Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, March 4, 1994 TAG: 9403050005
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DIANE WERTS NEWSDAY
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Values.
Meaning.
Dare we say - religion?
The fundamentalist Christian lawyer played by Alexandra Powers on "L.A. Law" is just the tip of an iceberg that ironically threatens to make network shows warmer than they've been in years. The new midseason series are full of extended families who talk about going to church as if it's the most natural thing in the world. They talk about homesteads and traditions and sharing life with your folks in the casual way we're used to hearing TV characters talk about upward mobility and erotic entanglements.
Suddenly, it's hip to be square.
"Everything we're pitching this year," says producer Michael Jacobs, "has to do with - I hate using the phrase `family values' - but has to do with the fact that the country is absolutely sick of vast liberalism in family relationships, the single mommy, the single daddy"; Jacobs himself has left behind the makeshift relations of "My Two Dads" for the nuclear family at the heart of "Boy Meets World" and "Where I Live."
He isn't alone:
Get ready for the multigenerational clan. When "The Road Home" premieres on CBS on Saturday, suburbanites Karen Allen and Terence Knox bring their brood back to the rural homestead along the North Carolina shore, where churchgoing and lazy evenings with the grandparents supplant TV and video games. NBC's "Winnetka Road" serial, debuting March 12 with Catherine Hicks, Ed Begley Jr., Meg Tilly and Josh Brolin, traces the hometown relationships that resume when an actress and her son return from Hollywood to her Midwestern dad's.
In the sitcom format, Tom Arnold converts from the Hollywood heel of "The Jackie Thomas Show" into a loving family man with five kids and a Kansas homestead on his new series, "Tom" on CBS. And Norman Lear will soon revisit "All in the Family" territory with a more fervent slant: CBS' "704 Hauser" introduces a black family in the same Queens house where the Bunkers battled with polarized platitudes. But this liberal father (John Amos), conservative son (T.E. Russell) and strong-minded mother (Lynne Godfrey) hold deeply personal beliefs that include differing views of faith.
Religion is at the core of two upcoming network dramas. At Easter, CBS will launch "Christy," based on the modern classic by Catherine Marshall about a young 1910s woman (Kellie Martin of "Life Goes On") who goes to teach in a remote Appalachian school run by a Quaker missionary (Tyne Daly). For fall, NBC is developing an hour in which Patty Duke plays a contemporary minister in the Pacific Northwest.
But if viewers shy away from overt preaching, they do now seem to be drawn to emotional, moralistic, spiritual characters and the kind of programs often derided by critics as "soft." CBS programmer Jeff Sagansky noted at the recent critics' press tour that his network had notched seven of the season's top 10 movies with sentimental Sunday-night offerings like "A Walton Thanksgiving Reunion" and "Jane's House."
"If what the audiences are telling us is right, they want that kind of programming," Sagansky says. "It's never going to be hip. It's not cutting edge. It's just real emotional. ... These shows never get a buzz except out there in the audience."
So the audience is finally getting its way? Or are the networks now pushing this kind of programming merely to blunt increasing criticism from those who believe TV has been glorifying violence and alternative lifestyles, while ignoring or putting down what conservatives call "traditional" values?
Maybe the pendulum is simply swinging back from one extreme to another, in the cyclical way that all types of TV shows seem to fade and reappear with regularity. This sea change in prime-time perception probably began two years ago when Dan Quayle tied TV images to societal decay, in his attack on "Murphy Brown's" single motherhood. Quayle's "cultural elite" tirade seemed at first to backfire within the industry.
"If anybody but Dan Quayle was pitching the family-values ideal, the country would have run with it - because it's true," Jacobs says. "We all remember our own bringing up, and in generations past, the nuclear family was the norm, and I think it was a finer life."
So do many folks. Surveys show many Americans believe their quality of life is crumbling, that they're under siege by crime and alienation, that the country is tearing apart in some fundamental way - and they're desperate to find some common ground on which to put it back together.
by CNB