“Welcome Back, Homefront”
Detroit Free Press, Mar. 9, 1993
Welcome back, Jeff and Ginger.
And Anne and Al. And Charlie and Gina. And Abe and Gloria. And everyone else in River Run, Ohio, the post WWII industrial town where everyone knows everyone else. Or wants to.
The relationships on the
show have been as on-again, off-again as the show itself. After this last
hiatus, even loyal fans may not remember who’s currently dating/married/fooling
around with whom.
Homefront has seven weeks to turn itself into a real ratings hit for ABC. Otherwise, this sentimental soap opera with its high-quality ensemble cast could be history, just like the decade in which it’s set.
What’s coming? Two marriage proposals. A wedding. A new career. And a murder mystery with several suspects.
Will it be enough?
“We can only do our best,” says Bernard Lechowick, who shares creator honors and executive producer duties with his wife, Lynn Marie Latham.
Adds Latham: “I believe the last seven shows are as good as anything we’ve ever done.”
Which is a good thing. Homefront needs all the help it can get. Critics and fans love it, but can’t always find it. The show has been bounced through several different time slots on several different days, sent on hiatus more than once, and was even pre-empted last November for (gasp!) Matlock.
“I think the audience is there if they can find us,” says Latham.
ABC’s Homefront is back, and not a minute too soon for those addicted to its comforting blend of humor, romance and postwar period detail. This beautifully crafted show is History Life: shorn of ambiguities but full of villainous vixens and broad-shouldered, old-fashioned ‘40s heroes. Life in Homefront’s small Ohio city isn’t easy, but it’s almost never confusing.
Homefront has been on-again, off-again since debuting in the fall of ‘91. Now it’s on for seven episodes, then who knows? Judging from the two shows I saw, Homefront’s anxious producers are playing things safe. No funerals, no major melodrama, just one delicately crafted scene after another.
Most of the scenes are slyly or sweetly comic. When wife Ruth leaves town, factory owner Mike Sloan (Ken Jenkins) tries to arrange a rendezvous with Judy the barmaid (Kelly Rutherford). The complications that follow stop just short of farce. This is adultery we’re flirting with, after all. where an ’80s prime-time soap like Falcon Crest threw its characters together with abandon, Homefront holds back, and rehabilitates everybody.
Judy: “I’m not a home wrecker, Mike.”
Mike: “And you’re too good to be anyone’s mistress.”
Too good to be true, more likely. But Homefront’s world is innocent, and hopeful rather than cynical: this show owes more to The Waltons than to Knots Landing.
Even when the problems here are big, like learning to live with polio or losing a job, they’re small.
Things get solved, often in very ’90s ways. One female character becomes a secret sportswriter; another, sensing the wave of the future, turns her radio job into a TV one. If women’s roles had changed this fast in the ’40s, Hillary would be president today, not Bill.
But Homefront can be forgiven for confusing its decades. What this show lacks in naturalism, it makes up in charm.
Ginger, says the guy who plays Jeff, is Abbott. He is Costello. Except that this Abbott and Costello love each other to distraction and don’t yet understand they are much more interesting together than they are apart.
Kyle Chandler seems as
uncomplicated as Jeff. He thinks Jeff and Ginger are terrific “because of the
writing.”
They got better together by working hard and by “doing what the scripts say.”
The kissing is hard because “it’s an intense thing, to put your lips on somebody else’s.”
The first woman he ever kissed, on-screen, was Tammy Lauren, and he was nervous.
He might be out of a job soon if ABC doesn’t renew Homefront but his policy is not to pay too much attention to what’s going on with the network because he can’t change any of it.
He is not Jeff, though he sure sounds like him and he sure laughs like him and it sure feels like he is just as sincere.
But Jeff is a right-fielder with the Cleveland Indians. Kyle played Little League. Kyle plays golf with Bo, his makeup man. Jeff couldn’t afford the greens fees.
Likewise, he says, Lauren is not Ginger. Lauren is one of his best friends, but give him a break on the why-don’t-they-date question. Ginger is a character; Lauren is an actress.
Does this sound as if he doesn’t like Jeff or Ginger or Homefront?
Don’t be silly. He loves them all. He sees the ‘40s world he helps create as “magical.” If Ginger and Jeff are magical, too, he is pleased.
It couldn’t happen to nicer people.
The allure of Jeff and Ginger, says the actress who plays Ginger, is simple: “When they kiss, they bump noses.”
It’s the innocence, that
they have never been slick or steamy or sophisticated about their feelings for
each other. “They are Everyman and Everywoman.”
Well, maybe not exactly.
“Every time I’m out with him I feel like Barbra Streisand in Funny Girl,” says Tammy Lauren. “He’s so much prettier than I am.”
The first time Lauren laid eyes on Kyle Chandler, 10 pages of dialogue and Jeff’s upstairs bedroom rested between them.
“We said nice to meet you, I’m Tammy, I’m Kyle, now we have to get in bed together.”
She’d done love scenes before; he had not. They went to a Los Angeles restaurant to talk about it. Five hours later, they were still arguing over one line. Tammy figured they had something.
Obviously, they do.
Jeff and Ginger are the new Maddie and Dave – remember Moonlighting? The tension and chemistry between them is too good to let go. That wasn’t the plan. Originally, Ginger and Jeff were to do the heartbroken horizontal bop and be done with each other. So much for original ideas.
Now Lauren says she’s stuck, big-time, on Ginger and the ’40s. It’s getting so a girl can’t enjoy a night out in the ’90s anymore.
“Kyle is one of my best friends,” she says now. “But he’s not Jeff. I go into a bar and some musclebound guy with some pitiful line hits on me and I wonder, ‘Is Jeff anywhere around?’ I’d really like to meet him somewhere.”
When Last We Met: Mike and Ruth were oh-so-concered about the impending Charlie-Gina nuptials. Mike was contemplating an affair with Judy Owen, the bombshell barkeep and baseball broad he met at an Indians game. Abe and Gloria, who work for the Sloans (Abe’s the chauffeur; Gloria does everything else), were running their own restaurant on the weekends.
Background: The snobby, WASPy Sloans’ only son died in the war, leaving Jewish-Italian Gina and granddaughter Emma as their only living heirs. Ruth resents Gina, but the Sloans love their grandchild. Abe and Gloria’s war-hero son, Robert, left town with his French wife after their lives were threatened by racists.
Tune In: Will Mike Sr. sleep with Judy? Will Ruth discover how well Mike already knows Judy? Will she care? Will Abe and Gloria be able to keep Rupert’s Cafe? Will they ever see Robert again?
Linda Metcalf, Judy Owen
When Last We Met: Linda Metcalf, who lost her job on the assembly line when the men came back from war, was looking for a meaningful career. Wisecracking widow Judy Owen was pining for Mike Sloan Sr. while offering witty barroom advice to everyone else.
Background: Linda was engaged to Mike Sloan Jr. before he shipped off to Italy, where he married Gina. Linda, a decent human being and feminist before her time, can’t bring herself to hate the widow Gina. Unhappy with secretarial duties at the factory, Linda took a second job as a proofreader at the town newspaper. Meanwhile, Judy met Jeff during spring training, but failed to seduce him. After her Florida bar burned down, she moved to River Run and got a job as the main barkeep at the road house where Jeff and Al also work. Judy and Mike Sloan Sr. became baseball buddies and were considering their own romp around the bases.
Tune In: Will Linda ever be happy? Will Judy ever be happy? Will anyone care?
When Last We Met: Anne was recovering from polio. Al was worried about how he’d pay the hospital bills. Their kid was crying constantly, pacified only by the Lemo Tomato Juice jingle, which was driving the rest of the household batty.
Background: Al breezed into town to organize the union at the Sloans’ factory. Prim and proper Anne was afraid the worldly and Jewish Al was putting the moves on her union activist daughter, Linda. Anne confronted Al, who assured her his interest in Linda was purely professional. Things got hot. Al and Anne nookied – even though staunch Catholic Anne always warned her children never to nooky without the benefit of marriage. Anne got pregnant. Al proposed. Anne worried about religion. Al persisted. They got married. They had a son. Anne got polio.
Tune In: Will Anne recover completely from polio? Will Al be able to pay the bills? Will their kid ever stop crying? Will Anne ever again care about how the toilet paper falls?
When Last We Met: Injured Cleveland Indians star Jeff and aspiring actress Ginger were fighting and, reluctantly, starring together in Lemo Tomato Juice radio commercials.
Background: Jeff fell in love with his brother Hank’s fiancée, Sarah, while Hank was overseas in the war. Hank and Sarah got married anyway. (Hank moved to Chicago after Sarah was shot to death, but that’s another story and they’re both off the show anyway.) Meanwhile, Ginger spent the war waiting for her fiancé, politically incorrect hunk-a-lunk Charlie Hailey. Instead, Charlie brought home another bride, the conniving Caroline, a Brit desperate to escape war torn England. Jeff and the virginal Ginger, both heartbroken and on the rebound, slept together. Then they fell in love and got engaged. Ginger got a chance at radio stardom – provided she postpone the marriage. Jeff wanted to go ahead with the wedding and focus on his own baseball stardom. A tearful breakup ensued.
Tune In: Will Jeff play ball again? Will Ginger’s career transcend the Lemo Tomato Juice Girl radio gig? Will the obviously-still-in-love Jeff and Ginger get back together? Or will Ginger marry that smooth-talkin’ Arthur?