“Homefront: How the Postwar Was Won”
by Tom Shales, The Washington Post, Sept. 24, 1991
That the past is making a comeback should hardly constitute a surprise. The nonentity ’90s aren’t exactly high times. All the big news is happening abroad. America has the Bush-blahs. It’s a nowhere time, so it’s natural for TV to try to supply a somewhere.
Homefront, the new ABC drama series premiering with a special 90-minute episode at 9:30 tonight on Channel 7, probably isn’t moody or trendy enough to appease fans of thirtysomething, which formerly occupied the time slot, but it does deliver the nostalgia goods, harking back to postwar years when, says a narrator, “America was invincible, sodas only cost a nickel, and Coke? Well, it only meant cola.”
Clearly, Homefront is not barking up the wrong tree.
The idea is not simply to eulogize the period for its alleged innocence, however. In the premiere, social issues that would haunt the country for decades are beginning to rise to the surface. Linda, a young woman who has worked as a welder during the war (Linda the Welder equals Rosie the Riveter) is angered when told to quit her job now that the Johnnys have come marching home.
“I want to work here,” Linda says. “You sound like a radical,” says her mother.
Robert, a young black soldier returning from the front, has been promised a job at the local factory. The job turns out to be janitor. His father, Abe, a chauffeur who must endure his boss telling him that Robert is “a credit to your race,” intercedes to get him a decent position. He manages to get through to one of the most important people in Washington.
But the most compelling of the many stories being told involves simply an affair of the heart-three hearts, actually. Hank, a young soldier heading home, looks forward to hot baths and “Mom’s mincemeat pie” and to marrying his longtime girlfriend, Sarah. But while Hank was away, his own brother Jeff fell for Sarah, and vice very versa.
Jeff waits for the right moment to tell Hank and never quite finds it. Maybe next week; Homefront is serialized drama.
The cast is absolutely terrific, so that even when Homefront plays a bit simplistic, or like “Peyton Place” flashed back to the ’40s, the actors give the material a gleaming polish. Jessica Steen as Linda not only gets to fight the good fight for feminism, she has a scene on a front porch near the end of the premiere that is an emotional knockout.
Kyle Chandler as Jeff and Alexandra Wilson as Sarah make a very appealing, sympathetic star-crossed couple, even though betrayed brother Hank, as played by David Newsom, is strictly salt-of-the-earth stuff. As Robert and his father Abe, Sterling Macer Jr. and Dick Anthony Williams make sure they are anything but mere symbols. Williams is given a line that may qualify as Author’s Message: “Ninety-nine percent of the time, people will do the right thing if you give them the chance to.”
Maybe in 1945 they would. Today, the percentage has probably tumbled several points.
Naturally there’s lots of talk about sex, and some of it seems untrue to its time. Would even a liberated British woman really have walked into a pharmacy in those days and declared so loudly to the pharmacist that everyone in the store could hear, “I need a spermicide for my diaphragm”?
With everyone home after long separations, however, sex would naturally be on folks’ minds, to put it mildly. Soon the characters of Homefront settle down to creating that very baby boom that would grow up to be an apt target audience for just such a show as this.
Lynn Marie Latham and Bernard Lechowick wrote the premiere and did a first-class job. TV veteran David Jacobs (Dallas, Knots Landing) is among the executive producers. Skilled hands have fashioned Homefront and made it a trip worth taking-a journey to the past that is also supposed to tell us how we got to be the way we are. Given enough time, perhaps it will even suggest a cure.