The Way We (Maybe) Were

By Richard Zoglin

The sound track serves up a luscious, Big-Band rendition of It's Been a Long, Long Time. On the screen, black-and-white photos dissolve one into another: soldiers coming home, couples embracing, homey shots from Main Street. "In the autumn of 1945," a female narrator intones, "America was invincible. The countertops at the soda fountain were still made of marble. Sodas cost a nickel. And Coke -- well, it only meant cola."

In a nostalgic mood yet? If the opening of ABC's Homefront doesn't get you, try CBS's Brooklyn Bridge, a fond look back at growing up in Brooklyn circa 1956. NBC's I'll Fly Away, meanwhile, paints a moodier watercolor of life in a Southern town in the late '50s, just as the civil rights movement was gathering steam. In a medium that is usually more comfortable with the here and now, the timely issue and the hip wisecrack, three of the most ambitious shows of the new season are harking back to the past.

Period pieces have never been a TV favorite. True, the western was once a network staple (and the genre has made a modest comeback recently, with such shows as Paradise and The Young Riders), and a small handful of hit series have been set in the past. But these shows were mainly interested in using the past for its symbolic or mythic value. The Minnesota frontier of Little House on the Prairie and the Depression-era South of The Waltons were essentially the same locale: an all-American Everyplace, where ethical issues and family dramas could be worked out against an idealized backdrop, far from the messy moral ambiguities of modern days.

In the new crop of nostalgia shows, by contrast, a particular period is re- created precisely and dwelt on lovingly. In a sense, these shows are about the past -- a past, moreover, that most viewers personally remember (or, thanks to the media, think they remember). And though none of these eras are portrayed as totally idyllic, they give off a warm, comforting glow. Their problems seem more manageable when viewed in hindsight. We know how everything came out.

The sudden popularity of prime-time nostalgia is hardly surprising. Oldies radio stations are thriving; TV tributes to Ed Sullivan and All in the Family drew blockbuster ratings last season; Natalie Cole hit the top of the charts by bringing back her father's old songs. For David Jacobs, an executive producer of Homefront, the current fascination with the past is reminiscent of fin-de-siecle Europe a hundred years ago. "The last decades of a century are always reflective," he says. But Jacobs and his fellow TV producers insist there is more involved. Says Gary David Goldberg, who has based Brooklyn Bridge on his own childhood: "If the show is an exercise in nostalgia, it will be a brief exercise. The truth of the family has to come out."

In fact, Goldberg's autobiographical series cuts closer to the bone than any of his previous sitcoms (which include most notably the long-running Family Ties). Bridge focuses on 14-year-old Alan (Danny Gerard) and his extended Jewish family, headed by a nosy, domineering grandmother (Marion Ross). Filmed with more attention to detail than most sitcoms (and with no studio audience), the show revels in '50s icons, from mah-jongg games to Brooklyn Dodgers memorabilia to the inevitable rock-'n'-roll oldies on the sound track.

At its best, which is very good, Brooklyn Bridge rings with fresh and funny childhood observations. Alan's grandmother forces him to choose his dinner from frozen foods in the refrigerator even before he finishes breakfast. A school hood, taunting Alan and his friends in the rest room, demands to know if they are Jewish. "Not if you don't want us to be," one replies. Sentimentality gets the upper hand only in the show's "big" scenes: when Alan's nine-year-old brother (Matthew Siegel) meets his Dodger hero, Gil Hodges, or when Alan has to choose between a popular club and his dorky best friend. Grandma, the Robert Young of this series, is a bit too refined and understanding, and Alan is too much of an obvious winner. Leave it to a TV writer to remember himself as the cutest kid in class.

The memories are equally warm and fuzzy in Homefront. In this postwar soap opera set in a small Ohio town, mothers greet their returning soldier boys with "your favorite pie" and chide their kids with quaint cliches like, "You move as slow as molasses in January." Not that there isn't trouble in this paradise. One veteran comes home to a sweetheart who has fallen in love with his brother. There are stirrings of race and sex discrimination as well. A black veteran applies for work at the local factory but is told the only opening is for a janitor. A widowed mother is fired from her factory job to make room for the returning vets. Her boss's advice: "Find yourself a husband."

Homefront is a slick, satisfyingly busy soap opera, which suffers mainly by comparison with the show it has replaced on ABC's schedule: thirtysomething. Next to that complex and very contemporary drama, Homefront seems a throwback in more ways than one. The characters are drawn in primary colors and the confrontations hyped for melodramatic effect. This is the sort of TV drama where a girl puts on her wedding dress, races to the train station to greet her returning beau and meets -- who else? -- the war bride he has brought home but never told her about.

Where Homefront is loud and brassy, I'll Fly Away is quiet and relentlessly sober. Sam Waterston, with his somber mien and drooping shoulders, plays Forrest Bedford, a liberal-minded prosecutor in a small Southern town who is raising three children on his own. (His wife has been hospitalized after a nervous breakdown; Forrest, meanwhile, is growing friendly with a rival lawyer, played by Kathryn Harrold.) The family has just hired a new maid, Lily (Regina Taylor), who becomes the focus for an exploration of changing race relations at a crucial historical time.

The echoes of To Kill a Mockingbird and The Member of the Wedding are hard to miss, and the show's two-hour pilot moves as slowly as, well, molasses in January. Yet producers Joshua Brand and John Falsey (St. Elsewhere, Northern Exposure) have created a drama of rich texture, few tricks and much truth. The racial issues are sketched in deft, understated strokes, from the way Lily quietly eats her dinner separately from the family she has just served to her six-year-old charge's innocent questions after a bus ride ("How come me and you had to change our seats?").

I'll Fly Away rises above mere nostalgia, but it doesn't avoid romanticizing the past. The Bedford children are a bit too precocious in racial matters (15- year-old Nathaniel is bold enough to visit a black juke joint to listen to the music) and Lily too poetically noble. The town's first racial protest, moreover, is a sit-in that might have been a model for Gandhi. To protest the verdict in a case that Forrest has prosecuted, demonstrators gather slowly on the courthouse steps. They sit motionless, hushed, intense -- almost holy. The way it was? Or the way TV would prefer to remember it?

With reporting by Deborah Edler Brown/Los Angeles