‘The Old Settler’ Looks Good for KCET’s Future

It’s been an epoch or two since KCET was a major programming source for public television, a cosmic embarrassment for a prominent station located in the nation’s entertainment capital while being outperformed by WGBH in Boston and WNET in New York.

When Hollywood performers have appeared before cameras at KCET, it’s usually been as volunteers, using their celebrity to ask for money during televised pledge drives.

So let’s hear it for “PBS Hollywood Presents,” a new series of occasional dramas originated by KCET. It opens promisingly tonight with “The Old Settler,” an achingly tender adaptation of John Henry Redwood’s play about two sisters living together in Harlem during World War II. Shauneille Perry’s teleplay delivers sassy humor with racial undertones that epitomize the early 1940s.

Combative but loving Elizabeth and Quilly are played impressively by real-life siblings Phylicia Rashad and Debbie Allen, respectively. Allen, best known as a choreographer, also directs, and with assurance, capturing the rhythms and textures of the times while bringing out the best in her co-starring sister.

Quilly is divorced, funny (her girdle is killing her), brutally blunt and even envious, the older, unmarried, church-going Elizabeth quieter and drabber, her hair pulled back severely, her chances for marriage fading supposedly along with her looks, earning her the nickname, “old settler.”

Which means, Quilly explains: “A woman pushin’ 40, who ain’t been married and ain’t got no prospects.” Or in Elizabeth’s case, nudging 50.

So no wonder the routine of the sisters’ lives is shattered by the arrival of a roomer named Husband (Bumper Robinson), a small-town rube in a bow tie and ill-fitting suit, yet a fine form of a man who catches Elizabeth’s eye, even though he’s young enough to be her son and is drawn to the tarty Lou Bessie (Crystal Fox). A few dates later, Elizabeth is wearing her hair down and looking radiant, while Quilly warns her that Husband “is a mama’s boy lookin’ for a new mama.”

Although Robinson is soft and unpersuasive, Allen and especially Rashad deliver superbly, as Husband’s presence drives a wedge between the sisters, the complexity of their relationship surging to the surface as lingering bitterness takes over and raw wounds are raked painfully.

For Rashad, famous for playing Bill Cosby’s wife in a pair of sitcoms, this is surely the TV performance of her career, making you almost forget that this “old settler” is far too alluring to be viewed as spinster material.

This is no regular gig. Not yet, anyway. The next scheduled “PBS Hollywood Presents” is months away, meaning viewers will not immediately learn if it is a true successor to KCET’s famed old “Hollywood Television Theatre,” its “Visions” or “American Playhouse,” another late great PBS oldie to which the station contributed years ago. But tonight is an optimistic start.

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* “PBS Hollywood Presents” “The Old Settler” tonight at 8 on KCET-TV and KVCR-TV. The network has rated it TV-G (suitable for all ages).