Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, October 30, 1993 TAG: 9310300321
SECTION: SPECTATOR PAGE: 24 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: STEVEN COLE SMITH FORT WORTH STAR-TELEGRAM
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Good reviews, bad ratings.
Levin sighs.
"I tell you, I don't know if people want to watch one-camera shows anymore. Sometimes I think I'm fighting an uphill battle here."
Ex-Fort Worth resident Levin is the creator, producer and sometime writer and director of "Bakersfield, P.D.," a very clever, innovative Fox comedy (Tuesdays at 8:30 p.m. on WJPR-Channel 21/27) that has received near-unanimous raves from critics, but miserable ratings.
It's a one-camera show - meaning instead of just setting up three cameras on a sound stage and filming what happens, Levin's actors actually perform to a single camera, which is more time-consuming, more expensive, more professional.
It's the way they make motion pictures.
Most recent one-camera shows, ranging from "The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd" to "Frank's Place" - have been critical successes, commercial failures.
Good reviews, bad ratings.
One-camera shows like "Bakersfield" generally don't have a laugh track, either. The viewer has to decide what is funny, which may be more work than many viewers are willing to undertake.
"Maybe we're fooling ourselves here," Levin said. "If I put a laugh track on it, it would just cheapen it. Though it would make the show, I'm sure, more commercial."
"Bakersfield" premiered Sept. 14. It's about the Bakersfield, Calif., police department, specifically about Paul Gigante (Giancarlo Esposito), a black Washington, D.C., detective who moves with his family to Bakersfield and finds himself in something of a time warp.
Those of us who have been to Bakersfield have found it to be a little slice o' East Texas, right there in the California desert.
Gigante is paired with white-bread detective Wade Preston (Ron Eldard), eager to please but not quite sure what to make of his new partner.
Also present at roll call: an incredibly indecisive captain (Jack Hallett), his attentive sergeant (Brian Doyle-Murray) and a rednecked one-man wrecking crew (Chris Mulkey, homicidal Hank on "Twin Peaks"). Eldard, Mulkey and Doyle-Murray had worked with Levin on previous series.
Any reaction from Bakersfield, and their police officers?
"Yeah, they hate it," Levin said.
"They really took offense from the pilot's inference that there might be racism in that town. I think the comment was, `It's an image we've been fighting for years.' Which, of course, means it exists.
"They just didn't have much of a sense of humor. They're very sensitive - I guess they've been the butt of jokes in the past."
Still, it works - unless you live in Bakersfield, at least. "My desire was to do a show about male relationships," Levin said.
"I liked writing about cops before, and since they are in life-or-death situations, they seem to develop relationships more quickly than other guys in other workplaces.
"It was also a desire to write about small towns, which I like. Quirky, offbeat places, like I did with the last show, and this show."
That last show was ABC's "Arresting Behavior," which aired briefly two summers ago on ABC. It was a funny show that married "Cops" with "Police Academy." Leo Burmester and the aforementioned Ron Eldard played two patrol officers chosen by a documentary TV crew, which followed them around, taping the proceedings.
It was often hilarious, but ABC had no idea what to do with it, and neither did viewers.
Good reviews, bad ratings.
Well.
A very young Levin moved from Illinois with his family to Fort Worth, his mother's hometown, in 1963. Four years later, they moved to Dallas, and Levin remained in Texas through college.
After graduating from the University of Texas at Austin, Levin moved to New York City, where he wrote for "Saturday Night Live" and several other series.
He moved to Los Angeles, where he was co-producer and writer of "It's Garry Shandling's Show," then writer and supervising producer of "Good Sports," the often amusing but short-lived Ryan O'Neal-Farrah Fawcett series. Then "Arresting Behavior," then "Bakersfield."
Despite the show's low ratings - ranking generally in the Bottom 10 of 90-odd network shows - Fox "was thrilled with the reviews," Levin said, and apparently will air all 13 episodes they bought.
"And we should know in the next week or so if we'll get the full season order" of 22 or more shows, Levin said.
"My feeling is we will. Fox is very much behind it," and the network, which is just now making a serious effort to entice viewers to watch on Tuesday nights, "just doesn't have an audience then. So they aren't faulting us."
Good reviews, bad ratings. But hopefully, Fox will stick with a worthy show a little bit longer.
by CNB