Viewpoints: Nostalgia on Wheels
By RICHARD SCHICKEL
Nostalgia is turning television into a vehicle for vehicles. Since most of the people who write and direct TV series have yet to create more than a handful of convincing contemporary Americans, it is probably hopeless to expect them to imagine realistically people contending with, or shaped by, antique historical forces--and easy to see why they so readily traffic in antique autos instead. It is so simple to take a picture of an old car going buckety-buckety across the screen, so hard to come honestly to grips with the way things were.
Probably the most serious charge of vehicular homicide of the senses can be brought against The Manhunter (CBS, Wednesday, 10 p.m. E.S.T.). Ken Howard plays a rural private eye of the 1930s as if he were afraid that sudden mobilization of his facial muscles would crack his handsome lines. Luckily the scripts require him to do little more than slip behind the wheel of what bad old novels described as a "high-powered" car and set off on cross-country chases after the current episode's miscreants. For variety, there are many closeups of the car's head lamps and fenders, which are about as emotionally expressive as the leading man--and as beautiful in the same old-fashioned sort of way. Such suspense as the show works up derives from one's fear of seeing either one scratched.
The car in Paper Moon (ABC, Thursday, 8:30 p.m. E.S.T.) is cute rather than awesome, as befits what is intended to be a comedy. An ever-open convertible is often glimpsed gleaming invitingly in the ceaselessly shining sun. The car is a symbol of the footloose lifestyle Moze and Addie Pray (Christopher Connelly and Jodie Foster) have chosen as the best way for con man and girl to survive the Depression '30s. It is, apparently, a rolling Camelot. The pair have yet to encounter any bad weather, let alone any bad vibes on ABC the roads they (theoretically) share with the dispossessed multitudes inscribed on our consciousness by the fiction and photography of the period. Documentary verisimilitude is too much to ask of a sitcom, but surely there might be some semblance of the vulgar energy that animated the movie from which the show is derived--not to mention Joe David Brown's fine novel.
As it now stands, Paper Moon is the most spiritless comedy--regardless of setting--on the tube. Sons and Daughters (CBS, Wednesday, 8 p.m. E.S.T.) comes closer to self-parody, therefore to being funny (at least for one or two viewings), than Paper Moon. It purports to show us the problems of what it tries to pass off as a typical high school class of the 1950s. The kids spend most of their time necking at the drive-in or necking in lovers' lane. Or rather squabbling about necking, because the girls all appear to be in a state of permanent hysteria over their reputations.
The concern is all too understandable: every last one of their parents is a spiritual descendant of Stella Dallas. Now automobility has become a threat to morality. The fact that the adolescents are more concerned with tailpipes and milkshakes than with Eros does nothing to dissipate the cloud of sexual anguish that hovers round the show. Indeed, some good comedy might have resulted from the contrast between the dark depths of the older generation's suspicions and the lame-brained but essentially innocent manner in which their offspring contrive to waste their time--and ours. Alas, Sons and Daughters, already a cancellation because of rating trouble, is doomed to make its brief mark as just another attempt to rip off rather than understand a recent past that at least partly made us what we are today. qedRichard Schickel
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