What A Waste of (Prime) Time

By WALTER SHAPIRO

Picture an America where friendly, funky, Cub-fan-fanatic Chicago is the only inhabited spot between New York City and Twin Peaks. Imagine that this mythical U.S. has become so awash in racial sensitivity and tolerance that even drug dealers practice affirmative action, yet, strangely enough, intergalactic aliens are a far more visible minority group than Hispanics. In this youth-obsessed culture, where children of all races automatically come equipped with loving families, the stork must have supplanted traditional biology, for there are virtually no pregnant women.

Other oddities abound. How can the economy remain prosperous when half the work force lazes around luncheonettes and broadcast studios swapping dirty- word-free double entendres, while the other half consists of overworked and underappreciated cops? And why are all these people so hazy about their history? Is it not peculiar that no one ever refers to an event that predates Elvis' appearing on Ed Sullivan?

If such through-the-looking-glass images of an alternative America seem eerily familiar, the reason is probably that they are an impressionistic synopsis of a recent week's worth of prime-time TV watching on all four broadcast networks. Why would anyone voluntarily subject himself to nearly 50 hours of sex-and-sass sitcoms, puerile police procedurals and yuppie yammering about the meaning of life? Call it a census of sorts, a time-slot-by-time-slot canvass of the nation's nightly fantasy life, a solitary journey up the lazy river of the collective consciousness armed only with VCR and fast-forward button. The goal was to view television through the eyes of an outsider and to pretend to encounter the Huxtables, Roseanne and, yes, even the Simpsons for the first time. Alas, the results were depressing, not only in the obvious vast-wasteland sense but also more seriously as a reminder of the insidious ways in which prime-time TV distorts America's sense of itself.

Make no mistake, not even the most credulous couch potato believes that, say, 16-year-old Doogie Howser, M.D., is for real. But the easy affluence that is the birthright of Doogie's family might seem representative enough, especially when on the following ABC show (The Marshall Chronicles) the TV father was dressed in a tuxedo for an evening of Manhattan night life. Despite the pseudo-lower-middle- class realism of Roseanne and Married with Children, the implicit message in much of prime time remains almost effortless economic entitlement. For while most of the nation resides in what bicoastal types call "the great flyover," TV characters are never rooted in Toledo or Omaha; instead, most spring to life magically equipped with sprawling houses and apartments in glamorous cities like New York and Los Angeles.

Take last Monday night's prime-time schedule. Murphy Brown and Capital News depict journalistic superstars strutting down the corridors of power in Washington. Working Girl is climbing her way into the upper echelons of New York corporate life; next maybe Tess will be dating Donald Trump. In Atlanta the Designing Women are even less likely than Scarlett O'Hara ever to be hungry again. Newhart is living the yuppie fantasy of owning a Vermont country inn. Even the downwardly mobile Philadelphia lawyer of Shannon's Deal can still manage to take a first date out for a $172 restaurant meal. Yes, one of My Two Dads did abandon an oversize New York apartment during reruns but only because he left his heart in San Francisco.

On television, most real work is done by just four occupational groups: cops, lawyers, gravediggers (funerals are a dramatic staple) and the staffs of hospital intensive-care units who are constantly battling to keep characters like MacGyver alive. Everyone else is on a perpetual coffee break. Most of the cast of Wings hangs out in the airport restaurant. The office scenes in Working Girl and Open House were all devoted to the workaday rigors of party planning.

What scant vigor remains in American capitalism is mostly due to the indestructible J.R. Ewing, who is still spouting business maxims like "He's my kind of man -- bribable." Only thirtysomething tries to replicate the real-life stress of middle management, the ulcer-producing anxiety normally reserved for commercials hawking business phone systems and airlines. At a time when America needs role models of scientists, engineers and factory managers striving to keep ahead of the Japanese, all prime time offered were Elliot's self-indulgent efforts to direct a public-service spot worthy of Fellini.

But the treatment of most social problems on the networks cannot avoid being tinged with escapism and societal wish fulfillment. With the best of post- Cosby intentions, television seems determined to become the only place in the nation where the black middle class is growing exponentially. Most black sitcoms are like old-fashioned white ones except with better music. On Family Matters, the Winslows all joined together to perform in a rap video to help Eddie win a contest. The kids enjoying a beach vacation on A Different World may be black, but their primary identity seems to be boisterous middle-class college students. Symbolically, of course, it is indeed a different world when sitcom characters routinely wear T shirts that proclaim, MARTIN, MALCOLM, MANDELA, ME.

But in their zeal to do the right thing, the architects of prime time are largely masking the strains in race relations and the social isolation of the black underclass. On most shows, blacks are portrayed either as work buddies or in comfortable middle-class roles like an art-gallery owner on Father Dowling Mysteries. As a result, prejudice becomes an abstraction to be preached against and overt bigotry all but limited to a bizarrely menacing alliance between American Nazis and skinheads on 21 Jump Street. So too does TV breezily dismiss the crisis of the black family. On Bagdad Cafe, Whoopi Goldberg plays a recently jettisoned wife whose son's only adjustment problem is that working in the restaurant kitchen interferes with his ambition to be a classical pianist. This atypical dilemma is resolved in 1950s-sitcom style: Henry Mancini decrees that the kid has real talent.

Crime is the one arena where prime time drops its Panglossian pose to pander to public hysteria. This is not to argue that the narcotics squad on Nasty Boys should instead pursue jaywalkers or that the cops on Hunter should stop shouting, "Freeze. Police. Drop the gun!" O.K., so you cannot have detective shows without serious crime. But why are sitcoms also menaced by a crime wave that resembles New York City during a blackout? In this single week, there was an interracial team of angry drug dealers on A Different World, a psychotic killer rudely intruding on an office camping trip on Perfect Strangers, and that laugh riot -- a berserk gun-wielding busboy -- on Sugar and Spice. Even when Suzanne and Julia of Designing Women jetted off on vacation to Japan, probably the world's safest nation, their luggage was promptly stolen in Tokyo's Narita Airport. The thieves, of course, belonged to a criminal class that now exists only on shows determined not to offend anyone's sensibilities: American hippies.

After seven days of total immersion in such prime-time platitudes, other smaller, less socially significant mysteries remain. Why was Grace, the tall, blond judge on L.A. Law, the only person allowed to voice the all-American sentiment that she hates her job? What happened to all the neighbors who used to drop by for coffee on all the sitcoms, and why have they been replaced by work groups? Why are there so few good meals and so many bad restaurants on television? Why are there no nostalgia shows reprising the '50s or '70s? And how about the biggest puzzle: What ever happened to all those car chases?