Want to know what the nation thinks of us? A New York writer gives an outsider's perspective, and, it isn't pretty

By Bernard Weinraub
The New York Times

     HOLLYWOOD - Everyone in Los Angeles is blond, beautiful and, duh, has an IQ capable of absorbing only one Leonardo. DiCaprio, not da Vinci. The town stops dead in its tracks every week for the late afternoon freeway chase that is more entertaining than anything else on television. Everyone over 30 gets facial surgery, and that includes the women. You can't find a good bagel either.
     The small-screen perspective on Los Angeles, focusing on the banal, the superficial and the glitzy, has been beamed out in dozens of telvision shows over the decades, reflecting an image of Los Angeles that has acquired the undeniable patina of truth for many viewers. But the city's image, like television, is changing. Its odd trajectory can be traced in the departure of that archetypal L.A. show, "Melrose Place," on May 24 after seven years and 226 episodes on Fox, and the critical success of the new ABC comedy "It's Like, You Know," which makes fun of the kind of gorgeous, self-absorbed airheadswho populate "Melrose Place."
     "There's often been a kind of shallow view of L.A.," said Peter Mehlman, a former co-executive producer of "Seinfeld" who created "It's Like, You Know." The new show is about a group of wacky underachievers in a Los Angeles apartment house who do things like spend an entire episode watching a high-speed car chase on the southbound Ventura Freeway.
     "The perception of L.A. has always been that of surface glamour, and there's never been much of an attempt to get beneath the veneer," he said. "Actually, it's one of the saddest cities on Earth because so many people come out here struggling for some kind of dream, and so few get there. And it's hard to see because it's so physically pretty."

Lack of Diversity
     In contrast to New York, which appeals to television executives precisely for its grittiness (though even shows like "NYPD Blue" have their moments of unreality, too), Los Angeles is often presented as a sun-drenched pastel city with barely a trace of economic or social diversity. Even "Dragnet," which made its debut in 1952 and became of the the most successful police dramas ever by drawing on actual cases from the files of the Los Angeles Police Department, rarely focused on the violence, poverty, and racial and immigration problems that were roiling the city in the postwar era.
     Several new Los Angeles-based dramatic series (including one by the filmmaker David Lynch) that promise to deal with the complexities of life in the city may turn up on home screens this fall. This more complex vision of Los Angeles is probably the next wave in television. (While movie studios have churned out film noir set in Los Angeles since the 1930s, television has shied away from these bleak mysteries in favor of the city's sun and light.)
     Los Angeles' complexity goes only so far on television. Even David E. Kelly, the highly skilled and innovative creator of shows like "Ally McBeal," "The Practice" and "Picket Fences," has a new show, "Snoops," that by all accounts depicts the more glamorous side of the detective business. The show, tentatively set for ABC, features handsome private eyes who use high-tech means to catch the bad guys. One network executive described it as "'Miami Vice' in L.A."

The 'Baywatch' factor
     Some television shows perpetuate the banality of life in Los Angeles. Look at "Baywatch," with its cast of hunk lifeguards with perfectly chiseled features. Or the USA Neetwork's successful "Pacific Blue," about seven young male and female police officers in tight clothes riding on motorbikes in Santa Monica. "It's cops on bikes," said Joan Swift, the publicity chief at the network. "They're in great shape."
     In contrast, some of the successful shows involving New York, like "Seinfeld," "Mad About You," "Law and Order" and "NYPD Blue," have been viewed by critics as more realistic and hard-edged. (The hit show "Friends," also set in New York, is another matter.)
     Paradoxically, with the exception of "Law and Order," most of these New York-based series are actually shot in studios in Los Angeles. And it shows. Even on a series like "NYPD Blue" there is a noticable absence of people seen - and accents heard - on the streets of New York now: Koreans, Indians, Pakistanis, Africans, Latinos, Russians, Israelis and others.
     Except for a handful of shows like "Cosby," with its star, Bill Cosby, who is African-American, the New York region is often represented in shows like "King of Queens" and "Everyone Loves Raymond" as a place populated by Italian, Irish and Jewish types - and stereotypes - where everyone speaks with an extreme Noo Yawk accent like that of Fran Drescher in "The Nanny."

Filthy rich
     By contrast, the shows set in Los Angeles often depict the outlandish welath of areas like Beverly Hills and Bel Air. This goes back to "fish out of water" comedies like a corny 1960's series, "The Beverly Hillbillies," about the backwoods Clampett clan who strike oil and move to Beverly Hills. More recently, there was the somewhat more realistic "Fresh Prince of Bel Air," about an African-American rapper from a tough Philadelphia neighborhood (Will Smith) who moves in with wealthy Bel Air relatives.
     Yet blondes at the beach still seem to predominate.
     Aaron Spelling - whose Spelling Television produced "Melrose Place," and whose Los Angeles-based shows over the years like "Mod Squad," "Charlie's Angels," "Hart to Hart" and "Beverly Hills 90210" have in some ways shaped the kind of glitzy version of Los Angeles - said essentially that fantasy sells, not only around the nation but, more importantly, abroad.
     "We do some of our L.A. shows for two crazy reasons," Spelling said. "When it's snowing in the East and Midwest, when it's freezing outside, people love to see the beaches and the sunshine. And in foreign countries they love L.A. Sunset Strip. Malibu. Rodeo Drive. The homes. It's the glamour. They love it."
     Heather Locklear, who played the malevolent Amanda Woodward on "Melrose Place," said that the highly successful series about a group of young people who live in a garden-apartment complex initially floundered when it was tamely patterned as a sober twentysomething version of the hit show "Thirtysomething." Then the creators added some spice.
     "It was a fantasy," she said. "The women became a little stronger than the men. It was sexy girls wearing tight clothes and no bras."
     Locklear said with a laugh that she hoped she would now get more varied parts. "I'm a little typecast," she said. "People think of me as a nasty-type person who wore short skirts. Hopefully, I'll be able to break that."
     As a reaction to the fantasy version of Los Angeles, "It's Like, You Know" is the first show to take on the city with a vengeance. Ted Harbert, an executive producer of the show and former chairman of ABC Entertainment, said he could not recall a series that had turned a city like Los Angeles into a dominant character.
     "Like Kramer in 'Seinfeld,' or Ted Baxter in 'Mary Tyler Moore,' and Norm and Cliff in 'Cheers,' L.A. is one of our crazy and loopy characters," said Harbert, who grew up in Pound Ridge, N.Y., and Stamford, Conn. "L.A. is a confusing place because it lures you with wonderful weather and great opportunity and then often frustrates with its inability to deal with complex emotions. It celebrates superficiality in many ways."
     (ABC executives remain uneasy that the show, which has performed moderately well, may be too much of an inside joke for most of the country.)
     The idea - or at least the title - for the show came when Mehlman, a onetime sportswriter for The Washington Post, visited Fred Segal, a trendy clothing store. "The woman who worked there used the term, 'it's like, you know,' about five times in one minute, and I thought that was a great idea for a title. And if I was going to use that title it would have to be set in L.A."
     The cast includes Chris Eigeman as a New York journalist visiting Los Angeles to write a book, "Living in Los Angeles: How Can You Stomach It?" Actually, Eigeman's personal view of Los Angeles is quite similar to the character he plays.
     "I do think L.A. is a little moral petri dish of degradation," said Eigeman, who lives in Brooklyn when he is not making the show in Los Angeles.
     But the star is the actress Jennifer Grey ("Dirty Dancing"), who plays Jennifer Grey. Reality blurs. In the show, the self-deprecating Grey talks about some real-life boyfriends and her facial surgery.
     "I'm not actually playing myself," Grey said. "I'm playing a character loosely based on certain facts of my life. It's also based on what the public might think I'm like, based on movies or rumors or tabloids."
     Grey lived in Los Angeles for eight years before moving back to New York two years ago. She has an apartment in Greenwich Village.
     "The show is about the most demented city in the country and how it dements the people who live there," said Grey, who admitted nonetheless that the yoga, the Pilates exercise, the weather and the health food were better in Los Angeles than New York.
     "Nothing's real in L.A.; it's all about illusion," Grey said. "It's about illusion of power, illusion of youth, illusion of wealth. Nothing is what it seems."

How superficial?
     But this kind of L.A.-bashing is anathema to other actors as well as filmmakers, who said it was far too easy to dismiss the city as superficial when it is, in fact, extraordinarily complex.
     Lynch, whose films include "Blue Velvet" and "Lost Highway," as well as the cult serial drama "Twin Peaks," has just completed an ABC pilot for a dramatic series sset in Los Angeles called "Mulholland Drive." He said he hoped to deal with numerous levels of life in the city.
     "At first glance there's a big sprawling sameness to L.A.," Lynch said. "But every little section has its own mood. And I love the different moods in L.A. The Valley is so different from Santa Monica, which is so different from Pomona or Riverside. It sort of excites me to deal with the specific moods here."
     And Mark Johnson, producer of the CBS drama, "L.A. Doctors," said he and the show's creator, John Lee Hancock, were seeking to present a series as much about Los Angeles as it was about doctors.
     "The reason we did this was that, like it or not, L.A. was at the cutting edge of what's going on in the country," Johnson said. "It's easy to make fun of superficiality and shallowness. But there are conflicts and temptations and dynamocs that abound in L.A. that are much more harsh and extreme than anywhere else in the country. And that, we hope, makes good television."