afire, two
aides to a U.S. Senator (John Ritter and Markie Post) get
together despite clashing political views. NBC's Mad About You
focuses on neurotic newlyweds living in Manhattan, while ABC's
Laurie Hill adds a five-year-old child to the trials of a busy
two-career couple.

    It's no surprise that thirtysomething shows are growing in
popularity. They reflect, to a large degree, the experiences and
life-styles of the people who create them. They attract the
audience demographics that advertisers crave. They usually get
applause from the critics -- or at least approving nods for
trying to bring "quality" to a medium dominated by escapist
drivel.

    The escapist drivel, meanwhile, is going after a younger
crowd. TV's hottest new genre is the twentysomething ensemble
show. Melrose Place (a spinoff of Beverly Hills 90210), The
Heights (about a group of blue-collar New Jersey youths trying
to launch a rock band) and 2000 Malibu Road, a soap opera set
in a California beach house, all drew strong ratings this
summer. Coming this fall are NBC's The Round Table (young
professionals in Washington), Fox's Class of '96 (students at
a small Northeastern college) and a slew of youth-oriented
sitcoms.

    A generation gap could hardly be more clearly defined.
TV's under-30s are, for the most part, shallow, fun loving,
upbeat. They tend to live in communal groups and spend a lot of
time in the sun. They are still young enough to be entranced
with the idea of being on their own. One of the two bachelors
who room together (while working at Patti LaBelle's nightclub)
in Out All Night raves about their new apartment: "It's what
we've always talked about. A place of our own, with no parents,
no dorm directors -- just freedom!"

    After the age of 30, however, life gets more complicated
and troubling. TV's thirtysomethings are tense, introspective,
concerned about relationships. They have pressure-filled jobs,
and they usually live in big cities, where just getting to work
can be a problem. "If we're not on the subway by eight, all the
nonsticky seats are taken," says the husband rushing for work
in Mad About You. They worry a lot about their future, and no
wonder: if they're not careful, they could end up like one of
the midlife losers of Middle Ages, CBS's downer drama that just
opened for a five-week run. Take Peter Riegert, for instance,
who plays a salesman trying to peddle computers to small-town
Midwesterners, many of them old people who are still mystified
by the little holes in steam irons. Willy Loman never had it so
drab.

    TV's younger generation, of course, has its troubles too,
but they are usually overblown soap-opera cliches, and they
seem to catch everybody by surprise. In Melrose Place, a naive
young secretary is sexually attacked by her new boss, but only
after warning signs that not even Senator Arlen Specter could
have missed. In The Heights, a band member's girlfriend
announces that she is pregnant. "I guess we'll get married. It's
the right thing to do," says the boyfriend, who has apparently
never seen an episode of Oprah or Donahue. The knottiest
problems in The Heights are not personal but group related. The
sole black member of the band gets razzed by his neighborhood
pals for playing with a bunch of whites. "It's not a color
thing," he replies. "It's a people thing." A blond waif
complains that the band won't let her sing her own soulful
music. "If you don't start taking me seriously, I'm going to
quit the band!" she cries. Who said anything about taking people
seriously?

    Not all of TV's under-30s appear brain damaged. Beverly
Hills 90210, the high school drama whose success launched the
current spate of twentysomething ensembles, has always borne
more resemblance to a thirtysomething show, with its brooding
characters and relatively forthright treatment of teen problems.
Going to Extremes, the new series from John Falsey and Joshua
Brand (I'll Fly Away, Northern Exposure) and set in a Caribbean
medical school, is a surprisingly bland concoction from that
creative team. But at least it revolves around characters with
minimum scores on the SATs and some awareness of the real world.

    Nor are the older-targeted shows, for all their
introspective angst, necessarily profound or truthful. Laurie
Hill sets up a familiar problem: a two-career couple (she's a
doctor, he's a freelance writer) trying to find time for each
other and for their five-year-old son. But the day-to-day
conflicts are too overbaked. Laurie's husband gets pouty when
their evening at home is interrupted by her beeper. "You have
a kid at home who's gonna be in college by the time the three
of us get to have a meal together!" he snaps later. And what is
the crisis that has called her away? A sick young boy whose test
results show he is HIV-positive. So much for marital
sensitivity.

    Love and War is shrewder and funnier, but its
therapy-session psychologizing tends to run amuck. Wally and
Jack, the couple from opposite sides of the tracks, dissect
their relationship in first-person comments to the camera. (He:
"I have this feeling about her. It's like the first time I rode
the Cyclone at Coney Island. I was strangely excited, and a
little nauseous at the same time." She: "I've always found his
type very attractive, but I'm in a dangerously vulnerable place
right now.'') Conversing with each other, however, they revert
to adolescent stammering. Jack tries to ask Wally for a date:
"Would you like to have dinner with me tonight? O.K., O.K., that
was too much, too formal, too crazy. Want to eat with me
tonight? I mean, I have to eat, you have to eat . . ."

    The one subject in which conversation is blunt and
unambiguous is sex. On their first date, Jack and Wally kiss
briefly, then she suddenly blurts out, "Would you like to have
sex?" They proceed to debate the possibility with all the
emotional involvement of a discussion of tax policy on Wall
Street Week. There are gag lines that must have had the show's
writers in stitches ("Your condom or mine?"), but the whole
encounter is contrived and phony, like too much of the show.

    Love and War seems even more artificial when compared with
Mad About You, the season's best new sitcom. Paul and Jamie
(Paul Reiser and Helen Hunt) are Manhattan newlyweds with no
cute eccentricities, no clashing political views, no comical
disparities in social background. Their problems are the little
ones that occur when even compatible people are tossed into the
same house together for the first time. Just getting out of the
apartment in the morning is a Feydeau farce: she rushes back to
open the window (the dog needs air), he rushes back to close it
(a burglar might get in).

    Mad About You, like Love and War, is too self-consciously
verbal on the subject of sex, but it has more self-deprecating
wit. She: "It doesn't bother you that we haven't had sex in
five days? What's going on with us?" He: "What's going on is
that we're married five months and the sexual part . . . is
over. I thought you understood that."

    Reiser, a former stand-up comic, has knife-edge timing and
a full repertoire of nervous tics, and Hunt manages to be both
charming and exasperating at the same time. One sign of a
sitcom that cares more about its characters than its gag lines:
when Paul and Jamie start to fight, they ask their dinner
guests to leave the room -- carrying their potential wisecracks
with them. Privacy is one concept that becomes more precious
with age.