Yup, Yup and Away!

By Richard Zoglin

In the new ABC sitcom Full House, two would-be fathers frantically try to diaper a baby, using an electric fan, a roasting pan and a roll of paper towels. It is one of the dumbest scenes in one of the dumbest of the season's new shows, but a sharp-eyed viewer will notice a small breakthrough: the baby. Infants on prime-time TV are sometimes talked about, maybe even glimpsed from afar; yet with rare exceptions (O.K., Little Ricky), they have traditionally been nonpersons in a medium that prefers tots old enough to fire one-liners at the grownups.

This season preverbal toddlers turn up as characters on no fewer than three new series. The children are a fitting symbol for TV's discovery of yuppies and their world. Young married couples, coping with baby strollers and middle- of-the-night feedings, are a chief focus of two new family dramas, thirtysomething and A Year in the Life. Striving young professionals -- single, well appointed and usually living in New York City -- populate several others.

Yuppie shows are easy to spot. CBS's Everything's Relative revolves around two brothers who share a New York apartment and a nagging mother. One (John Bolger) is a blue-collar swinger; the other (Jason Alexander), a buttoned-down yuppie who does consumer research for products like sushi-on-a-stick. In NBC's My Two Dads, two bachelors get joint custody of a twelve-year-old girl, whom one of them -- no one knows which -- has fathered. Again, they are a contrasting pair: Greg Evigan is a free-spirited artist, Paul Reiser a compulsive financial analyst who describes himself as a "coffee achiever." In CBS's Leg Work, a former assistant D.A. (Margaret Colin) goes into the private-eye business, but seems to spend less time solving crimes than caring for her Porsche and commiserating with girlfriends about the dating scene. It is no accident that this fall marks the debut of the first network series to deal with that formative experience for the baby-boom generation, the Viet Nam War.

The sudden prominence of yuppies in prime time can be traced at least partly to the success of L.A. Law, NBC's classy drama series set in a Los Angeles law firm. Never mind the courtroom theatrics; this is a show about attractive young professionals grappling with '80s problems: managing relationships, balancing a career and personal life, reconciling ideals with the demands of the real world. Another influence has been the advent of people meters, the new ratings technology that is expected to mean higher ratings for shows watched by younger, upscale viewers. Most important may be the fact that TV writers and producers -- mostly well-paid men and women in their 20s, 30s and 40s -- are simply creating shows about what they know. They don't know much about autoworkers in Detroit.

Which is why ABC's thirtysomething, the season's best new series, has the ring of authenticity. The protagonists, Michael and Hope (played attractively by Ken Olin and Mel Harris), are a young married couple with a nine-month-old daughter and a batch of friends who are pulling them in different directions. Gary is a long-hair '60s leftover who wants them to loosen up and go backpacking. Ellyn is a childhood friend of Hope's who feels abandoned now that the baby has arrived. Elliot, Michael's partner in a small ad agency, is a practical family man who urges that the agency agree to a big client's demand for a campaign that rips off someone else's ideas.

One can smirk at the show's blatant appeal to the yuppie audience and at some of the cliched relationshipspeak ("It's too hurtful"). But Creators Edward Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz invest what is potentially banal with conviction and wit. The dialogue is sharp but not showy (Michael, complaining about a near sleepless night with the baby, asks Elliot, "Do you get used to having, like, no REM periods?"), and the small crises are credible and not overblown. Michael and Hope quarrel about whether to hire a baby sitter so they can go on a camping trip. Michael, after some soul searching, does agree to that ad campaign he wanted to turn down, simply because the agency can't afford not to. Imagine! A character we are meant to identify with actually compromises his principles and doesn't get a moral lecture for it. Thirtysomething is not just grownup; it is honest.

NBC's A Year in the Life, based on last season's Emmy Award-winning mini- series, has a broader scope, encompassing three generations of an upper- middle-class Seattle clan headed by a widowed businessman (Richard Kiley). But the show intersects with thirtysomething through Kiley's four grown children, who are in various stages of marital happiness or disarray. Indeed, the new parents played by Adam Arkin and Jayne Atkinson have an argument over baby sitters -- Mom is reluctant to leave the tot with a stranger for the first time -- that is virtually identical to Michael and Hope's.

The difference is that here the problem is turned into familiar jokes: the couple hires a housekeeper who speaks no English but is so efficient that Dad feels left out and spends the day spying on her. A Year in the Life is well acted (especially by Kiley) and tries to be unsparing in its dissection of a typical American family. But it resorts too often to contrivances and soap opera. When a divorced mother is asked out on her first date after the split, her two teenage youngsters help their nervous mom prepare for the big evening. What she doesn't tell them is that, at the last minute, the guy has called to cancel. All dressed up with nowhere to go, she spends the evening at a Marx Brothers movie -- and then in bed, guiltily, with her ex-husband. A week in the life of this family is probably enough.

Once past thirtysomething and A Year in the Life, TV's family album gets considerably bleaker. Fully assembled nuclear families are scarce on the season's new sitcoms; swinging singles and unattached parents are in. One new twist, however, is a trend to half-hour shows that eschew laugh tracks or live audiences and aim instead for the mixed moods of comedy-drama. The technique does not always work -- witness CBS's Frank's Place, a languid, unfunny variation on Cheers set in a New Orleans Creole restaurant. More promising is The "Slap" Maxwell Story, with Dabney Coleman as a self-centered sports columnist. Coleman, so delightfully rancid in Buffalo Bill, is more sympathetic here, his thick-skinned pomposity barely disguising the desperate character underneath. The ABC series, created by Jay Tarses (Buffalo Bill, The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd), is maybe too precious and in-jokish ("Six cliches in ten seconds," marvels a bartender after one of Slap's overripe monologues), but Coleman seems headed toward another memorable characterization.

The other quiet comedy this season is ABC's Hooperman, created by the L.A. Law team of Steven Bochco and Terry Louise Fisher. Starring John Ritter as a San Francisco police detective who inherits a run-down apartment building, the half-hour series plays like a scrunched together episode of Bochco's Hill Street Blues without the violence. The premiere segment made some jarring missteps (a running gag about a policewoman trying to seduce a gay cop) and lunged too hard for the emotional knockout (Ritter bursting into tears over the death of his landlady). But the engaging Ritter is adept at both ends of the comedy-drama spectrum, and Hooperman has possibilities.

While comedies experiment a bit, crime dramas this season have the smell of used goods. Among veteran performers starring in new series are William Conrad as a wily district attorney in Jake and the Fatman, Paul Sorvino as a police- department p.r. man who returns to the streets in The Oldest Rookie, Jerry Orbach as a private eye in The Law and Harry McGraw, and Dale Robertson as a crime-solving Texas billionaire in J.J. Starbuck. Only Robertson seems to be truly enjoying the work. NBC's Private Eye, created by Anthony Yerkovich (Miami Vice), is hipper but not much better. Star Michael Woods, as a disgraced cop who becomes a private eye to avenge his brother's murder, growls like a road-company Don Johnson; the stylized 1950s look is unconvincing, and the dialogue sounds like parody: "I can look at myself mornings, Charlie. Sounds to me like you're havin' problems in that department." For hard-boiled crime fighting, CBS's Wiseguy, with Ken Wahl as an undercover cop trying to infiltrate the Mob, is smarter and meaner.

Tour of Duty, CBS's ambitious Viet Nam series, should have been smarter and better timed. This cleaned-up-for-TV look at an American platoon in 1967 might have just passed muster a couple of years ago, before the recent surge of Hollywood interest in Viet Nam. After Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, it just won't do. When a battle-hardened sergeant (Terence Knox) grills a group of new recruits in search of "winners, survivors" for his platoon, he rules out marijuana users right away: "If you're smokin' dope and gettin' high, you're not listenin' to me. You don't listen to me, you're gonna get me killed." That doesn't stop him, however, from picking an antiwar protester who claims at the outset that he won't fight. The point, of course, is to complete the rainbow coalition on a show where the issues, and the men, are too clear-cut. Viet Nam was a quagmire; Tour of Duty is a game of hopscotch.

Sometimes TV does better when it forgets about reality altogether. In CBS's new fantasy series Beauty and the Beast, a young New York attorney (The Terminator's Linda Hamilton) is accosted after a party by some thugs who slash her face. She is nursed back to health by Vincent (Ron Perlman), a deformed, leonine creature who lives in abandoned tunnels beneath the subways. After she has recovered -- her scars miraculously removed by surgery -- this underground Equalizer becomes her benefactor and partner in fighting crime. The first episode had some inept action sequences and could have used more fanciful detail. But there are nice lyrical touches, and the show may have hit on something. Beneath the city streets, away from the hassles and hazards of everyday urban life, lies a hidden world of refuge, romance and moral order. The perfect yuppie fantasy.