Video: On the Town on the Tube

Four CBS shows feature sassy, streetwise women

In TV mythology, New York is Sin City: garbage on the streets, porno on the screens and larceny in the heart. And New York City women? Talk about pushy. Take Rhoda. Please. She was meant to be the quintessential New York woman, and she stood out like a kosher pickle on Minneapolis white bread. In the land of sitcoms, New York has rarely been a laughing matter. In fact, there has not been a successful sitcom set in the Big Apple since Taxi drove onto the screen in 1978, and with the exception of Rhoda no single woman has found a home there since MarloThomas perkily impersonated That Girl.

But that was yesterday. Now CBS is busily refurbishing the image of the city and its inhabitants. Four of the network’s current shows revolve around street-smart New York women, all but one of them single, and none a ditsy ingenue. Cagney & Lacey and the newest show, Kate & Allie, feature pairs of female buddies trying to cope; Mama Malone and Suzanne Pleshette Is Maggie Briggs showcase brassy and boisterous women who cannot help stirring up trouble.

For the past 15 years, Maggie Briggs has chased sirens as a hard-boiled reporter for the mythical New York Examiner. But she and her beefy sidekick, played with vulgar charm by Kenneth McMillan, have been lured into the newspaper’s revamped Modern Living section, home for stories about boutiques and Mexican restaurants. “Walter,” she recalls, “I saw my first dead body with you.” Replies Walter: “Good times can’t last forever, kid.” The sassy and seasoned Pleshette could do credit to any town and role, but of all the show’s fixtures only she seems credible. The hyperthyroid Examiner newsroom has untimely been ripped from The Front Page, the news is more suited to Poughkeepsie than Manhattan, and the other reporters are too blatant even for journalists.

Mama Malone is as proficient at making pasta as Maggie is at concocting stories. The voluminous star runs a TV cooking show from the kitchen of her walk-up apartment in Brooklyn. When she brays, “We’ll be right back,” the actual show also breaks for a commercial. But the spice of the device is soon overwhelmed by Mama’s overcooked material. The failure is not the fault of Lila Kaye, late of the Royal Shakespeare Company (she was Mrs. Squeers and Mrs. Crummies in Nich olas Nickleby). Kaye plays Mama with manic élan, but she is giving flesh — kilos of it — to an ethnic stereotype that should have gone out with the organ grinder and his monkey.

Although the most authentic New York touch about Cagney & Lacey is the latter’s Bronx accent (“I swear I’ll take ya outta the game”), the relationship between the leads is canny and convincing. The pair do a balancing act: Cagney is hard bitten on the outside, a soft touch underneath; Lacey, played with subtlety and warmth by Tyne Daly, is motherly in manner but rough with the “poipatraters.” The original show was canceled last spring, but CBS decided to bring it back to life in part because of a deluge of protest mail from viewers who responded to strong, intelligent female characters.

Those viewers should be delighted by Kate and Allie. The show, starring Jane Curtin of Saturday Night Live and Susan Saint James (McMillan and Wife; The Name of the Game), is a witty reinterpretation of The Odd Couple, plus three children. Both women are unabashedly in their 30s, divorced and skeptical about the mating game. If Pleshette Mary Tyler Moore developed a split personality, her two halves could be spun off as Kate and Allie. Played in wound-up preppie style by Curtin, Allie is the kind of roommate who makes meatloaf while wearing 5 pearls. Kate, a low-key tomboy, tries to unstarch Allie by taking her camping: “Come on, I’ll teach you to make a fire by rubbing two credit cards to gether.” Both women are ruthlessly verbal and seem actually to have read books. Although there is nothing overtly urban about the show, the clipped backchat makes it the most cosmopolitan of them all and in fact the only one that is entirely filmed in Manhattan.

CBS is obviously hoping that these up-scale comedies will attract up scale viewers, beloved of advertisers. Ironies are obvious: once the network that offered a haven for countrified fare like Green Acres and The Beverly Hillbillies, CBS has slowly been re-gentrifying itself. With three more pilots set in New York on the way, it seems ready to march to a different anthem: “My little town blues/ are melting away,/ I’ll make a brand-new start of it/ in old New York.” CBS and Manhattan may seem like another odd coupling, but given the influx of new shows, it just might take.

—By Richard Stengel