ABC’s ‘China Beach’ Juggles Decades

ABC’s “China Beach” will move not only to a new time next season. In some episodes, it will travel to new decades, its producer says.

The Vietnam War series goes to Saturdays at 9 p.m. in the fall and, in the season pilot, jumps forward to the year 1985, executive producer John Sacret Young said Monday.

The acclaimed drama that chronicles nurses and doctors attending to war has been set in the 1960s since its debut two years ago.

This fall, the series also will follow the main characters’ lives in sequences that occur in the 1970s and 1980s, Young said.

“The characters are going to have a wild ride,” Young said.

“China Beach,” despite laudatory reviews and an Emmy award last year for star Dana Delany, had a wild ride itself this season.

Never a ratings winner, the dark depiction of life in the trenches faced an uncertain fate until ABC renewed it for the fall at the last minute.

Network entertainment President Bob Iger said he hopes the show’s new time slot, which will precede ABC’s cult hit “Twin Peaks,” helps to ensure its survival.

Young and Delany, speaking to television critics Monday, said they were surprised the visceral series has lasted this long.

“China Beach” premiered as a spring replacement series in 1988. “I didn’t think the pilot would get picked up,” Delany said.

Next season, Delany’s character, the hard-drinking, emotionally stifled nurse Colleen McMurphy, will be shown as an oft-married woman in flash-forward sequences, Young said.