Word: homefront
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...nostalgic mood yet? If the opening of ABC's Homefront doesn't get you, try CBS's Brooklyn Bridge, a fond look back at growing up in Brooklyn circa 1956. NBC's I'll Fly Away, meanwhile, paints a moodier watercolor of life in a Southern town in the late '50s, just as the civil rights movement was gathering steam. In a medium that is usually more comfortable with the here and now, the timely issue and the hip wisecrack, three of the most ambitious shows of the new season are harking back to the past...
...prime-time nostalgia is hardly surprising. Oldies radio stations are thriving; TV tributes to Ed Sullivan and All in the Family drew blockbuster ratings last season; Natalie Cole hit the top of the charts by bringing back her father's old songs. For David Jacobs, an executive producer of Homefront, the current fascination with the past is reminiscent of fin-de-siecle Europe a hundred years ago. "The last decades of a century are always reflective," he says. But Jacobs and his fellow TV producers insist there is more involved. Says Gary David Goldberg, who has based Brooklyn Bridge...
...memories are equally warm and fuzzy in Homefront. In this postwar soap opera set in a small Ohio town, mothers greet their returning soldier boys with "your favorite pie" and chide their kids with quaint cliches like, "You move as slow as molasses in January." Not that there isn't trouble in this paradise. One veteran comes home to a sweetheart who has fallen in love with his brother. There are stirrings of race and sex discrimination as well. A black veteran applies for work at the local factory but is told the only opening is for a janitor...
...Homefront is a slick, satisfyingly busy soap opera, which suffers mainly by comparison with the show it has replaced on ABC's schedule: thirtysomething. Next to that complex and very contemporary drama, Homefront seems a throwback in more ways than one. The characters are drawn in primary colors and the confrontations hyped for melodramatic effect. This is the sort of TV drama where a girl puts on her wedding dress, races to the train station to greet her returning beau and meets -- who else? -- the war bride he has brought home but never told her about...
...Where Homefront is loud and brassy, I'll Fly Away is quiet and relentlessly sober. Sam Waterston, with his somber mien and drooping shoulders, plays Forrest Bedford, a liberal-minded prosecutor in a small Southern town who is raising three children on his own. (His wife has been hospitalized after a nervous breakdown; Forrest, meanwhile, is growing friendly with a rival lawyer, played by Kathryn Harrold.) The family has just hired a new maid, Lily (Regina Taylor), who becomes the focus for an exploration of changing race relations at a crucial historical time...