Is ‘Year in the Life’ Running Out of Time?

TV Guide calls it “the best show of the (1987-88 television) season in many ways, the best of the past several seasons.” Other television critics, in a chorus of mellifluous adjectives, have dubbed it “a profound revolution in network television,” “extraordinary entertainment,” “perfect television drama,” “gut-busting comedy” and an hour that makes TV “glow.”

But such critical applause may not be enough to keep NBC’s “A Year in the Life” on the air past its first season.

“It’s questionable whether there is a large audience for this kind of show,” laments Joshua Brand, co-creator and co-executive producer of the series. “If you look at our (ratings), we are by no means a hit show. And we all have a great deal of uneasiness and uncertainty about our future. The only thing it’s tempered by is the fact that we know the network likes the show; they believe in the show. But on the basis of the numbers alone, we would not be picked up for next season.”

“At this point it’s up in the air,” Warren Littlefield, NBC executive vice president for prime-time programs, says about the show’s chances for renewal. “I root for it to be back because I think it’s good work, superior work. My heart is with it. But ultimately you have to sit down and ask, ‘Do you believe you have a place on the schedule where it can succeed?’ ”

“A Year in the Life” ranks 60th among the 98 prime-time series that have appeared on the three major networks this season. NBC moved it from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Wednesdays two weeks ago, hoping to find signs of a budding audience before network executives sit down to map out their fall schedule in May. In its first outing there, however, the series lost half the audience that had been watching the show ahead of it, “Aaron’s Way,” and finished third in the time period. It was third again last week.

“It’s extremely frustrating because I feel that the show we’re writing is an accessible show,” says John Falsey, “Year’s” co-creator and the other executive producer. “We write about very relatable people and the problems and triumphs that they have. Why it hasn’t caught on, I just don’t know.”

Falsey, 36, and Brand, 37, the team that created “St. Elsewhere” back in 1982 and then left the show after its first season, have populated the NBC series with the rivalries and affections of three generations of an ordinary, middle-class family living in Seattle. There are mothers and teen-age sons and daughters, grown-up brothers and sisters, girlfriends, ex-husbands, old flames, infants, rambunctious newlyweds, intimidated daughters-in-law and a tough but sensitive patriarch named Joe Gardner, played by veteran Broadway actor Richard Kiley, who recently won a Golden Globe for his TV performance this season.

Born out of the 1986 Emmy Award-winning miniseries of the same name, the show is a kind of “Passages” about family life, featuring the everyday dramas surrounding life, death, marriage, divorce, birth, work, school and personal relationships. Falsey and Brand describe it as a chance to move a television audience. When reviewing the show’s scripts, they listen with what they call their “mood meters” and ask themselves if the situations and dialogue are genuinely evocative.

“It’s really hard to get people to feel on television,” Brand says. “You can entertain them, but they’ve all seen so many hours of television, they know what to feel, they know what marks to hit. The audience is so sophisticated that our big main trick is, ‘How do you get someone to feel?’ ”

“I think when we succeed, it comes out of real situations,” Falsey says, continuing the thought. “There’s nothing worse than trying to manipulate feelings, where the scene is crying for you to feel, to let this touch you. We won’t go that way. If you understand the situation well enough and it’s real enough, then the emotion just comes up and overwhelms you.”

At its best, “A Year in the Life” is quiet and restrained, squeezing emotion out of simple dialogue and family dynamics. Though smart, resourceful and lovable, the characters don’t exhibit the same analytical self-awareness and fluency with snappy dialogue that often characterize the scripts of other relationship-based shows, such as “thirtysomething” and “L.A. Law.”

“It’s challenging and exciting,” says Adam Arkin, who plays a 30-ish patent attorney, devoted husband and father of a baby girl. “It’s stuff you have to rise to as an actor. We deal with issues that we can feel good about trying to shed some light on. And I’m convinced that if we can get people to try this show, they will like it.”

“A Year in the Life” is crammed with drama--the painful and angry alienation between a teen-age son and the divorced father he rarely sees, the moving reflections of two yuppie parents on their daughter’s first birthday. But it is far from humorless.

In one recent episode, the 65-year-old Joe Gardner, who lost his wife a few years earlier in a traffic accident, sneaks out of his big house--in which two of his children, two of his grandchildren and his one daughter-in-law also live--late every night to sleep at the home of his steady girlfriend. After days of sneaking back in before dawn to avoid upsetting his family with his randy behavior, Joe is exhausted, and his family begins to worry that he is sick or losing his mind or worse.

Finally one morning, he creeps back into his house only to find his entire clan waiting for him in the kitchen. After a fumbling, bumbling, embarrassed preamble, he blurts out the truth, expecting tears, shock and screams of condemnation. Instead, relieved that it is nothing “serious,” everyone simply stares back, says, “That’s nice, Dad” and goes back to sleep.

NBC has been extremely pleased with moments like these and, according to Brand and Falsey, has not demanded that they spice up “Year” to boost the ratings.

But Littlefield concedes that occasionally the show’s attempts “to celebrate the ordinary may have been too ordinary.” He says the network has discussed with Brand and Falsey the need to try to include an important milestone in the life of the family in each episode to make it more of a “must see” for the audience. The strength of the miniseries, Littlefield says, was that each of the three nights featured events--death, birth, marriage, divorce--that were significant to the entire family.

Over the last seven years NBC has earned a reputation for sticking with low-rated but critically acclaimed shows such as “Hill St. Blues” and “St. Elsewhere” until the audience came to care about the ensemble cast of characters and began to tune in in bigger numbers.

But back in the pre-Cosby early ‘80s, when those shows debuted, NBC was in last place and could afford to let a couple of high-quality shows survive despite disappointing ratings. Today, NBC is the top-rated network and, Brand says, despite its reputation for ground-breaking television, it may have to cancel its few low-rated shows simply to make room for some of the new shows currently in development.

“It’s just as frustrating to them as it is to us,” Brand says. “They like the show. But this may be one time where everybody says, ‘It’s a terrific show’ . . . and it won’t be back.”