| Television: Stepping Back into Yesterday's America Wall Street Journal; New York; Sep 23, 1991; Rabinowitz, Dorothy Something very interesting has hit television this season, if in a limited way. That something can only be described as the past -- the subject of the season's two most ambitious new shows, "Homefront" and "Brooklyn Bridge," which are set in 1945 and 1956 respectively. This can only mean that, out there in the land of the lost where new TV-series concepts are spawned, they have apparently stumbled on to the truth that in the America of today there is a large and unappeasable yearning for the America of yesterday. In the strange and wonderful world of television, of course, setting a show in a time 45 years back doesn't mean that it won't come packaged with the full complement of '90s hot-button social issues, as, in fact, "Homefront" (ABC, Tuesdays, 10-11 p.m.) does. "Homefront" starts with the war's ending, the men coming home and "Its Been a Long, Long Time" blasting sweetly in the background. Add a montage of era snapshots, and, no doubt about it, "Homefront" begins on a dramatically promising note. That promise is only briefly kept, no doubt about that either, as melodramatic complications and characters begin multiplying at a fearsome and familiar rate. After the evocative beginning and a brief nod to the large historic event that created this home front -- namely the warthings move on briskly to the main business at hand, which mostly concerns broken hearts, lust, love, jealousy and a variety of similar ingredients woven into a series of soap operettas. This should not be altogether surprising, since the executive producer of "Homefront," David Jacobs, also gave us "Knots Landing." It also should not be surprising that "Homefront," like "Knots Landing," is polished stuff, as soaps go. The show has, it should be said, a certain zest, deriving mainly from the period setting. But what is really most intriguing -- and also frequently absurd -- about "Homefront" is the uses to which the writers have put that setting. Into this 1945 drama the writers have injected most of the prime-time concerns of the '90s, chief among them the status of women. All that's missing in tomorrow's premiere (9:30-11 p.m. EDT, on ABC) is a reference to date rape. Other aspects of the show's themes are similarly up-to-date and familiar. For example, the principal villains are a well-to-do manufacturer and his wife -- selfish brutes of boundless amorality. The couple's Original Sin, it is clear, derives from the fact that the husband is a successful businessman of some wealth. In the wonderful world of TV, we know that no good is to be expected of people like this. Lest there be any doubt, the publicist's handout explains that this couple hates everybody -- blacks, Jews, Italians, and so on. This is unnecessary to explain, since it goes without saying that any major villain created by our TV writers is bound to be deficient, above all, in multicultural sensitivity. By the end of the first show, however, the crafty businessman has been outwitted by his black servant, a man infinitely wiser and better than his employer. But that, of course, also goes without saying. "Brooklyn Bridge" (Fridays, 8:30-9 p.m. EDT, on CBS) is a much higher order of retrospection. Gary David Goldberg (creator of "Family Ties") looks back at the mid-'50s in Brooklyn with an eye that is truthful in the most important regards. He has written -- as writers are for good reason taught they should -- what he knows, and what he knows is the 14-year-old boy who is the main character, as well as that boy's friends and the things they think and talk about. The choice of Danny Gerard for the role of Alan was a canny and fortunate piece of casting -- the kind that can sometimes save a show. Alan is a modest and grave character, son of a postal worker and a regular kid who wears club jackets and yearns for girls. He also knows what he knows, and already has the slightly disputatious authority of a lifelong reader and believer in the printed word. A lot of viewers will recognize this boy because he existed -- and still exists -- and because young Mr. Gerard brings him to life with great skill. Here, too, the producers begin the show with a montage of black-and-white snapshots to evoke a bygone era. But in this case, the opening is like the flick of a lash in the way those pictures recall the old neighborhoods as they were 35 years ago. The pictures tell of a Brooklyn that was and is no more, where people did not fear to walk out in the streets at night (much less in the day, as they fear to do in some parts of Brooklyn now). The other star of the cast is Marion Ross, who portrays the boy's Jewish immigrant grandmother without too much nonsense, and even manages to inject a certain portly glamour into the role. The generally splendid script has its flaws, mainly its occasional tilt to mawkishness. For instance, it is not absolutely necessary to wring every last throb out of scenes like the one in which the grandmother and grandfather meet up with Gil Hodges, who then nobly supports Grandpa's lies about his skill at baseball. Then there is the occasional moment when characters talk like people out of the '90s. The boy's mother burbles "I love you" as she goes off to work, instead of goodbye. In the '50s, "I love you" had not yet been transformed so as to mean "goodbye," "goodnight," "hello" and "how is your cold?" as it does today. It took our own era's propensity for cheapening language and its meaning to have come up with this particular atrocity. Such matters aside, "Brooklyn Bridge" is an enchanting look back that should win the hearts of huge numbers of viewers, including those who have never set foot in Mr. Goldberg's old borough. |
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