Letter Campaigns Fail to Save Shows

TV or not TV . . .

NO SOAP: Viewers who thought TV might heed their pleas are apt to be more cynical after the last week.

Write-in campaigns for “Life Goes On,” “Homefront,” “I’ll Fly Away” and “Quantum Leap” all failed as the shows were dumped from the fall lineups announced by ABC and NBC.

Occasionally, a write-in campaign helps--as it did with CBS’ “Cagney & Lacey.”

But that was a decade ago, and so-called soft shows are having a tougher time in the era of hard-edged newsmagazines and reality series.

“Life Goes On,” with Chris Burke as a young man with Down’s syndrome, ends Sunday. It’s actually had a pretty decent run of four seasons. Together with another canceled series, “Reasonable Doubts,” which starred Marlee Matlin as a hearing-impaired assistant district attorney, it broke down barriers in TV’s treatment of the disabled.

Still, “Life Goes On” had plenty more to offer, as indicated by its recent multipart AIDS story. And it did comparatively well against the CBS ratings monster “60 Minutes.”

LONG AGO AND FAR AWAY: Fox TV’s 25th anniversary special about the historic year 1968--in which the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated--didn’t interest the network’s youthful audience. Only 4% of viewers tuned in the hour last week. Scary.

PICKUP: Aaron Spelling called to say that Fox has renewed “Melrose Place.”

IN THE WINGS: NBC’s hurry-up docudrama about the Waco, Tex., cult airs Sunday, with Tim Daly as David Koresh. Title: “In the Line of Duty: Ambush in Waco.”

DANCING IN THE DARK: It’ll be exquisite torture to watch “Twin Peaks” again soon when Bravo cable reruns all 30 episodes. But once is enough for the disappointing “Wild Palms,” which continues tonight and ends Wednesday.

Although the two shows have been regarded as similar by some because of their off-the-wall stories and styles, “Twin Peaks” was mesmerizing by comparison, even as it circled around aimlessly in later episodes, like a long, long shaggy dog story--which it was.

MOVING ON: You don’t see Walter Cronkite much anymore on CBS, the network he helped build. Instead, his new quarterly series debuts on cable’s Discovery Channel May 28. It’s an hour titled “The Cronkite Report: Help Unwanted,” and it deals with “the growing problem of permanent unemployment as well as ‘underemployment.’ ”

ARTS AND CRAFTS: There’s this thing called line-dancing, a country-music contribution. And in an infomercial we saw, a woman says, “I bought the tape on Wednesday, and by Thursday I was out dancing.” What took her so long? It ain’t calculus.

TANDEM: It was just a coincidence but that was quite an entertainment blast Friday--Bob Hope’s three-hour, 90th birthday special on NBC followed immediately by Arsenio Hall’s 1,000th program on KCOP-TV Channel 13. Among the show-stoppers: Hope’s wife, Dolores, with a pretty fabulous rendition of “Paper Moon.”

TAKING STOCK: A syndication expert says that “Roseanne,” still flying high in its fifth season, will probably earn about $300 million in rerun sales if it lasts just eight years, which at this point seems highly likely.

Pairing “Roseanne” with “Coach” this fall makes ratings sense for ABC. They did well together before. According to ABC, 10 series have followed “Rose-anne” since its 1988 debut: “Moonlighting,” “Anything but Love,” “Have Faith,” “Coach,” “Chicken Soup,” “Brewster Place,” “The Jackie Thomas Show,” “Stat,” “Room for Two” and “Delta.”

ON THE EDGE: We saw the pilot of CBS’ “South Central,” and it tries to walk a fine line as a dramedy. But as a comedy incorporating drama it faces endless land mines and charges of insensitive exploitation because of its geographical setting in the wake of last year’s riots and the cases of Rodney G. King and Reginald O. Denny.

The irony is that it is a show with promise and could easily eliminate exploitation charges by doing away with the specific South-Central locale--and title--and going for a generic, unnamed urban setting. It’s not the Los Angeles neighborhood that makes the pilot, but the family characters and story, and there are relatively few references to the locale anyway. It could be a lot of cities.

Best of all, of course, would be if the series went the whole distance to straight-up drama--there’s always human comedy anyway--and broke network barriers to serious portrayals of contemporary black family life.

THE LATE SHOW: Jay Leno, who comes from Massachusetts, should feel right at home when his “Tonight Show” following the finale of “Cheers” on Thursday originates in the Boston bar after which the sitcom’s setting was modeled.

Tonight and Wednesday night, meanwhile, “Cheers” creators James Burrows, Glen Charles and Les Charles will be the guests on NBC’s “Later With Bob Costas,” which follows the David Letterman show.

BEING THERE: “If you take your wife on a sea voyage, buy her a round-trip ticket no matter what your plans may be.”--Alfred Hitchcock in “Alfred Hitchcock Presents.”

Say good night, Gracie . . .