Word: sitcoms
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SCENES FROM BOTH SIDES OF TV's generational divide: the first, from Diane English's much anticipated new CBS sitcom Love and War, is hip, sophisticated, full of knowing media references (including one to English's own show -- and current cause celebre -- Murphy Brown). The second, from a less heralded new NBC sitcom called Out All Night, is brassy and in-your-face; its TV reference, appropriately, is to a salacious game show. Love and War is one of a potful of ( upscale, thirtysomething sitcoms served up by the networks this fall. Out All Night gives a good idea...
Anyway, the motif of family values kept recurring along the Ik-Idaho Road. The Republicans conjured it up and turned it to powerful political effect. Their show in Houston was gaudy and complex -- a hellfire tent meeting dissolving to a '50s television sitcom with flags and confetti and sometimes tinny modulations...
...inherently subjective. The use of the issue in this year's politics blends a yearning idealism with a breathtaking cynicism. On another level, that mix reflects the tendency of entertainment and politics -- and their values -- to merge confusingly with one another. The season's first episode of the television sitcom Murphy Brown next month will have Murphy's reply to the moral criticism leveled last spring by Vice President Dan Quayle -- continuing the argument over Murphy's single motherhood that showed Republican strategists just how powerful the family-values issue might be in this campaign. At an even farther remove...
...quintessential yuppie comic of the '80s: his larky, laid-back observations about the trivial pursuits of modern life -- buying candy at a movie theater, riding with your dog in the front seat of the car -- were funny, recognizable, nonthreatening. Now he is the centerpiece of nbc's hottest sitcom. Since the series made its debut in January 1991, Seinfeld has improved steadily in the ratings, especially among young, upscale viewers searching for life after thirtysomething. Sign of a show on the make: NBC promoted it heavily during the Olympics and has introduced two fresh episodes during the August doldrums...
Seinfeld seems totally at ease as a sitcom leading man, all gawky insouciance and whiny sarcasm. When he visits his parents in Florida, the family conversation has the ring of truth, not shtick. Mom, commenting on Jerry's scuba diving: "What do you have to go underwater for? What's down there that's so special?" Jerry, unfazed: "What's so special up here?" Traveling to Los Angeles to appear on the Tonight show, he spends his time fretting because the hotel maid threw out his notes for a new joke. Seinfeld isn't the first TV show...