Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, July 8, 1993 TAG: 9309020342
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LYNN ELBER ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Medium
But the tobacco-stained series popping up on TV often include the dramatic equivalent of a surgeon general's warning. In episode after episode, characters who puff are chastised, criticized and mocked.
Banish the classic film image of suave Paul Henreid lighting up a pair of cigarettes and bestowing one on Bette Davis in ``Now, Voyager''; picture, instead, Marge Simpson's frumpy, chain-smoking sisters.
``In general, television's much better than the movies in not glamorizing tobacco and tobacco addiction,'' says Joe Cherner, president of Smokefree Educational Services, a nonprofit, New York-based anti-smoking group.
On ``Beverly Hills, 90210,'' Brenda (Shannen Doherty) is unmasked as a closet smoker and has to endure friends' comments about how, like, YUCKY, cigarette breath smells. The peer pressure leads her to quit.
A scene in the sitcom ``Wings'' shows a unhappy Helen (Crystal Bernard) with an uncharacteristic cigarette in hand. Confronted by another character about it, she says that she's trying to kill herself.
Chainsmokers on other series kicked the habit, including an attorney on ``L.A. Law'' and a sportswriter on ``Love and War.''
Health and social acceptance aside, smoking took shots for other destructive tendencies.
In an episode of ``Cheers,'' Rebecca (Kirstie Alley) burns down the bar after tossing away a lighted cigarette. On ``Seinfeld,'' a careless Kramer (Michael Richards) torches a mountain cabin with a cigar.
Smokers, generally, are subpar role models, such as Marge's lowlife siblings in ``The Simpsons'' or a snide newscaster puffing a ciggie off-camera on the sitcom ``Home Free.''
There are shows where smoking goes unchallenged. In the comedy ``Evening Shade,'' Burt Reynolds and Elizabeth Ashley have been shown puffing cigars (him) and cigarettes (her) contentedly.
But series executives vow to be more circumspect in the upcoming season.
``We're aware that a show does set an example on many levels, and smoking is one of them,'' said Victor Fresco, ``Evening Shade's'' co-executive producer. ``We are going to make an effort to curtail smoking.''
He said smoking has never been scripted, but introduced at the request of the actors themselves.
For tobacco pushers, all this anti-smoking propaganda doesn't create a pretty picture.
In the good old days, before TV was pushed into banning cigarette ads, there was a warm and cozy relationship between the TV and tobacco industries.
Smoking was omnipresent: cigarette makers sponsored popular shows, with such blatant promotions as one host's signoff recalled by Cherner: ``This is Arthur buy-em-by-the-pack Godfrey.''
Series stars such as Steve McQueen, Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball gave smiling pitches for cigarette brands; even stone-age cartoon character Fred Flintstone hawked a label.
(Godfrey, McQueen and Arnaz all developed lung cancer.)
Television's current anti-smoking fervor may be that of a sinner reformed yet again.
After weaning itself from cigarette advertising, TV networks adopted voluntary guidelines that called for smoking only when essential to the character being depicted.
But about a year ago, backsliding series began puffing and wheezing their way through pack after pack - often without an anti-smoking punchline.
The trend was so noticeable that it raised hackles among viewers who complained to John Banzhaf, executive director of Action on Smoking and Health, and a professor at George Washington University Law School.
Banzhaf called the growth in TV smoking illogical, if not suspicious: There's a clear increase in anti-smoking sentiment among the public, and smokers have dropped to about 25 percent of the U.S. population.
Also alert to the issue was the Entertainment Industries Council, a 10-year-old, nonprofit group which uses industry resources to deal with just such social and health topics.
About a year ago, the council undertook a Tobacco in Media project to help producers and writers avoid the gratuitous or positive use of tobacco.
The project drew up a series of guidelines, including suggestions that cigarettes be abandoned as mere props for actors and that smoking be depicted as addictive behavior, not a ``positive social activity.''
So let's call TV a smokefree zone. Now, about this tendency toward violence
by CNB