Is The Sitcom Played Out?

Here’s a game to play while watching the onslaught of new situation comedies being offered by the networks this fall. Try to imagine the original meeting between the shows’ creators and the network executives. For CBS’s Princesses, for example, it must have gone something like this:

“O.K., here’s the idea. Three single women in New York. All looking for a husband. All living in the same fancy Fifth Avenue apartment.”

“Yeah. Sounds like How to Marry a Millionaire. But how do we make it work for the ’90s?”

“Lemme tell you the twist. We call the show Princesses. One of the women is a Jewish-American princess. The second is a wholesome, Middle American sweetheart — sort of a Wasp princess.”

“And the third?”

“Are you ready? She’s a real princess! The European kind.”

“Love it. How about Friday at 8?”

Princesses is far from the worst new comedy of the fall season. After a pilot episode that goes through ludicrous contortions to set up the situation, it may turn out to be a passably entertaining look at manhunting in the Big Apple. But the blatant gimmickry of its premise is symptomatic of the malaise that has descended on TV’s most venerable format, the situation comedy.

In terms of numbers, sitcoms are riding higher than ever. By the end of September, no fewer than 17 new ones will have debuted on the Big Three networks and Fox. That fact, combined with the cancellation of such serious- minded dramas as thirtysomething and China Beach, has sparked a cry among critics that the networks are abandoning adventurous programming for safe, frivolous fare.

The charge may be valid, but is it fair to blame the sitcom? In fact, the format is the most durable, supple and, on occasion, artistically perfect one TV has ever invented. That 23-minute package has housed everything from the homey morality plays of Father Knows Best to the antiwar messages of M*A*S*H; from the social incisiveness of All in the Family to the scattershot farce of Police Squad! If the new TV season had another Sergeant Bilko or Mary Tyler Moore Show, critics would be cheering the revival of network TV, not lamenting its demise. No, there’s nothing wrong with the sitcom that a good show wouldn’t fix.

The genre seems to be suffering from creative exhaustion, and the problem can be blamed, at least partly, on two pernicious developments. One is the tyranny of the gag line. Egged on by live studio audiences and a fear of letting viewers’ attention flag even for a second, sitcoms have subordinated well-told stories and plausible characters to a barrage of one-liners. Another is the curse of “high concept.” To stand out in this crowd (nearly 50 half- hour comedies will be airing on the networks this fall), you gotta have a gimmick. Typically that means putting together characters who clash in some way: an oddly assembled family, mismatched co-workers, or simply a grouchy guy who throws insults at everyone who crosses his path.

The trouble is that insults and oddballs do not wear very well. To survive for the long haul, most sitcoms have to reinvent themselves in more sympathetic terms. The regulars at the Cheers bar were originally a collection of funny misfits; now they’re a family. Roseanne roared to the top of the ratings on the strength of its revenge-of-the-housewife wisecracks. Since then it has played down the gag lines and established a nice rhythm as TV’s best domestic comedy.

This fall, however, battling and bickering are back in style. In CBS’s Teech, a black music teacher gets hired at a snooty white boarding school, providing the occasion for a predictable batch of racial wisecracks. (“I am only reluctantly conforming to federal guidelines,” sniffs the headmaster to his token hire. “Shoeshine?” offers the teacher.) NBC’s Pacific Station pairs a hard-boiled police detective (Robert Guillaume) with a flaky new partner (Richard Libertini), who brews herb tea and spouts New Age psychobabble. Only the two stars’ professionalism keeps this from being a match made in hell.

In Fox’s Herman’s Head, the discord has spread to the main character’s subconscious. As a young magazine researcher plows through a typical day, his four inner “selves” — representing intellect, anxiety, sensitivity and lust — compete for control. The device generates some laughs but starts wearing thin before the first episode is even finished.

High concept goes totally over the top in ABC’s Good & Evil, an outre farce from the creators of Soap. The title refers to two warring sisters. One (Margaret Whitton) is a medical researcher so good-hearted that she tests a new vaccine on herself rather than give it to lab monkeys. The other (Teri Garr), who is scheming to take over her mother’s cosmetics empire, smears an experimental cream on her secretary’s face to see if it makes the skin peel off. Among the other characters: a husband of one sister, who has just been thawed out after four years frozen in the ice on Mount Everest, and a blind man who totals a laboratory with his cane in the most gratingly ill-conceived bit of TV slapstick of the year. Maybe ever.

Not all the new families are as dysfunctional as the one on Good & Evil, but few seem very happy together, at least initially. In ABC’s Step by Step, two single parents (Patrick Duffy and Suzanne Somers) marry and merge their respective three-child broods; the kids are at one another’s throats instantly. In NBC’s Flesh ‘n’ Blood, a yuppie lawyer (Lisa Darr) is visited by her long-lost brother (David Keith), a hillbilly layabout, and his two unwashed kids. Much to her dismay (and ours), they promptly move in. In CBS’s < The Royal Family, Redd Foxx plays a sour Atlanta mailman whose sunset years with his wife (Della Reese) are interrupted by yet another band of unwanted relatives: their daughter and grandchildren from Philadelphia. It’s hard to know which is more annoying — these paper-thin pretexts for put-down jokes or the cavalier way they are tossed aside in a headlong rush for the heartstrings.

Even when family members get along, the gags often get in the way. ABC’s Home Improvement boasts an appealing star in Tim Allen and a nuclear family with no obviously malfunctioning units (at least no relatives from the Ozarks). But the show is hampered by its originating gimmick: Allen, the host of a TV fix-it show, is all thumbs as a repairman at home. There are some amusing gibes at power-tool macho (“What is your problem with the blender? It’s the only blender on the block that can puree a brick”), but dubious prospects for long-term fun.

The few spots of greenery on the sitcom desert can mostly be traced to the influence of one unlikely hit: ABC’s The Wonder Years. That nostalgic sitcom, with its first-person narration, absence of a laugh track and eye for childhood detail, has sparked a minor trend toward more sensitive, autobiographical sitcoms. One of the most widely anticipated comes from Gary David Goldberg (Family Ties), who has based his new series for CBS, Brooklyn Bridge, on his experiences growing up in an extended Jewish family in the 1950s. Judging from the pilot script (the show is still being finished), Brooklyn Bridge will have its share of TV sentiment but a good dose of ethnic authenticity as well.

The nicest surprise of the new season is a little-heralded show from NBC called The Torkelsons. The series revolves around a ragtag Oklahoma family of six: five kids and their poor but resourceful single mother (Connie Ray). In Wonder Years fashion, the central character is a sensitive teenager, 14-year- old Dorothy Jane, who monologizes from her bedroom window about how her crude family embarrasses her.

The season opener — in which Mom tries to greet new neighbors, rent out a room, fend off a suitor and keep the washer and dryer from being repossessed — is a bit too hectic and overwrought. But the family is believable, and Olivia Burnette is totally winning as Dorothy Jane. With a voice that cracks charmingly at the high end, she can take a routine wisecrack (“They’re just an unsuspecting, innocent family. Please don’t turn into the Welcome Wagon from hell”) and make it a cry of adolescent anguish. A TV kid whose jokes are rooted in real feelings and family tribulation. What a concept!