‘MAIN STREET’: KIDS’ SHOW OFF A SIDE STREET

Peggy Charren was encouraged after watching the premiere of NBC’s “Main Street” last September. And she was angry.

Charren, president of Action for Children’s Television (ACT), had spent years campaigning for kids’ TV reform. She and her high-profile lobbying group had made an impact on Saturday-morning programming, but could not soften network rigidity about more peak viewing times for kids.

After-school TV, for example, was a dry gulch, yielding no regularly scheduled network programs for the younger set. So Charren happily saw in “Main Street” an afternoon news magazine--though only monthly--that at least addressed its 12- to 17-year-old target audience as intelligent, thinking beings. Here at last was a program that aimed to be snappy without being sappy.

Here also was a program, hosted by Bryant Gumbel of “Today,” that NBC had allowed to debut almost unheralded, and that’s why Charren was mad.

“I thought, ‘Wouldn’t you know they wouldn’t tell anybody it’s there,’ ” Charren recalled by telephone from her Newton, Mass., office. “Then they would say, ‘See, it didn’t get any ratings.’ ”

So Charren, never one to be shy, composed a newspaper ad in which ACT urged America to tune in “Main Street,” and she persuaded NBC to run it in seven major cities. Charren said that the newspaper campaign cost NBC $150,000. “It was the first time that ACT or NBC ever did anything like this,” she said.

Was “Main Street,” which has an eight-program commitment, worth the promotion effort? Emphatically yes, as Tuesday’s upcoming fifth episode (3 p.m. on Channel 4) demonstrates.

Produced by NBC News, “Main Street” is a polished magazine series that tries to observe the world through youthful eyes and doesn’t lecture its audience. Moreover, the collegiate-looking Gumbel seems to relate with the dozen clean-scrubbed students known as “Main Street Friends” who join him on camera and discuss some of the segments on the hour show.

Tuesday’s best is a tender piece by chief correspondent Bill Schechner on families living in a Denver public shelter where friendships are transient and privacy doesn’t exist. A 14-year-old girl complains of men there ogling her. And a boy says sadly: “I know I’m not a grown-up, but it’s kinda like I gotta be one for awhile until I get outa here, and then I can go back to being a kid.”

The hour also includes other nice stories on Marvel Comics (by the show’s 16-year-old reporter) and American kids living in Rome, an interview with illusionist David Copperfield, a profile of a 15-year-old racing-car driver and a look at high-camp professional wrestling.

One of the nice things about “Main Street” is that it allows those swell kids on the show (it would be nice if just one of them looked a little off center, with hair shaped into green icicles) to discuss some of the stories with Gumbel.

“NBC is really trying,” Charren said. “They hired a good producer. They put Bryant Gumbel on the show. They built a nice set. They spent time and money on the program in a glitzy way to attract kids. And in between the glitz, there are stories about a black child in South Africa and a kid who has AIDS and kids who are homeless and so on.”

But “Main Street” is not without zits.

The only worthwhile exchange between Gumbel and the “Main Street Friends” comes after the shelter story, even though the comics piece (which includes a Marvel editor mentioning that Spider-man was “abused as a child”) literally demands some reflection about the social and political sophistication of contemporary comics. The clock intervenes, however, and it’s time to move on.

Far worse, though, is the wrestling story, which dotes on the sweaty burlesque and ignores the more fundamental questions about an ersatz sport cut from a Cold War mold. “It’s good versus evil,” a ranting Hulk Hogan boasts. “Kids can relate to that.”

That’s the point, of course, along with the polarizing ethnic and political stereotypes that abound in professional wrestling and its multitude of kid-targeted marketing spinoffs. But alas, the 20-second follow-up chat is concerned only with the pressing question of whether the action is real or sham.

“They should have asked why a company finds it appropriate to turn these characters into toys,” said Charren, an opponent of kids programs that are commercials for toys. She returned disturbed and depressed from the recent National Assn. of Television Program Executives (NATPE) meeting in New Orleans--local stations’ annual marketplace for syndicated shows.

“Children’s programs on commercial TV have never been worse,” Charren charged. “You go to NATPE and all you see are shelves of toys. You go to the national toy show in New York and all you see are shelves of TV programs.”

Ditto for Rambo the doll and the new “Rambo” animated TV series from Coleco, both spinoffs from the violent, Commie-crunching movie character created by Sylvester Stallone. The kid-show producers insist that a mellower TV Rambo will use violence only as a last resort.

“I saw one of the episodes, and he looked like the same Rambo to me,” Charren said. “And the only villain I saw was very Asian.”

Charren envisions how it started, with a TV executive “going into this R-rated movie and saying, ‘Look, I found a new children’s hero--a terrorist outlaw who takes foreign policy into his own hands.’ ”

Returning to loftier matters, meanwhile, Charren fears that a monthly “Main Street” with no regular time slot will never command an audience large enough to ensure its survival. “It should be weekly,” she said. “ ’60 Minutes” wouldn’t be successful if it was on once a month. It’s not (NBC News president) Larry Grossman’s fault. It’s not (NBC chairman) Grant Tinker’s fault. I would think just like NBC if I were a network. It’s the FCC’s fault, and it starts with the Reagan Administration, which doesn’t want TV regulation. So TV can do what it wants.”

And what it wants, apparently, is kids’ TV dead-ended down a side street.