THE GOOD THING about all the bad shows in the four or five mini- seasons that
now constitute a new TV season is that you don't have to watch TV. You have
time to read books, clean out the gutters, work on your stamp collection.
There is bad news, in this sense, about two of the new shows starting
off yet another season this week. They are quality shows of such superior
nature that with one hand I'm writing them into my appointment book, and, with
the other, starting campaigns to save them.
The first program I am demanding the network not cancel is "The Road Home,"
a new series starring Karen Allen, Ed Flanders, Terence Knox and Frances
Sternhagen, premiering on CBS Saturday night at 9. This is the series heavily
promoted during the Olympics, made by Bruce Paltrow and John Tinker, members of
an exciting gang of which much has been expected since they did "St.
Elsewhere."
But it has been a long hard road for Paltrow and partners since NBC pulled
the plug on the great drama's life support system prematurely in 1988. All of
the bad luck experienced by the Paltrow Group, I'm still convinced, is because
they killed the MTM kitten at the end of the last episode of "St. Elsewhere."
The dreaded Six Year Curse is ending with "The Road Home." At last, for Paltrow
& Co. the Saint Elsewhereians go marching in.
It's an hour-long family drama, a simple story about the Matsons, Alison
(Allen) and Jack (Knox), who return to her parents' home on the North Carolina
coast for a family summer vacation, something they do every other summer. Their
four kids are both bored and thrilled with the prospect of spending quality
time with their grandparents, Walter (Flanders) and Charlotte Babineaux
(Sternhagen).
The last time I saw Flanders he was Dr. Donald Westphall, the mooning
hospital chief of staff on "St. Elsewhere." Now Westphall is a shrimp boat
operator whose business is going south.
Knox, who had been Dr. Peter White, a troubled doctor at "St. Elsewhere,"
is now a high school history teacher who is going to spend his summer vacation
helping grandpa save the shrimp business. It's a different time for the family,
mixing the gag-me-with-a-spoon despair of the city sophisticates, the emergence
of young love, the magic of tree houses, ghost stories, financial problems and
Alzheimer's.
There is a lovely lyrical quality to the writing. "It's been said," Alison
observes in her marvelously throaty voice, "parents need to give children two
things: roots and wings." And she has brought her family back to replenish
both. What a joy it is to become immersed in a story of family values, to
experience the pleasure of spending time with loved ones you don't see all the
time.
What I especially like about "The Road Home" is that it's the story of one
family. It's not the inter-cutting serial approach to story-telling, where they
splice four or five stories together, fearing TV viewers' famed slim attention
span.
It has the languid, luxurious quality of a lazy summer's day visit to the
North Carolina Tidewater. "People have music in their souls here," Alison says
one night on the porch. "You can hear it the way they call their children, the
way they walk along the streets. It's a melody, a rhythm."
And the show has it, too. The most beautiful scene of the year is Saturday
night when Alison is sitting on the floor of the front porch listening to the
sounds of her old neighborhood. It's nothing like mine, with the TV burbling
away through open windows.
The grandparents' dog, I should point out, goes back to sleep as soon as
the family arrives for the vacation. It's probably a metaphor, a warning to
thrill seekers: Beware. "The Road Home" is not for thrill seekers. It's for
those seeking serenity in the jungle that is TV and for those who are not put
off by great writing, acting and story-telling.
I have similar good news about "Byrds of Paradise," the new Steven Bochco
show opening on ABC tonight at 8. The hour-long family drama, starring Timothy
Busfield of "thirtysomething," is yet another serious setback to the people who
say there's nothing on TV.
Created by Channing Gibson, yet another "St. Elsewhere" producer, and
Charles Eglee of "Moonlighting," "Byrds of Paradise" is also about a family on
the move. Busfield plays Sam Byrd, a widower who with his three children moves
from New Haven, where he was a Yale philosophy professor, to Hawaii in search
of a new life.
Sam Byrd, not related to such other TV greats as Robyn or Big, has come to
the islands to forget after his wife is murdered during a senseless ATM
robbery. With neither primary nor secondary school background, he is hired as
the headmaster of a private plantation school.
Sam and his kids have trouble making the transition. The Hawaiians
apparently have a bad attitude toward anybody from another time zone. Here in
Paradise, WASPs are treated as aliens. Big Byrd struggles for acceptance with
the faculty, and the little Byrds have problems interfacing down the line. Byrd
has the most trouble with his teenage daughter, Franny (Jennifer Love Hewitt),
who hates him for relocating.
What sometimes seems like a "Hawaii 90210" with all the high school scenes,
crossed with "Hawaii Five-O" surf-wise, develops into a really involving drama,
heightened by a chance to look at Hawaii as a travelogue. Shot on location in
Oahu, "Byrds of Paradise" is truly a thing of beauty to look at, something
missing from shows shot on the backlot.
As if this weren't enough, Bruce Weitz (Belker of "Hill Street Blues") has
abandoned his onion sandwiches and is now the island psychiatrist, Dr. Murray
Rubinstein. And singer Arlo Guthrie shows up as a 45-year-old dropout who
returns to school.
It's like I've been saying all along. TV can make better shows, as "The
Road Home" and "Byrds of Paradise" suggest. Now all they have to do is put the
network executives, who kill all the good shows with their itchy trigger
fingers, in straitjackets and send them on a cruise to Hawaii for the next six
years, and we will have two great new series to keep us company in our old age.
Copyright © 1994 Newsday and New York Newsday