If you’re anxious about life today, TV this fall is inviting you to journey to a happier time. A time when ketchup was a vegetable, when Saddam Hussein was a strategic ally, when children went to school, teenagers courted and families thrived with no greater worries than the possibility that they might at any moment be incinerated in a global nuclear war. If programmers are correct, the state of the American psyche is such that suicide attacks and anthrax anxiety have made the cold war seem cozy. TV-series reunion specials last season drew big ratings, attributed to viewers’ desire to escape into the past after Sept. 11. The networks are looking to capitalize on this trend with new comedies and dramas that look back to the Kennedy and Reagan eras. On NBC’s drama American Dreams , set in 1963 Philadelphia, 15-year-old Meg Pryor achieves her dream of dancing on American Bandstand. Fox’s Oliver Beene takes a comedic look at the same era. Two forthcoming shows set in the ’80s are a strange manifestation of TV’s collective unconscious. In both ABC’s drama That Was Then and the WB’s sitcom Do Over , a salesman in his 30s gets transported back in time to relive high school, fix his parents’ marriage, win over the unrequited love of his life and avoid flubbing a speech in front of the school. Do Over executive producer Warren Littlefield, once a programming executive at NBC, knows a thing or two about TV trend chasing. “I’m sure [Sept. 11] was a factor,” he says. “We’re in a conservative time, where simplification and wish fulfillment are very appealing.” The wish on the two ’80s shows is essentially an extension of the moving-back-home premise of series like Providence–getting to improve your childhood and thus becoming a different and better person as an adult. Do Over plays it more broadly, with plenty of moderately funny pop-culture references. That Was Then plays down the hairstyle humor, opting for a romantic-comedy plot in which the hero fights his brother for his high school love. “It’s not a nostalgia show about the ’80s,” says co-creator Jeremy Miller. “It’s a nostalgia show about high school.” Dreams, on the other hand, is old-school nostalgia: a misty-lens look at the past that shows how the ’60s’ social change roiled one blue-collar family: Mom is dissatisfied; Dad feels the patriarchy slipping away; daughter Meg is seduced by the forbidden libidinal beat of Motown. The Bandstand story line, with archival footage courtesy of co-producer Dick Clark, provides a baby-boomer-friendly sound track. Plots about feminism and civil rights flatter us about how far we have come. And the blue-collar, Catholic setting is free of modern jadedness. “It was not a more innocent time,” says Dreams creator Jonathan Prince. “I’m not that naive. But maybe we lost something when we gave up that time around the dining-room table.”
