Word: offbeat
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...woman insisted that her daughter schedule her wedding around the event. Another loyal customer told her husband that his open-heart surgery would just have to wait. And what was the big occasion? Opening day of a sale at Tuesday Morning. The offbeat discount retailer, with stores in 52 cities, engenders a loyalty bordering on fanaticism among its customers. And that loyalty has fostered frantic growth. Since 1980, the Dallas-based discount chain (estimated 1990 sales: $110 million) has expanded from 35 outlets to 132 stores in 21 states, with profits climbing from $695,000 to a projected $5 million...
...main challenge for the networks, however, is to find ways of wooing back viewers who seem bored by the sameness of network programming. The success of such offbeat shows as The Simpsons and Twin Peaks early this year demonstrated that these viewers will perk up for formula-breaking fare. The result, say many TV producers, has been a rather confused quest for unusual shows. "The question is always, 'Why is this show different?' " says David Gerber, president of MGM/UA Television. "((Network programmers)) are worried that they might get a well-executed show but that it won't be different enough...
Though he makes rounds in hospitals including Babies Hospital, a unit of New York City's Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, Stubs is clearly no ordinary doctor. To those who witness his offbeat bedside manner, Stubs' true trade is obvious. He's a clown, a founding member of the one-ring Big Apple Circus. But to Stubs, a.k.a. Michael Christensen, working with young hospital patients is serious business...
...single one ranks in the Nielsen Top 30. Is there a comedy glut? Or, more likely, are viewers simply recoiling against network packaging that has grown so boringly rote and predictable that all signs of life have drained out? If so, relief is at hand: increasingly offbeat shows are cropping up in out-of-the-way places on the dial. Some deserve their obscurity. Others might shrivel in the glare of too much mass-audience attention. But what they all share is an eccentric, homemade, try-anything quality...
...that there aren't a few quirky ideas, offbeat shows and modest gambles. The most unusual new entry by far comes from Steven Bochco, the impudent impresario who created Hill Street Blues, L.A. Law and Doogie Howser, M.D. This time, Bochco has combined song-and-dance numbers with a gritty police drama to create Cop Rock, TV's first musical cop show. The beat goes on in NBC's Hull High, a comedy-drama set in a suburban high school and spiced with MTV-style music interludes, and in the same network's Fresh Prince of Bel Air, which brings...