January 22, 1992|By Rick Kogan,TV critic.
`Anything But Love`` is a charming, quirky, witty and intelligent show. Starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Richard Lewis as writers and lovers working for a Chicago magazine, its cast includes Chicago actress Holly Fulger, Ann Magnuson and Bruce Weitz.
It is a member-in-good-standing of that small club of quality shows.
But for reasons that have alarmed many in the TV biz, the series is being killed.
After a bumpy, three-year, 39-episode TV life, the show entered the 1991-92 season with high hopes. ABC ordered 22 episodes.
But earlier this month Twentieth Television Corp., which produces the show, and ABC decided they had had enough. Citing the show`s high cost and a lack of faith in its potential in that gold mine called syndication, ABC and Twentieth decided the series would end after only 17 episodes, the last of which is to air Feb. 26.
It isn`t unusual for a TV series to die. It happens all the time, to shows good and bad. But the reasons for the death of ``Anything But Love``
have caused concern in the TV community.
A network pays a licensing fee for each of the programs it buys from a studio. In many cases, this fee does not match production costs. So the studio, Twentieth in this case, makes up the deficit, hoping to recoup when the show hits syndication.
It takes roughly 100 episodes to make a show attractive for the rerun syndication market. But many successful series did not initially show this 100-episode potential. ``Cheers`` is a good example, as is ``All in the Family``; both languished in ratings limbo during their first seasons.
The killing of ``Anything But Love`` sends a signal that the increasingly penny-pinching studios and networks will be unwilling to stand behind a series unless it becomes a quick hit.
It also implies that many studios might be unwilling to operate shows at a deficit, thereby creating cheaper programming.
There are those who would argue that ``Anything But Love`` never met its expectations. It never flirted with the top of the ratings, recently resting in the 60s out of the 115 network programs.
The fault for that, however, lies with ABC, which shuttled the series around the schedule as if playing a game of hide and seek with the audience.
Viewers should feel a sense of loss, especially if they watch Wednesday night`s episode (8:30 p.m. on WLS-Ch. 7). It displays most of the show`s charms, as the magazine`s editor (Magnuson) must deal with a stranger who arrives claiming to be her husband.
ABC could bring the show back; technically it has not been canceled. ABC still has an option for next season. But ``canceled`` or ``option,`` it`s all semantics.
The bottom line is that money is talking louder than ever, as ``Anything But Love`` becomes the first in what might eventually be a very crowded graveyard of quality shows.
Channel hopping ...
- Jane Seymour, the erstwhile queen of the mini-series, gets caught in a messy tale of sex and violence called ``Are You Lonesome Tonight.`` It airs at 8 p.m. on USA cable, a network that continues to astonish with its crassness. The sex in this film is of the phone kind, an increasingly popular genre for unimaginative screenwriters. The violence is standard-issue.
Wealthy socialite Adrienne Welles overhears her husband, Richard, engaged in a rather steamy phone chat with a sultry-voiced gal. Then, after Richard mysteriously vanishes, she finds 20 tapes of previous phone sessions.
On her own, she tracks down her husband`s aural sex kitten. Her name is Laura (sexily portrayed by Beth Broderick), whose real gig is as a $300 call girl.
Hooking up with a down-at-the-heels private eye (Parker Stevenson), Adrienne tries to find her missing hubbie, discovering all sorts of sex-business hokum, false leads and false friends before enduring a chase-through-the-house ending that is as laughable as it is dull.
- ``The Elvis Conspiracy,`` 7 p.m. Wednesday on WGN-Ch. 9, picks up where ``The Elvis Files`` left off last season. Broadcast live from Las Vegas and hosted by Bill Bixby, the show continues to feed the sad beliefs of those who want to think Elvis is alive.
- Blah, blah, blah ... and for good, stultifying measure, blah. There you have the wordy sense of the dime-store philosophizing that characterizes writer-director Hall Hartley`s ``Surviving Desire`` (10 p.m. Wednesday on WTTW-Ch. 11), a play commissioned for ``The American Playhouse.``
Focusing on the fascination felt by a literature professor named Jude
(Martin Donovan) for a comely student named Sofie (Mary B. Ward), the
``drama-comedy`` is a series of pretentious or ponderous musings on desire, pain, love and self-indulgent angst.
Ward is lovely in a Paris-cafe way and brings a nice sense of wonder to her part. Donovan plays the tortured prof with a consistent hangdog expression. Other characters, sketchily drawn, are not worth mentioning.
- ``Street Life`` is a TV rarity on two counts. Not only is it the only show I can think of that is anchored by two blacks, but it also is very good. A quarterly news magazine show, its second edition airs at 9 p.m. Thursday on WTTW-Ch. 11. It`s solidly reported, interesting and handsomely produced.
Its segments include a visit to the Marshall Islands for a look at the destructive aftereffects of U.S. nuclear-weapons testing; a visit to the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis; and an examination of the reaction in the black community to the Thomas-Hill contretemps.
Anchors Delmarie Cobb and Art Cribbs, both of whom have labored in local radio, are as first-rate as their show.