Viewers Flock to Premieres, but Will They Come Back?

Great expectations? Or the annual cynical interest in the new TV season?

What else can explain why viewers, disappointed time and again, tune in the networks to check them out once more as each fall season begins?

Consider this week. Just about everyone in TV knew that the “Murphy Brown” pregnancy story and the revamped cast of “Designing Women” would kick off the official 1991-92 ratings competition in a big way.

Which they did on Monday, the season’s opening night.

But the huge audience that the embattled networks drew on that night delivered a more important message:

For whatever reason, the viewers indeed are out there, waiting to be entertained by the right shows and able to prolong the life of the networks--in one form or another--even though many regard them as dying dinosaurs in the age of cable and VCRs.

The name of the game is still hits, not cost-cutting.

While tune-in fluctuated throughout the week, opening night saw 79% of the nation’s viewers tuning to CBS, ABC, NBC and the smaller Fox network, well above their usual total. CBS, ABC and NBC, for instance, averaged only 60% of the audience in the 52-week, 1990-91 season that just ended.

What’s more, the 9-10 p.m. hour that included “Murphy Brown” raised the networks’ audience share to 81%.

But don’t haul out the theme to “Rocky” just yet.

Not every night was a winner, and there were some sizable tune-ins during premiere week in 1990 too--higher, in fact, than this year on some evenings.

The hard truth is that there won’t be any miracles at the Big Three networks that will transform them into the powers they used to be. But what is fascinating is how, like most people in trouble, they are returning to the formulas that once helped them succeed, hoping they work again this season.

ABC, which won its first ratings championships in the late 1970s behind such sitcoms as “Laverne & Shirley,” “Happy Days” and “Three’s Company”--aimed at young, urban families--is loaded with comedies targeted at the same audience.

CBS, the most sharply programmed network last season, continues to seek the mainstream programming balance of its triumphant years. There is, for instance, the social-oriented comedy of “Murphy Brown,” in the tradition of “Maude.”

And there are lightweight new CBS dramas such as “Palace Guard” and “P.S.I. Luv U”--old-fashioned action-adventure shows, although much lower on star power than the network’s successes with “Barnaby Jones” (Buddy Ebsen), “Hawaii Five-O” (Jack Lord), “Magnum, P.I.” (Tom Selleck) and “Murder, She Wrote” (Angela Lansbury).

Like the CBS of old, with its high-toned hours such as “Lou Grant,” “Cagney & Lacey” and “The Defenders,” there are the stylish recent entries “Northern Exposure” and “The Trials of Rosie O’Neill.” Comedy, once CBS’ strong suit, is attempting a comeback on the network. And even Carol Burnett, a onetime CBS variety-show fixture, is returning to the schedule.

NBC seems less well-defined this season. But the network of “Hill Street Blues,” “St. Elsewhere” and “L.A. Law,” while also playing the comedy game, remains faithful to serious drama with such new shows as “I’ll Fly Away,” a weekly, one-hour family saga set against the civil rights movement of the 1950s.

“They used to say comedy is dead until ‘The Cosby Show’ came along. Now people are saying drama is dead, and I think it’s exactly the right time to have a hit with drama,” says NBC Entertainment President Warren Littlefield.

In NBC’s case, many of the series that gave the network its greatest years--”The Cosby Show,” “Cheers,” “The Golden Girls,” “Empty Nest” and “L.A. Law”--are still on the schedule. And the network has had a tough time for several years in matching their success and living up to their tradition.

With all of the Big Three going strong on sitcoms and sticking to the mainstream, it is clear, as has been noted elsewhere, that the networks are programming this season for the public--and innovation and experimental series such as the canceled “Twin Peaks” and “Cop Rock” are out.

It is, in short, a Populist TV season in the extreme.

The intelligentsia--those of them who are still watching network TV--will have to find their satisfaction in well-executed, traditional series that at least have been liberated in subject matter and language, despite frequent excesses and tastelessness.

Fox TV, which is only five years old and thus has no real tradition to draw upon, is the one network that has no interest this season in the tried and true, the mainstream, the reworking of old formulas. In fact, it is at its worst when it forgets itself and begins to look like the Big Three.

But, like ABC, CBS and NBC, Fox is also heavy on comedy this fall. And with the promising ensemble sitcom “Roc,” about a garbage man, joining such established winners as “The Simpsons,” “Married . . . With Children,” “Beverly Hills, 90210” and “In Living Color,” the young network now is suddenly a real player, a force of its own that is making itself up as it goes along.

As the Big Three return to their roots, no network is doing more of a sudden turnabout than ABC. In the 1980s, ABC’s unique identity came from blockbuster miniseries such as “The Winds of War” and high-powered TV movies, including “The Day After.”

Then, in the last few years, ABC became the standard of risky but exciting network drama with “thirtysomething,” “China Beach,” “Twin Peaks,” “Equal Justice” and “Cop Rock.” All are gone now. With ABC just as cost conscious as its competitors and no longer venturing into expensive miniseries or dramas, the danger is that the network will revert to its more simple-minded years.

Not so, says ABC Entertainment President Robert Iger:

“I would love to be wildly creative, but this is also a business. What we’ve tried to do this year is revitalize the foundation of our schedule, which is comedy--and once that is achieved, we’ll go back to drama. We felt our comedy foundation (including ‘Who’s the Boss?’ and ‘Growing Pains’) was aging.

“If you’re in my shoes and you know you’re canceling in one fell swoop ‘thirtysomething,’ ‘China Beach,’ ‘Twin Peaks’ and ‘Equal Justice,’ the first thing you want to do is find a high quality, cutting-edge drama.”

But this season, Populism rules.