Date: Sunday, January 31, 1993
Column: INSIDE TELEVISION
FANS URGING ABC TO GIVE `HOMEFRONT' ANOTHER CHANCE by SYLVIA LAWLER, The Morning Call
"Brooklyn Bridge" and "I'll Fly Away" are not the only examples of entertaining, worthwhile commercial television in mortal danger this season.
A save-"Homefront" letter-writing movement is taking shape even as America waits to learn whether the erstwhile Lemo Tomato juice girl Ginger Szabo and the injured Cleveland Indians rookie Jeff Metcalfe will get back together again, or how Ruth Sloan will find out that husband Mike is lusting in his heart for pretty blonde roadhouse owner Judy Owen (see below).
"Homefront," ABC's juicily depictive melodrama of post-World War II life in a small Ohio mill town, has gathered ferociously committed fans since it premiered in September 1991. Among champions of the large ensemble serial is Dorothy Swanson, president of Viewers for Quality Television, a consumer advocate group known for going to bat for, and sometimes saving, series in jeopardy like "Designing Women" and "Cagney and Lacey."
Wrote Swanson to Ted Harbert, Entertainment President of ABC Television: "What was the reasoning behind renewing `Homefront' only to place it opposite `Cheers,' then giving it only four consecutive airings before disrupting it with pre-emption and re-runs, only to pull it off the air (while) blaming the show for inadequate ratings? It seems to us that the failure was on the part of ABC, not `Homefront.'"
Exactly.
Swanson says that Harbert never responded to her letter, but other sources quote ABC as saying publicly that of its several endangered or about-to-be-banished series, only "Civil Wars" has a strong chance of returning. Swanson also said that Mimi Kennedy, who plays the formidably bright, toughly genteel Ruth Sloan on the series, has become its unofficial spokesperson and could deliver the straightest news on where the series stands now. Within 24 hours Kennedy, a brainily articulate Smith College graduate and actress-writer ("Knots Landing"), was calling from California to talk about "The Campaign to Save Homefront."
Kennedy has Sloan's persona nailed dead to rights, from her social pretensions and conventions to her use of control and sly mischief as weapons of self-preservation -- not to mention the scarlet lips and upswept hairdo. Sloan is obviously not Kennedy's role model --"She's not a character to inspire affection, regardless of how vulnerable she becomes in any one show," Kennedy has said -- but growing up Irish, Catholic and Republican in Rochester, N.Y., Kennedy says she has known her share of condescending Ruth Sloan types in her 43-year-old life (she plays Sloan quite a bit older).
"Homefront" is on hiatus, she confirms. That means production is entirely shut down until ABC decides its fate. "It's been a week since we were in production and nobody (in the cast) has picked up the phone to call anybody else because nobody wants to show a sad face. And we all have them," she said.
As for herself, she hesitates and then decides to answer head-on: "My heart is breaking. Any loss is really difficult in life, and when it involves your livelihood and identity as well ... Actors are prepared by nature for this, but when you are in something particularly good that looks like it might be long-running, and your characterization helps make it strong -- as I believe mine does -- it's just very, very difficult."
She wants to see Ruth Sloan grow as America did, "full of confidence and energy, also full of denial and false ideas." She wants to show the limitations on wealthy women of her day, "how their expectations of themselves and their `perfect lives' did them harm as well as good." She wants to recall how there was a day, and not so long ago, "when a woman was restricted by her marriage and her station, and had to exercise all her powers within that range, which sometimes led to her controlling other people's behavior."
Yes, there's still a chance for all of that to happen. But it will be a make-or-break situation this spring, much as the last chance CBS says it will give "Brooklyn Bridge" around the same time.
"They're going to put `Homefront' on in March and April and try to make it work," Kennedy confirmed. "There are nine (unseen) episodes left so I hope it will be nine weeks in a row." But no permanent night or time has been announced and this, friends, is peeving.
Kennedy, Swanson and many others are convinced it is ABC's hit-or-miss scheduling that is killing "Homefront" by keeping it from the reach of the mass audience. Then there is the current Hollywood bias against hourlong dramas to contend with, the advertisers' concerns about the kind of audience they are reaching and the ratings to worry about. ("Homefront" has averaged, roughly, a finish of 79th out of 99 shows in its most recent audience measurings). Kennedy says she doesn't trust the reliability of Nielsen ratings but even if she did, she says, "It's popular knowledge that it's demographics -- which is the sorting of the type of people who are watching a given show by age, income and gender -- that are more important to advertisers than sheer numbers.
"That makes the advertisers say `We want to sell to this show' because one particular type watches a particular show. And that makes a network feel `We don't need a mass audience; we just need to hit the audience this (particular) advertiser wants.' So they go away from hoping the show appeals across a wide range -- although they are thrilled when it does, and of course, with `Homefront,' the mass appeal potential was always there -- and yet what they look for are solid ratings.
"But they didn't give the show the consistency it needed to build the ratings. Every time we were on for four weeks in a row our ratings went up. They still weren't good, but they always went up. The potential was there to build.
"But instead I heard from people why they weren't watching. They'd say, `I couldn't find you.' Or `I went to tape you and it was another show,' or `It was a rerun.'
"What bothers me is that television, which has suffered for years from being called a `bad habit,' is now asking people to put it first in their weekly living. They must hunt a show up in a listings guide and check it out every week to make appointment television? People feel subliminally -- and I feel all of television is subliminal -- that `I'm not going to put my bad habit first in my week.' People can't arrange their week around it without feeling guilty. They shouldn't have to hunt down what they want to see."
This hiatus, too, after three schedule shifts, is a huge disruption. Syndication rules have changed. "`Homefront' is not a golden goose for ABC and never will be, the way some of their new offerings might be, but it stands to produce some money for somebody."
She thinks maybe the networks began rankling at seeing independent producers like Lorimar, which does "Homefront," becoming rich on long-running series while the networks were left with a little bit of press and ratings before fading to black. Kennedy says she doesn't want to put the entire onus on the networks, though. She knows bright and caring creative people at ABC, "but I just don't think the networks and the mass audience understand each other," is what she says.
"Back when I was a teen-ager, ABC made great inroads by presenting the rock 'n' roll shows the other two networks didn't. I loved them and thought they were the hot new network -- and, of course, my parents were not watching them. I think they still think of themselves as the bold network, unafraid to try new ideas.
"The trouble is, when you're being bold, you think differently. You can say, `We're gonna cut the strings on this one but don't worry, you'll like what we give you next just as well.'
"I'm only an aging baby boomer trying to make life consistent for my two children, but sometimes, if you're known as the bold network, you disregard the pull to stick with the same consistent thing. That's just a guess from a teen-ager who loved rock 'n' roll.
"This could all be just a bump in the road. But if it's not a bump in the road, it's about larger issues than `Homefront' and ABC," she said meaningfully.
Oh, and about how the ever-so-haughty Ruth Sloan finds out about husband Michael's attraction to roadhouse owner (and fellow baseball fan) Judy Owen, here's the gospel as Kennedy has shared it:
"Ruth runs into a friend who says `I wish I'd gone up to meet your daughter-in-law when I saw her at the baseball stadium with Michael. Blonde Italians are so rare.'"
Now, Ruth is no dummy. Not only is her Italian daughter-in-law, Gina, a brunette, but she remembers Michael's odd behavior the night they went slumming at the roadhouse to celebrate his birthday. But she bides her time until, one night ...
"The Sloans have the first television set on the block, naturally. Michael is fiddling with the set and she plants herself beside him and says `Pretty soon they'll even have television cameras in the stadium and everybody will be able to see my husband make a fool of himself on a national broadcast.'"
Spoken in Ruth Sloan's voice, it's deliriously delicious.
"Homefront" fans may address their letters to Ted Harbert, ABC Entertainment President, 2040 Avenue of the Stars, Century City, Ca., 90067.