The New Good Old Days

First, a confession: I loved “Bonanza.”

We watched it together as a family on Sunday nights when I was a child. I drank in the reruns on lazy summer mornings when they played on KTLA. I even caught up with the “lost episodes” on the Family Channel (before Fox mucked it up), which offered a full day of violent old westerns as a lead-in to Pat Robertson and “The 700 Club.”

Sure, I’m a geek, but I’m hardly alone. “Bonanza”--which topped the prime-time standings three of its 14 seasons and spent a decade in the Top 10--remains a seminal TV western for many, the kind of iconic program writer-director Barry Levinson could garner laughs lampooning in the movie “Tin Men,” where a character complains that the show wasn’t very realistic in that it featured a 48-year-old father with three 47-year-old sons.

It’s something of a kick, then, to tune in “Ponderosa,” a “Bonanza” prequel that premieres Sunday night on Pax TV--the little-seen network partly owned by NBC, where the Cartwright clan settled before finally riding off into the sunset in 1973.

It’s a kick, in part, for what “Ponderosa” isn’t, and the changes undertaken to bring the concept--a repeatedly widowed father with three sons born of different mothers, living on a massive ranch in the Nevada territory--into a new century. (This is only the latest attempt at a “Bonanza” revival, by the way, following previous made-for-TV movies and pilots that ultimately fizzled--including one that would have had Lorne Greene reprise his role as patriarch Ben Cartwright, before ill health prompted his replacement by John Ireland.)

Each of the changes, in its own way, tells us something about television today as contrasted with the environment when “Bonanza” was at its commercial peak nearly 40 years ago. Back then, 37% of all U.S. homes watched the program every Sunday, which gave literal meaning to the expression “water-cooler show,” since you had a better than 1 in 3 chance Monday morning that a co-worker had seen “Bonanza” the night before. (The most-watched drama last season, “ER,” was viewed by a little more than 15% of U.S. homes each week.)

For starters, “Ponderosa” is indeed a prequel, meaning the Cartwright boys have been sized down to suit the youth market. Grown men in the first show--and what respectable teenager wants to watch four grown men in a house unless they’re eating bug larva or voting each other out?--Adam is now 21 years old, while Hoss and Little Joe are 17 and 12, respectively.

In another departure from the original, which featured no females among the cast of regulars, there are self-sufficient, feminist women in town--women no doubt being a prime demographic target for this sort of family fare.

David Dortort--who created and produced the original series and collaborated with the new show’s principal executive producer, “Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman’s” Beth Sullivan, on the prequel--said he preferred going backward because it offered more fertile historical terrain to mine. So though the demographic advantages of having teenage sons around was a bonus, he did acknowledge a need to afford women greater representation.

Dortort was less keen on another concession to current times--namely, that the latest incarnation of this quintessentially American story is shot in Australia to reduce costs. As a result, when the Cartwrights gaze lovingly at what is supposed to be Lake Tahoe, they are in fact looking at the countryside near Melbourne.

“I was opposed to it,” Dortort admitted. “They said, ‘But it’s so much cheaper.’ I said, ‘Yes, it is, but the show belongs in California.”’ In fact, Little Joe is played by a young Australian actor, Jared Daperis, which means he not only grows up to be Michael Landon but switches continents in the process. Amazing what they can do with that digital imagery these days, isn’t it?

Adding women isn’t the only revision to make the show more politically correct or demographically appealing. Though “Bonanza” often made pointed statements against racism, there was still the problem of the Cartwrights’ thick-accented Chinese cook, Hop Sing, who was often relegated to the role of comic relief. The pilot not only recounts how the Cartwrights come to meet Hop Sing but, as played by Gareth Yuen, clearly makes him less of a caricature--including the fact that this younger Hop Sing has a far less-pronounced accent.

In addition, the Cartwrights get help establishing their ranch from a young officer in the Mexican army named Carlos Rivera De Vega (Fernando Carrillo), who had his own ancestral home sold out from under him. An African American character will join the cast in subsequent weeks.

“Ponderosa” is also seemingly more overtly religious than its predecessor--noteworthy in that Pax Chairman Lowell “Bud” Paxson, a born-again Christian, has stated its dramas should leave behind a “warm, fuzzy feeling” and, without proselytizing, not shy away from spiritual content.

Pax President and Chief Executive Jeff Sagansky maintained there was no conscious effort to make the program more spiritual, though he does see it as filling a void the other networks largely ignore. “There’s such a huge audience there that wants this kind of entertainment,” he said. “It’s the networks that just don’t think it’s hip.”

As for other revisions the show has undergone, Sagansky remembers sitting down with the producers and saying, “What elements are we going to keep, what was crucial about the old ‘Bonanza,’ and how do we contemporize it? ... You cannot put on a western from 40 years ago and have it be as relevant, because the issues have changed.”

Dortort, now 80, stressed that the original’s enduring popularity (the reruns have played steadily for three decades) stems from its universal themes, and that the idea of a loving family set against a sweeping western backdrop is as appealing today as it was during the tumultuous 1960s.

“At a time when the dysfunctional family was becoming a current way of life in this country, this was a functional family,” Dortort said. Amid the various hardships, he added, “There was always a morality in this show. Yes, there are difficulties, but we can overcome them by working together.”

Such square-jawed ideals do provide the common thread connecting “Ponderosa” to its past--along, of course, with the fact Ben buries a wife in the opening episode, again proving that the fastest way for a woman to die in the Old West was to fall in love with a Cartwright.

In that respect, at least, the sprawling old Ponderosa hasn’t entirely gone condo.

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“Ponderosa” premieres Sunday night at 9 on Pax TV with a two-hour episode. The network has rated the show TV-G (suitable for all ages).