Glub, Glub, Glub
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television GLUB, GLUB, GLUB BY MARVIN KITMAN Not since the Ty-D-Bol Man sailed the seas in the early 1970s has there been such an obsession with water as a source of comedy in broadcasting....
...These five guys-buddy, Stuf, Dancer, Moose, and Boychick-are postgraduates, of high school, and they don't live in houses...
...The catch is, it doesn't wash as comedy...
...So why aren't you laughing now...
...However, I do not want to glorify the bums by this comparison...
...They particularly tried to sew up the toe-caught-in-the-youname-it class of comedy...
...Beach Bums is as fresh as a TV executive's brain...
...It resembles Laverne & Shirley-only it is grosser in number (the two chums concept has been expanded here to five) and in Aaron Spelling and Douglas S. Cramer-and the final concoction is often enough to make you run to the ship's railing and heave-ho...
...Addams, who wants to win the war, and young Lieutenant Nick Hol-den, a Yossarian type interested only in surviving...
...Or so he thought...
...Addams had the last straw...
...Ad-dams (John Astin), as Lieutenant Commander Matthew Sherman, skipper of the submarine USS Sea Tiger, involved in what is laughingly called the war effort against the Japanese during World War II...
...Because it's going to get worse with Commodore Silverman at the helm of this nation's number-one network...
...There are also similarities to Welcome Back Kotter, another program boasting five friends...
...That marvel of imagination consisted of a half hour divided into three sitcomlets-or short sitcoms, many of them written by the medium's most distinguished hacks...
...It does not contain three stories, but scraps of three stories...
...Is it enough of a wrinkle that there are five-women-five on a show...
...A writer for Love American Style came up with the toe-caught-in-the-bowling-ball variant...
...ABC, after all, also gave us Barney Miller, one of the better sitcoms of the 1970s...
...Nor does it work as history...
...I always felt he was the most underrated member of the Mary Tyler Moore Show cast...
...His portrait of Murray Slaughter, man behind the news, was a subtle gem...
...In fact the stowaways will be the death of the boat, and I'll willingly testify before the naval board of inquiry when disaster strikes...
...It was a repository of stupidity, cupidity, vapidity, venality, banality and various other idities that insult the id...
...Ninety-five shows have done all this before, and none of them was as good as McHale's Navy (cocreated by Joseph "Catch-22" Heller...
...Ultimately, though, tedium is the biggest defect here...
...On the September 17 premiere night, for example, Mr...
...spirit, if that's possible...
...Beach Bums is even dumber than that blast from the past, What's Happening, and that was my standard for really dumb...
...This understandably leads to conflict between the skipper and the nurses...
...But I haven't been able to figure out why are they doing this to us, what awful crimes we have committed that television should inflict on us such pubescent junk...
...It is claimed that Operation Petticoat is a remake of The Wackiest Ship in the Army, an amiable moron-level movie...
...That they are Gomez' angels instead of Charlie's...
...He sits in the office laughing at what makes everybody else cry...
...The secret attraction of that show is seeing people who have gotten out of high school and remain friends...
...Some network executives say it is another Love American Style, as if that were something to be proud of...
...It could not be more wrong...
...for instance, went to sea in a two-parter (aired on November 8 and 15) that took place aboard a luxury liner...
...Some day we will look back nostalgically and see Operation Petticoat, Love Boat and San Pedro Beach Bums as part of the golden age of the sitcom...
...The nautical motif has sprung up in the older ABC comedy series as well...
...the laughs are there, but the jokes aren't...
...The Bataan Death March comes to mind (probably because I heard the line on The Betty White Show...
...Still, these aquaseries are rooted in a rich artistic tradition-dadaism...
...As Love Boat slowly sinks in the west each week, the saddest loss of all is Gavin McLeod...
...Unfortunately, we were not paying attention...
...Get it...
...The collapse of the New York Knicks was pretty bad, too...
...But the success of Roots seems to have relieved ABC of its obligation to humanity...
...I would like to examine in depth Operation Petticoat, Love Boat and San Pedro Beach Bums, for they say something about American culture-namely, oy gevalt...
...The unique thing about Freddy is that he watches all the programs he puts on," said one of his rivals...
...The ABC winner (circa 1972), won my vote for the all-time low in comedy, drama and eight other genres...
...Most obsessed is Commodore Freddy Silverman of ABC, who has floated his Saturday night lineup: At 8:30 he has Operation Petticoat and at 10:00 Love Boat...
...The TV series takes us 10,000 leagues under that...
...He has had the last straw every week since...
...The laugh track got quite a kick out of that wry name when the camera first picked it up...
...I suppose Commodore Silverman bought this one thinking we'd have a weekly Marx Brothers stateroom scene...
...I am sure you remember the toe-caught-in-the faucet episodes of Dick Van Dyke, Lucy, et...
...Laverne & Shirley (Tuesday, 8:30 p.m...
...Those were the questions preoccupying my soggy head as I waited for Love Boat to come into view...
...I frankly believe this goes under the head of the average TV viewer, who has the intelligence of a 10-year-old...
...One explanation for this phenomenon might be that ABC thinks stupid eight-year-old humor accounts for the popularity of Lav-erne & Shirley...
...but" or "and furthermore The stories, amazingly supplied by three separate teams of writers, are blended together by the mixmasters-executive producers T here have been worse experiences than watching San Pedro Beach Bums, the third of the watery comedies I've gone down in my Ba-thyscope to examine...
...Commodore Silverman may have been pointing to the direction comedy was taking as early as two years ago with On the Rocks and When Things Were Rotten-titles that contained accurate self-criticism...
...and" or...
...It's about these guys who are friends...
...Another problem is that all the episodes have the same plot: The girls go up and down ladders...
...In Love Boat he has been turned into a Teutonic Ty-D-Bol Man strutting about the ship as if he is sailing on the blue waters of the water closets of yore...
...We don't...
...Whoever foisted this silly and false character on Murray Slaughter should be set adrift, with no supplies except a portable TV set...
...In other words, Laverne & Shirley could have jokes comprehensible to a 13-year-old and still be a hit...
...Besides, since stupid eight-year-olds cannot add up to much-statistically speaking-there is no reason why the networks should deliberately program for them...
...Watching a typical segment is comparable to finding fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls and then realizing that all they have written on them is...
...You must have lost your sense of humor...
...But there are differences as well...
...Freddy also rules the waves at 10:00 on Monday evenings, with The San Pedro Beach Bums...
...The sitcomlets were almost always classics-in other words, stories you'd seen before in longer format...
...If this trend continues, the next thing you'll be hearing is Harry Reasoner saying: "This is Harry Reasoner on the good ship Lollipop with the news," although strictly speaking, the ABC Evening News is not a comedy show...
...Why does every sitcom have to remind you of your whole sad history with TV...
...There is conflict, too, between Mr...
...There is one weak joke in the series: Five beautiful Army nurses-count them, five-get stuck in the sub and have to go cruising about the Pacific with the boatload of horny men...
...But maybe I'm wrong and the Sea Tiger is just picking up a laugh track from Radio Tokyo...
...You may have seen one of those thrilling scenes in last summer's promos for the series...
...And each in its way is an example of what is happening to the TV sitcom-namely, to use the current hot broadcasting phrase, "going down the toilet...
...Some of the Little Rascals, now grown up and unemployed, have merely revived their show and retitled it...
...Instead, they prefer a boat called "Our Boat...
...It's tight quarters all right, especially with those 900 people brought on board as laughers...
...it makes Baa Baa Black Sheep, a series that covers the same period, look like Herodotus' chronicle of the Persian Wars...
...The Universal Television production stars an old favorite, Mr...
...Love Boat aims for those heights-and misses...
...It is a marvel that Universal got them inside that tiny space...
...The dadaesque comedies mark the emergence of a new sensibility on the sitcom: humor directed at a stupid eight-year-old...
...Glub, glub, glub...
Vol. 60 • November 1977 • No. 23
