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Hey, guys: Chick TV does sell
San Jose Mercury News - October 26, 1999
BY LISA DE MORAES
Washington Post
AFTER a couple of seasons perfecting excuses as to why their new drama series -- which invariably starred men and involved guns, swearing and/or bare bottoms -- weren't catching on with TV
viewers (who are mostly women), broadcast network suits (almost exclusively male) have stumbled onto what viewers actually want to see these days.
Chick dramas.
"Judging Amy," CBS's warm and fuzzy one-hour series (Tuesdays, 10 p.m., Chs. 5 & 46, although it's being pre-empted tonight), is the star of the new TV season. Amy Brenneman
plays a young attorney who divorces hubby, flees Manhattan for small-town life with young daughter in tow, and moves back in with retired-social worker Mom (Tyne Daly). "Amy" ranks No.
13 among all television programs this season; it's the second-most-watched new series. Among new programs, "Amy" falls behind only NBC's new Thursday sitcom, "Stark Raving
Mad," and you could pretty much schedule a half-hour of grass growing between "Frasier" and "ER" and end up with the season's most watched new show.
The boys' club
TV critics -- another boys' club -- are surprised by "Amy's" success. But then, they're the same bunch who were dumbfounded last January when viewers by the millions ignored their
uniformly scathing reviews of the debuting chick drama "Providence" (Fridays, 8 p.m., Chs. 4 & 8) and made the NBC program the "surprise" hit of last season. Also among the
surprised were NBC suits, who had shown little confidence in the show last season, yanking it off the fall lineup during the schedule-setting process and sending it to the midseason bench.
Usually, when a network lands itself a hit, it spends the next couple of seasons cloning it to death. NBC, for instance, made an art form out of mass-producing sitcoms about single women in the
publishing industry, after promising early numbers on "Caroline in the City," which led to "Suddenly Susan," "Veronica's Closet," "Just Shoot Me," etc.
But on NBC's schedule this fall there are no "Providence" clones. What's up with that?
It's about hipness. "Providence" hasn't got it. "Providence" is the anti-hip. It's sweet, it's gushy, it has sick puppies. At NBC, if you are not hip, you might as well be
dead. Same goes for ABC, Fox, WB and UPN. Hip these days means "Dawson's Creek"; hip means chasing viewers in their teens and twenties.
Then there's CBS. CBS hasn't seen hip in ages. CBS almost went out of business trying to get its groove back. Remember "Central Park West"?
But these days CBS is embracing unhipness. CBS Television CEO Leslie Moonves has actually made the network's unhipness a very cool thing. He loves to tell advertisers that more of their precious
viewers in the 18-49 age bracket are watching his geezer show "Diagnosis Murder" than WB's "Dawson's Creek" and then see the look on the ad guys' faces.
Moonves also loves "Judging Amy" -- calling it "the perfect CBS show."
But "Amy" isn't CBS's only early drama-series success in the Season of Girls Rule. "Family Law" is pulling in 41 percent more viewers on Monday at 10 p.m. (Chs. 5 & 46)
than CBS was getting there this time last year with "L.A. Doctors" -- one of those dramas starring men who were supposed to be irresistible to women but weren't.
More puppies
"Family Law" stars Kathleen Quinlan as an attorney who starts up her own firm after getting dumped by her hubby/law partner and takes on mostly cases involving child victims, the rights
to the family puppy's ashes, beached whales -- stuff that'll make you weep.
Meanwhile, ABC took a stab at a more sophisticated chick drama with "Once and Again" (tonight, 10 p.m., Chs. 7 & 11) starring Sela Ward. The show, from the kings of angst Marshall
Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, came out roaring in September with a debut audience of nearly 17 million and the biggest debut rating among adults aged 18-49 on any network in four years. But the
relationship show has cooled off since then as time-slot competitor "Amy" has gained steam.
Copyright © 1999 San Jose Mercury News. All rights reserved.
Copyright © 1999 Washington Post. All rights reserved.
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