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Show The Salt Lake Tribune Sunday July 15, 1984 S13 One more bad television show by Bill Carter Baltimore Sun Writer BALTIMORE This is a story about why there are bad shows on television. In the fall, ABC will introduce a new show called Jessie. It is a very bad show. It should not be on television. But it might have been better, it might even have been good, if it had not been compelled to conform to the kind of formula that reduces most attempts to do something new or interesting on television to the level of mediocrity or worse. Jessie, which will be aired by ABC on Friday nights this fall, is a series about a police psychiatrist, played by Lindsay Wagner. As originally described, the show was to be an examination of this challenging profession. The heroine would be called on to work with disturbed criminals, to determine the mental condition of those who committed a crime, to draw up psychiatric profiles of pattern killers, and so on. The pilot of the show reduces these concerns to sausage filler. It is filled with car chases, shootouts, holdups and villains threatening the heroine with rape and murder. knife-wieldi- IN OTHER WORDS, it is another hackneyed television cop show, and a not very well executed one at that. What happened to Jessie is something of a textbook case of the limited vision of those responsible for what the public sees as entertainment on television. First of all, the show was only commissioned by ABC because the network had made a deal with the star, Lindsay Wagner. Wagner has marketability on television because she was once in a successful series, Bionic Woman, has made a number of high-rate- d TV movies and probably, TV q scores well in the ultra-secra ranking of performers by ratings their familiarity and popularity with TV viewers. Wagner says, I made a deal to do a series with the network 2 years ago. At that time I said I wasnt really interested in doing another show. But last year the time became right and Wagner and the network started discussing concepts. We went through four different concepts. None of them gave me the room I wanted in the situation I wanted. et ONE IDEA WOULD have had Wagner as a photographer, another was a kind of takeoff on The Philadelphia Story. ABC didnt care for either. What Wagner specifically wanted to do was believe it or not a show about holistic medicine, a subject she is deeply committed to. "But they told me they were overdeveloped in medical shows. Wagner argued that her show would not be medical hardware stories but people stories." Somehow all of this came around to a police psychiatrist. But its clear Wagners opinion on what the show would be was different from the net- - works opinion. She continued to want to do people stories, and portray a genuine holistic psychiatist. What the network wanted, in Wagners own words, was that I have to be in jeopardy four times an hour. One of the enduring, knee-jer- k television is standards of prime-tim- e the woman-in-je- p story. By its basic definition, it means taking a heroine and having somebody try to kill her at regular intervals. Wagner laid out what many have long suspected: that a network actually prescribes precisely what a show has to do writers dont do it, producers dont do it, studios dont do it. Networks do it or at least ABC, ABCS POSITION, as stated by its chief programmer, Lewis Erlicht, was intended as a defense against the accusation that it had meddled un; fairly in Jessie, but it really sounded much more like a confirmation. Erlicht said the requirement was not one scene of the heroine in jeoparact of the one-hody in every show, but one action sequence per act, four per hour. Erlicht said he and the producers agreed the pilot had pacing problems, and that our opinion, based on shows of every genre . . .was that it warrants one piece of action per act, to be determined by the content of the story. Erlicht chose to use as an example the action in the first act of Jessie, when the psychiatrist wanders into a hostage situation, walks into if house where an armed man is threatening his son and talks him out. He did not cite the action in Act II, when a conversation in a car between the heroine and her police superior is interrupted by a holdup and a wild car chase, with the usual vehicles hurtling through the air. All the action in the "Jessie pilot is so contrived as to be ludicrous. Yet the show is intended as some kind of quasi-seriodramatic show. Clearly ABC doesnt believe it can succeed on that basis, however. THE ENFORCED INCLUSION of gunplay, threats and flying autome biles is reason enough to have disdain for Jessie, but Wagner added a reason of her own by trying to make a case for having her character be, no joke, psychic. One key scene of the pilot features Jessie drawing up a psychiatric profile of a crazed killer who is raping and murdering older women. Pressed by the hard-bitte- n cop on the case to give him details he could work with, Jessie describes everything but the kind of coffee the guy drinks his height, weight, hair color, age, condition of his teeth, even what tattoos he ur has. Of course the man turns out to be precisely as described. There is never an explanation of how this amazing description was worked out. Jessie just says, I guessed. Pressed on the point, Wagner said., Some people do use things in psychic It was psychic. r ways ... |