Fortysomethings pack up the kids and head for brave new worlds in
The Road Home. But will they find anything more than
hackneyed truths?
ONE OF television's choicest ironies is that it can compel entire
families to sit still in front of the set, watching other families being
active and adventurous. Thus in The Road Home (CBS, March
5, 9-10 p.m.), Karen Allen (Raiders of the Lost Ark) hauls her husband
(Terence Knox) and four kids down to North Carolina for a two-week visit
with her folks, and they end up staying for good.
This show will gladden the hearts of real estate agents
everywhere. It also offers distinctly conservative variations on the
great theme of American literature: Your life's at a dead end? Light out,
in Huck Finn's phrase, for the territory, Move—somewhere,
anywhere—just make sure to take the kids along, too.
The Road Home reeks of smart people behind the cameras—in
this case, executive producers Bruce Paltrow and John Tinker, guys
who've given us good TV ranging from The White Shadow to St. Elsewhere.
There are smart actors here, too—the exemplary stage performer Frances
Sternhagen and Elsewhere's Ed Flanders portray Karen Allen's parents.
(The most distractingly odd thing about Road is Allen's voice: With its
Southern honey dip and unusually rough timbre, it sounds like she's
doing an imitation of Blythe Danner, who happens to be Paltrow's wife.)
But all this talent has been placed in the service of paeans to The
South and The Family, complete with lines like, "The people have music
in their souls."
Knox's Jack Matson is an academic type—well, a high
school history teacher—who's ready for a change. In the premier episode
of Road, Jack agrees to take a sharp career turn and help his aging
father-in-law run a failing shrimp-boat business. Jack murmurs, "Maybe
there's change in the air"—but that may just be the smell of rotting
shellfish, Jack.
Road makes the pointed comment that kids' lives are better without "TV
and video games"—as if shrimpers don't have electricity and cable—and
at the end of the show, everyone gets in touch with nature by dancing in
the pouring rain. Earnest but all wet, The Road Home makes you glad there
are still television families like the Simpsons. The Road Home: C
Copyright © 1994 Entertainment Weekly Inc.