Networking

By Richard Zoglin

The episode of HBO's new sitcom 1st & Ten opens with a shot of two comely lasses soaping themselves in a locker-room shower. Their endowments are on full display and duly noted by two football jocks ogling them from the doorway. The casual nudity may be startling to some viewers, especially since it has nothing to do with anything that follows. But for veteran watchers of cable TV series, such obligatory "skin scenes" are old hat. Their purpose is not so much titillation as information. The message: This is cable, folks, not network TV.

More and more, that is the only way to tell. As cable fights for viewers in the competitive TV marketplace, it is turning increasingly to sitcoms and other network-style series. 1st & Ten, which debuted in August, follows the fortunes of a struggling pro football team owned by a sexy divorcee. Showtime's newest entry is Washingtoon, a sitcom about a naive freshman Senator. The Disney Channel last season scored with Still the Beaver, an update of the old network comedy Leave It to Beaver, and this month introduced Danger Bay, an adventure series about a family that saves animals in peril. The USA Network has just unveiled its first original sitcom, Check It Out!, starring Don Adams as a harried supermarket manager. And Ted Turner's superstation, WTBS, now has three original sitcoms in a Monday-night "comedy bloc." Cable has long proclaimed itself an alternative to the networks, but a growing chunk of its schedule seems less a choice than an echo.

The network look is spreading. The Arts & Entertainment Network, which offers cultural fare and "quality" programming from Britain, also telecasts reruns of such defunct network series as United States and Breaking Away. Nickelodeon, the children's channel, is trying to attract older viewers at night with reruns of chestnuts like The Donna Reed Show and Route 66. Even MTV now interrupts its playlist of rock videos with a sitcom on Sunday nights, an import from Britain called The Young Ones.

The sitcomming of cable is partly a response to the industry's rough economic times. Cable's growth rate has slowed considerably in the past couple of years, owing in part to the proliferation of videocassettes, which offer new movies months before they appear on cable's premium channels. The two largest such channels, HBO and Showtime, actually posted a net loss in subscribers during the first half of 1985, the first such drop in their history. The solution, many pay-cable executives are deciding, is to supplement movies with original programming that can generate viewer loyalty. Translation: more series.

"We have changed our philosophy a little due to the VCR," says Peter Chernin, executive vice president of programming at Showtime. "We have to have more than just a few good movies to make subscribing worthwhile." < Showtime hopes to attract and hold subscribers with such regular items as Brothers, about a homosexual and his two siblings; the long-running drama The Paper Chase; and a batch of "rediscovered" episodes of The Honeymooners. HBO, while downplaying the importance of series, this season will offer six new segments of Philip Marlowe--Private Eye, starring Powers Boothe, along with the new episodes of such returning series as Not Necessarily the News and The Hitchhiker.

Cable executives insist that their series are different from network fare, in many cases more daring in language and subject matter. Usually that simply means a gratuitous glimpse of skin here, an expletive undeleted there. Brothers' treatment of homosexuality, for example, is a touch more explicit than ABC or CBS might allow. Yet in most ways the show is indistinguishable from a typical Norman Lear sitcom of the mid-1970s.

The newest cable sitcoms are even less adventurous. Washingtoon, which stars Tom Callaway as the dippy legislator, promises a biting look at the ways of Washington, but its political satire is toothless and its performers charmless. In 1st & Ten, the curvaceous team owner (Delta Burke) talks football as if she were reading a foreign language phonetically, and the gridiron goons who surround her (a womanizing quarterback, a dumb lineman named Bubba, an oily general manager in cahoots with the Mob) are well past sitcom retirement age. The bottom drawer in comedy's bargain basement, however, belongs to the new sitcoms showing up on basic cable. WTBS's Rocky Road, for example, set in a beachfront ice cream store, trots out juvenile plots and dialogue that make Beach Blanket Bingo look like Moliere.

Cable's freedom from network restrictions, however, has also given rise to more ambitious fare. HBO last summer anticipated this fall's anthology trend with its fine Ray Bradbury Theater, three original stories by the famed fantasy writer. The tales were seductive and creepy (in The Crowd, a man notices that the same group of bystanders shows up at car accidents across the city). Three more episodes are scheduled for this season. Shelley Duvall's Faerie Tale Theater on Showtime, meanwhile, continues to provide imaginative family fare. In December, Duvall will launch a second Showtime series, Tall Tales, which will retell the legends of such folk heroes as Paul Bunyan, Johnny Appleseed and Annie Oakley.

These efforts, however, seem to be in the minority as cable increasingly tries to woo a mass audience. "Pay TV is becoming more and more like the networks," says Duvall. "To tell the truth, I think the two are evening out. The networks are running more unusual things, like Amazing Stories, and pay TV is tightening up." Unless, of course, Annie Oakley happens to sleep in the nude.

With reporting by Dan Goodgame/Los Angeles and Arturo Yanez/New York