Word: sitcoms
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...Away was voted best continuing series, beating out a lackluster group of entries dominated by American shows (The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, Northern Exposure). Watching an episode of Cheers with a greatly amused band of international viewers, moreover, was a reminder that despite its grinding familiarity, the American sitcom at its best has achieved a level of craftsmanship unmatched anywhere in the world...
...Party seem to believe, that there are few disadvantages attached to being American. But there is at least one: What other democratic nation would make a bantam like J. Danforth Quayle its Vice President and send him forth to lecture on public morality and cultural health? Last month's sitcom episode in which the Vice President mistook Candice Bergen, a.k.a. Murphy Brown, for the Scarlet Woman of Babylon has already passed into history. A baby out of wedlock! The Veep blew his chance to link this fictional infant to the agenda of the antiabortion lobby -- MURPHY CHOOSES LIFE! -- and scolded...
Riggs ticks off the breakthroughs for blacks in the '60s and '70s, then puts each under a critical magnifying glass. Julia, in which Diahann Carroll played TV's first black sitcom mother, was intended as "some sort of an apology for a lot of the things we had done on Amos 'n' Andy," says creator Hal Kanter. Yet the show's sunny treatment of race relations was as far from reality as anything on the tube. (An encounter between Julia's little boy and a white playmate: "Your mother's colored!" "Of course. I'm colored too." "You are?" Squeal...
...duds you know are better than the duds you don't. The biggest surprise on the fall schedules is the number of shows that weren't canceled. Steven Bochco's drama Civil Wars, ABC's post-World War II soap opera Homefront, CBS's nostalgic sitcom Brooklyn Bridge, and NBC's family drama I'll Fly Away were all marginal performers in the ratings. But all will be back in the fall. They are upscale, critic-friendly shows that, the networks hope, could catch on with a little patience...
...comedy Love and War, for example, will have the all-but-foolproof spot following English's current hit, Murphy Brown. Hearts Afire, the new series from Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, will also get an enviable time period: after Bloodworth-Thomason's Evening Shade. Over at ABC, Tom Arnold's new sitcom The Jackie Thomas Show was surprisingly left off the fall schedule. But it has been promised a midseason spot, in the time period following -- what else? -- Mrs. Arnold's hit show, Roseanne...