Yawns From Yesteryear: Been There, Seen That

Searching for metaphors? How about a prime-time season that opens with a remake of “Family Affair”?

You know, those moldy cadavers Uncle Bill, Mr. French and Buffy, Jody and Sissy, exhumed from an America of decades past when only laugh tracks found humor in sitcoms.

That low wit applies also to this century’s “Family Affair,” which joins the WB schedule Thursday, then a week later gets paired with another WB newcomer appropriately titled “Do Over.” It’s about a man reliving his past.

Many viewers will be doing the same when in front of their TV sets this season. Returning shows deliver their own deja vu. TV’s annual fall slab of new series, however, finds broadcast networks at their most derivative and incestuous in 2002, while crossing bloodlines like the royals of old Europe.

Originality equals obscenity in this programming scenario, as nearly everything appears to be an extension of everything else.

Could it be the age we’re in? Instead of challenges and uncertainty, nostalgia may be exactly what most Americans desire from TV as they slog through dire economic times and depressing news from abroad while contemplating 9/11 and a possible hot war with Saddam Hussein and Iraq.

Take Fox’s “American Idol” (Puleeeeeeze!). As a phenomenon, the summer’s most popular series reeks of staleness. Its striking vapidity aside, “American Idol” is a close cousin of televised talent searches that have filled the small screen for a half a century. It, too, will return, of course, someday perhaps even in triplicate.

Just as Dick Wolf’s “Law & Order” fleet travels NBC, the huge CBS hit, “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation,” has spun off the new season’s “CSI: Miami.” If it’s a hit, what, “CSI: Fairbanks”? The possibilities are endless.

Nothing is wrong with using oldies as templates, and then improving or updating them smartly. Arriving on PBS next month, for example, is an elegant revival of John Galsworthy’s “The Forsyte Saga.” The original was a 19th century British serial that became a signature work for infant public TV in the U.S. about the time “Family Affair” was making its infantile mark on CBS. The first “Saga” was somewhat deadly in black and white, this new one livelier and in color.

What’s more, the fall’s most intriguing new series offers its own whiff of familiarity. It’s Fox’s “John Doe,” which each week sends its hero--a man of infinite knowledge who knows everything about everything, except who he is--on a search for his identity and origins.

Prime time’s Character On a Weekly Quest--going back nearly 40 years to Dr. Richard Kimble’s pursuit of his wife’s one-armed killer in “The Fugitive”--is one of TV’s most utilized premises. Viewers will benefit, however, if “John Doe” adapts it innovatively to 2002, as it does in its pilot.

If only the rest of the new season appeared as promising.

By the way, just as the WB’s “Do Over” zooms its 34-year-old hero back in time to age 14, ABC’s “That Was Then” has its 30-year-old salesman waking up one morning to find himself 15. Which reportedly is the median age of today’s TV writers.

As for more blasts from the past, UPN has resurrected “Twilight Zone” tediously this season, ABC has Wolf’s new “Dragnet” scheduled for midseason, and Fox’s “Fast Lane” brushes the cobwebs from a pair of cops who will somehow succeed magnificently as partners--bank on it--despite not getting along at all.

Meanwhile, the WB’s “Everwood” has a famed New York neurosurgeon and his kids finding fulfillment in the Colorado Rockies. Exchanging urban for rural does wonders for TV characters. And if you think you’ve already seen the WB’s “What I Like About You,” you have. Only in 1986-88 it was called “My Sister Sam.”

What we have here is TV’s antique, all-purpose, ever-available Moving In Creates Havoc theme. In “What I Like About You,” a chaotic teenager shows up unexpectedly and immediately destroys the routine of her adult sister. In “Family Affair,” the surprise arrival of 6-year-old twins Buffy (Sasha Pieterse) and Jody (Luke Benward, only in the premiere, then he’s replaced by Jimmy “Jax” Pinchak), and then their teenage sister, Sissy (Caitlin Wachs), jolts the orderly lives of carefree bachelor Uncle Bill (Gary Cole) and his dignified English butler, Mr. French (Tim Curry). To the accompaniment of an ear-splitting laugh track.

Buffy on the butler: “His name’s French, but he’s really English.”

Laugh track: HAHAHAHAHAHA.

Only an electronic box could laugh at this. With Buffy speaking overly precious kid talk, your impulse instead is to gag. And the high jinks really start when the twins use the microwave to heat soup for caustic Mr. French. But do it in the can!

Laugh track: HAHAHAHAHAHA.

“Family Affair” is rooted like weeds in TV’s little tykedom of the ‘60s. It’s so out of tune with the times that when the twins disappear from Uncle Bill’s swanky Manhattan apartment, hand-wringing is minimal. In the real world, CNN would have the story in five minutes.

Can this creaky concept for a series succeed today? Sure. Think “The Bernie Mac Show” on Fox, mingling hilarity with universal truths about parenting as Uncle Bernie sweats out his young nephew and two nieces, whom he reluctantly took in at the start of last season.

“The Bernie Mac Show” has imagination and, well, Bernie Mac.

“Family Affair” has something else. It’s maudlin and saccharin yet, in spite of that, also witless. After all these years, it’s lost nothing.

“Family Affair” will be shown at 8 p.m. Thursday on the WB. The network has rated it TV-PGL (Parental guidance suggested due to infrequent coarse language).

Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays and Fridays. He can be contacted at howard.rosenberg @latimes.com.