‘JEFFERSONS’: A ‘TIRED’ TV SERIES GETS A WAKE-UP CALL

How can a show about a dry cleaner and his wife be expected to do battle with “The A-Team”?

In the case of “The Jeffersons,” the proposed answer is to add casinos, celebrities and cleavage to a tried-and-true formula.

In TV parlance this sort of modification is called “stunting,” a tactic that Embassy Television and the producers of CBS’ “The Jeffersons” have turned to in their struggle for survival.

“The Jeffersons” is prime-time TV’s longest-running current series, now in its 11th season. Recent events suggest that it may not reach its 12th.

Earlier this year, both “The Jeffersons” and “Alice”--which CBS decided not to renew after a nine-year run--were moved from Sunday to Tuesday nights. They now reside in the killer 8-to-9 slot opposite Mr. T and company on NBC.

At about the same time, Harvey Shephard, CBS senior vice president for programming, proclaimed both shows “tired.”

Asked to recall the comment, Shephard said: “Someone had asked me why the change on Sunday, and I said it was quite apparent that ‘The Jeffersons’ and ‘Alice’ were tired. They weren’t holding onto their lead-ins and they weren’t outperforming what I considered weak movies on the other two networks.”

Glenn Padnick, president of Embassy Television, said he believes that CBS is still giving “The Jeffersons” a chance, and he has “opened the purse strings” to make the most of it:

--On Jan. 8, in its first Tuesday-night outing, boisterous dry cleaning mogul George (Sherman Hemsley) and his wife Louise (Isabel Sanford) took a trip to Atlantic City, where Louise just happened to run into Helen Reddy, Engelbert Humperdinck, Phyllis Diller, Michael Spinks, Joe Frazier and Charo.

--The following Tuesday George was visited by Reggie Jackson.

--On Jan. 22, neighbor Tom Willis found himself surrounded by five real-life Playboy Playmates.

--Last week marked the return of Lionel Jefferson (Mike Evans), the first Jefferson to surface on the tube (in 1971 on “All in the Family”), as he and his wife are about to divorce. The two-part episode continues tonight.

Executive producers Don Seigel and Jerry Perzigian, who started with the show as writers six years ago, said that recent shows were scripted essentially as is but were “goosed up a bit” to draw attention to the new time period.

“We were planning to tape the (Jan. 22) show with five beautiful girls in aerobics costumes,” Perzigian said by way of example. “Instead, we decided to use five Playmates of the Month. We thought, ‘Hey, how can we let people know we’re on Tuesday night?’ ”

“It’s going to take your audience a little time to find the show (in the new time slot),” added Seigel. “There are only a limited number of things you can do.”

Seigel and Perzigian acknowledge that this approach places the show in a sort of Catch-22 situation: The stunting necessary to draw viewers to Tuesday night tends to obscure the character interaction and down-to-earth format that they say earned it a steady viewership over the years.

The cast agrees.

“The viewers look for a lot of the sameness,” said Roxie Roker, who plays Willis’ wife Helen. “They tell me, ‘I like it when you’re giving George a bad time.’ The ensemble acting is what we enjoy.”

“The Jeffersons’ ” longevity now may be working against the show. The producers believe that the proliferation of episodes rerun in syndication for the last four years may have hurt first-run viewership.

Padnick also noted that a show’s license fee--the amount the production company charges the network for each episode--increases each year. That makes “The Jeffersons” one of TV’s most expensive half-hours, he said, although he added that “CBS has never complained” about the show’s price tag.

But is the network simply leading the lamb to slaughter?

Shephard said that the move to Tuesdays was “purely defensive.” He needed something stable to replace the departed “AfterMASH,” which had been followed by holiday specials. And he did not expect the show to draw as many viewers opposite “The A-Team” as he did on Sundays following the strong lead-in from his network’s very successful “Murder, She Wrote.”

“Shephard and CBS in general have it within their power to kill a show whenever they want to,” said Padnick. “We had a show, ‘Good Times,’ a hit show for many years, which in its sixth season opened very poorly and CBS yanked it. This is not what happened to ‘The Jeffersons.’ ”

Still, Padnick said, “All shows end sometime. That’s a fact. ‘Gunsmoke’ went off after 20 years, but it did go off.”

The Jefferson family--and cast and staff do refer to it as a family--are not ready for that to happen. Perzigian and Seigel point to small ratings increases over the first few weeks of this year. They are also hopeful that the show will do even better when new episodes play opposite “A-Team” reruns as a result of several preemptions of “The Jeffersons” early in the season.

“We have four more shows to do and we’re still plugging away,” said Franklin Cover, who plays Willis. “If we are going out, we’re going out with all guns firing.”

Maybe, they hope, Harvey Shephard was wrong when he called the show “tired.”

“I think Harvey is tired,” said Marla Gibbs, who plays Florence. “He hasn’t had the opportunity to take any time off. I think the child needs a vacation.”