“Homefront in for an Untimely Demise”
by Matt Roush, USA Today, Dec. 17, 1992
Here’s the state of the heartless in this year’s saddest soap, As the Schedule Churns (and tosses out the good stuff):
Already dead: CBS’s Brooklyn Bridge. Death pangs prolonged: NBC’s I’ll Fly Away, given a reprieve through January but unlikely to survive beyond the Super Bowl. Now ABC makes it a shameful hat trick, turning its sights on Homefront, which disappears after tonight (9 ET/PT) into a “hiatus” limbo until at least spring.
And so the season goes – right into the toilet. Happy New Year. Rent a video.
Homefront’s mistreatment at ABC’s hands is especially painful. No matter how praise-worthy and painstakingly crafted are Bridge and Fly – like Homefront, well-made period pieces – their lack of mass appeal is sadly understandable.
Bridge’s sentimentality and Fly’s thoughtful solemnity color their respective shows with an inescapable “good for you” quality. The viewer may feel more duty than enthusiasm about tuning in each week, although a small legion of ardent fans appreciate their uniquely entertaining qualities.
But Homefront is just plain fun, the sort of escapist good time critics too often ignore, but viewers once used to relish. The ‘40s trappings merely lend a quaint zing to the robust, twisty storytelling - with romance, humor, conflict, great looking stars - that was a reliable TV staple before the smarmy days of distorted cheap ‘reality’ TV.
As a serialized ensemble piece, though, it requires two critical elements: visibility and continuity.
ABC gave it neither.
Renewing it only to place it opposite Cheers, which snares much of the same young-female viewership that carried Homefront through a shaky first year, ABC added insult to injury by pre-empting the show almost as often as it aired. Tonight’s is only the eighth original of the season.
And what an original.
Book-ended by vintage newsreels - the opener is a March of Dimes event at the Truman White House, the latter a report on famine in China, with the U.S. to the rescue (how timely) – this “Life Is Short” episode finds rich emotion and even gentle humor in the polio epidemic of 1946.
While homespun mom Anne Kahn (Wendy Phillips) comes down with the dread disease, launching a health scare in the Ohio burg of River Run, the clever writers lighten the tone with contrasting midlife crises of confidence for two of its male characters.
The use of music is, typically, a polished asset, including a big-band mood piece underscoring a montage of polio-era iconography; and “Always” to cap the tentative flirtation between town bigwig Mike Sloan (Ken Jenkins) and the Veronica Lake-stylized barmaid Judy Owen (Kelly Rutherford).
Homefront sings, with the hum of pure pleasure. And for the moment, the song goes on. However unsung. This week, they’re shooting a red-scare episode, and will stay in production through mid-January.
A week ago, the producers believed they were getting an uninterrupted seven-week run in the new year. Instead, they just got interrupted.