Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, November 24, 1995 TAG: 9511240074
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: SCOTT WILLIAMS ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: NEW YORK LENGTH: Medium
Only in New York City could TV's lowest-rated soap opera, ABC's ``Loving,'' hope to reinvent itself - and succeed brilliantly.
Welcome to ``The City,'' a dazzling breakthrough in daytime drama. It's a soap with a vibrant, visual energy that makes the competition look static, and positively ... down-market.
``The City'' is still a soap, mind you, but it's like no soap you've ever seen.
Credit ABC for not folding the show and credit executive producer Jean Dadario Burke and head writers Barbara Esensten and James Harmon Brown (former head writing team of ``Dynasty'') for devising the makeover.
Gone is the sleepy college town of Corinth, Pa., home of sleepy Alden University.
Gone, too, are a half-dozen characters (and actors) who were done in by a fiendishly clever serial killer. Not only did the killer's rampage clear out the cast, but it spiked up the ``Loving'' ratings.
A dozen ``Loving'' survivors got the heck out of Corinth and moved into a lovely old cast-iron loft building in Manhattan's SoHo district where, a synopsis assures us, they'll pursue ``the dreams and despair of city life.''
It gets better. ``Loving,'' which debuted in June 1983 but never had ratings success, hired some instant soap-opera credibility in the form of Morgan Fairchild, who plays the media mogul Sydney Chase.
Fairchild, who began her TV career on ``Search for Tomorrow,'' and cut her prime-time teeth on ``Dallas'' and ``Falcon Crest,'' would be a mainspring for anybody's soap. Her Sydney is bright, brainy, sexy and dangerous.
In her first entrance on the show, Sydney stepped gracefully from the cockpit of a helicopter, wearing a white Versace suit and calf-high boots. An anxious lover waited in the limo. ``I've left my wife!'' he blurted.
``Why'd you want to go and do that?'' she replies, trivially annoyed. She dumps him and heads for Washington Square Park, where she regularly plays - and beats - a chess hustler.
Another ``newcomer'' is soap veteran Roscoe Born as the itinerant guitarist Nick Rivers - a guy with a past, almost certain Sydney-bait. Born has appeared on ``Santa Barbara,'' ``One Life to Live'' and ``Ryan's Hope.''
There are more than a dozen other appealing characters in the mix of ``The City,'' and the pace of the show is so brisk that you needn't wait long for something to happen to somebody.
What ultimately sets ``The City'' apart from other soaps is its cutting-edge production techniques.
Instead of the stage set, studio lighting and four-camera setup used by sitcoms and soaps, ``The City'' creates its loft building in a huge studio, and uses outdoor locations, movie lighting and the single-camera style of prime-time dramas like ``Homicide,'' ``ER'' and ``NYPD Blue.''
``The City'' also uses every bit of '90s technology available to it - darting hand-held cameras, floating Steadicams and the boom camera's overhead vantages and telephoto shots.
Shot and edited on videotape, ``The City'' is transferred to film to give it that rich visual texture. Throw in a hooky sound track with a driving beat and ``The City'' makes quite a package.
``The City'' is such a breakthrough that it can't be long before other soaps are dragged into the 21st century and adopt similar techniques.
Even so, the other soaps might have trouble catching up.
In just the first episode of ``The City,'' the guys brought in a Persian rug somebody had dumped in the street. When they unrolled it, they found a dead guy.
Hey, you've got to love this crazy town.
by CNB