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...more conventional turf, the old formats are at least being enlivened this fall by new settings. Following the lead of NBC's hit Miami Vice, a number of action shows have gone on location to spice their tales with big-city ambience. Chicago is the locale for ABC's Lady Blue, a hard-edged cop show about a female homicide detective who shoots first and asks questions later, a sort of Dirty Harriet. Red-haired Jamie Rose wields her .357 magnum like a pro, and Danny Aiello is fine as her exasperated boss. The series is scheduled to be replaced...
...ABC's Spenser: For Hire, based on Robert B. Parker's popular detective novels, the sleuthing moves to Boston. Parker's hero is a "sensitive" private eye who quotes Shakespeare and Wordsworth, dabbles in gourmet cooking and drives a 20-year-old Mustang. Unfortunately, straitlaced Star Robert Urich seems more at home with TV dinners and spy novels, and the pace of the two-hour pilot is plodding. This show seems as dead as the Red Sox's pennant hopes...
...Family Honor, also on ABC, is a more ambitious undertaking. Kenneth McMillan and Eli Wallach co-star as former boyhood pals who are now the patriarchs of families lined up on different sides of the law. The location filming in New York City lends the true grit of authenticity, but the show is out of balance. Too much time is spent on McMillan's police family (among them a granddaughter who has just joined the force), while Wallach and his criminal clan are tossed off in cut-rate TV cliches...
...ABC's lengthy roster of new crime fighters is, if nothing else, diverse. Robert Wagner is leaden as ever as a high-living investigator for an insurance company in the dreary Lime Street. The Insiders uses a rock score to enliven the weekly adventures of a hip free-lance reporter and his partner who go undercover for stories. The apparent model, again, is Miami Vice, but the show looks more like an '85 version of The Mod Squad. The season's biggest howler is Hollywood Beat, another Miami Vice-influenced show about a pair of undercover cops who patrol seedy...
...other Cosby imitators are easily disposable. In CBS's Charlie & Company, Flip Wilson and Gladys Knight cope with standard TV family dilemmas in substandard comic fashion. And in ABC's Growing Pains, Alan Thicke, the former talk show host, plays a psychiatrist who sets up an office at home while his wife (Joanna Kerns) goes off to work and his children attack him with lines like "You can't hit me, you're a liberal humanist." The only comedy to venture out of the house this season is CBS's hourlong Stir Crazy, based on the phenomenally successful 1980 movie...