TV Reviews : Haves vs. Have-Nots in ‘The Outsiders’

Half the budget must have gone for grease.

Seven years after Francis Ford Coppola’s movie “The Outsiders” comes his Fox television series “The Outsiders,” premiering at 9:30 p.m. Sunday, thereafter to air at 7 p.m. (Channels 11 and 6).

Like the movie, the series is based on the S.E. Hinton novel about some troubled young guys in the 1960s and takes place in a small Oklahoma town where the blue-collar greasers and rich-kid socs (pronounced soshes) are in eternal conflict.

The noblest of the greasers are the orphaned Curtis brothers, who face one crisis after another in trying to remain together and out of the clutches of the welfare agency. Oldest brother Darrell (Boyd Kestner) is the moralizing head of the household and main breadwinner. Younger brother Ponyboy (Jay R. Ferguson) is the novel-reading literary light. And middle brother Sodapop (Rodney Harvey) is a somewhat unpromising work in progress.

Meanwhile, Darrell’s oldest friend, love-making, law-breaking, head-cracking Tim Shepherd (Robert Rusler) is also his biggest headache in addition to being the greasers’ point man for fistfights, staredowns and various other clashes with the socs.

Of which there are no more than, oh, half a dozen an episode.

The heart of “The Outsiders” is class conflict--just about everything is defined in those terms--with the have-nots resenting being exploited and patronized by the haves. As a rule, the greasers take the high road on “The Outsiders” (Tim excepted) and the socs--who are a bunch of spoiled snots--the low road.

Although the characters are too inconsistent to be entirely believable and often act too inanely to be respected, there are enough nice moments here to lift “The Outsiders” above the ordinary and give it promise. Yet “The Outsiders” depicts a pretty dismal world, giving us corrupt, sadistic cops and rotten rich who spend their waking hours plotting how to oppress the poor and dirty-fingernailed. What’s more, even the show’s young target audience may ultimately tire of week after week of greasers and socs sneering and snarling at each other.