Fall Season Is Off and Stumbling : Wait Just a Minute, Did We See the Same Show?

Mail call on the new season. . . .

Read your little snide snipe at “Space: Above and Beyond” and its politically correct rainbow coalition cast. I couldn’t believe that bothered you and these all-white ensemble comedies and all-white ensemble dramas don’t. Watch the opening title montages of these shows and you go snow blind. Yet a show that has some color among its regulars provokes merriment from you.

While watching “Murder One” last night I realized how TV may have warped you into thinking that just the mere presence of people of color equals political correctness. A real L.A. murder trial has many people of color as principals. The TV equivalent is whites only.

The O.J. trial has been so multicultural in real life that I know it would have been mocked by every TV critic in every town as being a prisoner of political correctness had it been fictional. African American attorneys on both sides? A female prosecutor? An Asian judge? Experts of every race, creed and color, some of them at the very top of their fields? Yet that is real life. It’s only in fiction and in casually racist minds that the world (and all the important people in it) is white.

Funny, I got color TV years ago; I wish the art would catch up to the technology.

KEN NARASAKI

Santa Monica

I disagree with your opinion of “Can’t Hurry Love.” You complained that Nancy McKeon’s character described a sex triangle between two pigeons named Bill and Hillary and a blue jay. You complained that this show will be run at 8:30 p.m.

I guess your family values are that all television channels should only show programming that appeals to young children. Perhaps you think that when a child turns 13 years old, his or her family should discard the family’s own television set, along with his old baby basinet and his old children’s toys. Or perhaps you would like PBS to show a nature documentary about the stork, along with the statement, “When a couple wants to have a child, they ask the stork to deliver one to their front door.”

Why don’t you ask the MTA and other local transit organizations how early in the morning most of their business commuters go to work--and also how early in the morning many of their own employees must report to work? Why don’t you ask your co-workers who deliver The Times or who process delivery complaints what time they go to work? Why don’t you ask some of the people who are trying to help children by working at schools and day-care centers how early they must get to work?

Perhaps some of these people would like to have a chance to see a television program that appeals to viewers who are older than 10.

DOMINICK FALZONE

Venice

That you didn’t care for my pilot “Dweebs” is not the reason for this note. We clearly have differing tastes (you panned my last pilot, “Cafe Americain,” and find in “The Bonnie Hunt Show” virtues that elude me).

Misidentifying Peter Scolari’s character as Walter, rather than Warren, isn’t the reason either, though it’s unsettling, as the character is referred to by name a good half-dozen times during the course of the show, far more often than any other character. It does call into question how closely you could have been watching.

Rather it is your characterization of Carey’s (the main female character) joke about Windows (“I don’t do windows”). You describe her replying “earnestly,” which makes her and, the real point, myself sound like morons. It couldn’t be clearer the way the other characters in the scene react that she is making a deliberate, self-conscious, lame joke. It couldn’t be less “earnest.”

This sort of distinction may seem trivial to you, but to me it is the equivalent of being misquoted. To utterly misrepresent a line reading, and then beat me up for it, is either infuriatingly stupid, sloppy or dishonest.

If you’re going to sit in judgment, next time please show me the courtesy of both paying attention and playing fair.

PETER NOAH

Executive Producer

So “The Naked Truth” is one of the best new shows? Did you miss, perhaps, the opening segment? Did you miss the fact that the lead character, about which you are so rhapsodic, throws out the pejorative term “homo”? In what way is this funny?

Hundreds of gay men and lesbians are physically and verbally bashed every day, and it is just this kind of language that promotes prejudice against my community. Shame on ABC. Shame on Tea Leoni for agreeing to the dialogue. And shame on Howard Rosenberg.

TERRY HOUSE

West Hollywood

Perhaps the most interesting fact about your review of the new season on “Saturday Night Live” was, aside from the individual critiques, this same review would have applied to at least the last three years. Maybe they should rename it “Saturday Night in Toledo.”

It seems, certainly since the last group of cast members, the show has forgotten its satirical roots. This is especially odd considering that there is so much to spoof and satirize; so many bigger-than-life figures in politics and entertainment, so much on television.

MICHAEL D. SOLOMON

Los Angeles

Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t the newspaper business a part of the media? You write about the television coverage of the O.J. Simpson verdict as the “them” of the business. If this case couldn’t attract millions of viewers, there wouldn’t be this kind of coverage, nor would it totally dominate the front section of the Los Angeles Times.

However, it has, and it does. Television needs viewers, and newspapers need readers. Your own article appears nine pages into Section A. What does that tell you? Quit being a hypocrite and pointing your finger at others when you yourself are just as guilty. You may not be shoving a microphone into somebody’s face, but you are shoving a newspaper onto doorsteps. So either stand up and convince your editor or sit down and shut the hell up.

EDWARD C. STEINHAUS

Westminster