Word: sitcomming
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...Sitcom writers know it as the oh-no-here-we-go-again ending. It is a tired device, but it appears to be the one with which Jane Alexander has chosen to finish her tenure as chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Three weeks ago, with the agency's budgetary survival ensured for another year, and with the dust from the culture wars thus temporarily settled, Alexander announced her pending retirement from the endowment. This was quickly followed by the release of a new study that accuses the nonprofit arts world, and by implication the NEA, of elitism...
...That's right. If the Paula Jones case makes it to trial, poor President Clinton will have, in TV sitcom parlance, two dates to the same prom. Remember Ms. Flowers from '92? Her attorney Rugger Burke says that she has been officially subpoenaed to give a deposition to Jones' lawyers...
...precinct full of hotheaded urban cops. As the new shows suggest, the broadcast networks are not exactly venturing into unexplored territory this season; in fact, they aren't even leaving the hotel. That's neither surprising nor necessarily bad. Lots of successful shows have followed the conventions of the sitcom or the police drama. If a series about a divorced father and his wiseacre kids is truly funny, does anyone care that it's been done a dozen times before...
...course, the best way to win viewers is to discover shows they want to watch. And each network has some bright spots to point to this fall. ABC's Dharma & Greg, the flower-child-marries-lawyer sitcom, has justified its favorable preseason press and is winning its time period. Veronica's Closet, starring Kirstie Alley, has a fail-safe time slot on NBC between Seinfeld and ER, and it has kept more of Seinfeld's audience than many other shows similarly blessed. Ally McBeal, Fox's Monday-night comedy-drama, looks like another success...
...many more shows, even those with big stars and critical acclaim, have been disappointments. The Gregory Hines Show, a perfectly appealing family sitcom on CBS starring the talented song-and-dance man, is struggling. So is Jenny, the NBC vehicle for Jenny McCarthy, babe of all media. Nothing Sacred and Cracker, ABC's Thursday-night duo, though winning good reviews, are among the lowest-rated shows on TV. A USA Today study published last week shows that of the 26 new shows that debuted in the first two weeks of the season, 15 failed to attract the audience guaranteed...