Can Good TV Lure Viewers to Networks?

Something important is happening in TV. And we’re right in the middle of it.

The networks, hemorrhaging and groggy from audience defection, are suddenly unleashing a whirlwind of new tryout series--from Carol Burnett’s “Carol & Company” to “Bagdad Cafe” to Sunday’s much-awaited “Twin Peaks”--to prove they can be interesting again.

Not everything’s working, but last week, this week and the next few weeks comprise one of the most critical periods of audience testing in recent network television history.

Positive viewer response to a taste for experimentation would surely influence the new fall schedules due next month from ABC, CBS and NBC.

The networks’ motivation is simple: fear. What else could it be after their tried-and-true formula shows were blown away by two nonconformist series that turned out to be the season’s biggest new hits--ABC’s “America’s Funniest Home Videos” and Fox Broadcasting’s satirical cartoon entry “The Simpsons”?

This week’s ratings showed audiences hungrily searching for something else new. Surely the shocker in the ratings was the unexpectedly powerful debut on last-place CBS of the Whoopi Goldberg-Jean Stapleton sitcom, “Bagdad Cafe,” which ranked 18th among all shows, with 27% of the audience tuning in the tale of the two women who work together in a desert diner.

Will it hold up? Who knows? But viewers are checking out the spring menu.

“Carol & Company,” an NBC comedy anthology, also had a potent ratings debut last Saturday, ranking No. 9 and attracting 32% of the audience. It certainly benefited greatly from its powerful lead-in, “The Golden Girls.” But viewer curiosity was also there to check out the return of a great TV star, Burnett, in her first series in a decade; and the show held almost all the audience that “The Golden Girls” provided it.

Networks basically hate the anthology form--they think it’s too risky and can point to such recent ratings failures as Steven Spielberg’s “Amazing Stories.” Clearly, Burnett’s popularity made the series possible. It gets its second outing tonight, and then its fate will be decided finally when it is switched to 10 p.m., after “Empty Nest,” starting next Saturday.

But, whatever its fate, Burnett may well have her finger on TV’s new mood--and viewer boredom--when she sizes up how the networks have looked to her since her last series:

“Everything was perfect situation comedy. So perfect that I could tell they were probably done mostly in pickup--that is, they might do it in front of an audience, but you could tell that they’d stopped, gone back to re-do a scene because maybe somebody flubbed a line. For me, it was too perfect. There wasn’t a sense of any kind of danger or being on the edge of that liveness that I think is the most fun to watch.

“It doesn’t have to be picture perfect as long as the spontaneity is there. And then I found out that a lot of (the shows) go way into the night, like 1 o’clock or 2 o’clock in the morning, and they’re doing pickup shots. People are dragging and they’ve lost their audience, and then comes the canned laughter and all that.”

But the staggering ratings of “America’s Funniest Home Videos,” with its primitive tapes, unquestionably validate Burnett’s point about the appeal of spontaneity as opposed to overly manufactured TV sitcoms.

While Burnett is finally getting a chance at her anthology--”Everybody called it the A-word,” she says--ABC is also gambling big Sunday night with “Twin Peaks,” a Gothic soap opera laced with horror and humor, which depicts small-town life the way Norman Rockwell might have painted it if he had gone berserk or tripped out on LSD.

Although many who have seen the two-hour debut of “Twin Peaks” regard it as a TV masterpiece, ABC is extremely nervous about whether the public will accept it--and also about the extraordinary advance praise it has received. One ABC official points to the considerable praise lavished on “Elvis,” the splendid series about the early days of Elvis Presley, which failed miserably in the ratings just recently.

Nonetheless, ABC, with its attractive programming ranging from “Roseanne” to “thirtysomething,” also drew respectable ratings with two episodes of another new series last week, “Equal Justice,” about a group of young prosecutors. While it was not a representative ratings week because of the Academy Awards and the NCAA basketball playoffs, viewers were undeniably shopping around.

They shopped around so much looking for something different that even a standard, by-the-numbers, new NBC sitcom called “A Family for Joe,” with Robert Mitchum, did reasonably well in the ratings. And so did another standard new CBS sitcom, “Sugar and Spice,” helped by the lead-in of “Bagdad Cafe.”

This week, meanwhile, the ratings also were passable for the debut of a bright new ABC comedy, “The Marshall Chronicles,” with Joshua Rifkind simply delightful as a New York teen-ager with a Woody Allen flavor.

The moves by ABC, CBS and NBC to revive viewer interest--and beat the competition--make the current burst of new shows much more than merely another group of mid-season entries. The stakes get increasingly high as the alternatives to network television grow.

As an example of the fierce maneuvering as next season approaches, NBC Entertainment President Brandon Tartikoff has signed series and/or movie deals with such creators as Ron Howard (“Cocoon”), Gary David Goldberg (“Family Ties”), Paul Witt and Tony Thomas (“The Golden Girls”), Joel Silver (“Lethal Weapon”), Dan Curtis (“War and Remembrance”), Bill Persky (“Kate & Allie”), Bruce Paltrow (“St. Elsewhere”), Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz (“thirty-something”), John Sacret Young (“China Beach”) and Garry Marshall (“Beaches”).

The dimensions of such competition were outlined nicely Wednesday in a speech by Howard Stringer, president of the CBS Broadcast Group, to the Royal Television Society in London:

“In such a dicey business as TV, the biggest players are willing to pay big premiums for proven talent because it reduces the even costlier risks of failure. Thus the Disney studio, whose brilliance in movies and theme parks is now beginning to trickle into television, is pouring tens of millions into a search for TV Cinderellas. It is paying writers with the mere hint of a reputation huge fees, unconcerned that many of them will turn out to be ugly sisters.”

According to Stringer, “Just last week, the writer-creator of one of our best shows watched in amazement as a rival studio paid her number-three writing team double the fee she was getting. Then before she could say the word ‘typewriter,’ she herself received a huge offer from yet another studio to abandon her current show and start another one.”

According to a CBS source, the writer-creator was Diane English, whose show, “Murphy Brown,” is a Warner Bros. production, and the writing team in question was lured to Paramount.

But with such high stakes, Stringer noted, it is easy to give “script writers and directors less room to experiment.” That, of course, is what has turned off viewers and perhaps, finally, has caused the networks to start rolling the dice again--for their own survival. As Stringer observed in his London speech:

“There is a wonderful show in the U.S. It is a contemporary family situation comedy in cartoon form. It is called ‘The Simpsons.’ Its writers are virtually all in their 20s. That’s the excitement of television.”