Word: fallings
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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When even big stars do not ensure big audiences, what's a network to do? Strike out in bold new directions, some would say. Play it conservatively, network programmers seem to be responding this fall. By late November, when the strike-impaired season finally musters a quorum of new shows, viewers will find little that is adventurous or likely to lure them back from the increasingly aggressive competition...
Sitcoms, too, are playing it safe this fall; the ambitious "dramedies" of the past few seasons have mostly been supplanted by old-fashioned gag comedies. That isn't necessarily bad. The season's funniest new show, NBC's Dear John, hardly advances the art of the sitcom, but it surely restocks it with human-scale humor. Judd Hirsch stars as a divorced schoolteacher gingerly exploring the single life. On his first visit to a singles group, he meets a sly assemblage of oddballs, including a group leader fixated on sex and a hilariously sleazy skirt chaser (Jere Burns doing...
...main upholder of the traditional nuclear family this fall is Roseanne. Pudgy comedian Roseanne Barr plays a working-class mom grappling with a dull factory job, three hyperactive kids and her lazy but lovable porker of a husband (John Goodman). Barr's sullen sarcasm -- a cross between Erma Bombeck and Alice Kramden -- is a cry of revolt against years of cheery sitcom parents. Says Mom after the kids run out the door: "Quick, they're gone. Change the locks...
...still there is a sense of self-possession, and even stealth, about the kingdom that suggests it will not easily fall hostage to the people it attracts. For perhaps the most alluring attribute of Thailand is its simple ambiguity, the merest hint that its designs are always subtler than any visitor's perception of them. The Thais like to remind foreigners that theirs is the only Asian country never to have been colonized or occupied by a Western power, and even if this reflects nothing but the culture's gift for co-opting foreign influences, it also suggests its facility...
Once they were the Big Three: rich, powerful broadcasters that determined what America would watch each night. Now ABC, CBS and NBC are struggling against cable, VCRs, independent stations and other aggressive competitors. What' s more, the writers' strike has left the fall season in shambles, and the bland batch of new shows will hardly provide any miracle cures...