TV Season Was Memorable for Its Failings

We pause now for a sober, intellectual treatise on the 1995-96 TV season: Yuck. Blegh. Phooey!

The season, which officially ended last Wednesday, saw the networks wallowing at the bottom of the creative barrel--one is tempted to say “like pigs in slop”--and proved even more dismal than cynical pessimists might have predicted.

Do you have any conscious memory of “Dweebs,” “Charlie Grace,” “The Home Court,” “Hudson Street,” “Too Something” or “The Pursuit of Happiness”? These bouncing bombs are not from some dimly remembered season of the distant past; all of them were among the 42 new network shows that premiered last fall.

No network successes this season were half so spectacular as the flops. CBS thought it would find salvation in “Central Park West,” a youth-aimed serialized drama from Darren Starr, creator of Fox’s “Melrose Place.” Surprise, surprise. The audience didn’t just stay away in droves, it stayed away in mega-droves.

“CPW” was yanked for alleged retooling but never resurfaced. Now CBS says it will air the remaining episodes this summer. America can hardly wait.

ABC apparently also thought viewers craved more cheesy soap operas, so it offered “The Monroes,” a “Dynasty”-like serial about a vaguely Kennedy-like political clan. The very first episode included a scene in which a naked man was locked out of his Senate office after having sex with a girlfriend on a conference table, plus a shot of the show’s heroine giving an obscene gesture to a hovering helicopter.

But even with tantalizing nifties like those, “The Monroes” quickly joined the Great Unwatched. The networks were flailing and failing.

The decline and fall of ABC’s “Murder One” is a much sadder case. Its pilot was the most critically praised of all the new shows, and it looked like ABC had another sophisticated winner from Steven Bochco, producer of “NYPD Blue.” This time Bochco and company intended to follow a single murder case over 23 episodes, with the audience theoretically watching as avidly as it watched the O.J. Simpson trial.

Choking on chutzpah, the network slotted “Murder One” opposite NBC’s powerhouse smash “ER.” That was murder, all right. The show took a merciless clobbering at “ER’s” mighty hands. Meanwhile, even viewers who stayed loyal to “Murder One” (many using their VCRs to tape it) got a shock. Instead of concentrating entirely on the main murder, subsequent episodes included irrelevant subplots involving other attorneys and other cases. The show began to look suspiciously like Bochco’s old “L.A. Law.”

By the time the series was moved to a new time slot and the subplots were jettisoned, it was too late. What had promised to be a riveting new national habit turned out to be just a slightly above-average drama series. Even so, its finale earned fairly good ratings, and ABC plans to bring it back in the fall--with a new leading man to replace Daniel Benzali.

Perhaps next season “Murder One” will turn out to be the breakthrough hit it was supposed to be this season.

Another disappointment, though a less traumatic one, was Mary Tyler Moore’s umpteenth attempt at a comeback, “New York News,” a drama series set at a newspaper.