Tarses Returns to New Days, Night on TV With ‘Morals’

A few years ago, Jay Tarses--disenchanted by what he deemed shoddy treatment of his latest TV series--threatened to chuck it all. He’d written an off-Broadway play, “Man in His Underwear,” and joked about buying into a baseball team and retiring to Idaho.

So what brought this producer of acclaimed but short-lived shows such as “The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd” and “Buffalo Bill” back to do “Public Morals”--a new comedy whose hype has stemmed mostly from using a term CBS ultimately deemed too offensive for broadcast?

“I decided to give television another chance. I think it’s very magnanimous of me,” Tarses deadpanned in his office at the CBS Studio Center, where the show is produced. “And, you know, you have these bills, and these residences. . . .”

To many producers, Tarses’ iconoclasm and battles with networks--coupled with the memorable programs he produced--have made him almost a cult figure. To younger members of the TV community, meanwhile, he’s probably better known as Jamie Tarses’ dad, especially after his 32-year-old daughter was named president of ABC Entertainment in June.

At 57, friends say Tarses’ reputation as an artist who doesn’t suffer network intervention gladly has cost him.

“Of course he’s paid a price for it,” said Bernie Brillstein, the manager and producer who handled Tarses for 25 years before they split in 1994. “Sometimes this is not a business of great visionaries, [and] he’s not the most politic guy in the world.

“He’s irascible and all those things you’ve heard, but all he cares about is doing better work. If every so-called show runner was like Jay Tarses, there would be a lot better shows.”

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Tarses’ brief exile followed “Smoldering Lust,” a 1993 comedy starring Kate Capshaw that NBC shelved for months, retitled “Black-Tie Affair” and then scheduled at 10 p.m. Saturdays in the summer--an obvious move to cut losses and dump the project.

At the time, Tarses said the network “not only violated my creative rights but has driven a stake into the heart of this show.” He called the time slot “pathetic . . . like giving us Sunday afternoon at 3:30.”

Tarses insists his reputation is overstated but concedes he harbors some grudges. He said he has no desire, for example, to work for NBC again under current management and has little nice to say about Dabney Coleman, who starred in two of his shows, “Buffalo Bill” and “The ‘Slap’ Maxwell Story.”

He also freely admits to his lack of commercial success. Indeed, Tarses had a knack for crafting critically lauded series that didn’t win big ratings, perhaps the foremost being “Molly Dodd,” which eventually shifted from NBC to the Lifetime cable network.

The genre was dubbed “dramedy”--half-hour programs mixing comedy and drama. According to Tarses, they were “not cookie-cutter type shows that would have caught on. Whatever that was, I was a part of that. . . . I was having a good time, and I thought it was interesting work.”

From that standpoint, “Public Morals” represents a departure, a conventional four-camera comedy shot before a studio audience.

Tarses has made clear he’s doing the show by virtue of a chance encounter with producer Steven Bochco. Running into him on the 20th Century Fox lot “coming back from some stupid meeting,” Tarses told Bochco that his police drama “NYPD Blue” is “the best show that’s ever been on television.”

Bochco suggested they team up, developing his premise to do a comedy about the New York vice squad euphemistically called “public morals.” The two drafted an outline together, then Tarses wrote the show.

“I had always been a great admirer of his work,” Bochco said. “I think he’s one of the most genuinely original guys working in television.”

Tarses hadn’t done a show taped in front of an audience since “The Tony Randall Show” in the late 1970s and admits he’d rather use one camera or at least do without an audience. (He frets dryly that some audience members seem like “people in the witness-protection program.”)

Still, the only real negative he can cite thus far on “Morals” stemmed from the press response he and Bochco encountered in July--most of the furor surrounding an alliterative nickname for the vice squad using a crude term for female anatomy.

CBS debated whether to include the line before ultimately opting not to air the episode at all, instead beginning with the second installment.

“I was surprised by that particular reaction. I was distressed by all that stuff,” Tarses said.

“I just didn’t feel it would cause all the flap that it caused. It wasn’t my term. I didn’t originate it, I didn’t invent it. That’s what the cops [who work in the vice squad] call it.”

Critics also took issue with frequent use of the word “whore,” which Tarses found even more baffling.

“[The show] deals with gambling and vice,” he said. “That’s why it sold in the first place, I thought. We try to soft-pedal it as much as we can, but it’s still in there. I mean, you hear the word ‘stat’ in ‘ER’ 75 times an episode because it’s a hospital show. You hear ‘whore’ in this show because they deal with whores.”

Tarses has found collaborating with Bochco (no stranger to wrestling matches over such issues) a comfortable process. “We try very hard to protect our writers and fight their battles for them, which frees them to produce their show,” Bochco said.

During their association, Brillstein similarly tried to insolate Tarses from such considerations. Tarses--who maintains he has never concerned himself with ratings, only the programs--noted: “Bernie kept them away from me, and Steven has done that too.”

The producers have nearly completed production on 13 episodes of “Public Morals,” with the premiere delayed by presidential debates and baseball playoffs. As a result, CBS must decide quickly whether to continue.

Tarses hopes it will. “Public Morals” has been fun to do, he said--partly because it’s allowed him to work with his son Matt, a writer on the show. His other daughter, Mallory, is a teacher.

Then there’s Jamie, whose career path he jokingly refers to as “an aberration.” Although he didn’t deal with her directly during her tenure as a development executive at NBC--which overlapped his struggles with the network--both have acknowledged that the situation fostered occasional tension and arguments between them.

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The younger Tarses subsequently championed an NBC show, “Madman of the People,” about an opinionated father (played, ironically, by Coleman) whose daughter becomes his boss.

“I thought it was a good premise for a show, but it was so poorly executed,” Tarses said. “And I think it was based a little bit on me and Jamie.”

Despite past statements that he and his daughter--as one of the ratings-minded executives he tends to lampoon--exist on opposite sides of the creative fence, Tarses clearly takes pride in her accomplishments, and the relationship is amiable.

“I’m surprised that she’s done as well as she has on that side of the business, but she’s smarter than these people,” he said, adding that because Jamie started right out of college, “she has done a lot of stuff. It’s been more than 10 years.”

Still, Tarses has learned from the past about maintaining family harmony, and though he has no immediate plans to develop new shows, he’s already scratched ABC--in addition to NBC--from his list of options. “I think it would be harder for me to work at ABC than anywhere else,” he said.

* “Public Morals” premieres at 9:30 tonight on CBS (Channel 2).