Fox TV has pretty much cornered the market on teens in jeans with its "21 Jump Street" and "Booker" shows, for and about adolescents. Now it adds more to the mix: The Outsiders, adapted from a 1983 movie by Francis Ford Coppola that was in turn based on a novel about troubled youths by S.E. Hinton.
The series is handsomely produced, well-acted for the most part, and almost purely concerned with pandering.Coppola serves as an executive producer, and Hinton as a consultant for the series, which premieres on Fox with a 90-minute episode Sunday at 8:30 p.m. on Ch. 13. After that, regular episodes will air opposite "60 Minutes" at 7 p.m. Virtually no kids watch "60 Minutes" so Fox's counter-programming makes sense.
Does "The Outsiders" make sense? Not a whole lot, no, but then, the intended audience may not demand much. To say these youths are troubled would be like calling New York City untidy. The heroes are poor kids called "greasers" who are forever being pummeled and trounced by the affluent kids called "soc's," which is pronounced "soashes" and is derived from "society."
The time is 1966 and the place is, more or less, a small town in Oklahoma. Since no ethnic minorities seem to be represented in these here parts, the kids divide along socio-economic lines. Essentially what you get is a WASP "West Side Story," although "North Side Story" would be a better title because that's where the greasers live.
Fox could also have called it "The Blunder Years."
In the 90-minute premiere, we are re-introduced to the orphaned Curtis brothers, whose dead parents had a sense of mischief when it came to naming them. The youngest, 15, was christened Pony Boy (played by Jay R. Ferguson) and the middle brother, 17, is Sodapop (Rodney Harvey).
The oldest, who has to watch after his brothers and try to keep welfare workers from sending them to foster homes, is named Darrel (Boyd Kestner), which isn't very odd. But everyone calls him "Derry" to make up for that. Only on "The Outsiders" are you likely to encounter dialogue like this:
"I'm Two-Bit. This here's Pony Boy, Soda and Steve." How a mere "Steve" got in there is anybody's guess.
To complicate matters only slightly, a tough dude named Tim Shepard (Robert Rusler) arrives back in town in the premiere as a replacement for a character named Dallas who was killed off in the movie. Tim's got a wild streak a mile wide. This kid is trouble with a capital T.
Gosh a-mighty, but he's a mean'un.
"Tim and Dallas had always been friends," says Pony Boy, who narrates the series. "When they couldn't find anybody to fight, they fought each other." Hey, what are friends for? There's a big fight on "The Outsiders" every few minutes. Then the sides retire and lick their wounds.
Pony Boy is meant to be a sensitive soul, an aspiring writer and avid reader who comments on the comings and goings, and bashings and thrashings, of his brothers and friends. His narration also opens and closes each episode, an attempt to dignify pointless shenanigans with deep meaning.
"It's strange growin' up," observes Pony Boy at the end of the second show (April 1). "That's somethin' you can't plan. Sometimes, things just happen - things you can't control - and nothin' is ever the same again. Don't ask me how I know. I just do."
If this is what comes from reading books, maybe there's somethin' to be said for illiteracy.
"The Outsiders" is clinically designed to flatter a teenager's sense of isolation and persecution. The greasers are noble, upright, moral, and put-upon. Nobody understands them. They are treated like pesky insects. There's even a line about how their kind gets sent to the front lines in Vietnam while rich kids "get the cushy desk jobs."
There may be some accuracy in that, but "Outsiders" is concerned primarily with attitude. It strikes a pose and holds it. Adults are likely to find it pretentious and boring, but then, they're supposed to.
The '83 movie was one of three Hinton novels to be adapted for the big screen. "Tex," with Matt Dillon, was the only one that amounted to a hill of beans. The other two, "Outsiders" and "Rumble Fish," both directed by Coppola, seemed artsy, coy and incoherent.
But "Outsiders" did feature a rather amazing cast of young actors who achieved fame soon afterwards: Dillon, Tom Cruise, C. Thomas Howell, Ralph Macchio, Patrick Swayze, Diane Lane, Emilio Estevez and naughty Rob Lowe.
Will the young actors in the TV version go on to become stars? Ferguson has a spooky charisma, and Kim Walker, who plays rich girl Cherry Valance, finds a true friend in the camera. They and some of their fellow actors score tiny moments of truth, but they do so within a context that seems devotedly and hopelessly phony.