Network Scramble

By Richard Zoglin

At a press conference in Los Angeles this summer, ABC Entertainment president Ted Harbert shocked a gathering of critics and reporters by announcing the end of a TV tradition. Henceforth, he said, ABC would ask producers to eliminate or drastically reduce the opening-credit sequences in their prime-time shows -- and with them theopening theme songs. The goal is to reduce program downtime, when viewers are most tempted to grab the remote control and switch the channel. Logical, perhaps, but rather coldhearted. Imagine Mary Tyler Moore without Mary to "turn the world on with her smile," Gilligan's Island without its bouncy "tale of a fateful trip," Hill Street Blues without Mike Post's opening theme or Twin Peaks without Angelo Badalamenti's.

The opening-credits edict is just one sign of how tough the business of programming has become for a TV network. This should be a season of joy for ABC, CBS and NBC. Their combined audience share rose slightly last season, reversing a long downward trend caused by cable. The advertising market is more active than it has been in years: revenue from the summertime "up- front" selling season reached a record high $4.4 billion. The broadcast networks, dismissed as dinosaurs not long ago, are suddenly hot properties on Wall Street; rumors that one or another of the Big Three is about to be sold seem to be cropping up almost weekly.

The apparent good tidings, however, mask a host of troubles as the fall season gets under way. Fox has thrown a fresh scare into the other networks, stealing several major-market affiliates as well as CBS's Sunday-afternoon pro-football franchise. The number of alternatives, on both cable and broadcast stations, keeps growing, and the remote control has made them easier than ever to find. Indeed, the networks' recent ratings turnabout was due largely to special events like the Winter Olympics, and there's no guarantee the audience erosion won't resume this fall.

The networks have responded by launching a war against channel grazing. All four are moving to shorten opening-credit sequences, spice up the end credits with program material (such as outtakes from the show just seen) and add more "seamless transitions" -- eliminating the commercials between shows -- in an effort to keep viewers hooked. Meanwhile, time slots are more critical than ever to a show's success or failure.

NBC, for example, is jeopardizing one of its hits by a bold -- some would say foolish -- schedule shift. It has moved Frasier, which became a Top 10 show in its comfortable time slot following Seinfeld last season, to Tuesday nights. There the show was set to challenge Roseanne, ABC's powerful but aging hit. But ABC made the game more interesting by pulling its own switch and moving Home Improvement, TV's No. 1 show, to face Frasier on Tuesday. It's the most widely anticipated matchup since The Simpsons took on The Cosby Show in 1990.

As for new shows, scheduling is destiny. Networks now essentially choose their hits before the season starts: shows that get the "protected" time periods following established winners are predominantly the shows that survive. As the networks grow more obsessed with scheduling tactics and audience-flow gimmicks, a show's actual quality seems almost irrelevant. It certainly looks so this season. With one startling, heartening exception, the fall newcomers are a mostly bland and predictable bunch.

A choice time period is the only reason why NBC's Madman of the People, starring Dabney Coleman as a dyspeptic magazine columnist, has been widely tapped as the season's most likely new hit. Coleman's misanthropic TV persona has not proved very successful in prime time (Buffalo Bill and The "Slap" Maxwell Story both flopped), and his show is undergoing last-minute retooling, which means critics are supposed to keep mum until the mediocre pilot episode is revamped. Still, the sitcom is a good bet for success because it has been awarded the time slot after Seinfeld that was vacated by Frasier.

Coleman is just one of several established stars who have been coaxed into sitcoms this fall. NBC has rounded up Gene Wilder to headline his first TV show, Something Wilder, in which he plays the father of preschool twins. But his frazzled good humor doesn't compensate for a thoroughly ordinary comedy. Dudley Moore is equally ill served in CBS's Daddy's Girls, about a newly divorced businessman whose three grown daughters pester him while he tries to resuscitate his sex life. Only Martin Short seems to have taken control of his TV fate. His NBC sitcom The Martin Short Show casts him essentially as himself, the star of a TV comedy show. This allows him to sneak in some of his familiar characters and other comedy bits (Ed Grimley in a parody of the movie Dave). With the late addition of SCTV veteran Andrea Martin and Saturday Night Live's Jan Hooks to the cast (Short's is another pilot being revamped), the series promises more fun than any other new comedy this fall.

No fun at all are most of the other new family sitcoms. Parents -- and particularly mothers -- seem to be disappearing at an alarming rate. Stand-up comic Steve Harvey plays a widowed father of three in ABC's sappy Me and the Boys. In On Our Own, seven orphaned children fend for themselves while trying to keep social workers from sending them into foster homes ("I don't even know the Fosters," cracks one tyke). Fox's Party of Five has virtually the same premise: five San Francisco youngsters cope after their parents are killed in an auto accident. Though scarcely more plausible than On Our Own, this brood is at least responsible enough to worry about the mortgage payments. Kids, don't try this at home, but as a fantasy of family togetherness in extremis, Party of Five turns out to be oddly engaging.

Togetherness ad absurdum seems to be the idea behind Friends, a phony-to- the-core twentysomething sitcom on NBC. The show revolves around half a dozen postcollegiate pals (equally divided between the sexually bumbling and the sexually insatiable) who apparently have unlimited time to hang out at the local coffee bar and an unlimited capacity for sharing intimate sexual experiences with the entire group. This earnestly flaky show from the creators of Dream On runs the gamut from '30s romantic farce to Seinfeldian trivia -- the premiere show opens with a runaway bride and ends with two characters bonding over an Oreo cookie -- without being believable for a moment. ABC's All-American Girl is less of a confection but little more appetizing. Korean- American stand-up comic Margaret Cho stars as a hang-loose college student living with immigrant parents who chide her constantly to have respect for the "old traditions." Cho has some Valley-girl charm, but the show plays too much like an after-school special on cultural assimilation.

In TV, of course, the old traditions are sometimes worth preserving. The two most provocative new shows of the fall revive a venerable genre that has been under-represented of late: the medical drama. CBS's Chicago Hope, created by David E. Kelley (Picket Fences), has name stars -- Mandy Patinkin, Adam Arkin, E.G. Marshall -- and provides familiar TV pleasures. It's a self-important but frequently entertaining mix of Ben Casey melodrama (should an operation be performed to separate two Siamese twins, even though both may die?) and St. Elsewhere-style modernism (the surgeons sing Midnight Train to Georgia around the operating table). Kelley tries to bring the format into the '90s: one early plot line involves a woman whose hmo won't allow her brain-tumor operation to be performed by the more experienced surgeons at Chicago Hope. Yet these doctors are self-righteous heroes of the old TV school. Hospital executive, arguing against performing the dangerous Siamese-twin operation: "Our job is to look at the overall picture." Surgeon: "I held those babies in my arms!"

Chicago Hope loses even more credibility when compared with NBC's ER -- which, in an inexplicable scheduling ploy, will air opposite Chicago Hope on Thursdays. ER was written and co-produced by Michael Crichton, the one-time medical student and author of Jurassic Park and other best sellers, and it's . clear no one told Crichton rules of television drama. Like don't cram too many story lines into one episode, especially if you're planning to leave some of them hanging. And don't introduce more characters than viewers can comfortably get to know in one sitting. And don't show medical tragedies unless you balance them with displays of hope and spiritual courage.

ER breaks all these taboos and more. The absorbing two-hour premiere takes place in one 24-hour period in a big-city emergency room (Chicago again), and it's probably the most realistic fictional treatment of the medical profession TV has ever presented. The pace is furious, the narrative jagged and unsettling. Cases are wheeled in and out -- a severed hand, a gunshot wound, a child who has swallowed a key -- and while some are followed to a conclusion of sorts, others disappear without a trace. Yet the episode, directed by Rod Holcomb, is not just a cinema-verite jumble. The characters are fleshed out in a few deft strokes -- one doctor (Anthony Edwards) is being wooed by a cushy private practice -- without hype or sentimentality. These are doctors of stoic demeanor and blunt bedside manner, yet they're more honestly compassionate than the breast beaters of Chicago Hope. The real tragedy of the emergency room, they realize, is that they don't have the luxury of lingering over tragedy. The triumph of ER is that it gives hope that even in the age of time- slot programming, a good show can still get noticed.