Heading for a Fall
Fathers and sons! Dads and boys! Pops and tykes! Sires and sperm! They’re everywhere, and they’re bigger than cats, bigger than science fiction, maybe even bigger than Madonna! Don’t scoff — the father-son thing is the hottest subject in Hollywood, the wellspring of summer blockbusters (father-son friction fired up movies like Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Field of Dreams and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids). Now it’s the big thing on the small screen this fall. Hey, mothers and daughters, go rent a video! Us men got some problems to iron out with Pop, and the men who run network TV have generously given us a season to do it in.
Ten new shows this fall will feature especially intense and troublesome father-son relationships. Seventy percent of these shows star dads who are single, while the rest feature dads who shoot guns (twenty percent) or own furniture that speaks (ten percent). By interpreting these statistics, we can see that despite Dad’s newly found popularity, he has been unable to climb out of the networks’ mutant-family-configurations rut and find himself a mom, though he may be a pretty good shot and enjoy talking to chairs.
“Family shows, especially comedies, have been historically stable,” says NBC vice-president of programming Warren Littlefield. “But we know that viewers like a little bit of a twist — so it’s like ‘Let’s try dads.’ There’s also an assumption that parenting comes naturally to mothers and unnaturally to fathers — and that’s funny.”
“When Taxi and Cheers and Mary Tyler Moore were on, people were on their own a lot more,” says Earl Pomerantz, an executive producer of the new CBS sitcom Major Dad. “Now people are having families — and fathers are being invited back into the family situation.”
After a few months of the new season, viewers may feel inclined to rescind the invitation. In ABC’s Doogie Howser, M.D., the central character, played by Neil Patrick Harris, is a sixteen-year-old boy genius who’s a resident surgeon in a major metropolitan hospital — but his stiff-necked dad still won’t let him borrow the car to take his date to the big dance. This is something we can all relate to, right guys? The premise of this Stephen Bochco comedy would probably work as a five-minute sketch, but to fill out a half-hour, the show forces us to enter the dramatic side of Dr. Doogie’s world: Before the first episode ends, Doogie gets his first kiss, loses his first patient and, you guessed it, makes up with Dad. (“I’m so proud of you, son.” “I love you, Dad.”)
The boy prodigy in CBS’s Top of the Hill is somewhat older but just as busy. Thomas Bell Jr. is a twenty-nine-year-old surfer who has been elected to fill the congressional office that his father, Thomas Bell Sr., was forced to leave for medical reasons. Happens all the time! Although he’s basically been a beach bum all his life, Bell, played by William Katt, is full of naive idealism and looks a lot like Joe Kennedy Jr., so no one laughs at him outright. But Tom senior hangs around trying to get Tom junior to compromise his values in the name of Washington deal making.
All the ingredients are in place for some father-son fisticuffs mixed with a little populist-politico bashing, but in the pilot Junior suddenly flies to some tiny Latin American nation to rescue an imprisoned drug agent, and the result is a shoot’em-up Mr. Smith Goes to Central America. If somebody can figure out what this show’s about, tell the producers.
In ABC’s Life Goes On — the kind of TV-show title that has family warmth and father-son understanding written all over it — the son is Corky, an eighteen-year-old with Down’s syndrome. Corky (Christopher Burke) is going against the odds and trying to make it in a regular high school. His parents are real proud of this — “When was the last time I told you how proud I am of you?” Dad tells Corky. When Corky runs afoul of the school authorities halfway through the first episode, you can start the twenty-minute countdown to a hug-filled resolution.
The ABC sitcom Homeroom offers a fresh twist on the father-son fixation: The chief domestic conflict is between father-in-law and son-in-law. Darryl Harper (Darryl Sivad) has quit his advertising job to teach fourth grade in an inner-city public school, and, hoo-boy, his wife’s father doesn’t like it at all. “What kind of man gives up his high-paying advertising job to play wet nurse to a bunch of future delinquents?” he growls. Dad shouldn’t worry so much: The school where Darryl teaches is a cynical advertisement for the state of public education — the supposed inner-city classroom is clean, well lit and full of smiling, happily integrated students. It’s the perfect antidote for all that worrisome news about inner-city classrooms as poorly funded excuses for education.
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