Waiting for the New Television Season : ‘Hard Time’ Copes With Renewal Jitters

In the series “Hard Time on Planet Earth,” hero warrior Jesse is exiled to our planet. Then CBS exiled the series to another netherworld . . . the Wednesday abyss.

A comedy-fantasy-adventure with Martin Kove (the macho cop Victor Isbecki on “Cagney & Lacey”) as the innocent alien abroad, “Hard Time” runs an hour those nights at 8, which has been devoid of life for CBS.

The time period is bounded by a rock (“Unsolved Mysteries” on NBC) and two hard places (“Growing Pains” and “Head of the Class” on ABC).

Are there enough people left over to make survivable ratings? Will Jesse live to see the fall schedule, due to be announced later this month?

“Hard Time” went on the air March 1 and clawed its way to the status of “marginal” with 14 and 15 “shares” (the percentage of sets in use that are tuned to that program). By contrast, the other shows hover around 25 and 30 shares. By further contrast, previous CBS entries such as the Mary Tyler Moore and Dick Van Dyke series and “TV 101” had death-dealing 8s and 10s.

Co-executive producer E. Jack Kaplan acknowledged that this is life on the edge of extinction: “We expect to hear within the next two weeks. A CBS guy was trying to be hopeful. He said, ‘Who knows what will happen when they get behind the oak doors in New York? Who knows what they will decide?’ ”

The “oak doors” refers to the culmination of what’s called “the pilot season” and those mysterious executive rituals by which the networks select next season’s hits and, undoubtedly, misses.

If there are any answers, officials weren’t even available for the questions, including Kim LeMasters, president of CBS Entertainment, and producing Disney TV officials Randy Reiss, president of network TV, and Tony Jonas, vice president for network development. They pleaded busy.

Veteran writer-producers Kaplan and Richard Chapman seem to retain a veteran sense of equilibrium. Kaplan did shows such as “Laugh-In,” “Hill Street Blues,” “Designing Women”; Chapman did “Simon and Simon,” “Leg Man” and “The Oldest Rookie.”

On one Monday, only two acts (of the required four) were written for the episode that was to start shooting three days hence. On Tuesday, a third act was finished. On the next morning the last act was up for contemplation.

CBS was calling: Was there was a script yet? No.

Kaplan said: “Every indication we get from CBS is that they like the shows, they love the shows, they like the demographics. . . . Marty (Kove) has amazed a lot of people. Marty’s always played macho tough and (in this) he’s vulnerable and he is genuinely funny.

“(But) we don’t have enough ‘numbers.’ CBS has four or five shows that are getting the same sort of numbers--’Tour of Duty,’ ‘Beauty and the Beast,’ etc.--which are consistent but probably not (strong enough). CBS has some tough decisions to make.”

Kove, in his trailer awaiting what would be another 14- or 18-hour day, was rapping with a CBS executive on how to improve the show. The executive used terms like adult relate-able.

The show has a heavy young audience--”Kids love the superhero element,” said the star--but now needed sophistication.

Kove was suggesting, “Why not have a nemesis who occasionally comes down? Like in ‘The Fugitive’ (Lt. Gerard, always in hot pursuit of Kimball). Jesse never knows what body, what form, this guy appears in. The audience sees but Jesse doesn’t know.”

The producers were especially pleased with the episode running that night in which the Amazonian dancer-actress Sandahl Bergman played an alien hit-woman who comes to Earth to toy with Jesse--some playful girl-boy business--then terminate him. This may be what TV folk call “an 8 o’clock show,” as in family time, but it’s not all kiddie stuff.

Jesse was a great revolutionary hero but peace has broken out and his planet doesn’t need warriors anymore. So the Tribunal consigns Jesse to Earth for rehabilitation, along with a computer-generated cybernaut--like a little flying eye--to keep watch. But “Control” is short of circuits and darts about dispensing malaprops of wisdom: “A penny saved is a joy forever.”

(Control’s four to six minutes of shtick per episode is animated onto the film, adding considerable time to the post-production burden and a major blip on what a source said was an estimated $1.2 million-plus per-episode budget.)

The pilot was shot last year during the writers’ strike, so that creators Jim and John Thomas (they wrote the Arnold Schwarzenegger movie, “The Predator”) couldn’t do corrective rewrites. But even though all parties agreed that radical changes were needed, CBS ran the pilot as the premiere. The critics beat it to death.

Then the resurrection. The “look” of the show was enhanced, different lighting, trickier camera work; Control lost powers to make its persona more interesting; Jesse was made less Rambo and more vulnerable, therein more appealing to women viewers.

But should Jesse be more Incredible Hulk? Or more Chauncey Gardiner (as in “Being There”)?

Said Chapman: “The tightrope we walk is having him learn too fast and lose some of the ingenuous quality or--does he look silly if he doesn’t learn fast enough?”

Jesse takes Earth on literal terms: “He sits down with you over a cup of tea--but he doesn’t know what to do with the lemon. But he knows how to convert a computer.”

In one episode, Jesse sees a TV commercial about a Cal Worthingtonian-type car dealer named Buck who’s in big trouble because he has so many cars to sell. Jesse dashes off to help Buck.

CBS gave the “go” order in early December, with production to start in early January.

“So when the people were writing these scripts,” said Kaplan, “the show hadn’t been on the air yet. They weren’t familiar with the show and the nuances that changed week to week.”

Of the first 10 scripts commissioned, Kaplan and Chapman wrote one themselves and “massively” rewrote eight: “In many cases, not a word was left standing.”

For a brawny guy (6-feet-1, 180 pounds), the star was looking a bit peaked, even through the haze of the day’s careful makeup. He plays in virtually every scene.

He has little time for basic actor amenities, so his assigned hairdresser had to stop over at the Kove home on a day off to lighten his hair for the cameras. On one Sunday the director was coming over to talk about the next episode.

In the middle of this series he was doing double duty by continuing his role in the “Karate Kid” films as Kreese, the vicious sensei. But the producers of “KK 3” were displeased to the point of being angry with his TV schedule and were forced to rewrite the role.

How is life on the edge?

“I’ve been through ‘Cagney & Lacey’ for six years,” Kove said, “and we were canceled twice and the first year they fired every writer after six shows. I’ve been through the ups and downs and I know how it works.”

On one of the upcoming “Hard Times,” Al Waxman, Kove’s crusty precinct boss on “Cagney and Lacey,” directs an episode that employs Jesse’s brain power. A university scientist claims to have a microchip that can contact alien life, but Jesse reveals him as a fraud. “Not the innocent comedy anymore,” Kove asserted.

Is it too late? Viewers have to know more about Jesse to care about Jesse, “other than see him tossing people over cars.” Kove wants a bigger scope, a Jesse bigger than life.

“The character’s a little more sophisticated,” Kaplan said. “The last few shows are more concentrated on his stories. In one he runs across another prisoner like himself who’s in the body of a high school kid who’s determined to rule the world.

“The final show is poignant, with Gordon Jump (from “WKRP in Cincinnati”) playing a kid-show host who tries to commit suicide and Jesse saves him.”

Star and producers have arm-wrestled over just how to achieve “bigger than life,” but they seem to get along pretty well considering the state of a series on life support.

“We’ll see,” said Kaplan. “I’m having supper with Marty this week and we’ll see if he picks up the tab.”