Spanning Networks’ Troubled Waters : ‘It’s Time for Me to Turn Away From Network TV,’ Says ‘Brooklyn Bridge’ Creator

I remember the call well. A CBS publicist was phoning from New York. “Are we all crazy, or is this show as wonderful as we think it is?” she asked.

Yes, it was. It was the premiere last year of the gentle comedy series “Brooklyn Bridge,” about a Jewish family in Brooklyn in the late 1950s.

The creator was Gary David Goldberg, who had given NBC one of its biggest hits ever, “Family Ties.” And now CBS felt he had brought magic to its network with his fond remembrances of growing up.

Creatively, there was no doubt about the very special tone of “Brooklyn Bridge” in the episodes that followed.

To some admirers, the only drawback--and perhaps it eventually was fatal--was that the 30-minute series should have been an hour each week, like the premiere, allowing the richly flavored characters to blossom fully rather than being compressed in the standard sitcom length.

No matter. CBS loved the show. Surveys showed that the ethnic flavor played well in the heartland. True, ratings generally were mediocre and the series was bounced around the schedule. But CBS pledged allegiance to “Brooklyn Bridge” and brought it back this fall.

Suddenly, however, the honeymoon with the show is over. And this week the breakup went increasingly public.

Goldberg, dismayed after CBS yanked the series, said that the show had, in effect, been canceled, and the network retorted that it hadn’t.

Peter Tortorici, executive vice president of CBS Entertainment, said the remaining seven episodes would be run later this season and that improved ratings could bring “Brooklyn Bridge” back in the fall of 1993.

Miracles theoretically can happen. And the grass-roots organization Viewers for Quality Television is mounting a campaign to resurrect the series. A CBS spokeswoman said Friday that the show’s cast is on hold until June, but Goldberg contended that that was “standard.” Tortorici responded that if the series had truly been canceled, the cast would have been contractually released.

Goldberg, however, said that CBS’ promise to try to revive the series by finding a proper companion show is “jargon, it’s meaningless. They’ve made their decision. Everyone knows what that means.” He thinks CBS executives believe what they’re saying but that “they’ll bail out” at “the first bump in the road.”

Well, those are the outer differences between Goldberg and CBS--along with the creator’s further dismay at the scheduling of “Brooklyn Bridge” this season on Saturdays, the network’s weakest lineup and TV’s lowest viewing night.

But more significant is Goldberg’s indictment of current programming practices--a dissatisfaction that goes beyond the dropping of his series to the shaky state of traditional TV.

Sure, he admits, the lure of TV will always be there, but “I believe it’s time for me to turn away from network television. More than ever, there is really no commitment to television programs. Those little (program) squares that (network executives) play with is the filler between the real business--the commercials.

“That’s what’s really on TV. In between these commercials are the programs, and if they interfere with these commercials, they will be gone. The fact that you have a show that is good is incidental. There is nobody saying, ‘This is a good show. It’s going to take time to let it build.’ They’re competing against each other for short-term victories.”

Hard-nosed commercialism is hardly new in TV. But Goldberg, whose “Family Ties” was one of those shows that was allowed to blossom, adds: “You had a larger (network) audience and there was more opportunity for noblesse--for a Grant Tinker to say, ‘That show is staying on,’ as he did with ‘St. Elsewhere.’

“There was more of a sense of obligation to the public to present a wider range of programming opportunities. People like (the late CBS Chairman William) Paley would say: ‘That’s a CBS show. That show will stay.’ But the three networks did not come from God. The numbers 2, 4 and 7 are just numbers now. They’re irrelevant. The networks have isolated a large number of people they’ll probably never get back.”

It is, indeed, tougher financially in the new world of TV alternatives to stick with promising shows in the hope that they build audiences. And the process grinds increasingly harder on fragile series such as “Brooklyn Bridge” and NBC’s distinguished drama “I’ll Fly Away,” which is also reported hanging by a thread.

“This is a different network universe, and I don’t have to be part of it,” Goldberg says. “I’m not the only one who feels this way. The networks have become the Big Three automakers. They’re adding chrome and fins. The creative stuff is coming from other places. I’d love to work with HBO and A&E; (the Arts & Entertainment channel).”

For “Brooklyn Bridge” fans, that notion may also raise the hope that the series--like “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd”--could be revived on a cable network such as Lifetime if it returns to CBS and fails to increase its audience. Lifetime targets women viewers, and the show’s family focus, with an appealing matriarch (Marion Ross), is a natural for the channel.

“The only way to go back into (network) TV is with time-slot approval,” Goldberg says. “I don’t think anyone should go in without knowing where they’re on--and the assurance that a series will air so many times without being moved.”

That, of course, would undermine the traditional system in which the networks have the last word in program placement--unless a top star, studio or producer is having such huge success on the network that they have the clout to demand a slot.

“Yes,” Goldberg says, “but it has to be undermined. They (the networks) are going away anyway. There’s not going to be three of them five years from now in the same form. They’ve pushed out audiences.

“I remember TV when it was something that would bring us together. Now it’s ‘let’s segment 18- and 19-year-olds and get them.’ We have breakdowns of (prime-time series) demographics and find out that we don’t do well with 4-year-olds. I accept that. I think I can give up writing for 4-year-olds.

“At this point, the networks have become tabloids, whereas at one point they were full newspapers. They just keep escalating in crassness.”

As for the fuss over “Brooklyn Bridge,” CBS’ Tortorici says: “If we have to be the heavy to get people to watch it, it’s a role we’ll gladly accept. There’s nothing that would give me greater pleasure than to see it succeed. We don’t disagree with the point that on Saturday nights, it was hanging out there by itself.”

Says Goldberg: “Creatively, we were granted a marvelous degree of autonomy. But the real test of how (networks) feel about their product is: Where do you put it? You don’t put your best product on the back of the shelf.”