Frowns of A Summer Night

By Richard Zoglin

SHOWS: GRAPEVINE, HOME FIRES, ON THE AIR

TIME: CBS, MONDAYS, 9:30 P.M.; NBC, SATURDAYS, 8:30 P.M.; ABC, SATURDAYS, 9:30 P.M. (ALL EDT)

THE BOTTOM LINE: Touch that dial! Three new summer shows could drive you back to those boring old reruns.

The Big Three networks may be having their problems, but they still know how to play the p.r. game. This summer has been heralded as the most active and creative in years: an unusually large number of new series are being offered instead of reruns. Many of them are offbeat entries, which, we are assured, are getting special treatment by being launched during the less competitive summer months.

What the networks neglect to mention is that summer has also served another traditional function as a dumping ground for shows that weren't good enough for the regular-season schedule. The newcomers so far might well bring reruns back into fashion.

CBS's Grapevine, a relationship comedy from David Frankel (Doctor, Doctor), at least tries a fresh approach. Each half-hour episode recounts a different boy-girl story through the words of assorted characters talking directly to the camera. Some of their comments are ironically juxtaposed; others are coyly suggestive. She: "We never even made it to the bedroom." He: "It happened for both of us real fast." She: "He does have big hands, I'll give him that . . . "

It's sort of thirtysomething meets MTV: fast, frank and relentlessly yuppie. Characterized only by their sound bites, the principals (a cruise director named Susan, a TV sportscaster named Thumper) seem even more superficial and craven than usual, and the scattershot storytelling technique, fun at first, is eventually just annoying.

Bruce Paltrow, the former executive producer of St. Elsewhere, is another TV creator with a sudden fondness for the confessional first person. Each episode of his new NBC comedy, Home Fires, opens with the main characters talking to a family therapist. Again the technique seems merely a way of tricking up an otherwise routine sitcom.

We have for the umpteenth time two earnest parents (Kate Burton and Michael Brandon) who seem inordinately befuddled at the job of raising a family, and two teenagers who have little on their minds except sex. The show's attitudes are hip, but the plot twists are strictly Donna Reed: in one episode, Mom advises 14-year-old Jesse that he ought to be more frank in trying to woo his girlfriend. When he goes too far, the girl's father shows up on their doorstep and punches (who else?) Jesse's dad in the mouth. A laugh track tinkles wanly in the background as if someone were too embarrassed to turn it up louder. As well they should be.

On the Air is a sadder disappointment. The ABC comedy comes from David Lynch and Mark Frost, who shook up network TV with their brilliantly perverse soap opera Twin Peaks. This time the pair have come up with a sitcom about a ragtag TV network in the 1950s. Must have sounded great in the story conferences.

It looks awful on screen. Lynch (who directed the first episode) has given the show an otherworldly glow and populated it with Peaksian oddballs, ranging from a sound engineer with a seeing impediment (he sees more than we do) to a director who misplaces vowels like a cross between Inspector Clouseau and Balki from Perfect Strangers. ("Mere pits and pons" means "More pots and pans.") There are cartoon-like sound effects and indecipherable running gags like the "hurry-up twins" -- two men inside one sweater who walk around saying, "Hurry up." In Twin Peaks, the offhand weirdness had reverberations even when we didn't know what it meant. But for comedy to work, there must be at least some common ground between the filmmakers and the audience. On the Air seems totally lost in space.