“Homefront: Good Yarn, Great Gossip”
I love continuing stories. My idea of a great network vice-president in charge of drama would be Scheherazade, telling stories that go on and on.
The closest we have to a never-ending yarn that has me on the edge of my couch wanting to see more is Homefront (Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on ABC).
It’s a saga about a fictional American small town circa 1945, right after World War II. River Run, Ohio, is located halfway between Peyton Place, New England, and Knots Landing, California.
With the great war just over, Johnny – and Charlie, Hank and Robert – come marching home, bringing love and despair. One of the boys comes back in a box: another arrives with a war bride he forgot to mention to the girl he left at home.
The hour-long drama focuses on three families in the upper, middle and lower classes. The Sloans own the local factory, which made war parts. The Metcalfs (a widow and three grown children) had a mother and daughter working at the plant. The Davises are a black couple who serve the Sloans at home, and whose son, a war hero, now works on the factory assembly line. The series masterfully intercuts their stories as the families cope with the postwar realities of love, friendship, work and home.
You could catch a cold in the neck from the draft whipped up by the tongues of town gossips. While her poor hubby Charlie (Harry O’Reilly) is hoping for a baby, British war bride Caroline (Sammi Davis-Voss) buys spermicide from Ginger (Tammy Lauren), who works at the town drugstore trying to forget Charlie, her betrothed, who forgot to tell her he was married. And isn’t that English war bride a scheming tart? And what a villain is Ruth – hiss! – Sloan (Mimi Kennedy), who’s doing her darndest to get her dead son’s bride deported, concentration-camp tattoo and all.
Sure, its soapy. I can almost hear the “Rinsowhite” commercials from the 1940s. Sure, they have sex on the brain. But it does cut the dirt and bubbles with social realism. And it’s all done with classy production values, the closest Lorimar (Dallas) has ever gotten to Upstairs, Downstairs.
Homefront is hunky-dory with me.