Dramas Bite Back at Reality : Television: Five dramatic series are arriving from the companies of top-name producers. But can they recapture fans of the popular newsmagazines?

No TV form is a more endangered species than weekly drama series, but the success of “NYPD Blue” and “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman” has renewed hope for their viability.

Maybe it’s a pipe dream, yet the networks are suddenly engaged in a kind of tryout season for new dramas, which have been displaced in large numbers by sensational reality series that are far cheaper to produce.

Throw in the content problems for weekly dramas--the “family values” pressures highlighted by former Vice President Dan Quayle, the anti-violence drive supported by Congress and the Clinton Administration, and the more adult material permitted on cable--and fictional storytelling has been reeling.

While a handful of solid dramas has managed to survive--including “Northern Exposure,” “Picket Fences” and “Law & Order,” which was renewed this week for next season--the number is still few and the odds against newcomers remain long.

Thus, the fact that five series are suddenly arriving for a look-see from the companies of top-name producers--Steven Bochco, Aaron Spelling, Stephen J. Cannell, Barney Rosenzweig and the “St. Elsewhere” team of Bruce Paltrow and John Tinker--is at least a ray of hope.

Also tentatively scheduled to arrive around summer, says ABC, is the latest one-hour drama from “thirtysomething” creators Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, “My So-Called Life,” about a 15-year-old girl, her friends and family.

Nothing has been more devastating to network drama than the reality shows. This week alone, as examples of their fare, “Dateline NBC” interviewed killer Jeffrey Dahmer and ABC’s new “Turning Point” revisited the Manson case. There now are 10 prime-time reality series in the so-called newsmagazine category.

And yet . . . and yet. . . .

Along came CBS’ “Dr. Quinn” last season and the audience responded to its wholesomeness. And along came Bochco’s “NYPD Blue” this season, with the adult appeal to hold the cable audience for ABC. Both series ranked among the Top 20 shows in last week’s ratings.

“I think Bochco is helping us bring drama back because (“NYPD Blue”) is a hit,” says Cannell. “And ‘Quinn’ is in that category. And NBC hanging on to ‘Homicide’ and giving it another shot was important.”

Cannell has one of the new network dramas: “Traps,” which debuts on CBS March 31 with George C. Scott and Dan Cortese as grandfather/grandson homicide detectives.

Just last week, Bochco’s company launched the ABC drama “The Byrds of Paradise,” with Timothy Busfield as a professor who moves his family to Hawaii. Created by Charles H. Eglee and Channing Gibson, it is billed by ABC as a “family drama.”

Also last week, CBS introduced the Paltrow-Tinker drama “The Road Home,” with Karen Allen, Ed Flanders, Terence Knox, Frances Sternhagen and Alex McArthur in a tale about a family on the North Carolina coast.

Tonight, Spelling’s latest series, “Winnetka Road,” arrives on NBC, dealing with “the subculture of working people in a wealthy suburb of a Midwestern city” and starring such performers as Ed Begley Jr., Meg Tilly and Catherine Hicks. Created by John Byrum, it replaces “Sisters” in its six-episode tryout. (See review, F18.)

On April 3, meanwhile, Rosenzweig (“Cagney & Lacey”) and co-executive producer Ken Wales introduce the hour drama “Christy,” about “a spirited young woman who leaves her sheltered city life to teach at a missionary school in a remote Appalachian community.” The cast includes Kellie Martin, Tyne Daly--who won four best actress Emmy Awards in “Cagney & Lacey”--and Tess Harper.

Given the premise of “Christy,” Rosenzweig says the success of “Dr. Quinn,” which deals with a frontier woman physician, was an influential factor: “I called Jeff Sagansky (president of CBS Entertainment) and said, ‘Do you want to make more programs in this arena?’ And as a matter of fact there was this book, ‘Christy’ (by Catherine Marshall), that he wanted to do.”

Spelling, hopeful about the apparent renewed interest in drama, says: “I think we’re absolutely sated with comedies.” He currently has four network series--”Beverly Hills, 90210,” “Melrose Place,” “Winnetka Road” and a revival of “Burke’s Law”--and his recent HBO production of the late Randy Shilts’ landmark book on AIDS, “And the Band Played On,” will be rerun by NBC on March 28. Not on his agenda, he says, are reality series.

“We’ve been asked to do a couple, but we won’t do them,” he says. “The thing I hate most is that I think they’re more likely to be aped by people than fiction like ‘Columbo’ or ‘Starsky and Hutch.’ But they all get ratings, and that’s what scares me. We once did a show called ‘SWAT’ (a violent police drama), but I would never do ‘SWAT’ now.”

“NYPD Blue” is a sometimes violent, sexy but almost always literate and stylish series--and a network benchmark in competing, at least moderately, with the frankness of cable.

“Most viewers that (networks) have lost,” says Bochco, “have not deserted to watch half-hour comedies on cable. We’ve lost them to movies--and longer movies. One of my arguments about ‘NYPD Blue’ was that we have to compete. And clearly I was right. When you put on a drama that has the sound and the feel of movies, people come back.”

There is also often more truth about the human condition in a piece of good fiction than in the cold, cynical, soulless recitation of the awful deeds that comprise so much of reality series. Herskovitz, assessing the flood of depressing one-hour reality series, says succinctly: “You come away from those shows feeling worse than when you started.”

The trick now is for drama series to take the right pulse of public tastes in fiction amid the harsh reality shows of the 1990s. Cannell acknowledges the impact of pressures over the family-values and violence issues:

“This much I will tell you,” he says. “I started off saying to CBS about ‘Traps’ that I wanted this show to be not about criminals but about ideas. The first show is about the generation gap. The second is about changes in police work over the years and how it has been redefined since the Rodney King case. Another show is about sexism among police.”

For Herskovitz, “The problem is that we have not found a cheap way to tell a dramatic story well.” Saying there are tightened costs for sets and other physical outlays in storytelling, he adds: “When we did ‘thirtysomething,’ we would do something different each week. That free-form creativity is impossible today. You have to write the show in such a way that it is containable, which puts limitations on the style.”

Reality shows, of course, don’t have to worry about such fine points. Just grab somebody, point the camera--and down the tube we go.