CBS (Thursdays, 9:30 P.M. ET)
B
A spry, slightly addled, new sitcom about battling co-anchors at an all-sports cable television network stars Farrah Fawcett and Ryan O'Neal. (Has anyone noticed how much O'Neal has come to resemble Doug McClure?) She's a former model; he's a dissolute ex-receiver for the Jets.
Neither Fawcett nor O'Neal is an adept comic, but each possesses inexhaustible charm. Curiously, there isn't much chemistry evident between them.
The humor gets goofy at times, but the supporting cast is quite strong, including Brian Doyle-Murray, Cleavant Derricks and Lane Smith, who, as the glib station owner, steals the show. Best of all there's a spine-tingling theme song sung by the Rev. Al Green.
CBS (Fridays, 10 P.M. ET)
B-
This sprawling, three-generational, family-drama series set in Portland, Oreg., stars Lucie Arnaz, Rick (Roxanne) Rossovich, Don Murray, Scott Plank and Peggy Smithhart.
Taking the cherished yuppie themes of relationships and children, the show attempts to wring out of them both poignance and humor. The result, contrived as often as it is touching, is a down-scale hybrid of A Year in the Life and Parenthood.
It's a bighearted and ingratiating series but not worth quitting your bowling league to stay home for.
ABC (Saturdays, 9 P.M. ET)
C+
Anthony John Denison and Linda Purl are your average suburban couple with three cute kids living near the Washington, D.C., Beltway. Except they have pillow talk like, "Who saved your butt in Bangkok?" You see, they're operatives for a CIA-like agency, which means they must regularly skulk off to some Third World backwater to stop an assassination or subvert a coup. Hope they have good baby-sitters.
The show, from the makers of China Beach, is more sophisticated than it sounds. But the juxtaposition of domestic and international crises doesn't wash. (Honey, you call the plumber for that clogged sink, and I'll deal with that renegade KGB agent.)
Already the acting is better than the writing deserves; that disparity is sure to grow as the insatiable demands of a weekly series stretch the action and intrigue elements thinner and thinner. John Rhys-Davies, Josef Sommer and G.W. Bailey co-star.
ABC (Sun., Jan. 13, 9 P.M. ET)
C
In a tedious real-life drama, Mario Thomas stars as Sis Levin, an Alabama woman who joined her TV correspondent husband (David Dukes) in Beirut six weeks before he was abducted and held by Muslim guerrillas in 1984. Preaching conciliation, she wages a tireless, vexing campaign here and abroad to affect his release.
Everyone in the cast, including William Schallert and our old friend G.W. Bailey, gives earnest, if decidedly transparent, performances. By network movie-of-the-week standards, the production, filmed in Israel and Los Angeles, is well executed. But however noble, Levin's costive crusade doesn't make for interesting TV.
NBC (Sun., Jan. 13, 9 P.M. ET)
C
It's poetic justice that this gothic soap opera from the '60s should be revived after nearly three decades. After all, the premise revolves around Barnabas Collins, a vampire untombed after 200 years who haunts his descendants in the foggy coastal town of Collinsport, Maine. Yet this sluggish, dramatically anemic entry doesn't look to be the savior for NBC's Friday night lineup. (After this four-hour miniseries, which concludes on Monday, the show will settle in on Fridays at 9.)
Barnabas is played with misty menace by Ben (Chariots of Fire) Cross. (Hmm, Cross—interesting name for a vampire.) Joanna (Another World) Going is the governess on whom he is fixated. Jean Simmons is the family matriarch and Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Sean Lennon, her grandson.
The program has a phantasmal style, at least in this two-part pilot directed by Dan (War and Remembrance) Curtis, who created the original series. It also has an attractive younger cast, many of them recruited from daytime dramas, all of them with lovely long necks that beg to be ravished. But this is still a soap opera, a spooky, stupefyingly slow soap opera.
ABC (Mon., Jan. 14, 9 P.M. ET)
B
Ed O'Neill plays a San Francisco bar owner and devoted weekend daddy who goes wild when his daughter (Cassy Friel) disappears into the Witness Relocation Program along with his ex-wife (Almost Grown's Eve Gordon) and her drug-dealing boyfriend. He hires an investigator (Equal Justice's Debrah Farentino) to find his child.
What begins as a terrifically taut drama loses steam as it proceeds, through no fault of a fine cast, including Lee (Lenny) Garlington, Steven (21 Jump Street) Williams, Dan (The Tortellis) Hedaya, Mike Farrell and Dakin Matthews.
O'Neill, trying to escape the dirtbox image with which his Married...with Children role of Al Bundy has saddled him, is a paragon of believability as the easygoing but determined father.
The movie's executive producer, Tony Danza, appears briefly as a brawling bar patron—an ironic cameo in light of his past nocturnal troubles.
>One of the great sitcom mysteries is why the folks on Gilligan's Island never got rescued. After all, that tiny atoll was trampled over by more visitors than Disney World, yet when they left at the end of the episode, as they inevitably did, not one of them ever sent back a boat or plane for our castaways. Monday (Jan. 14, 8:05 A.M. ET) on TBS, the inimitable Phil Silvers drops in as a manipulative Hollywood producer (or is that redundant?). Needless to say, he flies back to Tinseltown alone, breaking Ginger's heart. Later that day, on Nick at Nite (2 A.M. ET), it's a meeting of giant schnozzles on Make Room for Daddy, as Tony Bennett joins Danny Thomas and Hans Conreid (Uncle Tonoose) as a visiting relative. (An Italian playing a Lebanese) Well, ethnic identities are always a little slippery on television.) Now if only Jimmy Durante could have joined the party...
>For the next five Fridays, beginning Jan. 11 (11 P.M. ET), HA! will present Jackie Mason's Town Meeting, freewheeling sessions in which the comedian responds to questions and complaints from studio audiences. Not known for his ad libs, Jackie proves to be pretty quick—and funny—on his feet. On HBO, A Different World's Sinbad brings his jive-alive standup act to Morehouse College in Atlanta for Sinbad: Brain Damaged (Sat., Jan. 12, 10 P.M. ET). He raps about college life, fast food, black hairdos, marriage, and even brings out a trio of dancers for musical revues which open and close the show. Watch out Heavy D. & the Boyz. Airing opposite Sinbad on Showtime is The Steven Banks Show, the performer's second special. Once again this manic, MTV-age Walter Mitty is scurrying around in a cluttered apartment, acting out rock and roll fantasies. His professional and personal lives may be going to hell, but, hey, a dude can dream, can't he?
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
