Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, July 4, 1990                   TAG: 9007040356
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: EX5   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Tom Shales
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

FILM CLIPS BEST PART OF HBO SITCOM

Ronald Reagan, Bette Davis, Groucho Marx, Joan Crawford, Jack Benny, Vincent Price, Ed Wynn, Burl Ives, Lee Marvin and many others, living and dead, materialize. It seems the hero grew up watching television, and now his daily life is besieged by visions from long-gone TV dramas.

That's the premise, anyway, and it's a slim one. The series, premiering on HBO tonight at 10 p.m., does have a certain illusory entertainment value. The problem is that the little scenes from the old shows seem so much more intriguing than the new show they interrupt.

Early in the premiere, for instance, we see Barbara Hale (later Della Street on "Perry Mason") shrieking in horror as she watches Peter Lorre saunter down a hallway. Reason: He has an eye in the back of his head. But literally.

Gosh, let's see more of that! But no, we're soon out of the flashback and back to the story of a 36-year-old book editor, sort of a Walter Mitty type, who bumbles through life half-heartedly romancing his ex-wife and never quite asserting himself in a way that would make you want to give a hoot.

Brian Benben, who plays the man, has the anonymous looks of a typical TV hero. He could be Joel Higgins of "Silver Spoons" or Scott Bakula of "Quantum Leap" or some other modular schlemiel. The character is just about as indistinguishable as the actor is.

David Crane and Marta Kauffman, the writers, put in some bright lines and funny touches, and occasionally the juxtapositions with the old film clips are inspired.

Some viewers will be cheered to hear that since this is cable, there is a peep of nudity here and there. To be specific: two bare breasts per episode.

The clips are all from anthology dramas produced for TV in the '50s and '60s, and sometimes they are maddeningly tantalizing, like when Peggy Lee opens the door and sees a man with a melted face! Or when a woman jumps out a second-story window as a man on the ground yells, "Jane! No!"

CBS, the last-place network on regular TV, has a few low-calorie summer series on its docket, too. One of them, "Prime-Time Pets," is unforgivably inane, a feeble mutant rip-off of "America's Funniest Home Videos" and David Letterman's "Stupid Pet Tricks."

In the premiere, Monday at 8:30 p.m., host Wil Shriner unreels supposedly hilarious videos of animals doing the darndest things. A cow sits on a picnic table, a parrot drives a toy car, a cat leaps across a room and a man dresses up his dog's rear end in sunglasses.

"Prime Time Pets" constitutes cruelty to animals and to viewers as well.

Better by an immeasurable country mile is "Northern Exposure," a whimsical hour-long comedy-drama about a young doctor from Queens, N.Y., who with enormous reluctance opens his practice in a remote and frontiersy Alaskan hamlet. The series begins its eight-week run on Thursday.

In the noble tradition of fishes-out-of-water, our anxious novice physician faces innumerable problems of adjustment. A severe case of culture shock is only the half of it.

Rob Morrow, the young actor who plays the doctor, has a lot of whining to do, and the character as written is almost too wimpy a complainer. Presumably he will soften as the series progresses.

There's a sweet, friendly charm to the show, and the unusual setting is handsome and welcome. If there were more summer shows like "Northern Exposure," viewers might start to dread the thought of fall.

Washington Post Writers Group