What’s in Store for TV Dramedies? : Despite Critical Praise, Hybrid Genre Faces Uncertain Future

Just before NBC’s “The Cosby Show” came on the air in 1984 and soared to the top of ratings, the television industry decided that comedy was dead.

As the 1987-88 television season draws to a close, some industry observers are wondering whether death awaits the dramedy.

For those who have neglected to follow the development of network television comedy recently, the new kid on the block is the dramedy --a half-hour, laugh track-less hybrid of comedy and drama that appeared on the TV horizon in the fall of 1987. The critics were delighted, but, if the ratings are any indication, the mass audience was totally confused.

And so was NBC Entertainment President Brandon Tartikoff, who recently said of CBS’ “Frank’s Place”: “I just don’t get it.”

“Cosby” saved the sitcom format four years ago. So far, no hit show has come to save the dramedy.

This season’s dramedies include “Frank’s Place”; ABC’s “Hooperman” and “The ‘Slap’ Maxwell Story” and NBC’s “Days and Nights of Molly Dodd.” All have been pulled from their time slots at one time or another this season, but “Frank’s Place” is the only one not currently airing. CBS plans to return it to the schedule after May.

Besides blending comedy and drama, these shows shun the traditional sitcom method of taping with three cameras before a studio audience in favor of filming the show with one camera in front of no one. Dramedy producers liken the result to a half-hour feature film.

But will the dramedies--none of which made it into the Top 20 network shows this season--be back in the fall of 1988? And will new dramedies be forthcoming in future seasons?

And should the dramedy survive?

Hollywood opinion remains mixed on all counts.

“Frank’s Place,” the continuing saga of the quirky characters in a Louisiana Creole restaurant featuring a predominantly black cast, has been renewed for fall despite ranking 62nd among 105 prime-time network shows this season (the ratings period concluded April 17).

Shows that may or may not come back: the brooding “Molly Dodd” (28th), starring Blair Brown as a New York divorcee; “Hooperman” (35th), a mini-”Hill Street Blues” starring John Ritter, and “ ‘Slap’ Maxwell,” with Dabney Coleman as an abrasive sports writer (55th).

ABC has recently introduced “The Wonder Years,” another half-hour with no laugh track about growing up in suburbia in the 1960s; it has performed well in the ratings. Despite moments of pathos and its own unique style, however, the highly accessible “Wonder Years” has more in common with the traditional warm, family comedy than this season’s other dramedies. (The TV industry, never at a loss for words, calls comedies that provide smiles but not big laughs softcoms or warmedies .) And the slate of network pilots features few new dramedies.

TV producers, writers and executives interviewed for this article routinely praised the dramedies, but admitted that low ratings have caused the genre to fall out of favor with nervous programming executives.

“I’m told that at the beginning of the (1987-88) season, all the network executives were saying, ‘We’ve got to have dramedies, we’ve got to get some of these into development,’ ” said Steve Marshall, an executive producer of ABC’s “Growing Pains” and its new spinoff “The 10 of Us,” both of which are performed in front of a studio audience.

“Now,” said Marshall, “I think some of that ardor has cooled a little bit, and it’s a shame.”

Added Dan Guntzelman, another executive producer on the two shows: “Now, you’d have to be a pretty silly writer to walk in (to a network) and say, ‘I want to do a dramedy.’ ”

“If I had to guess, I don’t think you’ll see a whole bunch of new dramedies next year,” said Ted Harbert, ABC’s vice president, prime time. The network, he said, will not decide whether the new comedies it selects for fall will have laugh tracks until the network’s development staff looks at the rough cuts and decides what’s appropriate for each.

“What has the audience told us about these shows?” Harbert said. “The ratings show that they’re saying, ‘We like these shows, we want to watch them, but we’re not quite sure what you’re giving us.’ Before we flood the schedule with new dramedies, we have to see what we can do with what we have.”

“Hooperman” executive producer Robert Myman has produced two comedy pilots for fall, “Anything But Love” and “Have Faith,” but both are traditional studio sitcoms.

Grant Tinker, whose GTG Entertainment is developing new comedies for this fall and the next few seasons, praises the current crop of dramedies, but has none in development himself.

Tinker considers the continued existence of the dramedy an open question because these one-camera film shows--usually shot outside a studio--are much more expensive for the producers, and so far have not gotten high enough ratings to provide the networks incentive to pay the deficit costs.

“While I’m hopeful about them creatively, I worry about them fiscally,” Tinker said.

CBS vice president of marketing David Poltrack believes the jury is still out on whether the dramedy form can eventually be a popular success as well as a creative one.

“You can debate it from two perspectives,” Poltrack said. “One is that it’s a new form and like any innovation, it takes a while for the majority to accept it. The other position is that basically it is a type of television that has limited appeal and will always have limited appeal. I think that probably the real answer is somewhere in between.”

Some industry observers believe the word dramedy should never have been coined. “Hooperman” producer Myman said he and other dramedy producers never got together and decided to create a new genre.

“I remember (“Hooperman” creator) Steven Bochco talking about how we shouldn’t try to label it,” he said.

Each of this season’s dramedies, producers and network executives argue, has its own reasons for getting low ratings that have nothing to do with laugh tracks or whether comedy and drama are blended. Story lines, characters or time slots are the real culprits in the poor ratings performance of the dramedies.

Bill Rubens, NBC vice president of research, said network studies have shown that audiences don’t much care whether a show features a laugh track.

“It’s much more important to the creative person than it is to the viewer,” he said.

Some producers point out that television has been blending drama and comedy in the half-hour form for years, as well as experimenting with removing the laugh track.

“I don’t see any great trend in these shows,” said veteran network executive Fred Silverman, now an independent producer.

Larry Gelbart, producer with Gene Reynolds of the long-running “MASH,” which debuted in 1972 and often contained as much tragedy as comedy, said he waged a continuing battle with CBS against including a laugh track, but was defeated.

“We used it very sparingly and selectively,” Gelbart said. “There were certain areas we would never use it. In the operating room, we would always dump the track.”

And in 1980, he added ruefully, he produced for Silverman’s NBC a dramedy precursor called “United States,” which, he said had “no laugh track--and no audience.” The unusual show, which was a favorite subject for newspaper critics, lasted just two months on the network.

Ratings aside, producers continue to debate whether TV critics have been fair in hailing dramedy as a form superior to the live-audience sitcom. Most defend both formats as equal but different.

“Does (press opinion suggest that) because ‘All in the Family’ or ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show’ had an audience, they were bad comedies?” Silverman asked.

Even the makers of “Hooperman” considered shooting before an audience but rejected the idea.

“In the first episode, we had a lady dying; we had a guy up on a ledge,” producer Myman said. “You’d lose all that realism. It just wouldn’t be the same.”

Harry Thomason, executive producer, with wife Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, of the live-audience comedy “Designing Women,” likes dramedies but defends the traditional format.

“The press and some network people think that if it has no laugh track, it must be quality, and if it has a laugh track, it’s a sitcom,” Thomason said. “What are we supposed to do, tell the audience not to laugh?”

Thomason, as well as the producers of “Growing Pains,” said they tape shows longer than they need to be and cut out material that doesn’t work, rather than “sweetening” the weak material with canned laughs.

Gelbart, however, thinks the studio-audience format can result in lower quality scripts than the more cinematic dramedy form.

“It creates a different goal for writers when they know they are writing for two or three hundred people with shopping bags sitting between their legs,” he said.

Although unwilling to predict the course of the development of new dramedies, Silverman believes that networks have a financial imperative to work to save the ones now on the air.

“It’s tough to come up with a good show, it costs millions of dollars. Failure is very expensive,” he said. “And there are enormous profits that go along with keeping a show in place on the schedule.”

And even if today’s dramedies don’t survive, “Growing Pains” producer Guntzelman thinks their influence will.

“Whether or not you can call the the results they get in the ratings successful, they have an effect on all the the sitcoms that are on the air,” he said.

“They loosen the form by one degree. And that’s pretty good.”