Autumn Goofs, Winter Repairs

By Richard Zoglin

Watching a new TV season unfold may be mind numbing for some viewers, but for network executives it is an intense learning experience. Huddled over their weekly Nielsen report cards, they chart the winners and losers, try to divine trends and make mid-course corrections. Judging from the replacement series joining the prime-time schedule this month (the traditional start of TV's "second season"), the networks have done their homework. Herewith, the major lessons of autumn:

Keep soap operas in the family. Of all the flops of last fall, perhaps the most unexpected was ABC's Paper Dolls. Set in the chic world of New York modeling, the series seemed expertly designed to satisfy the audience's yen for opulent-looking trash. But viewers responded with a gigantic yawn. The show's failure must have caused some nervous gulps at rival NBC, which was busily preparing a glossy soap set in the chic world of New York retailing. Oops.

Well, Berrenger's may yet deliver the merchandise. The slickly produced show puts back an important element that was missing from Paper Dolls: a strong family unit. The Bloomingdale's-like department store of the title is run by an aging tycoon (Sam Wanamaker) whose children and their spouses vie for power and assorted sex partners. "Positively Byzantine," remarks one family member, after Papa Berrenger has announced plans to retire. "It's going to be fun watching this family fight their way through this." Not as much fun, unfortunately, as it would be if the actors and plot twists did not look so much like mass-produced goods. One exception: Andrea Marcovicci, as a bitchy Berrenger wife, has an offbeat beauty and a mocking, low-key style that is a flavorful slice of rye in the white-bread surroundings.

TV detectives should mind their manners. Rough, tough crime fighters like NBC's Hunter won relatively few fans last fall, while CBS's civilized whodunit Murder, She Wrote, with Angela Lansbury as a sleuthing mystery writer, was a hit. Presto! CBS has given that show a Sunday-night partner in crime, Crazy Like a Fox. The surprise of Murder, She Wrote is that, for all the echoes of Agatha Christie, Lansbury is not playing Miss Marple; the irony of Crazy Like a Fox is that Jack Warden is. As a gruffly eccentric middle-aged private eye, he delights in getting his son, a button-down lawyer played by John Rubinstein, involved in oddball cases. Crazy Like a Fox is one of those shows where the car chases are accompanied by jaunty music, as if to say it's all in fun. With some clever plots and a pair of appealing stars, it frequently is.

MacGruder & Loud, a new ABC show from Producer Aaron Spelling's factory, is equally lighthearted. The heroes are a pair of police officers (John Getz and Kathryn Harrold) who are secretly married but continue to share a patrol car against department rules. Their deception gets fairly elaborate: they live in neighboring apartments, for example, that are connected by a hidden door in the bookcase. MacGruder & Loud goes through the cop-show motions, but the off-duty mush is clearly where its heart is set. You can't keep a good genre down. Reports of the sitcom's death, it turns out, were premature; all the genre needed was a healthy dose of adult writing, as proved by The Cosby Show, the new season's biggest hit. Enter Sara, a very adult sitcom about a single lawyer (Geena Davis) trying to make it on her own in San Francisco. The show is being touted as 1985's answer to the Mary Tyler Moore Show, a boast that can most charitably be described as optimistic. Davis, a tall brunet with an annoying habit of talking into her chest, has little of Mary's tough-but- vulnerable charm, and the gag lines would have embarrassed the crowd at WJM- TV. (A friend, chiding Sara for taking low-paying cases, wonders if she has something against making money: "Did something happen when you were a kid? Were you attacked by a $10 bill?") Bronson Pinchot, currently winning acclaim for his bit as a swishy art-gallery assistant in Beverly Hills Cop, brightens the show as a gay lawyer who works with Sara, but he too is at the mercy of mediocre material.

If at first you don't succeed . . . From Battlestar Galactica to this season's V, science-fiction shows have stubbornly failed to take off in prime time. CBS apparently can deduce no earthly reason why, so it is trying with Otherworld. A family of five, touring the Great Pyramid of Egypt, is transported through a "space-time warp" to a mysterious world where the good people are androids, the bad people have ray guns, and no one is allowed to venture into the "forbidden zone." The family seems terribly blase about all this, but no more so than the series' creators: folks on this planet wear cardigan sweaters and three-piece suits remarkably like our own. Still, the show moves quickly, has sparks of humor and just might catch on. The final lesson, after all, is that TV "breakthroughs" often occur where you least expect them.