Quality TV crusade

Viewers for Quality Television is crusading again, this time on behalf of two of its favorites — Brooklyn Bridge and I’ll Fly Away. When CBS yanked Brooklyn last month, VQT urged its 2,000 members to write in to campaign for the award-winning series. The result: 400 postcards a day to the group’s offices.

CBS insists the show is not dead. ”We’ll find a new time slot for it this spring and hopefully it will do wonderfully well,” says spokeswoman Susan Tick. But VQT maintains the show lost ratings precisely because CBS shuffled it around a variety of time slots. Creator Gary David Goldberg concurs: ”Creatively, we were treated with great dignity. From a programming standpoint, we were abused and humiliated.”

NBC’s acclaimed drama I’ll Fly Away isn’t gone yet, but its fate is to be decided by the end of the year. It has also suffered from a shifting time slot. ”We had one bad (rating) number and they panicked,” says co-executive producer John Falsey, who credits the support of VQT last season with helping to keep his show alive. ”That does get frustrating.” Next on VQT’s endangered species list: Reasonable Doubts at NBC, and Life Goes On and Homefront at ABC. Watch them or watch them go extinct.