Son of Roots

By Frank Rich

PALMERSTOWN, U.S.A. March 20, CBS, 8p.m. E.S.T.

No one has more cleverly or profitably turned social issues into prime-time TV entertainment than Norman Lear and Alex Haley. Without Lear's All in the Family and Haley's Roots, network television in the 1970s might nearly have been bankrupt of innovation. To kick off the new decade, Lear and Haley have joined forces to undertake what could be their most exciting project yet: Palmerstown, U.S.A. is a new series that aspires to combine the historical sweep of Roots II with the activist humor of Lear's best sitcoms. Still, a lot of hard work lies ahead. Though the first episode of Palmerstown abundantly illustrates Lear's and Haley's political concerns, it offers little evidence of their considerable dramatic gifts. The show is completely humorless and simplistic in its moralizing; it embraces exactly the kind of preachiness that Haley and Lear have scrupulously avoided in the past.

The setting is a fictional town in Tennessee around 1935. Palmerstown looks a little like Haley's native Henning and a lot like the homestead of The Waltons. The premise is reminiscent of Mark Twain: two young boys, one black (Jermain Hodge Johnson) and one white (Brian Godfrey Wilson), are best friends despite the racial barriers that separate their respective families. The two-hour opening show introduces the boys and their parents with the dubious aid of a very frail plot mechanism. The white father, a grocer (Beeson Carroll), mistakenly overcharges his black counter part, a blacksmith (Bill Duke), by $3.47 on a monthly bill. What follows is an escalating series of conflicts that not only sets blacks against whites, but husbands against wives and parents against children. Eventually the K.K.K. makes grotesque threats, boycotts start to destroy the town's economy, and it seems that a new Civil War might break out. Since the story's underpinnings are so weak, the strain on credulity borders on the ridiculous. It is as if an I Love Lucy episode about a lost purse suddenly turned into an overheated melodrama about the stock market crash.

In its period detail and acting, Palmerstown is well produced, but it is full of stereotypes and padding. The many repetitive confrontations unfold in the prosaic manner of a high school civics class. The black characters are all saints, as they are not in other Lear and Haley shows, and the whites are generally either fire-breathing racists or pure-hearted liberals. There are also too many sentimental scenes that show the two young heroes frolicking in brotherly love on sunny fields. The results are so tame that not even a last-minute medical crisis can arouse any excitement.

If Lear and Haley would only remember their roots, they should soon bring on a new Edith Bunker or Chicken George to stir Palmerstown up.

--Frank Rich

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