| Village Voice Oct 1 1991 March of Time By Amy Taubin Homefront Brooklyn Bridge Faced with no future, two of the former big three networks are grasping at the past. ABC�s Homefront (Tuesdays, 10 pm), an hour-long primetime soap produced by some Dallas and Knots Landing alumni, focuseson three small-twon Midwestern families- one rich and white, one blue-collar and white, one hard-working and black- adjusting to the rapid changes of post- World War II America. CBS�s Brooklyn Bridge (Fridays, 8.30pm), at a more economical 30 minutes, is set a decade later and peopled with the ethnic minorities Homefront omits- Jews, Irish and Italians. Both shows trade on nostalgia and feature such collector�s items as Schwinn bicycles, glass milk bottles, and a cloth-bound edition of The Yearling. In Homefront�s premiere, the return of the heroic eldest sons of the Sloan, Metcalf and Davis families is so clouded with broken engagements and lost jobs that it�s a struggle to keep the silver lining on which all ratings depend in plain sight. Linda Metcalf already knows that she�s been jilted by Mike Sloan Jr., but she hardly expects to run smack into Gina, his Italian war bride, when she goes to the station to meet her brother Hank. Hank is so eager to marry his childhood sweetheart, Sarah, that no one can bear to tell him she�s been playing hide-and-seek between the sheets with his kid brother Jeff. Ever the optimist, Linda�s best friend Ginger meets the train in her wedding dress. Her boyfriend Charlie isn�t on it, but Caroline, his English wife, is. As if one humiliation weren�t enough, the next day, Ginger, who works in the drugstore, is forced to sell �the slimy Limey� a jar of spermicide and a package of condoms. Homefront�s melodramatics are liberally greased with shame and anger of both the racial and gender variety. Robert Davis applies for a job at the Sloan factory and gets one- as a janitor. It�s not what his parents Gloria and Abe, who work as the Sloans� maid and chauffeur, expected when they were assured by Mr Sloan that there�d be a job for every vet. Linda and her mother, Anne, who�ve been working, like Rosie the Riveter, on the assembly line, are laid off to make way for the victorious men folk. Fortunately, the show (or at least, the pilot) is as fast-moving as it�s predictable. No sooner has Jeff done the honorable thing by giving up Sarah than Hank�s put the ring on her finger and announced that they�re going to help Mom pay the rent by moving into the room next to Jeff�s. And though the army may have put a damper on Robert�s expectations, his father makes a call to someone who makes a call to Eleanor Roosevelt and the New York Times and suddenly Robert�s the first Negro on the Sloan assembly line. Moreover, Homefront has the guts to put Robert�s getting hired back-to-back with Anne Metcalf getting fired. If the pecking order of the plot holds, it�s the women who run the show. As Jeff, Kyle Chandler has the makings of a teen throb, but only Jessica Steen�s Linda has the complexity and forthright appeal to sustain a season. Linda, who resembles a young Candice Bergen, has had a taste of working life and she likes it; though her mother tries to convince her otherwise, she�s more pissed about losing her job than about losing Mike. And anyway, it turns out that Mike�s been killed during the last minutes of the war. In one of those wild coincidences that Homefront thrives on, Linda gets to break the news to Mike�s bride when they both show up looking for Ginger at the drugstore. Linda needs a shoulder to cry on, Gina wants something for that strange nausea she�s been waking up with in the morning. (It�s not the least of Homefront�s hooks that it allows the baby-boom to watch its own conception. While Linda is the feminist forerunner, Ginger is the self-hating flirt in sexual denial, the victim of every female stereotype the patriarchy ever coined to keep women in whatever place it wanted them to be. Homefront encourages us to admire Linda and pity Ginger while feeling superior to both. After all, we've come a long way, baby, and isn't it more fun to congratulare ourselves about the gains of the past 45 years than to face the fact we're well on the way to losing most of them? That's show biz- and the difference between prime time and C-SPAN. Like Homefront, Brooklyn Bridge opens with a black-and-white montage of home movies, newsreels and family photos. But if Homefront's appeal is its liberal revisionist take on the mythology of middle America (as depicted in four decades of film and television), Brooklyn Bridge takes a direct stab at the collective unconscious of a televisually underrepresented ethnic group- New York Jews. Since, even in an era of reduced ratings, the potential audience for such a show would hardly register on the Nielsens, Brooklyn Bridge's creator, Family Ties auteur Gary David Goldberg, buries his specifics in a pile of universal. The peculiar result is that the Berger and Silver households, despite the clutter of mah-jongg tiles and Yiddish newspapers, are more emotionally repressed than their Homefront WASP counterparts. If the characters didn't mention their Russian Jewish heritage at least twice an episode, who would no? No one is anxious. No one yells. No one even talks at the same time as anyone else. Personal interactions are perfectly reasonable. And if "Are they Jewish?" is the immigrant grandparents' reflex response to all outsiders, each of the first two episodes features a triumph of tolerance over bigotry. Grandpa Jules acknowledges that Gil Hodges is a mensch even if he's Catholic and, even more remarkably, Grandma Sophie gives her blessing to the romance between 13 year-old Alan and Kathleen Moynihan, whose snub nose and blue parochial school uniform her grandson finds irresistable. As yet, nothing in Brooklyn Bridge has the Can-I-really-be-seeing-this-on-prime-time? power of the bris episode on thirtysomething. It's unlikely that anything will. The spotless, leak-free tenement building is not only a sentimentalization, it's a virtual proclamation of neutrality. Who are these people who praise their son's essay on Eugene Debs and the Haymarket Riot but never mention McCarthy? Basically a 30-minute sitcome shot dramedy style (i.e. on film and without a laugh track), Brooklyn Bridge attempts to jolt some life into its soporific scripts with the occasional flashy camera move- like the series of zip pans across the faces of the mah-jongg foursome that opens the first episode. An atmospheric non-sequitur, it has little to do with the coming-of-age narrative that follows. As Alan, Danny Gerard has a solid integrity. Though it's hardly believable that he could be a football prodigy, mixing it up off-screen with fearsome Irish and Italian teens, his performance is the only thing in the show that doesn't seem denatured. Poor kid: he's carrying the full weight of Brooklyn Bridge on his pudgy shoulders. |
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