Subject: LEISURE & ARTS -- Television:  A Dish and Her Lionhearted Dude
Date: Published: 11/2/87 140 lines
Source:  WALL STREET JOURNAL. Copyright Dow Jones & Co. Inc. 

    LEISURE & ARTS -- Television:  
    A Dish and Her Lionhearted Dude
    ---
    By Martha Bayles

    Like most classic fairy tales, "Beauty and the Beast" is
 psychologically compelling.  Hulking and beetle-browed, the
 Beast is really a prince -- on the inside.  But as most men
 can attest, that's not much help when asking for a first
 date.  Eventually he manages, through the good graces of
 Beauty's father, to impress her with his sterling mental and
 spiritual qualities.  She grows attached to him, and, after a
 few ups and downs, she decides she can't live without him.
 "At last," he sighs, released by her pure love from a
 longstanding wicked spell.  He shuffles off his ugliness and
 becomes as handsome as she is beautiful.
    The tale is also morally compelling.  The entire courtship
 takes place without anybody setting foot in the bedchamber,
 for the simple reason that back in the days of yore,
 spiritual love was supposed to take priority over the
 physical kind.  If a couple's minds and souls found a way to
 live in harmony, then it was expected that carnal bliss would
 follow.  Such is the original significance of the Beast's
 transformation.
    The question is, how much of this story remains compelling
 after the rough handling of today's TV scriptwriters,
 producers and network executives?  At first glance, "Beauty
 and the Beast" (airing Fridays, 8-9 p.m.  EST, on CBS) seems
 one of those contrivances that are born with the new season
 and buried by Halloween.
    It casts Beauty as a Manhattan socialite and corporate
 lawyer named Catherine Chandler (Linda Hamilton), who is
 beaten by a vicious gang and left to die in Central Park,
 only to be rescued by a mysterious Man/Beast named Vincent
 (Ron Perlman).  Carrying her to a secret underground city
 populated by gentle and wise social outcasts, he nurses her
 back to health.  Because she can't see Vincent (her eyes are
 bandaged), Catherine develops a deep bond with the
 noble-spirited Vincent that persists even after she returns
 to the daylight world resolving to quit corporate law and
 become a crime-fighting assistant district attorney.
    Critics have not laid a hand on "Beauty and the Beast."
 The show has also held its own in the ratings.  One reason for
 this success may be that its fairy-tale unreality mixes well
 with certain other, less enchanting unrealities that are
 nonetheless typical of TV fare in 1987.
    Take sex.  By today's standards, Vincent -- a lion-faced
 dude with vampire fangs, dirty-blond dreadlocks and garments
 that belong in a heavy-metal version of Puss 'n' Boots -- is
 not unattractive.  Your 13-year-old daughter would love him.
 Yet in this era of cable-competitive heavy breathing, the
 program's creators have chosen to impose medieval restraints
 on the relationship between an unmarried dish like Catherine
 and a guy who not only knows his way around New York, but
 also is single, straight and a gentleman.  Don't they know
 what a rare combination that is?  
    Watchers of prime time will guess the answer:  The fairy
 tale's antiquated morality fits with a contemporary trend.
 The confluence of AIDS, family breakup and careerism has made
 it tough for Hollywood to follow its usual more-sex-is-better
 ethic.  But that ethic has been operative so long, it's also
 tough to find a substitute.  Naturally, Hollywood wants it
 both ways.  So the airwaves fill with look-but-don't-touch
 lovers ogling each other while bleating banalities about how
 they're "afraid of commitment."
    It's not a pretty sight, all this lustful slavering.
 That's why, compared with a sly drooler like David on
 "Moonlighting," it's refreshing to see Vincent gaze at
 Catherine without licking his chops.  And unlike Maddie on
 "Moonlighting," Catherine isn't coy; she really doesn't
 respond to Vincent's physical charms, however stylish they
 may be.  Both he and she behave honorably, refusing to conduct
 stupid pet tricks with their emotions.  And occasionally, the
 love-struck Vincent even rises above scriptwriter banality.
 Instead of mouthing lines like "I really care about what we
 have together, Maddie," he has the sense to quote
 Shakespeare.
    The program also improves on pop feminism.  For fear of
 appearing sexist, television frequently assigns cushy jobs to
 the ladies.  Yet for fear of losing viewers, it also makes
 sure that the ladies are gorgeous and well under 30.  The
 upshot is that on television, many key societal institutions
 appear to be run by ever-so-plucky ingenues.  To some extent,
 Catherine fits this mold, exerting more authority than is
 realistically possible after only a couple of months'
 experience in the district attorney's office.
    She also takes foolish risks.  In a recent episode, she
 arrives in a bad neighborhood ("Nothing here but nightmares,"
 quips her cabby), and promptly executes the plucky-ingenue
 maneuver of walking alone into a deserted bar to interrogate
 the leader of a sadistic youth gang.  Most shows engage in
 such nonsense in order to convince us that the ordinary
 starlet playing the heroine is actually an extraordinary
 human being.  We don't believe it for a minute, but because we
 recognize it as a well-intentioned pro-feminist cliche, we
 accept it.
    Not so "Beauty and the Beast."  Catherine may be in peril,
 but she doesn't come off as a fool.  After all, she knows as
 well as we do that the ferocious Vincent is lurking outside,
 having smelled danger (he's quick that way), grabbed an
 express subway train (he prefers to ride on top), and climbed
 back above ground through a nearby manhole.  The minute things
 get tense, Vincent will bust in from the alley and pulverize
 any hoodlum who dares to threaten his fair lady.
    By the same token, it doesn't matter whether the danger
 comes from gang members or fire-breathing dragons.  The New
 York of "Beauty and the Beast" is at least as unreal as the
 New York of any number of other shows.  For fear of offending
 minority groups, well-meaning TV shows often populate the
 inner city exclusively with white faces, criminal and victim
 alike.  And the street criminals are usually working for the
 real bad guys, namely the CEOs of large corporations.  The
 wickedest enemy faced by Catherine and Vincent so far has
 been a real-estate developer whose use of thugs to evict the
 elderly tenants of a rent-controlled building gets equated
 with the Nazi Holocaust.  Yet none of this grates on the
 nerves the way it does in a "realistic" show, because the
 whole thing is a fairy tale from the start.  We suspend our
 disbelief long before these implausible events.
    Forced to assign an ethnic identity to Vincent's
 underground clan, I would have to settle on Dutch.  Their 
 clothing, language and manners hark back to the Age of 
 Discovery; their map of the city shows a harbor full of
 16th-century sailing vessels..
    Along with reducing TV unreality to episodes in a fairy
 tale, "Beauty and the Beast" has another, more subtle appeal:  
 It offers the reassuring fantasy that deep, deep down in the 
 bedrock, beneath the chaos of the streets and the mayhem of 
 the subways, New York is really a civilized place.
R0601 * END OF DOCUMENTS IN LIST - ENTER RETURN OR ANOTHER COMMAND. 

[This article is made available here by Dow Jones Co. for the 
personal and non-commercial use of callers to this bbs, in the 
hope that it will be of some help to those who are suffering 
from the disease and others who are seeking to help them.]