Beating The Summertime Blahs

By Richard Zoglin

Summer television: the term alone is enough to conjure up the hot-weather blahs. Viewers know the drill all too well by now. Once the May sweeps are over, the network schedules become almost wall-to-wall reruns, occasionally interrupted by new episodes of series we thought we'd seen the last of and batches of rejected pilots gathered into umbrella series with disingenuous titles like Summer Playhouse.

For network executives, that blah feeling has become a recurring stomachache. Every summer the three-network share of the TV audience shrinks further, as viewers flee to other options on cable. (This year combined ratings for the Big Three since mid-April are down 4% compared with last year. For the week ending July 7, the three-network share dropped to its lowest level in history.) Network programmers periodically make noises about fighting back and introducing more fresh fare during the hot months. From time to time they do. But the financial realities -- airing repeats is necessary to help amortize programming costs -- have kept the summer largely a ghetto of rejects and retreads.

Now for the good news. Even though summer pickings are slim, they are getting more interesting. With the audiences smaller and the stakes lower, the networks can afford to experiment more aggressively than they do during the regular season. So far this summer we've seen Norman Lear get religion (in CBS's Sunday Dinner); a former Surgeon General, C. Everett Koop, get a prime- time showcase (in five low-rated NBC specials); and CBS News invade the courtroom for a new reality series, Verdict. Three even more atypical offerings will debut in the next two weeks. Each would probably be regarded as too off the wall to be taken off the shelf during the cooler months. But two of them are worth some attention in any season.

Hi Honey, I'm Home represents a new trend in the TV industry: cooperation between those instinctive rivals, the broadcast networks and cable. The half- hour sitcom is being produced for ABC by Nickelodeon, the children's cable network (which will rerun the episodes on its Nick at Nite channel). The gimmick: a wholesome 1950s TV family materializes in 1991 New Jersey, where they find that their sweetness-and-light television fantasy life (which they can revert to by switching themselves into black and white) clashes with the real world of muggers, homeless people and feminist single mothers.

It's one of those ideas that sound cute until you see it in action, at which point you wish you'd never heard of it. The TV family members are portrayed so broadly that they go beyond parody into the realm of condescending camp. Mom offers everybody fudge and says "Oh, pooh!" when she gets upset. Dad smokes a pipe and thinks a woman's place is in the kitchen. The jokes are moronic: the '50s mom tries to use 1990s lingo with malaprop results ("My, don't you look squirrelly," she says, meaning "foxy"). And when the punkish '90s kid asks for a high five, his '50s counterpart, who wears a Boy Scout uniform, gives him $5. Oh, pooh!

A much smarter media parody comes from Rob Reiner, the former All in the Family co-star turned movie director. As Reiner, who acts as host, explains at the outset of his new CBS series, Morton & Hayes, Chick Morton and Eddie Hayes were a popular comedy team of the 1930s and '40s. All their movie two-reelers, however, were thought to have been lost in a "tragic fire," until 100 of them were recently rediscovered in a vault. Each week Reiner introduces one of these forgotten chestnuts (with names like Society Saps and Daffy Dicks), restored in all its black-and-white drabness.

The whole thing, of course, is a put-on. Reiner has shrewdly re-created the bargain-basement look and ham-fisted style of those old comedy shorts: dawdling pace (with Hal Roach-style music in the background), cornball jokes, elaborate double takes, slapstick fights with the camera speeded up. Typical gag: Chick, the skinny, acerbic one, tries to wake up Eddie, the fat, dull- witted one. He shakes him, rings an alarm clock in his ear and blows a bugle, to no avail. Finally, Chick sits down and says, "That is a nice- looking piece of cake." Eddie pops up and asks where the food is.

Kevin Pollak and Bob Amaral, playing the duo, are a bit on the bland side, and the show's amateurishness doesn't seem to be entirely satire. Still, Reiner's In-jokish stunt has plenty of funny moments and an appealing, renegade air. A black-and-white parody of bad movie comedies? No network programmer in his right mind could expect this to be a hit.

Reiner is only the second biggest auteur to take a crack at TV this summer. Stephen King's Golden Years, another CBS offering, is the first TV series created and (in all but two of its seven serialized episodes) written by the prolific author. From the title, one might expect another of King's nostalgic memory pieces, in the Stand by Me vein, rather than a grisly horror story, a la Pet Sematary or The Shining. It turns out to be neither. Golden Years is an old-fashioned science-fiction tale with spy-novel trappings. And pretty nifty stuff.

The series takes place in a secret, vaguely futuristic government laboratory, where a mad scientist (Bill Raymond) is conducting experiments on tissue regeneration. When his lab blows up, a 70-year-old janitor (Keith Szarabajka), who is about to be laid off because of failing eyesight, gets contaminated by the chemicals. He survives, but with a difference: he begins to grow younger.

That premise might be enough for a lazier author, but King has cooked up an array of subsidiary characters and plots to keep things lively. There is the preening general (Ed Lauter) who oversees the lab, his edgy chief of security (Felicity Huffman) and a government investigator (R.D. Call) who has his own mysterious agenda. King's mordant touches are everywhere: an electrified fence surrounding the lab, which fries any bird that lands on it; the bleakly regimented, 1984-ish atmosphere of the plant. Except for the janitor and his wife (Frances Sternhagen), every character who is introduced seems oddly remote, sinister or just plain screwy. Not since the debut of Twin Peaks has a TV series been so disorienting.

Like one of King's long-winded novels, Golden Years takes its sweet time unfolding. But the result is unusually dense and evocative TV drama. At times the show recalls another TV excursion into paranoid sci-fi: The Prisoner. That short-lived cult hit came and went during the summer too.