Here’s Something You Don’t Often See

The family of black drama series on TV remains a family of zero.

Coming closest is the new “Linc’s,” a weekly half hour on Showtime filled with intelligent black characters who juxtapose heavy and light in a boisterous homage to that great former CBS series “Frank’s Place.” But “Frank’s Place” it isn’t. Nor is it quite a drama.

Yet how odd that a medium so resistant to weekly drama series about African Americans--on the flawed presumption that non-blacks wouldn’t watch--doesn’t shrink from airing an occasional serious movie about them. And to boot, this time during a critical November ratings period, when each program acquires added weight in building ad revenue.

That movie, featuring grand work from bankable Cicely Tyson, is the high-performing CBS two-parter “Mama Flora’s Family.” Steeped in African American culture, it’s an aging black matriarch’s spin on her universe from 1912 to 1970, based largely on a novel that Alex Haley began and David Stevens completed after the famed “Roots” author died nearly seven years ago.

It saddens, it pleases, it warms. The verdict? Two wet hankies way, way up.

A period black family drama with fleeting TV life is better than none at all. More preferable, still, would be something even rarer, a black story of equal warmth, intelligence and complexity set in the “now” of the ‘90s.

Sunday’s competition on NBC, meanwhile, is “Exiled,” an urban crime drama that has Chris Noth resurfacing as his old “Law & Order” character, NYPD Det. Mike Logan, whom devotees of that sterling series may recall was banished to Staten Island in 1995 after slugging a corrupt city councilman. That’s how the departing Noth was written out of the series.

Logan’s homecoming here is blahsville. Once one of the edgiest, angriest, most charismatic characters on TV, the latest Logan hasn’t much juice in this rather routine movie, which lacks the customary “Law & Order” structure and magic.

Neither law nor order is available to African Americans in much of “Mama Flora’s Family,” a black’s-eye-view of six decades through the tumultuous experience of a single brood whose steely backbone is Tyson’s kindly, feisty, God-fearing Flora, who is loosely based on Haley’s mother.

Tyson has traveled similar roads, most notably on TV as former slave Miss Jane Pittman. And again she is meticulously persuasive down to the smallest tic and nuance, submerging herself in this heroic character as if dipping into the baptismal waters of old-time religion. Rarely have as many lawd-have-mercies come from a single mouth as effortlessly or as soulfully. And Erika Alexander works here as the younger Flora.

Director Peter Werner pushes the story along nicely, its facilitator being Flora in old age. While giving her aimless, stubbornly blase, ex-Black Panther granddaughter (Queen Latifah) a good talking to, Flora proceeds to recall the family’s Tennessee roots so that the young woman can learn from her history and put her own troubled life in order.

Part of the story has Flora, in her own callow years, becoming the massa’s concubine. Only instead of white, he’s black--the cruel, exploitative son of a moneyed African American landowner to whom Flora’s father, a poor tenant farmer, is beholden.

Yet no flashback to U.S. blacks of this period is credible without white racism intervening. In this case, violent vigilante justice is aimed at a black man who steals to feed his family during the Depression. Then a black church is torched. Much later, Flora’s son, Willie (Blair Underwood), is chased by snarling local rednecks. And Flora has her “colored blood” rejected when she offers it on behalf of G.I.s fighting in World War II. The war is still underway when Part 1 ends.

Part 2 is stronger because it’s fresher historical turf that brings Flora and her family nearer to the present. There’s something deeply tragic about Willie--a janitorial worker played with fierce, seething emotion by Underwood--symbolizing black soldiers who fought for their country during World War II, only to be lynched economically back home, where segregation and a dearth of good jobs kept them down.

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Yet there’s social activism here, too, for just as creaky Jane Pittman integrated a Southern water fountain, so does Flora impose her own will at a whites-only lunch counter.

Flora has a capacity to forgive former tormentors that seems almost inhuman. Of course, this story is largely about coming together, and its extravagantly emotional ending resembles one of those softy Charles Kuralt vignettes about reunited families that melted even icemen.

Although Flora is ever huggable, the character here with the most potential is the pivotal one least developed in this script by Stevens and Carol Schreder. He’s Flora’s other son, Luke (Mario Van Peebles), a highly successful Chicago lawyer who is bitterly resented by mop-pushing Willie and whose starchy ambivalence toward his mother provides an intriguing edge.

And wouldn’t he or someone similar make an interesting protagonist in a drama series? Not a black lawyer amid whites, as Underwood was in NBC’s “L.A. Law” and Steve Harris is now in ABC’s “The Practice,” but one who is the man himself, around whom everyone else orbits.

Or why not a drama series about a powerful black corporation head? That’s what Larry Hathorn is wondering.

Hathorn, a black Los Angeles real estate developer with some minor TV producing credits, was on the phone recently speaking about “CEO,” his concept for a drama series about a polished, high-powered African American business mogul whose life is a rainbow of interesting facets.

“He’d be an exciting guy,” Hathorn said about the complex mogul he has in mind, someone fully developed, flaws and all, whose career and private life would intersect a variety of areas. “He would confront the social, civil and everyday conflicts of life,” Hathorn said. That would include, he added, facing racism both from outside the black community and, interestingly, from within.

Well, why not? Given their recent limited success in creating Nielsen-friendly hour dramas, the networks would have little to lose by taking a chance on colorizing beyond the usual black comedies.

On the table now, though, is “Mama Flora’s Family,” a rewarding piece that, with beloved Alex Haley’s name attached to it, has a good shot at attracting a sizable audience, race notwithstanding.

But would whites who watch “Mama Flora’s Family” also watch a well-executed “CEO”? Here’s one who would.

* “Mama Flora’s Family” airs at 9 p.m. Sunday and Tuesday on CBS. The network has rated it TV-PG-V (may be unsuitable for young children, with an advisory for violence).

* “Exiled” airs at 9 p.m. Sunday on NBC. The network has rated it TV-14 (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 14).