Has TV Lost Touch With Its Audience? : Commentary: The authors of the new book ‘Prime Time’ are deeply concerned with how the tube is changing the face of reality in the ‘90s.

“Ozzie doesn’t live here anymore.”

That line from a new book about the cultural impact of television is hardly news to viewers to whom Ozzie, Harriet, Rick and David Nelson came to symbolize a prime-time generation of fantasy innocence.

But the book, “Prime Time: How TV Portrays American Culture,” by S. Robert Lichter, Linda S. Lichter and Stanley Rothman, is noteworthy--above all, because it is yet another illustration of the growing national obsession with what those who control the home medium are doing to us and our values.

While such concerns might once have been the focus primarily of academics, critics and special-interest groups, viewers nowadays have become far more aware and outspoken about such matters as crime-heavy local newscasts; the scrounging for even trivial details of the O.J. Simpson case; the freak-show atmosphere of the daytime talk programs and the near-invisibility of such minorities as Latinos in prime time.

Not to mention the demeaning and cheapening effect of tabloid reality shows and newsmagazines and the in-your-face style of the new era of both comedy and drama.

So what else is new?

Well, the authors of “Prime Time,” like others before them, have come up with their own spin on the changing face of TV.

They speak of an “artificial world”--nothing new for TV--but they are deeply concerned with how prime-time TV is changing the face of reality in the ‘90s. One can argue that it is always a case of the chicken or the egg: Is television simply reflecting society’s changes, or is it causing them? A safe answer is that both elements are in play here.

But TV has always tried to have it both ways in assessing its influence. If anyone hollers about the questionable values of a network show, the answer is usually something like: “Hey, it’s only television.” If, however, a program has a major, positive impact, the network powers-that-be are quick to remind us of the huge influence of the home medium.

Huge, indeed. In one telling line, the authors of “Prime Time” note that, in general, television “doesn’t need to take on the Establishment these days. It just redefines it out of existence.”

Viewers are well-versed on the controversies over TV violence and sex, but somehow it all seems more relevant than in the past because of increased worries about crime, dysfunctional families and promiscuousness--all constantly paraded before us not only in news and reality shows, but entertainment as well.

“I feel like June Cleaver on acid,” the title character of “Murphy Brown” is quoted at the start of one chapter in “Prime Time,” referring to the fantasy mom of the old “Leave It to Beaver” television series.

And, in the quote opening the prologue of the book, we get this line from the father in “The Simpsons” series, Homer Simpson: “The answers to life’s problems aren’t at the bottom of a bottle. They’re on TV!”

God help us.

The authors duly note that “television entertainment’s tradition of social commentary extends back to the ‘golden age’ anthologies”--citing such dramas as Rod Serling’s “Patterns.” But, as they add, social commentary and advocacy in the days of TV’s earlier entertainment were far more occasional.

“Our thesis,” they write, “is that television once served as an agent of social control, but it became an agent of social change. The onetime servant of the status quo, it now fosters populist suspicions of traditional mores and institutions. A medium that originally helped legitimize authority today tries to demystify it.”

Well, this is not bad. In many ways, it represents some of the best of the American spirit. But then comes the zinger:

“Far from always following in the wake of popular tastes, the fictional world of prime time can be sharply at odds with public sentiment. More often, it tries to guide middle-American tastes in the direction of intellectual trends emanating from New York and Los Angeles.”

OK, New York and L.A. are indeed important trend-setters, and creators don’t necessarily have to reflect public sentiment. But increasingly, the networks, in part because of the New York-L.A. axis and the catering to the nation’s heavily populated urban centers, have too often seemed to dismiss the middle-American tastes that are sources of pride to many viewers.

In this sense, TV has almost certainly lost touch with much of the audience. CBS has been the prime exception here, and it proved the remaining hunger for such tastes when it came up with the surprise hit “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman.” And is it any wonder that television’s top entertainment series, “Home Improvement,” is about as mainstream as you can get?

But what makes “Prime Time” provocative is the fact that a show like “Roseanne”--not to mention “Married . . . With Children” and “Grace Under Fire”--scored tremendous success by saying, in effect, that there is a new mainstream out there, a new set of Middle-American tastes, a new attitude that really touches a nerve after the perfect family images of “Father Knows Best” and “The Cosby Show.”

“Escapism has given way to engagement,” write the authors of “Prime Time.” And “the world that survives” nowadays in prime time, they add, is “sarcastic, sometimes cynical, and apt to cast a jaundiced eye on the very standards and sensibilities the medium embraced so enthusiastically a mere generation ago.”

What has occurred in TV’s evolution, the book observes, is “a major change for what was once the most cautious of the entertainment media.”

In itself, the dismissal of caution is, in most cases, a plus. TV was frequently ridiculous in its earlier years when it often pussyfooted around touchy subjects, didn’t allow husbands and wives to sleep in the same bed and barred the word pregnant .

And surely no one can argue with such facts as TV’s modern representation of women as more independent figures than they once were. (One chapter is titled “From Lucy to Lacey.”)

In addition, TV blossomed for a while in the 1980s when the networks tackled important social issues such as abortion and incest in their films at a time when the movie industry all but abandoned heavyweight subjects.

So where is the real problem in the loss of caution?

It is not in the subjects, but partly in the nasty, edgy new tone of prime time, which may be unavoidable in an age of “attitude”--but nonetheless irritates and turns off many viewers.

It is also in the tasteless, vulgar approach of the tabloid shows, the talk programs and the newsmagazines--all of which add up to a dumbing down of programs to accommodate the audience that is left after many better-educated and more affluent viewers fled to new television alternatives such as cable and other burgeoning, interactive media.

There will always be room for a “Frasier” or an “NYPD Blue,” but the overall and continued dumbing down of programs on the major networks seems inevitable unless they are bought or merged and re-targeted.

Meanwhile, as “Prime Time” notes, “There are no more flying nuns, talking horses, or millionaire hillbillies. . . . Hip-hop has replaced the Huxtables, sex has moved from the bedroom to the kitchen table, and the battle of the sexes has heated up almost as much as the sex itself.”

But, as the authors say, “The real question is not what TV watchers believe but how their beliefs change from exposure to TV programs.”