TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/102990/1029250.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 5.3 KB | 118 lines

                                                                                VIDEO, Page 95

My In-Law, The Housefly


Off-the-wall comedy flourishes in out-of-the-way places

By RICHARD ZOGLIN


    Network programmers like to think of themselves as wacky
guys. Just look at the shows they put on the air. In NBC's The
Fanelli Boys, four grownup brothers move back to Brooklyn to
live with . . . their mother! In CBS's Evening Shade, a man is
nonplussed when his wife tells him she's pregnant; he's already
had a vasectomy! (Rim shot.) In Fox's Good Grief, Howie Mandel
plays a nutty guy who does TV commercials for (hold on to your
hats) a mortuary!

    Had enough? Now try switching instead to Maniac Mansion, a
family sitcom that is not so much off the wall as out of this
world. Dad is a mishap-prone inventor whose botched experiments
have turned his brother-in-law into a housefly and his
four-year-old son into a 250-lb. clone of Benjy in The Sound
and the Fury. We learn these things in the show's
10th-anniversary special -- a nostalgia trip that takes place,
oddly, on the program's first episode. Weirdest of all, the
series is running, virtually unnoticed, on cable's Family
Channel, a new incarnation of the old Christian Broadcasting
Network.

    Comedy is the gasoline that keeps the networks' engines
humming, but the octane level seems especially low this fall.
Of the 17 new sitcoms introduced by CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox, not
a single one ranks in the Nielsen Top 30. Is there a comedy
glut? Or, more likely, are viewers simply recoiling against
network packaging that has grown so boringly rote and
predictable that all signs of life have drained out? If so,
relief is at hand: increasingly offbeat shows are cropping up
in out-of-the-way places on the dial. Some deserve their
obscurity. Others might shrivel in the glare of too much
mass-audience attention. But what they all share is an
eccentric, homemade, try-anything quality.

    My Talk Show, a syndicated late-night half-hour, is homemade
in a literal sense. The premise is a throwback to that old Mary
Hartman spinoff, Fernwood 2-Night: a housewife (Cynthia
Stevenson) in the little town of Derby, Wis., has turned her
living room into the set for a nightly talk show. It's a homey
affair: her brother-in-law is the announcer; gray-haired Mrs.
Battle, her old school nurse, is musical director; neighbors
drop by to chat. So do real-life celebrities such as William
Shatner and Florence Henderson.

    This reductio ad absurdum of TV's talk-show mania has had
funny sequences, like Jim Belushi joining in an inept
neighborhood game of charades: while the women whiz through
titles like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the men
are stumped by Jaws. But the Hollywood-meets-the-heartland
satire falls a little flat. My Talk Show is too straitlaced and
good-natured; it needs a bit of the rudeness of Late Night with
David Letterman. Or at least some quirkier performers. Where
have you gone, Louise Lasser?

    Mystery Science Theater 3000 has origins in the heartland
as well: the show began life on a Minneapolis UHF station
before being picked up last November by cable's Comedy Channel.
Crummy old movies (Rocketship X-M, The Corpse Vanishes) are
unspooled in their entirety, while three characters -- one
human being and two gabby robots -- offer wisecracking
commentary at the bottom of the screen.

    It's the year's funniest prank. The hecklers jeer at love
scenes, hoot at tacky special effects and pounce on every dumb
line. Creator Joel Hodgson and his colleagues throw in savvy
technical references ("I think we just flew through a
dissolve," someone cracks during an airplane flight) along with
a torrent of smart-mouthed ad libs. "How do we stand on fuel?"
asks an onscreen astronaut. "I'm for it," comes the offscreen
retort. In the tense few seconds before lift-off, a voice pipes
up, "Did I leave the water running?" A scientist leans into a
pair of earphones, trying to pick up a weak radio signal; the
invented line is "I can't see a thing." Not since Woody Allen's
What's Up, Tiger Lily? has anyone had so much fun with bad
movies.

    Joe Flaherty knows bad movies too; as Count Floyd, the seedy
late-night host on the old SCTV comedy show, he used to
introduce dreck like Dr. Tongue's 3-D House of Stewardesses.
Playing the incompetent mad scientist in Maniac Mansion,
Flaherty again shows a flair for sweet dimwittedness. Another
SCTV veteran, Eugene Levy, is co-creator of this twisted update
of The Addams Family, which was inspired by, of all things, a
computer game.

    Maniac Mansion has the old SCTV spirit, mixing the
outrageous and the banal with nary a hint that anybody knows
the difference. In one episode, Uncle Harry, who is still
buzzing around the house, falls for a female fly, then has to
console his jealous (and still life-size) wife. "We've got 20
years -- that's a history," he tells her. "That's something I
could never have with a fly. Because they only live for --
what? -- two weeks max." Flaherty, meanwhile, is disarmingly
oblivious to the havoc he is creating. When he concocts a serum
that turns his shy guinea pig into a snarling monster, he
simply lets the hellion loose outdoors with a cheery "Run free!"

    For TV's oddball comedies, that could be a rallying cry.