Word: sitcomming
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They are such improbable rivals that even a TV sitcom writer might be embarrassed to cast them. A prim, perky Republican, Judy Petty, 41, teaches Sunday school and on occasion has lectured schoolgirls on etiquette. Her Democratic opponent in the close race for Arkansas' Second Congressional District is Tommy Robinson, 42, a roughhewn, tough-talking sheriff who once suggested that a bounty hunter be sent to the Soviet Union to bring back the man who last year shot down the KAL airliner...
...very few films become hits because of their originality; Rhinestone harbors no such subversive motives. It means to breed familiarity without contempt by putting two proven stars through paces as measured as any in a sitcom plot. Sly visits Dolly's Tennessee home town and feels like an alien among bohunks (as in TV's Green Acres). Dolly tangles with her alcoholic ex-singing partner, who is also her ex-husband (as in Tender Mercies). Dolly teaches Sly to move country-style (as in the Let's Hear It for the Boy sequence from Footloose). Sly belts...
EXPECTING. Meredith Baxter Birney, 36, star of the TV sitcom Family Ties, and David Birney, 42, star of the recent TV mini-series Master of the Game and of next season's Glitter: twins, their second and third children; in October; in Los Angeles. Taping of new Family Ties episodes has started, and in the grand tradition of I Love Lucy the show's story line will follow Birney's pregnancy all the way to the birth...
...state of the sitcom is no laughing matter. Though half-hour comedies still make up a considerable chunk of the network schedules-22 will be on next fall, compared with 24 last fall- the attrition rate has become alarming. Of the 20 sitcoms introduced by the three networks in the past year, only four-CBS' Kate & Allie and After MASH, ABC's Webster and NBC's Night Court-were renewed for next season. In the ratings for the 1983-84 season, the genre made its worst showing in 30 years: not a single sitcom that...
What has happened? For one thing, most of the formative creative figures from the 1970s have either left the field or lost their touch. Norman Lear, who revitalized the sitcom in 1971 with All in the Family, flopped with his comeback series earlier this year, a.k.a. Pablo. Alan Alda's The Four Seasons, his first effort since M*A*S*H (which he helped shape as a sometime writer and director), also failed to catch on, and has been canceled...