Caroline in the City

This show is pretty good, I watch it whenever I can find the time. It's not really outstanding, and there are better sitcoms, but the characters are nice and especially Richad has some good lines. Compared to Suddenly Susan this show is, well, a million times better, mainly because the characters aren't as annoying (except Julia).

Due to a recent wave of nostalgia for the seventies, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" has become recognized by many critics, historians and viewers of Nick at Nite as a landmark TV series that captured perhaps better than anything else on TV at the time the social changes that took place in the US following the turbulent sixties and women's liberation. The series focused on a single woman (Mary Tyler Moore previously known to America as the perfect embodiment of domestic femininity playing Dick Van Dyke's wife) whose job and friendships gave her life meaning at a time when most women

were only beginning to realize that there was more to life than being a wife and mother. Mary Richards was the perfect seventies heroine in that she was a woman nearing middle age stylishly with the domestic social values of fifties/sixties behind her and the sexual liberation of the seventies in front of her. A woman who has been trained her whole life to be subservient to men is now working amongst them, standing up to them and gaining their professional and social respect.

Lately there have been a plethora of shows that attempt to do what MTM did in the seventies. "Caroline in the City" is one of them, "Suddenly Susan" is another. Unfortunately these shows are taking place in the wrong time period because neither "Caroline" or "Susan," female characters who grew up during the sexual revolution and the AIDS crisis, have any adequate justification to feel overwhelmed by the prospect of being a working woman without a husband. A woman who choses work over marriage is no longer an edgy premise for a sit-com.

Caroline (Leah Thompson) is a cartoon artist who has recently moved to New York having grown up in the midwest. She struggles to preserve her small town values in the fast paced world of the big city. In order to give Caroline's character the innocence that MTM had, the writers keep drawing on her midwestern upbringing as a contrast to her cynical sarcastic native New Yorker friends. I don't know where this woman supposedly grew up but I don't know how she could have been living in NYC for as long as she has and still hasn't gotten over it. While MTM often seemed overwhelmed by the crassness of her female friends and her male colleagues because she was brought up in an era where she just may have been innocent of such behavior, Caroline remains overwhelmed by her New York friends for no other reason than she looks cute when she's overwhelmed.

A typical show goes something like this: Caroline gets really excited about something old fashioned. Her friends "wise cracking" Annie and "cynical-black-wearing" Richard (who is such a closet case and for some reason we are supposed to believe he's in love with her) get annoyed by her pollyanna attitude and make fun of her. She gets upset and gets even and the cynical New York gang sees the importance of Caroline's small town values. The End. There is no character development. There is no plot line that doesn't resolve itself within an episode or two (cept for her on-again-off-again romance with the closet homo Richard). There is no chemistry between her and her friends and Leah Thompson is simply too old to be acting cutsey.

I was really annoyed to see all those comments about Richard's character and Malcolm Gets playing his part. Richard's character is performed perfectly by Malcolm Gets, no one would have done it better! This show is not some stupid show that makes u laugh on silly things, you actually laugh because this show links you to reality. Caroline is the perfect confused woman who needs love in her life and Richard is the perfect struggling artist who is only satisfied by working as one, not a cartoonist assistant. If you look at the real world, you will find that the show makes perfect sense and has been a success from A to Z. As for Spadaro's character, well she's the comic relief of the show, she and Charlie's character. but the show is a realistic Drama with the right amount of real life comedy and tragedy in it and it's a shame seeing it unappreciated like that.

This show became an (undeserved) critical punching-bag during its too-brief run on NBC. It was similar to several shows which ran during the same period: female centered, urban, based in arts/media. All of them were lumped together and sniffed at by sour old critics. This was by far the best of the group, however. The degree to which the viewer identified with and appreciated "Caroline" depended on the degree to which one found Richard, and by extension Richard's budding romance with Caroline, appealing. I don't know if that was always the direction planned for the show's plot, but that had become the overarching direction it followed by the end of the first season. All the performances were excellent, though some of the characterizations were not designed to be warm and cuddly. Oddly, though I completely bought the Caroline/Richard relationship, the funniest episodes were often the ones which concentrated on other things (such as the one in which Caroline got in a public feud with JoAnn Worley over a deli sandwich). Unfortunately, the show was cancelled before the final cliffhanger was resolved, so we'll never know the outcome.

Lea Thompson was adorable as cheerful cartoonist Caroline Duffy, and Malcolm Gets got off the best lines as artist Richard. The other main characters, Del, Annie, and Charlie were fun to watch too. Then Julia came into the picture and the show went downhill fast, never to recover. Then again, you could never even FIND the show, it changed timeslots so much it didn't help. But thanks to the cast, the show was a joy to watch for 2 seasons.