A loss of face value

“WE’VE opened up the casting pool to the billions of people on planet Earth,” Ted Harbert said.

I had asked him where all the TV stars had gone. The Shelley Longs, the Patrick Duffys, the Tim Allens. The ones who just were television. Telly Savalas, Valerie Harper. Don Johnson.

Now the head of E! Entertainment Television, Harbert is a longtime executive with stints running ABC’s entertainment division and NBC Studios, in the era -- actually, only a decade ago and less -- before reality TV redefined TV stardom as something we could all truly, madly, deeply aspire to.

What show has a TV star? Take away any of the “Desperate Housewives” and you still have “Desperate Housewives.” The star of the show, really, is the titillating tone with which creator Marc Cherry imbued it. The star of “Lost” is not a person either, it’s a place -- that island. Special effects and lavish production values are increasingly becoming the norm on TV (as in movies). One reason procedurals are multiplying is because the star is, in a way, subordinate to the procedure through which a crime is solved.

In the pecking order that has emerged, there are very-good-actors-doing-television (Gary Sinise, Hugh Laurie), but they are not necessarily stars -- not in the way that “American Idol’s” Paula Abdul is or “Dancing With the Stars’ ” Kelly Monaco is or Donald Trump is.

It is this kind of intangible fame that seems most tangible now -- muddled, Jessica Simpson-type fame. She’s on the cover of the Aug. 22 Star (“Jess’ Butt Goes Flat!”), an issue in which Charlie Sheen also appeared -- paparazzi photos of him and formerly estranged wife Denise Richards, under the headline: “Charlie & Denise Back On: Their Kisses Say It All!” (the photos, frankly, were inconclusive).

Star did mention that, in addition to this domestic drama, Sheen also stars in the CBS sitcom “Two and a Half Men.” And the same issue featured five of the “Desperates”: two of the men from Wisteria Lane (they were in an ad for Lee National Denim Day) and three of the women, Eva Longoria, Teri Hatcher (repeatedly) and Marcia Cross (once).

If an actor hopes to become a certifiable presence in the culture these days, it seems safe to say it won’t happen through their day job but through their bigger overall TV job -- creating a persona out of the actual self.

“To the 18-to-34-year-old audience, except for a small number of exceptions, if they’re just actors showing up and doing their job, that won’t do the trick,” Harbert said. He pointed, for example, to the predicament for the “Lost” cast. “If you’re just an actor, and especially if you’re in Hawaii, you’re only seen once a week. You’d better be on E! and ‘Access Hollywood’ every night.”

Reality show stars are good for this kind of stardom. In fact, they seem like naturals at playing themselves, getting savvier with each new season. Who didn’t like Bo Bice as Bo Bice?

And so it’s a gas, seeing Don Johnson parachute into this fall season, where he so clearly no longer belongs, courtesy of the WB’s Monday offering “Just Legal.”

FROM THE FIRMAMENT

THERE are a few certified stars showing up on TV this fall (Geena Davis, Jennifer Love Hewitt, Chris O’Donnell, even Dennis Hopper, while Heather Graham is in the ABC midseason comedy “Emily’s Reasons Why Not”).

There are also plenty of appearances by that particular type of actor who shows up every TV season. Think of him as Matthew-Broderick/Paul-Rudd-still-won’t-do-television-so-how-about-th is-guy. He can do 30-ish, can be funny, can be relatable, can be attractive but not intimidatingly so. His name, this fall, is Josh Radnor (on CBS’ “How I Met Your Mother”) and Christopher Gorham (on CBS’ “Out of Practice”) and Josh Cooke in the NBC midseason comedy “Four Kings,” after costarring in last season’s canceled NBC sitcom “Committed”).

Jason Lee -- is he a TV star? Like an ambassador to greatness, Lee, starring in NBC’s heavily hyped comedy “My Name Is Earl,” comes from the film world, from having not done television yet. You are meant to be excited that he’s on TV, just as you are that Davis is starring on TV as the first woman president in ABC’s “Commander in Chief” or that Love Hewitt is going to be on CBS’ “Ghost Whisperer.”

Every year, networks try to get into business with “names,” but until further notice that’s all they are -- names, some of whom go through the pilot dance -- will they or won’t they? -- every year. Less discussed is the character that these names will play at the end of the deal. One of the more anticipated returning shows is in its second year, Fox’s “House,” and it has a bona fide character at its center. But otherwise, developing a character has become a trick to be expected mainly on cable, where this summer viewers got to see Kyra Sedgwick -- in a crime procedural, no less -- playing a three-dimensional human being in “The Closer.”

“Just Legal” too has a flesh-and-blood person. Johnson, last seen as San Francisco cop “Nash Bridges,” plays an alcoholic and spiritually broken lawyer who takes to mentoring a whiz kid. The show is far from great; it might not even be noteworthy, save for how bizarre it is that something so anachronistic would even make it onto a network’s schedule.

But there he is, Don Johnson as Grant Cooper (love the name, evocative of a western), all growly voice and weathered look, loping in and out of court. The show has him buddying up with idealistic 18-year-old David “Skip” Ross (Jay Baruchel) to represent clients who will no doubt range from the indigent to the just plain odd.

In other ways too, the show feels built from the ground up. Cooper’s physical world helps us understand who he is; his office is on the Venice boardwalk, and its dark shabbiness is practically an ode to film noir. It might be sunny and 80 degrees outside, but Cooper’s upstairs, avoiding the brief he has to read, drinking his coffee spiked with booze out of a mug. He’s not above resorting to punching a guy’s lights out in a bar down in the grittier pockets of Santa Monica and Venice.

The character, the story, is in his voice and his face -- that old throwback gleam, as when he says of a pretty client accused of murder: “She seems nice. She did stab a guy to death, though.”

Such is Johnson’s TV tenure that he has starred in a show credited with altering the stylistics of series TV (“Miami Vice”), and he now appears in one going against the grain in the opposite direction. “Just Legal” is a longshot of a show because the formula’s so retro, almost quaint at this point, and because, well, how many members of the WB’s core audience even know he is/was?

Johnson’s been around long enough, both as Hollywood tabloid fodder and Hollywood actor, to become a statue of himself, almost more reference point than person. But less is said about what he also exudes -- a certain TV gravitas, a kind of faith in the basic pleasures TV has long given, before cable happened, before words like “procedural” and phrases like “flawed characters” and “multilayered plots” entered the vocabulary of the ordinary TV watcher.

It is the paradox that Johnson represents this fall: TV is a whole lot better. But also a whole lot worse.

There are, it seems strange to say, few dramas anymore about people and their problems. If there has been, as some have argued, an advance in the kind of narrative that TV is leaning toward these days, a showcasing of more intricate plotting, what these new shows lack, at the same time, is the not-old-fashioned old-fashioned character. There may be better actors on TV these days than in Johnson’s heyday, but the system of creating TV shows being what it is now, it seems safe to say none of them will be a future Don Johnson -- fun, imaginatively accessible, uniquely TV.

STATURE OVER STORY

THE WB calls “Just Legal” “a fast-paced, procedural drama with humor.” They have to say that, even if, in another era, the title might be “The Rockford Files” or “Magnum P.I.” or “McMillan & Wife.”

Johnson’s not the only old-hand TV star back this fall -- every year brings a few of these faces. CBS’ “Out of Practice” has Henry Winkler as a divorced gastroenterologist dating young, and Fox’s “Prison Break” has Stacy Keach as a prison warden.

But Johnson is the only one back with a vengeance, representing once-upon-a-time dramatic television, when the men were men, the women were Lee Meriwether, and the on-screen persona an actor created -- larger than life, preferably -- mattered.

By contrast, for instance, we will get only glimpses of the hollow personal life of Carla Gugino’s government contingency analyst on CBS’ Thursday drama “Threshold” (unpacked boxes in her house, ready-made food in her fridge).

This is, I guess, understandable -- she’s trying to save the world from potential mass annihilation. But what about that novelistic notion that character is story? On “The Sopranos,” Tony’s sessions with Dr. Melfi are key to story, to conveying how the character exists in his varied worlds. What many shows seem to be saying nowadays is: No time for character. Gotta cut back to the chase.

For all its touching attempts to seem contemporary, “Just Legal” can’t hide that it has more character in its characters than do most new series. Its appearance on the WB’s fall schedule suggests that networks are still paying homage to this old way of manufacturing hits -- larger-than-life actor playing entertaining character in familiar template -- but that’s what it seems like now, homage.

Brownfield is a Times TV critic. Contact him at calendar.letters@latimes.com.