TV revives old hits, recycles past classics

HOLLYWOOD - Wrestling. Prime-time quiz shows. Weekly amateur hours. "The Wonderful World of Disney." Concerned young doctors. Picking out some regular woman and making her dreams come true.

The millennium may be drawing toward its conclusion, but television programmers appear headed back to the future, turning to shows and formats recalling the medium's infancy in the 1950s.

ABC's success with "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" - which heralded the quiz show's return to prime time in a big way during August - has only fueled the sense you can go home again, plucking concepts from TV's past and recycling old ideas in slick new packages.

"Millionaire" has left every programmer wanting its own prime-time quiz show, with NBC developing a revival of "Twenty-One" - notorious for spawning the quiz-show scandals of the '50s - while CBS toys with an updated version of "The $64,000 Question

Courtesy of ABC "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" re-invents the '50s show "Twenty-One."

." Fox weighs in with its own hastily assembled entry, "Greed," next month. With a few short-lived exceptions, such fare hasn't visited prime time in decades.

Still, that's just the tip of the iceberg. CBS' Friday lineup includes "Kids Say the Darndest Things" - derived from a segment on the '50s Art Linkletter series "House Party." Its running mate last season, the 50-year-old "Candid Camera," is waiting in the wings for a return engagement.

While not quite "The Original Amateur Hour," which ran from 1948 to 1970 (the last decade as a daytime show), or "Arthur Godfrey's Talent Scouts" (the top-rated show of the 1951-52 season), "Your Big Break" captures some of that spirit with a karaoke twist - bringing in amateurs and letting them impersonate favorite singers in front of an audience, all in pursuit of stardom, fabulous prizes and, at minimum, a few of those 15 minutes of fame Andy Warhol talked about everyone getting sooner or later.

"When I first saw it, I said, 'This is so old it's new again,"' notes "Big Break" producer Dick Clark, who based the show on a European format and knows a little something about sipping from the Fountain of Youth.

Several factors may be responsible for this mini-renaissance, from a dearth of new ideas to a hunger for affordable yet recognizable concepts to fill channels that keep sprouting up like weeds.

Yet the notion of reviving '50s formats also seems somewhat incongruous with TV's emphasis on youth; after all, most of those in the 18-to-49 age demographic - the principal currency of network sales departments - weren't born or were barely cognizant when the '50s progenitors of these shows were in their original glory days.

While seemingly raiding America's past, "Millionaire" hews closely to a British series that has been wildly successful in the United Kingdom. Some of the new programs bear no more resemblance to their predecessors than "ER" does to "Dr. Kildare," which began making the rounds in 1961. Thompson points out that updated versions of old standbys tend to be infused with a different sensibility, "just dripping with '90s American irony."

Clark - whose "American Bandstand" made its debut in 1952 - suggests certain ideas remain timeless, and that the entertainment industry's emphasis on youth means that network executives in a position to approve projects often come to the table with little sense of their history.

10-20-99