Can Jones Put a Fire Under ‘Pros’? : Veteran Star Teams With Richard Crenna in a ‘New’ Show

Maybe James Earl Jones was just too good an actor. Or maybe the hot dog was. Together, they certainly faked out ABC.

“Sure we saw some of the problems in the premise of ‘Gabriel’s Fire’ at the start,” Ted Harbert, ABC’s executive vice president, said of last season’s ratings flop, which began with Jones’ character, Gabriel Bird, being released from prison and experiencing street life again for the first time in 20 years. “But we just fell in love with the pilot, the wonderful experience of a man being exonerated and the great scenes of him getting out in public and eating his first hot dog. You can’t help but love it.”

Beguiled by the pilot, ABC scheduled the series in a suicidal time period against “Cheers,” the most popular show on television, and “Beverly Hills, 90210,” probably last season’s hottest new show. Saddled with a flawed premise--which had Jones, the star, working for a hot-shot female lawyer who originated and finished off most of the story lines in court, based on the information Jones passed on to her--the show was headed for oblivion.

“We had these two separate worlds and we probably needed a novelist to conceive those relationships,” Jones said. “You never really got to understand who everyone was until we were deep into the season, and by then it was too late.”

But James Earl Jones, venerated star of stage and screen, the voice of Darth Vader and the man who intones the “This Is CNN” station ID on the cable network each hour, inspires great loyalty. Even before he won the Emmy for best actor in a dramatic series last month, ABC had decided to scrap “Gabriel’s Fire,” but not Gabriel Bird. They found him a partner in Richard Crenna, moved him from the urban blight of Chicago to the sunny suburbs of L.A., and scheduled his new show, “Pros & Cons,” even before it had a solid premise, much less a pilot episode.

The only thing they knew for sure: This show, which debuts at 8 tonight, would be lighter, if not downright funny.

“ ‘Gabriel’s Fire’ got awfully dark and intense and brooding, and that reduced the entertainment level quite a bit,” Harbert said.

“Our attempt to deal with very serious subject matter got very turgid, slow and therefore irrelevant,” Jones said, reflecting on his Emmy-winning season. “No matter how relevant the subject matter, the style made it not worth watching. That is another kind of drama, a story so rich it can withstand that style. That’s Chekhov. And if we can’t write Chekhov, we shouldn’t play it that way. So I went along with the idea to lighten things up.”

Leslie Moonves, president of Lorimar, which produced “Gabriel’s Fire,” said that despite much critical praise and the acting Emmys won by Jones and Madge Sinclair as best supporting actress in a dramatic series, he is “97% certain it would have been canceled. I don’t think we can be knocked for taking off a show that wasn’t working. You can argue about quality, but if no one is watching, what good is that?”

Foreseeing that demise, Lorimar went to Jones last spring and asked his opinion about revamping the show. They offered him a list of about 40 actors for the part of his private eye partner. Jones said that his eye immediately stuck on Crenna, with whom he starred in the TV movie “Last Flight Out.” “That’s who I’d want to work with,” Jones said he told Lorimar. “He could give the show some zip and pep and snap and crackle.”

But Crenna, veteran star of countless TV and film projects including “Our Miss Brooks,” “The Rape of Richard Beck” and the “Rambo” trilogy, said that the last thing he wanted to do was give up his Christmas in Acapulco and golf tournaments in England for the grueling schedule of an hourlong TV series.

“I found it flattering that they came to me, but I didn’t want to do it,” Crenna said. “It was James’ show, and I can do my own show if I want. But I am a huge fan of James Earl Jones and to me the most important part of acting now is working with people I like. And this character is somebody who allowed me the opportunity to do comedy, to show a different side to what I can do.

“I did have buyer’s remorse,” he acknowledged. “The first time I get a bad script, I’ll probably scream, ‘See, I shouldn’t have said yes.’ But I did.”

Not exactly. ABC wanted to bankroll only 13 episodes of the new show. Crenna said he would agree only if they would guarantee a full 22-week season. Moonves said the deal wasn’t concluded until a day before ABC announced its fall schedule last May. “They were calling saying, ‘do you have him? If you don’t, then we can’t put him on the schedule,” Moonves said.

Meanwhile, over at rival studio MGM, George Schenck and Frank Cardea, the producers of the 1984 private eye series “Crazy Like a Fox,” were working on two pilots for ABC--one starring Brian Keith and another with Angie Dickinson. The network didn’t pick up either and instead asked them to take over “Pros & Cons.”

The weekend before ABC was to announce the schedule, Schenck said, MGM executives suddenly began talking about teaming Dickinson and Keith in the same show. “Lorimar was trying to save “Gabriel’s Fire” with Richard Crenna,” Schenck recalled, “so MGM said, ‘we’ll counter your Crenna with Angie Dickinson.’ ”

ABC decided that a pair of Crenna and Jones beats a Dickinson and a Keith. And Lorimar, blessed with a rescued show but stuck without anyone to create and produce it, turned to the vanquished Schenck and Cardea because of their reputation for producing what Schenck calls “old-fart detective shows.”

“It’s a little bizarre that you make all these pilots, and then ABC buys this show sight unseen,” Schenck said. “(ABC President) Bob Iger believes that the remote control has become a killer of dramas and if people are bored, boom. The thinking was if you add humor to this show, the attention span might expand. Who knows? It’s a gamble.”

“But as writers of dramatic series, at least this is a dramatic show,” said Cardea. “Otherwise you might have seen some more reality shows in that time period.” CBS has just such a reality show, “Top Cops” in that time period. “Pros & Cons” will also compete with Fox’s “The Simpsons” and NBC’s “The Cosby Show,” and ABC and Lorimar hope to attract older, adult audiences looking for an alternative to those popular comedies.

Lorimar gave the producers the choice of what to save and what to scuttle from the old show. The only imperatives: Jones’ character would move to Los Angeles and team up with Crenna.

“The move to Los Angeles gives us the opportunity to do more upscale stories,” Schenck said. “Last year was all so down and ghettoish. When you think of ‘Murder, She Wrote’ and ‘Columbo,’ they are always going to mansions and things. That’s why (those shows) work. They’re not down and dirty and graffiti on the walls. That’s the stuff that scares audiences. They don’t want to be reminded of that.”

Madge Sinclair’s Empress Josephine was the only other character salvaged from the previous show. She will marry Bird in the third episode to serve as a counterpoint to Crenna’s divorced and free-wheeling bachelor.

Jones, who also won an Emmy last month for his role in the TV movie “Heat Wave,” said that the Emmys he and Sinclair earned simply validate the decision to save those two characters.

Still, the producers and stars acknowledge that they will have to overcome the perception that they’ve turned something serious and honorable into a mundane TV show. Schenck said that Crenna is constantly chiding them that “they have taken this critically acclaimed Mona Lisa and sillied it up.” And when discussing this problem, he frequently protests that “Pros & Cons” is no “Dukes of Hazard.”

“The critics will come down on the network and say, ‘Here was this wonderful show,’ even though it was fifth from the bottom in the ratings. ‘Why take it off and put on this piece of crap?’ ” Crenna said. “That’s the price we pay. If we had started out without any of those preconceptions, I’m confident that this would be considered a fresh new comedy.”

ABC’s Harbert acknowledged that such criticism is inevitable, especially directed at a network that canceled several of its most acclaimed dramas, including “thirtysomething” and “China Beach,” in favor of sitcoms and reality shows. But Harbert counters that the quality of these two actors insures an august and unpredictable program and outweighs any of the negative baggage they’ll have to carry.

“It’s relatively rare to do this. Usually, you decide something works or it doesn’t and move on,” Harbert said. “But in this day and age, given how hard it is to get viewers into your shows, it’s harder to sell an entirely new show than it is to sell a character they do know from a different format.”