The Record (Bergen County, NJ)
Virginia Mann, Record Television Critic; 10-06-1991
When times get tough, the tough go back in time.
That's the conventional wisdom on TV this fall. In addition to programming a flurry of forget-your-troubles comedies, the beleaguered networks are harking back to eras remembered as kinder and gentler.
{BOX} ABC's "Homefront" is set in 1945, as a small Ohio town welcomes home its war heroes.
{BOX} CBS' "Brooklyn Bridge" begins in 1956, shortly before the Dodgers deserted.
{BOX} NBC's "I'll Fly Away," which bows Monday night, has winged it back to late-Fifties Georgia.
The common thread is nostalgia.
"The networks tend to jump on the bandwagon of the time. And now, there seems to be a return to traditional values," says Audrey Steele, associate director of television information at Saatchi and Saatchi Advertising in New York.
Though they're loath to admit it, programmers have not been keen about period pieces. Apart from westerns and military dramas -- formats unto themselves -- only a handful of such shows have become hits: dramas like "Little House on the Prairie" and "The Waltons" and comedies such as "Happy Days" and "Laverne & Shirley."
These success stories form no predictable pattern. But most of all, says Christopher Geist, a professor of popular culture at Bowling Green State University in Ohio, "You don't see them that much on television, because often they're too expensive."
Ah, but times have changed. Strapped for ratings, as well as cash -- a problem shared by many a viewer -- the Big Three have decided to take a few chances.
And their ill fortune coincides with a sort of general yearning to examine the past, claims "Homefront" executive producer David Jacobs.
"The ends of every century are always reflective," suggests Jacobs, who created "Dallas." "You're gung-ho to go into the new century, but you also want to look back and make sure that you haven't left anything valuable behind. The Renaissance was in 1494 not for nothing."
The rebirth of period pieces also has to do with the specific bents of three sets of producers, all of whom claim they arrived, independently, at the decision to go back in time. In fact, those producers -- all heavyweights -- bristle at any suggestion that they're somehow in collusion. Each claims a unique vision -- a boast that's unassailable in the case of "Brooklyn Bridge."
The Friday-night series, which does a pretty good job of re-creating Brooklyn on the Paramount back lot, comes from Gary David Goldberg, who excelled at turning Columbus, Ohio, into Everywhere, USA, in his long-running "Family Ties."
This time around, Goldberg, who was born and raised in Bensonhurst, insisted on being both ethnic and specific. Operating on the theory that "you can't work from the outside in," he has based the protagonists -- a multi-generational clan named Berger -- on his own family.
Goldberg says he notified CBS that he'd do this "comedy, with drama" only on his own terms.
"It's an eccentric show. It has a specific voice and a specific point of view. And I am not going to be involved in the homogenization of that point of view," Goldberg told TV critics last summer.
Not surprisingly, his recollections are relentlessly rosy. The women play mah-jongg. The boys obsess about the Dodgers. From her nearby apartment, Grandma Sophie Berger (Marion Ross) -- based directly on Goldberg's grandmother -- is always looking out for her brood, not to mention defrosting the dinner before she's even put out the breakfast -- a spread, by the way, more impressive than a diner's.
"There was a simplicity of life then," says Goldberg. "The bedrock feeling was that the world was getting better and that kids would have what their parents didn't have.
"In that neighborhood, you could come home from school, you could go into any apartment, and they'd know just what to do. Milk and cookies, change your clothes, send you back out to the schoolyard again. That sense of security and safety is gone, everywhere."
To be sure, the Bensonhurst of Goldberg's youth was a far cry from the place where Yusuf Hawkins was killed two years ago. Yet 1956 Brooklyn was also not without its prejudices -- a fact Goldberg only gently acknowledges.
Sophie raises her eyebrows when grandson Alan (Danny Gerard) begins dating an Irish Catholic girl. And the Italian kids hassle Alan and his "Jew" friends in the boys' room. But the epithets have no real bite. And in the end, everyone makes nice.
To some degree, all of the new shows rework the past, with characters that seem a little too noble or enlightened for their time. In the pilot for "I'll Fly Away," for example, Sam Waterston's aristocratic Georgia attorney, Forrest Bedford, risks his popularity and reputation by prosecuting a white bus driver for the deaths of black people. Regina Taylor plays his new black housekeeper, Lilly, who doesn't hesitate to speak her mind.
Charisse McGhee, NBC's vice president of Current Drama Programs, concedes that after screening the first show, some viewers questioned whether Bedford, Lilly, or an outspoken lawyer played by Kathryn Harrold would have existed in a small Southern town back then. But, she adds, "We all know that there are anomalies in every time."
"I'll Fly Away," which is far more brooding than the other shows, bears unmistakable similarities to Harper Lee's "To Kill a Mockingbird." But John Falsey, who created the series with his partner, Joshua Brand, stresses that Bedford is very different from Lee's hero, the noble Atticus Finch.
"People describe Bedford as a liberal, but he's not. He's a flawed character. He wants things to stay the same as they were for his grandfather and his father, yet he wants them to change."
By design, Falsey says, "I'll Fly Away" is not really rooted in the past. "We look at it as being done in universal time. We're more concerned with the idea that the more things changed, the more they stayed the same."
The project evolved from NBC's request that Falsey and Brand -- the creators of "St. Elsewhere" and "Northern Exposure" -- come up with a family drama, a format that has not really thrived since the late Seventies and early Eighties. Several years ago, they'd done a critically acclaimed family drama -- NBC's "A Year in the Life" -- which didn't last long.
"The idea of family members relating to each other attracts us, but we had found that one of the problems in doing a show like that is there can be a lack of inherent drama," says Falsey. "To try to satisfy the network, you find yourself getting into the area of melodrama."
Falsey says his partner came up with the idea of "setting an ordinary family against an extraordinary time." They picked the late Fifties because of the dramatic civil rights issues of the period.
"This allows us to do a family show in which there is built-in drama," says Falsey. "It also allows us, quite frankly, to deal with race. We're now going through an incredibly volatile and hurtful era of our society."
For husband-and-wife Lynn Marie Latham and Bernard Lechowick -- veteran writer-producers who have worked on "Knots Landing," -- the post-World War II era had long held a fascination.
Latham's interest had been piqued by several war brides she met during her childhood in Conroe, Texas. She and her husband agreed that this era -- which "held the seeds of so many things we have become as a nation" -- would make a great series. During the writers' strike of 1988, they hired a full-time researcher for the project. They've also gone to Texas to interview the war brides, as well as Latham's parents.
ABC loved their idea. And why not? The top gun on "Knots" -- David Jacobs, who also created "Dallas" -- joined "Homefront" as executive producer, a virtual guarantee there'd be as much soap as history. (In fact, a cynic might wonder whether part of the goal of a period series was to move the romance away from the age of AIDS.)
Thus far, in the town of River Run, Ohio -- a gorgeous little Norman Rockwellian canvas -- we've been introduced to two brothers who are in love with the same woman, and one English war bride whose furtive use of contraception may dash her husband's hopes of a big family. No doubt there are more entanglements to come.
In their first outings, "Homefront" tied for 41st place in the ratings, while "Brooklyn Bridge" placed 56th out of 94 shows after two weeks. Regardless of how these shows eventually do in the ratings, Jacobs believes they will have offered some perspective.
"It's interesting to set dramas in different time periods," he says. "They take us out of ourselves -- something we need to do. We seem to think we invented everything in our time."
Illustrations/Photos: 2 COLOR PHOTOS - (1)David Newsom and Alexandra Wilson are among the postwar set in ABC's "Homefront." (2)"I'll Fly Away": Sam Waterston and Regina Taylor in the South of the Fifties. PHOTO - (3)When the Dodgers didn't play in L.A.: Louis Zorich and Marion Ross help establish a Fifties atmosphere in "Brooklyn Bridge."
Keywords: TELEVISION. SHOW Virginia Mann, Record Television Critic, HOW HISTORY REPEATS ITSELF ON TELEVISION. , The Record (Bergen County, NJ), 10-06-1991, pp e01.