On Television
KITMAN, MARVIN
On Television IN MEMORIAM by marvin kitman None of the new TV shows are as good as last season's Supertrain, which NBC recalled after a few episodes. That program was really exciting, at least...
...Whenever he said "I," he thumped his chest noticeably...
...Goldberg, do yourself a favor and read Harvey Jacobs' novel, Summer On a Mountain of Spices...
...Such indiscriminate replacement was one thing on Lassie, where new Tim-mies appeared all the time...
...Bury it, I say...
...Of the 21 shows that have made their debut, many will probably be canceled by the time these comments are printed...
...The scripts of Detective School can be loved only by environmentalists, as a demonstration of how to recycle garbage...
...It is M*A*S*H mated with Medical Center, with the latter predominating in the gene pool...
...Trapper John came back from Korea 28 years ago, went to work for a hospital, got married and divorced, the whole schmear...
...As originally planned by its creator, Donald West-lake, it could have been a breakthrough in comedy as well as a useful guide for Amtrak on how to run a first-class railroad: the amenities included swimming pools, discos, boutiques, hair salons, and nightclubs?all atomic powered, of course...
...The show isn't even funny...
...His grandfather leaves him a hotel in Maine...
...John Mclntyre) 28 years after Korea...
...Gary Burghoff (Radar) could be turned into Hoss...
...Trapper John—M.D...
...With Freddy Silverman at the throttle, however, Supertrain became the train of fools...
...The brothers are not nearly as funny or as heartwarming as Brother Dominick of the Xerox commercials...
...The most promising of this year's sitcoms, in the opinion of those lucky enough—if you can call it that—to see all the pilots last summer, was an ABC show called Nobody's Perfect that didn't make it into the starting lineup...
...As a serious actor in Emergency, Mantooth (his real name) proved himself an honors graduate of the Body Language Acting School...
...The special-effects man at Paramount should have his makeup kit arrested as an accessory to a murder...
...So this review may actually end up largely an obituary...
...Perhaps the absence of a trend is itself a trend...
...There are 12 funny episodes in one book for you, although they may not be as contrived as Hollywood likes...
...Michael Keaton, who could be Diane Keaton's brother but probably isn't, is the co-star...
...That should tell you how bad the fall shows are...
...His body is by Fisher, instead of some mad scientist...
...He doesn't even look like a monster...
...Mel Brooks' movie, Young Frankenstein, has already told us more than we want to know about the big fellow...
...Take your hats off while reading this, in respect for the dead...
...Does he have an equal flair for comedy...
...It stars everybody's favorite ex-firefighter from Emergency, Randolph Manyteeth, who plays a shoe salesman by day determined to become a sleuth by night...
...What zaniness...
...She exudes bad vibes, dreaded LeWanda rays...
...But this has to be the dullest rewrite ever of Mary Shelley's monster hit...
...Walter Olkewicz is a funny looking fat waiter...
...I can't believe that a national network made it...
...He smokes a good cigar, but he has one weakness: comedy...
...In the premiere, for example, a rich beautiful blonde bimbo shows up in the kitchen as the pastry chef—only problem is, she has never baked before...
...You is from Argentina," she says to a Latin in the ethnically balanced supporting cast...
...That program was really exciting, at least on paper...
...I can't believe that actors went home to memorize lines, then stayed up all night rehearsing...
...she should have been encouraged to go into arson instead of acting...
...So after the pilot he went out to do some research...
...The premise of The Last Resort (Wednesday, 8 p.m., CBS) isn't much more original than Struck by Lightning...
...It has a lot of jokes like: "Will you take this . . . Room 2? It's a stomach pump job, and I just got my coat back from the laundry...
...This could start a whole new trend of reincarnations at CBS...
...Young Zane Lasky, who was brilliant as Mario Lanza, the clerk in the judge's office in The Tony Randall Show, plays a waiter working his way through school...
...The latest wrinkle involves Dr...
...First of all, Roberts is bald...
...He is a nontalent, a serious rival to Randolph Manyteeth for the Zero-of-the-Year Award...
...We may not get any real trends again until the 21st century...
...William S. Paley could be Mr...
...In Hollywood, this usually consists of interviewing the co-writers while bobbing up and down in a swimming pool...
...Better known as the inspector on Barney Miller, Gregory is a real pro...
...The second and third episodes were far worse...
...1 can even make one up...
...Frankenstein's great-great grandson, whose chief passions are cigars and the Boston Celtics...
...In other words, this is Eastern Comedy, a bone that the California television establishment is throwing us dogs back East...
...Jim Belushi is now starring in Working Stiffs (Saturday, 8 p.m., CBS), the story of two brothers who have trouble holding down jobs...
...Unfortunately, the writing—by Bernie Kukoff and Jeff Harris—is a crime...
...Yecch...
...The series marks the debut of a hot new young comic by the name of Jeffrey Kramer...
...The Luther Burbanks at CBS crossed their fingers and came up with a real freak...
...Fortunately, the year I spent in a Swiss hotel school as a youth made it possible for me to see the humor implicit in the situation...
...Speaking of throwing up, have you seen Struck by Lightning (Wednesday, 8:30 p.m., CBS...
...it's Xeroxing...
...It's puzzling why anyone would want to do one more update of the Frankenstein legend...
...It is sad that a producer has to sink so low to get some Catskill Mountain stories and anecdotes when so many Easterners have worked in resorts...
...Detective School is about a night school for private eyes...
...Will he ever develop into a comedian...
...The story concerns a Borscht Belt-type hotel, where the college guys are working very hard to earn money to pay for their studies as gynecologists, proctologists, brain surgeons, lawyers, and dentists...
...There isn't so much as a new trend to report this year, and I can see a trend at 50 paces...
...Nevertheless, TV's first Borscht Belt comedy in some time is borscht in a can by Campbell or in a packet by Lipton...
...There are some funny lines in The Last Resort—fair is fair...
...The show is no good either...
...The first episode was directed by Penny Marshall—LaVoine of "LaVoine and Shirley," lest anyone not realize that this show is supposed to be the male version of the ABC blue-collar comedy...
...I am told that Gary David Goldberg, the creator, a writer and the producer of The Last Resort, also felt reality was missing...
...Even NBC did a remake last season...
...It's so unfunny, in fact, you finally figure it must be a sitcom...
...But none of these is the star...
...What a heck of a way to introduce the 1980s...
...My TV set should be so lucky...
...Keep your hats off...
...Utterly wasted here is the great talent of Jack Elam, one of those poor wretches who never gets the right material...
...The star is Larry Breeding, whose meteoric rise in TV is incomprehensible...
...They did not tell us, however, what we could have believed: that in 1951 Trapper John was captured by the North Koreans and sent to a prison in Pammunjon, where he not only had his brain washed and dry cleaned, making his hair fall out, but also had a facial—the big one, a face transplant...
...Sunday, 10 p.m., CBS)—a series about the legendary M*A*S*H (surgeon—is dreadful, to put it mildly...
...They can't do this...
...is an example of the I-Can't-Believe-This School of Comedy...
...LeWanda Page plays another student sleuth...
...Randolph Mantooth, comedian, is the worst development in the history of casting since the invention of the hunch...
...She and the writers did manage to produce a pretty nutsy five or six minutes at the beginning, but then rigor mortis very quickly set in...
...The caretaker of the place is a rather large person, named Frank, who was struck by lightning three times in the opening scene alone...
...As for the cast, John Fujioka, the samurai cook in the hotel kitchen who pretends he understands no English, is hilarious...
...Miss Congeniality in the class, LeWanda, formerly of Sanford & Son, is the most hateful character on TV...
...The one asset of the show is James Gregory, as the world famous Nick Halligan, private investigator and dean of the school...
...Maybe this is simply medical humor that I don't get, from the Tickled-to-Death School of TV comedy...
...Secondly, his face is completely different...
...Roberts' basic problem is that he looks nothing like Wayne Rogers, whom everybody knew and loved as Trapper John...
...He showed me nothing in Who's Watching the Kids, even less than John Belushi's brother, Jim Belushi, his costar in that NBC bomb...
...Norman Lear's Highcliffe Manor...
...In August it was suddenly canceled, or put on hold, because it apparently wasn't perfect...
...The premiere episode went to great pains to explain the logic of the series...
...Never...
...We were kids then...
...Das where the grouchos are from...
...It lacks that certain something, the sour salt of reality, the tarn, or taste...
...It's unbelievable...
...Now this is what I call a bad comedy...
...It isn't even typewriting, as someone once observed of Jack Kerouac's work...
...I'll be back next month, with more on the season's goodies...
...When he referred to something he pointed at it, in case you didn't understand his acting...
...In its place, ABC inserted Detective School, which managed to weather its summer tryout...
...One would be hard put to top the absurdity of having Pernell Roberts of Bonanza play Trapper John (Dr...
...I can't believe that the producers actually hired writers, auditioned hundreds of players, built sets in a studio, and commissioned costumes...
...Sunday Night Live—Dead From Bethesda...
...But now we're grown up...
...This show (Saturday, 8:30 p.m...
...I'm told LeWanda was once a flame-thrower or a flame-eater...
...And that's how I felt after only the first episode, usually the one worked on from six months to a year...
...I hate to say it—no, I actually enjoy it: This may be the worst season since I started getting paid to watch television in 1967...
Vol. 62 • October 1979 • No. 19
