CBS Puts Accent on Comedy at Preview of Possible Fall Series

CBS on Tuesday presented a group of national advertisers with a slate of 25 television series that are being considered for next fall, relying heavily on such TV star power as Harry Anderson, John Amos, Kate Jackson, Robert Urich and Dennis Weaver, along with feature film players Faye Dunaway, Beau Bridges and James Coburn.

Although no pilot episodes have been shot yet, and decisions about which ones to buy won’t be made until May, network executives made a presentation at CBS Studios to receive feedback from the network’s most important audience: the advertisers, who pay the bills.

CBS’ heaviest development was in the area of comedies. Among those under consideration:

* Former “Night Court” star Anderson was wooed out of retirement in the Great Northwest for a comedy series based on the syndicated columns of Dave Barry.

* Dunaway has teamed up with series veteran Urich for “It Had to Be You.” “I’ve long looked for something exciting to do on television,” Dunaway told advertisers on a satellite hookup. She plays a high-power executive who falls madly in love with a simple blue-collar carpenter with three boys.

* If “704 Hauser Street” sounds familiar, it’s because that’s the address where Archie Bunker used to live in Queens. Now, “All in the Family” creator Norman Lear wants to move a new family in, the African-American Cumberpatches, headed by a black bigot played by Amos.

* Fran Drescher, the actress who speaks with an overplayed Queens accent, hopes to become “The Nanny” for an uptown family. The series is “like ‘Mary Poppins,’ but instead of Julie Andrews, I’m at the door,” Drescher whined.

Other comedy pilots include an “Evening Shade” spinoff, “It’s Never Too Late,” starring Charles Durning and Ann Wedgeworth; a sitcom with Nicollette Sheridan playing a superhero on TV who can’t get her personal life together, and “Tall Hope,” starring George Wallace as the father of two sons who aspire to be the next Spike Lee and Shaquille O’Neal, respectively.

In the drama department, CBS is looking at “Shenandoah,” a sweeping Civil War drama about two Southern families; Kate Jackson in the mystery drama “Arly Hanks,” and a project starring former “21 Jump Street” heartthrob Richard Grieco as a bartender. In “Greyhounds,” from action creator Stephen Cannell, Dennis Weaver, Robert Guillaume, Pat Morita and James Coburn hook up as crime-fighting consultants.

“South of the Sunset” stars the former lead singer of the rock group the Eagles, Glenn Frey, in a private-eye drama described by Frey as a “jaundiced view of Hotel California.” In the Western “Harts of the West,” Beau Bridges plays alongside his father, Lloyd, in a drama about some city slickers who open a dude ranch in Nevada.