TV Dramas: A Falloff This Fall

The attempted comeback of network TV drama series this season has thus far turned out to be a ratings flop.

In the new, hard-edged network world, drama series now trail not only sitcoms but also news and reality shows and the increasingly tabloid-style weekly movies that frequently seem ripped straight from the headlines.

Not a good sign in terms of civility. But the season-to-date TV ratings released this week tell the story in cold numbers:

Aside from “Murder, She Wrote,” a lighthearted mystery, and “Northern Exposure,” which is really a comedy, the highest-ranked genuine drama is “In the Heat of the Night,” which is No. 30 among 114 series presented by ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox this fall.

“L.A. Law” is 33rd, “Knots Landing” 37th, “Law & Order” 43rd, “Sisters” 49th, “The Commish” 53rd, “Going to Extremes” 56th, “Beverly Hills, 90210” 58th, “Quantum Leap” 68th, “Civil Wars” 69th and “Reasonable Doubts” 70th.

Heading farther downward, one finds “Life Goes On,” “Picket Fences,” “The Hat Squad,” “I’ll Fly Away,” “Melrose Place,” “The Heights” and a number of drama series already pulled from the network lineups: “Crossroads,” “Covington Cross,” “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles,” “The Round Table,” “Angel Street” and “Homefront,” which was yanked this week.

Now consider what’s selling in prime time:

Well, of course, there are the sitcoms, led by “Roseanne” and “Murphy Brown.” And, naturally, there’s always “60 Minutes.” But other news and reality series now entrenched in the Top 30 include “20/20,” “Unsolved Mysteries,” “Rescue 911,” “PrimeTime Live” and “48 Hours.”

And all five of the regular, two-hour movie series on ABC, CBS and NBC are also in the Top 30, clearly replacing such past hits as “L.A. Law” and “Dallas” as the favorite audience source of network drama.

Not all of the films on these movie nights are tabloid-style sensationalism. Miniseries such as “The Jacksons: An American Dream” and “Sinatra,” plus such entries as Katharine Hepburn’s “The Man Upstairs,” have helped leaven the mix.

But weekly drama series with continuing casts are another ballgame altogether--the kind of programming that entranced viewers over the years from “Gunsmoke” and “Bonanza” to “Hill Street Blues,” “Miami Vice” and “thirtysomething.”

The one-hour drama has long been perhaps TV’s prime source of storytelling art. And the networks, encouraged last season by the explosive success of such series as “Beverly Hills, 90210” and the tongue-in-cheek “Northern Exposure,” brought the one-hour story form back in a big way this fall with nearly 30 dramas, 13 of them new.

This season had better possibilities for new drama efforts, the networks hoped. To start with, “Beverly Hills, 90210” provided a sure-fire formula to cash in on the teen-age and twentysomething set--right? Wrong. The show’s producer, Aaron Spelling, had three new series full of other lithe, young “hard-bodies”--”Melrose Place,” “The Heights” and “The Round Table.” But they went nowhere.

Other hopes were dashed. The summer’s Emmy nominations had been a huge triumph for “Northern Exposure” and “I’ll Fly Away,” both created by Joshua Brand and John Falsey--and now the producers would also have another intriguing series this season, “Going to Extremes.”

But “Going to Extremes,” about medical students attending school on a Caribbean island, didn’t seem to catch the public’s fancy. And “I’ll Fly Away,” a brilliant series set in the South at the start of the civil rights movement in the 1950s, was bounced around by NBC, buried at 10 p.m. Fridays and will be hard put to survive beyond early February.

At the moment, however, there are larger questions about the future of drama series. With news and reality shows winning viewers and costing far less to produce, it’s tempting for the financially pressed networks to favor them as one-hour projects.

In terms of creativity, it’s tough for soft dramas such as “I’ll Fly Away,” “Life Goes On” and “The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles” to compete in the era of hyped-up, in-your-face reality series and increasingly hard-hitting, exploitation-type TV movies based on true stories.

Is network drama at a turning point, or is it just that most of the shows are mediocre? And how much are the networks committed to keeping alive the TV form that, at its best, brought them so much distinction?

A show like “Law & Order” would hold its own in any era because of its intelligence and dramatic force. But it takes time, patience and money--all three of which the networks are short on these days--to nurture borderline cases like “I’ll Fly Away” and “Homefront” rather than to schedule them erratically and hope for the best.

“Homefront,” about GIs returning home from World War II, had real potential and needed careful nurturing by ABC. When it was put “on hiatus” after Thursday’s episode--a move that usually signals last rites for a series--the show’s co-creator, Lynn Marie Latham, was stunned. Being dropped “came completely out of left field,” she said. “We were told we’d have a straight run in January and February. This was a complete shock.”

At the moment, only NBC, almost barren of hits and looking to cling to some kind of distinction, seems committed to drama series, despite its questionable handling of “I’ll Fly Away.”

Just how long NBC will hang on to such dramas as “Reasonable Doubts” and “Quantum Leap” is also questionable. Meanwhile, however, it will launch Barry Levinson’s “Homicide” series after the Super Bowl on Jan. 31 and is also planning debuts soon for a remake of “Route 66” and two new dramas from “Law & Order” producer Dick Wolf.

Fox is also still pumping out dramas--with two more new ones, “Key West” and “Class of ‘96,” due Jan. 19. ABC, after dumping “Homefront,” will bring back Andy Griffith’s “Matlock” series as a weekly show Jan. 14, following two successful TV-movie versions of the series.

Top-rated CBS, with “Northern Exposure,” “Murder, She Wrote” and “In the Heat of the Night,” doesn’t really seem interested in adding more heavy-duty dramas of the kind that the network was once known for: “Lou Grant,” “Cagney & Lacey” and “The Defenders.” The next new CBS drama, “Dr. Quinn: Medicine Woman,” stars Jane Seymour in a frontier story and is a leftover from the original fall lineup, from which it was dropped.

Drama series are the true grit of weekly TV entertainment, the place where characters can really get close to you. Most sitcoms can’t offer that. And reality shows are, to this viewer, curiously impersonal jolts, hard and tough and without soul. There is often more truth in fiction than in fact, and drama is where it’s at.