Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, March 2, 1991 TAG: 9103020177
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: TOM SHALES
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Medium
It's been mostly week-out for the series lately; "WIOU" has had a month's hiatus from the CBS schedule. Now it's back, and the network is giving it a two-pronged re-premiere. One episode airs as a special Monday (on WDBJ, channel 7 in the Roanoke viewing area), with the next installment back in the show's regular timeslot Wednesday.
Even though the producers go overboard to be outrageous and naughty, there's still plenty to admire and enjoy about "WIOU." And the episode that airs Monday includes a traumatic surprise that seems truly unexpected. It knocked me for a loop, anyway.
When it happens, it brings out some of the latent humanity in schemingly ambitious reporter Eddie Bock, and it also brings out the best in Phil Morris, who plays him. Morris gets to show a new side of Eddie's character that makes him less of a caricature.
Most of the people who work at the station are schemingly ambitious, and that's been a problem for the series; there aren't enough folks to root for. John Shea as news director Hank Zaret has turned out to be a feckless sleaze who'll do nearly anything to hype the ratings of his local newscasts.
In Monday's show, that includes playing up all the city's shootings and murders. "WIOU" doesn't take too harsh a view of Hank's ploy, because, after all, "WIOU" is knee-deep in ploys itself. Sexual ploys.
Thus on Monday's show, dirty-old anchorman Neal Frazier, played with seedy magnificence by Harris Yulin, makes a pass at a blind girl working at the station. Frazier licks his chops imagining her highly developed "sense of touch" and the "sexual adventure of a lifetime."
Eventually they wind up in an apartment together. Before you know it, or want to know it, he's shackled to a chair in a dog collar and panting, "I want a biscuit."
Like "L.A. Law," the series it most obviously imitates, "WIOU" juxtaposes tragedy with comedy, but sometimes the supposedly outrageous situations just come off as idiotic.
Eddie Bock also logs some sack time on Monday's show, keeping horizontal company with Rosie Perez as Lucy, a new addition to the roster. On Wednesday, a female stripper twirls her tassels, Frazier does a "sex for sale" series for the evening news, several of the women who work at WNDY attend a male strip show, and a station executive beds a tall slinky woman who claims to be from Venus.
A cameraman who seduces a beautiful young reporter (Kate McNeil) tells her at work the next morning, "Last night was fabulous. I taped it." Talk about hot to trot!
Meanwhile, some of the continuing storylines squeezed in between the sex scenes are genuinely absorbing. Young Willis Teitelbaum (Wallace Langham) still has a hopeless unrequited crush on the winsome Ann Hudson (Jayne Brook) who now has announced her engagement to an airheaded hunk. How Willis suffers - though not in silence, as when the series started in October.
"Ann, I do bicep curls for you," Willis tells her plaintively.
Less interesting by far is the rocky marriage of Liz, the executive producer of the evening newscast. Mariette Hartley is dull in the part, but she didn't have to be. The producers of "WIOU" missed a bet. They could have cast Hartley against type instead of as just another long-suffering goody-goody, the way the producers of the "Mary Tyler Moore Show" cast Betty White against type as Sue Ann Nivens in the '70s.
Instead, "WIOU" takes the easy route, and the result is boring. Hartley heaves sigh after sigh. It's hard to care that Liz is married to a lummox or that, as we learn in Wednesday's show, she is unexpectedly pregnant.
Sometimes it seems that in "WIOU" there is a great show trying to break out of a good show. Someone keeps pushing that great show back into the bottle. The sexual hijinks can be funny and provocative, but they should be the decoration, not the whole cake. Until that happens, "WIOU" is not quite A-OK. Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB