Coppola to Produce Plays for CBS

Francis Ford Coppola will produce live, one-hour dramatic plays for CBS starting next spring, and CBS has signed the original cast of the smash Western miniseries “Lonesome Dove” to star in a 1992 sequel, CBS Entertainment President Jeff Sagansky said Thursday.

The live dramatic telecasts, reminiscent of the old “Playhouse 90” productions, will feature mostly non-television actors, writers and directors in original works. Coppola will direct the first telecast for March or April, 1992, Sagansky told TV critics at their annual summer press tour here.

CBS also has scheduled the late Michael Landon’s final project, the two-hour movie “Us,” which was being developed as a series, to air sometime during the first week of the fall TV season in September. Landon, who believed that a return to family programming was an emerging trend in television, stars as a just-released convict trying to get back in touch with his family.

Also, based on the critical and ratings success last season of specials about “All in the Family,” “The Ed Sullivan Show” and “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” Sagansky said that in November CBS will bring back two more old series, “MASH” and the Bob Newhart show, and more clips from “The Ed Sullivan Show.”

In contrast to ABC and NBC, CBS will be relying more heavily this fall on one-hour dramas to drive its schedule, with the new Stephen J. Cannell series “Palace Guard” and the romantic comedy “P.S. I Luv U” joining such veterans as “Murder, She Wrote,” “The Trials of Rosie O’Neill” and “Northern Exposure.”

Sagansky denied an earlier suggestion of Robert Iger, his counterpart at ABC, that remote controls are responsible for the decline of dramas. The problem, he said, is that “all three networks are guilty of putting on the same dramas over and over, social dramas aimed at 18-to-49-year-old audiences exclusively.”