According to the auteur theory [dreamed up by French cinephiles and spread throughout the world by Village Voice missionaries] film is a director’s medium [with a passing nod to some "auteur" actors, namely Garbo, Astaire, Welles -- even when he was only acting in a movie they were still Wellesian.] It is the director who sets the tone of the film, creates the shared intimacy between the actors, carries obsessions and cinematic "ticks" from one film to the next. [Think of Howard Hawkes and the way his characters are always sharing cigarettes, or the conflicts between day and night, male and female that form the undertow of most of his films; or think of Douglas Sirk and his technicolor melodramas and the frames within frames within frames style he developed.]

In television, however, it’s all about the executive producer. We’ve had Norman Lear and his "social issue" sitcoms [such as All in the Family, Maud, and The Jeffersons -- though what issues that show tackled is anyone’s guess]; Garry Marshall and his sophomoric paeans to middle-class mediocrity [The Odd Couple, Happy Days, Laverne and Shirley, Mork and Mindy] -- though Marcey-Carsey seem to be mining that fallow plot of land at the moment; and, of course, the auter-ist of them all -- Aaron Spelling -- endlessly spinning his fantasies about youth and money and glamour, populated with buxom babes and soulless hunks [Dynasty, Fantasy Island, The Love Boat, 90210, Melrose Place, to name just a few].

Let’s also not forget, for even a minute, the producing team of Herskovitz and Zwick. They are our existential auterists, or the Sisyphus’s of television, rolling each of their big, tender-hearted series up that network hill only to have them roll right back down and canceled in their faces. Messrs. Herskovitz and Zwick like to create shows which delve into the murky depths of family dynamics, about fitting in, and finding your true identity. They are big on "getting in touch with your emotions." Their characters are typically self-absorbed, and overly-articulate; their shows filled with complexity and ambivalence, and rounded out with voice-overs and dream sequences. The shows are usually well written, and beautifully edited [for television], but H&Z’s thirst for tears and epiphanies can sometimes be a drain. You can’t always cry as much as they’d like you to. Needless to say, Herskovitz and Zwick are also the darlings of television critics. As Newsweek once gushed: "they are the best (and brightest) the medium has to offer ... they try to make TV forget it’s only teevee." Whatever.

First came "thirtysomething" which was, well, about people in their thirties. Boomers ate it up with a spoon, and laughed and cried and whined along with Melissa [laugh], and Hope [cry], and Michael [whine, whine, whine], and all the other thirties. Success spoiled the show, however, and soon entire episodes were devoted to bashing the world of advertising or showing how truly surreal L.A. is [and those are pretty huge, and very easy, targets to hit]. The show, in it’s last season, was actually trying to move into some interesting territory with Hope and Michael’s marriage disintegrating and the tedious and semi-stubbled Gary dead [hooray, hooray], but was abruptly canceled instead.

Several years later H&Z dried their tears and regrouped and came up with "My So-Called Life," which could have been subtitled "Something-teen." It starred the angelic and pimple-free Claire Danes [who is also angelic and pimple free in that free-for-all called "Romeo and Juliet" which I recently saw in South America for $2.50 at a theatre bigger than the Bronx Zoo; the movie has a nifty little soundtrack, and some interesting visuals early one, and Ms. Danes is nearly perfect, but Leonardo Diwhatever just can’t wrap his tongue around Shakespeare’s couplets, and John Leguizamo definitely needs a new agent]. But I digress ...

Well, Herskovitz and Zwick are at it again. This time they’ve called the show Relativity, and made it about twentysomethings and their families. [In a 1994 New York Times review of MSCL, the Twentieth Century was referred to as "the era of relativity"; one wonders if a germ for the new show was hatched there.] Next, I suppose, will come "Gerontology" about the sex lives of our parents [talk about your aged whine].

H&Z like narrators; they like playing with narrative modes. The first years of "thirty" focused on Hope and Michael as they struggled with the basic issue of balancing family and career. The other characters commented on the action, much like a Greek chorus, but they weren’t as fully fleshed out as our Zeitgeist couple. This, of course, couldn’t go on for very long, mainly because our young couple, as written, were not very interesting. Soon, entire episodes were featuring the other characters, with Hope and Michael making only the briefest of appearances. Things started to fall apart when Elliott and Nancy moved to L.A., and Ellyn got married, and Melissa kept falling in and out of relationships as shallow as mud puddles. All the characters were spinning out of control, and the narrative thread snapped.

MSCL, on the other hand, centered exclusively on the 15-year-old Angela, with assorted satellites of parents and teachers and friends orbiting around her. The entire world of MSCL was viewed through her eyes, and explained with her voice-over narrations [only one show, of the 19 produced, was narrated by someone other than Angela]. One wouldn’t think that such a focused narrative would work for television [and with only one year on the air, it’s hard to determine how long it could have worked], but surprisingly it worked wonderfully well. What made it work was the fact that Angela was your prototypical unreliable narrator. Unreliable narrators are a favored conceit in fiction [e.g., Welty’s "Why I Live at the P.O."; Capote’s "Breakfast at Tiffany’s"; Salinger’s "Catcher in the Rye"]; what makes these narrators so interesting is that the reader is constantly put off-balance trying to figure out what the real story is. With film it’s a more difficult style to pull off; what the camera records is generally thought of as the "truth." Why this mode of narration worked so effortlessly with MSCL seems to have been because teenagers are so clueless anyway [having once been a teenager myself], one accepts the fact that what they think and feel is not necessarily the truth, but usually just the warped product of rampaging hormones. For example: Angela’s hunkaburninglove Jordan Catalono writes a song called "Red" and she of course thinks it’s about her and her newly dyed "Crimson Glow" hair. The song, it turns out, was, of course, about Jordan’s red car. Or, Angela sits down to a quiet dinner with her parents, and although her mother [played by Bess Armstrong, whom H&Z originally wanted to play Hope on "thirty"] doesn’t even fret about Angela’s hair or the way she’s dressed [as all mothers do about their teenaged children], Angela still thinks to herself: "Lately I can’t even look at my mother without wanting to stab her." Or Angela spies her crush Jordan leaning against his high school locker and she moonily imagines, "He’s always closing his eyes, like it hurts him to look at things," and then Jordan squirts Visine in his eyes [he’s just hung over, like any normal high school god]. As the New York Times once opined: "The gap between appearance and reality ... has rarely been detailed on network television so sharply."

With "Relativity," H&Z have fallen back on a more typical, and less interesting, mode of narration: it centers around the romantic ramblings of Leo, a housepainter [in "thirty" Hope and Michael had a son named Leo, and Melissa’s boyfriend Lee was a housepainter], and his girlfriend Isabel. They meet cute in Rome [Isabel is perhaps a nod to Henry James’s heroine in "Portrait of a Lady"? James’s Isabel also affronted her destiny in Italy] and fall in love, although Isabel is engaged to another man, albeit a less soulful, less deep and hunkalicious, man. Leo [Jordan Catalono with a job] had gone to Rome to grieve his mother’s death, and no sooner does he meet Izzy [only H&Z could take a nice Protestant girl and nickname her with an old Jewish guy’s name; and of course there’s that Jewish/Gentile thing that H&Z played around with in "thirty"] and return to L.A. than he has to deal with the rest of his family’s mourning. His brother Jake [played by MSCL’s Brian ‘the Brain’ Krakow, Devon Gummersall], has practically gone mute with grief, and no one even likes the father. Heck, Angela would have thrown a party if her mom had died. Meanwhile, Isabel dumps the boring boyfriend and moves in with Leo the hunk, and her parents and sisters throw their two cents in about that, and well, the whole thing smells just a little bit like "thirtysomething."

There are some changes, however: Whereas "thirty" had the gay painter who was a friend of Melissa and dated someone from Michael’s advertising firm, "Relativity" has a lesbian sister. The "thirty" gay couple made headlines, and advertisers nervous, when they were shown in bed, post-coital [this was the episode where Melissa meets her 20-something boyfriend Lee, a housepainter, and they also end up in bed, which made no one nervous. Melissa and Lee were shown half naked with tousled hair and tangled bedsheets, while the gay guys were uncomfortably, and unrealistically, shown at opposite sides of the bed, tucked safely under sheets as crisp as concrete. It looked more like a Bible study group than like the beast with two backs]. This was of course before the advent of "Roseanne," a show where everyone now seems to be coming out of the closet. [Best joke on "Roseanne" in a long, long time: "By the end of my marriage," Roseanne’s newly bi-sexual mother revealed, "the only way I could have sex with my husband was if I stopped off at the store and bought myself a ‘Playboy’ first."] In contrast to all that, the two "Relativity" lesbians recently shared a long, simmering kiss, and nary an ad was yanked or a sponsor angered. Same-sex sex just isn’t as much fun as it used to be.

H&Z seem to have grown up, or at least calmed down, with their latest offering: they have brought a gentler, lighter touch to "Relativity" that was sorely missing from "thirty" and even sometimes from MSCL. Or maybe H&Z just happened to rent "Roman Holiday" or "Before Sunrise" one afternoon, both of which "Relativity" seems to have borrowed heavily from. Their new show is also hopelessly romantic [as was MSCL, but who among us was immune when Angela, breaking up with Jordan, says: "I’m going to miss your hair ... the way it’s so soft in the back"?]. Unfortunately, "Relativity" is often just downright corny. Which seems to please the critics, and the shows fans, to no end. Crooned Salon 1999, a cranky e-zine which doesn’t croon too often, "‘Relativity’ gives us characters who are the sum of all their secret selves, their pasts and possibilities, their DNA and collective memories." Okay.

Like most of H&Z’s shows, "Relativity" has a core group of vocal supporters [the Web is clogged with "Relativity" home pages], but its ratings are weak, and slipping. Not to worry. The siren’s song of cable TV will always beckon. Reruns of "thirtysomething" have become a staple of Lifetime’s late night schedule, while MSCL found a new life [and a clique of fans] on MTV, which runs the 19 episodes almost daily it seems. Expect to find Leo and Izzy necking in Rome, and kvetching in L.A., on VH1 sometime in the near future.

"Relativity" Web sites: