Cable Strikes When the Weather Is Hot

On Showtime’s “Armistead Maupin’s More Tales of the City,” everything is basically status quo among the eccentric inhabitants of 28 Barbary Lane: Anna Madrigal is smoking pot in her front parlor, musing about life; Mona’s in a Nevada whorehouse dressed as a nun; and Mary Ann’s cruising to Mexico, falling in love with a guy who’s too good to be true.

Meanwhile, over on HBO’s “Sex and the City,” Barclay, a SoHo painter and notorious “modelizer” (that’s a guy who only sleeps with models), is showing his friend Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) videotapes of his latest conquests.

“This is my real art,” Barclay says, hitting the play button on a video installation that features the artist having sex with a dozen different women on a dozen different TV screens.

“I couldn’t believe it,” Carrie says in a bemused “Ally McBeal”-like voice-over. “The man had slept with half the perfume ads in September’s Vogue.”

Welcome to June in TV land. Traditionally the harbinger of three months of down time for the major commercial networks, June signals a big push by cable, with new series and big-budget original movies offered as life rafts to the viewers thrown overboard into a sea of summer reruns.

Summer is the best time for cable outlets to counterattack against the Big Four. Last year, the programming on NBC, CBS, ABC and Fox accounted for only 50% of the total summer viewing audience, down from 62% during the summer of 1996.

“June has traditionally been a good time for us to get a series launched, because we have an opportunity to get [a show] sampled over several weeks,” said Chris Albrecht, president of original programming at HBO. “You need that to hook an audience.’

The splashiest programs in June are the two with “city” in their titles. They’re star-studded projects with big budgets and adult themes--homosexuality and transsexuality, in the case of “More Tales of the City,” the second TV installment in a series that began life in the 1970s as a column Maupin wrote for the San Francisco Chronicle.

The original “Tales of the City” aired on PBS in 1994, but when PBS balked at a sequel, Showtime eventually came to the rescue, just as the cable network recently took on another controversial project, Adrian Lyne’s adaptation of Vladimir Nabokov’s “Lolita,” which it will show in August.

“There are certain kinds of [programs] that have become the special province of HBO and Showtime,” said Alan Poul, co-executive producer of “More Tales.” “They can do things that are conspicuously high-minded.”

Conspicuously high-minded is exactly what HBO and Showtime are striving to be with much of their original programming of late, from HBO’s ambitious 12-hour space miniseries “From the Earth to the Moon” to Showtime original movies like “Mandela and de Klerk.”

By spending lavishly on such projects, the pay channels hope to bring a kind of high-brow cachet to their brand-names, wooing new subscribers in the process.

“It’s not just that we have the freedom from standards and practices, it’s that we have the freedom from the tyranny of if you lose a rating point you lose X number of dollars,” said Jerry Offsay, president of original programming at Showtime.

Added Albrecht: “We’re not in the ‘eyeballs for commercials’ business. . . . That gives us the flexibility to find unique franchises.”

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For Showtime, “More Tales” brings with it a built-in audience--the same viewers who four years ago made “Tales of the City” the highest-rated drama on PBS in more than 10 years.

Set in pre-AIDS, 1970s San Francisco, “Tales” is a high-brow, seriocomic soap opera swirling around the inhabitants of a Victorian apartment house whose landlady, Madrigal (Olympia Dukakis), is a transsexual.

That revelation came at the end of “Tales”; the sequel picks up with the characters six weeks later.

Despite the almost-universal critical acclaim that greeted “Tales of the City,” PBS opted out of the sequel, citing production costs (both “Tales” and “More Tales” had budgets of roughly $8 million, but PBS executives said they were asked to shoulder a much larger percentage of that for the sequel).

While PBS was widely accused of caving into pressure from conservative politicians who decried the first one, Maupin and co-executive producer Poul were left to look for alternate funding sources. They eventually managed to cobble together an international array of backers that includes Showtime, Working Title/Propaganda Films, Britain’s Channel 4 Television and Canada’s Production La Fete, which provided money on condition that “More Tales” shoot its interiors in Canada.

“The problem is, this has never made any money for anyone, and that’s what makes Hollywood sit up and take notice,” Maupin said, asked about the hoops he had to jump through to find backers for the sequel, which includes an in-bed nude scene between two male characters.

The author remembered with a laugh calling Dukakis on Mother’s Day two years ago with the news that “More Tales” had found a home on Showtime.

“She said, ‘Oh, Armistead, the best news you could give me on Mother’s Day is that I get to play that wonderful transsexual one more time.’ ”

It took two years for Darren Star to turn an option on Candace Bushnell’s “Sex and the City” into an episodic series for HBO.

Star, the creator of the escapist soap opera mega-hits “Melrose Place” and “Beverly Hills, 90210,” wanted to do a single-camera situation comedy on location in New York. Since the show was called “Sex and the City,” Star thought it only fair that his viewers, in addition to a real city, get some real sex, too.

“Most sitcoms that deal with sex are about euphemisms,” Star said. “That’s where the comedy comes from--how do you talk about sex and not say it? . . . I saw this as an opportunity to do a comedy about sex and relationships in a realistic way.”

Not seen regularly on TV since “Square Pegs” went off the air in 1983, Parker returns in a role ideally suited for her--part dating victim, part commentator on the absurdity of it all.

Star, who in addition to “Melrose Place” and “90210” created the short-lived “Central Park West” on CBS, says his new show’s title “gives you a great umbrella under which to tell stories.”

“The criteria [at HBO] is all about putting out the best show creatively, not necessarily what’s going to appeal to a wide audience,” Star added.

* MORE THAN SKIN-DEEP: Sophisticated “Sex and the City”; “More Tales” by Maupin. Howard Rosenberg reviews. F28