How Network TV Can Move Boldly to Break Out of Prison : Television: The structure works against progressive ideas. New hardware and new commercial scheduling are needed to help series like “Cop Rock” break the mold.

Television has become a prisoner of itself.

The ratings failure of “Cop Rock” and the struggle for wide acceptance by “Twin Peaks”--two of the most ambitious series in network history--are dismaying proof.

Never mind whether you like these ABC shows. There’s a lesson involved:

By playing it safe for years, network TV has painted itself into a corner--where anything too exotic or unusual is immediately suspect to viewers conditioned to expect the ordinary.

There’s a way out.

Start with the past. In the early days of TV, “Cop Rock,” Steven Bochco’s police drama with music, might have had a better chance because gambling was the order of the day.

The idea was to find out what worked. People talked about live, original plays they’d seen on TV the night before.

Then TV found out what worked . . . and worked . . . and worked. Sitcoms, standard dramas, routine variety shows.

As producer Grant Tinker said this week, TV now is mere furniture to many viewers. You don’t expect furniture to break into song or dance, or do odd things. Furniture is furniture.

It’s no coincidence that musical TV series from “Fame” to “Cop Rock” to “Hull High”--while varying widely in quality--somehow seem to have the common denominator of making most viewers uncomfortable enough to tune out.

MTV is different. It’s cable--where the same kind of wide-open atmosphere exists that marked the networks’ early days.

So?

So this: If the networks are to compete in the new world of wide-open cable competition and advanced TV hardware that is second nature to the young generation, they must take adventurous, even drastic, steps to accommodate unique ideas and program forms.

“Cop Rock,” for instance, should really be seen on a giant 70-inch TV screen with surround-sound for maximum effect. That, of course, isn’t possible for most viewers.

But it’s important that companies like NBC, which led the way in color TV because it was owned by RCA--which wanted to sell color sets--now think of the future again.

The hardware--the quality of sets and sound--has to be upgraded, promoted and sold not only to make money, but also as one way of encouraging new-wave TV and giving it a real shot.

It is a critical matter for the crumbling networks as they seek to stay alive. Most viewers simply don’t have the equipment to accommodate anything but ordinary programming. And that programming is the basic cause of network decline.

Something else: When we first watched the premiere of “Cop Rock,” we saw it without commercials. Then, on opening night, we watched it again on the air, commercials and all.

It was almost an entirely different experience. “Cop Rock” was badly damaged, in our view. You have to suspend disbelief in the first place to accept music in a drama--and then, just when you have, along come the commercials to destroy that fragile mood of acceptance.

You have to start all over again to rebuild the atmosphere after each commercial.

So?

So this: Unique shows have to be accommodated, or why bother in the first place?

Thus, if a network is really trying to break new ground with a show like “Cop Rock,” new patterns of commercial-scheduling must be considered within each episode to maximize a program’s impact.

Imagine, for instance, how commercials would have skewered several masterful British dramas with music that appeared on PBS, “The Singing Detective” and “Pennies From Heaven,” two miniseries that were able to establish and never surrender their aura of suspended disbelief.

But PBS viewers are more conditioned to freer forms of TV. Habitual viewers of ABC, CBS and NBC aren’t.

Here’s the rub: You can get away with almost any kind of content in TV shows nowadays--as the racier dialogue makes clear. It’s the form of new-style shows that’s the problem.

The dancing furniture.

Bochco broke ground in content and cinematic style with such series as “Hill Street Blues” and “L.A. Law.” Shows like “thirtysomething” and “Cagney & Lacey” also opened new doors for content in TV programming.

But in fact, the form for all these series--even the pace-setting “Hill Street Blues”--was, for the most part, not a difficult stretch for viewers used to traditional TV storytelling.

Lots of traditional characters and plots.

“Miami Vice,” in its first year, was far more revolutionary in form with its painting-like images and integration of pop hits into story structures.

It may have been the greatest single year of episodes provided by any TV series since “The Honeymooners.”

Yet “Cop Rock” immediately, with its premiere, demanded even more of an adjustment from viewers.

The response? “Cop Rock” got a moderately successful 19% of the audience in its debut. The second week, it plunged to 13%. And this past Wednesday, it got 12%.

Trouble.

New form. Dated manner of network presentation. Old TV hardware. Traditional viewer outlook.

It was also either a great series or off-base, depending on whom you talked to. The biggest problem, to most fans and detractors, was keeping up the quality of original songs.

But this corner says that the biggest problem is the embalmed network TV structure, which has turned people like ABC’s station owners into hooters against free-form ideas like “Cop Rock.”

It’s not easy to break the mold, as “Twin Peaks,” which has its weekly outing at 10 tonight, has learned.

“Twin Peaks” co-creator Mark Frost now is concerned that viewers may have misconceptions about the intentions of the gothic soap opera--especially whether they think they’re being strung along on the matter of who killed Laura Palmer, the most famous corpse in America.

Laura, says Frost, “was a great vehicle for us to lead people into the story. But from the beginning, we figured it would take 13 or 14 episodes to resolve her case. I hate for people to think we’re leading them on.”

See? Relax.

Frost would also like it known that the town “will be a gateway into the mystery” surrounding the Northwest community.

And as for the dream sequences, well, “One of the things we wanted to have from the beginning is that there’s a metaphysical side to the town.”

Metaphysics?

Singing cops?

What’s going on here?

Fun--and an attempted jail break by TV from the mental cell block in which it has imprisoned itself.