On Television
FRANK, REUVEN
On Television LAUGHTER AT THE LOWER DEPTHS BY REUVEN FRANK WHEN I AGREED to occupy this space, it was with the proviso that I wouldn't review programs. It is one thing to spend all your waking...
...He feels he must not drink...
...There were transvestites in the waiting room...
...Thirty years later, there's more hatred and intolerance then ever...
...That's right...
...Dexter asked...
...I think we all got high and forgot about it...
...It is called the The John Larroquette Show...
...a pair of cops—large male, small female—who hang out at a lunch counter eating doughnuts...
...An advertising executive named Betsey Frank—no relation—has dispensed her annual wisdom about which new programs will soar and which will plummet...
...there is no attempt to prettify them...
...There is more good writing on network television than most of us are willing to admit, but this is special...
...He was a drinker for 20 years...
...In the early days of TV, it was a job old reporters were assigned to when they no longer had the energy to rush to fires or murders and lacked the acuity and self-doubtlessness for writing editorials...
...a black floor cleaner who will not mop up the filthy men's room...
...The prostitute is too good-looking for the context, but otherwise these are real people, losers, and the scripts do not patronize them...
...This approach avoids the repetitive rhythms of program criticism while letting me watch only what I, a viewer like any other viewer, choose to watch...
...Herhusband sought revenge by trying to force him to drink a bottle of whiskey at gunpoint, and the main plot of the episode was how he managed not to...
...Here, though, they are intrinsic to many of the stories...
...NBC's panjandrums, thinking they detected signs of erosion in Roseanne, decided to throw against it their past season's breakaway hit, Frasier, about the psychiatrist (formerly on Cheers) who solves problems for the people calling his radio program...
...The permanent supporting cast includes a homeless man who sleeps in a phone booth...
...The following exchange between Hemingway and Dexter had nothing to do with race, but it is worth noting...
...Boy, we were going to make the world better for everybody...
...God may be a chicken...
...Whatever the case, the program was allowed to stay an entire season...
...we worked so the whole world could be free...
...A bus station is near the bottom of our society, but The John Larroquette Show is a situation comedy...
...A rip in the fabric of time...
...What would it take to get you to go out with me for nothing...
...We are not climbing the sunny uplands of Norman Learism...
...That hour has struck again...
...Hold it a second...
...Now he is John Hemingway, a recovering alcoholic, night manager of a bus station...
...You can laugh, but I can't...
...In the very first episode, when Hemingway was hired as the bus station's night manager, he was told his predecessor was shot by a junkie...
...Or a Mary Tyler Moore Show...
...a prostitute who comes by between clients...
...The networks have announced their plans for 1994-95...
...Each of them tried to convince the robber to shoot the other...
...In one episode an armed robber held up Hemingway and Dexter together...
...He started somewhere in the Northwest the day the Beatles broke up and came to in St...
...Some of the best dialogue is between Hemingway and Dexter, the young black man who runs the snack bar, played by a former rap singer named Daryl "Chill" Mitchell...
...In another episode, Hemingway was helping Dexter transport some live chickens in his pickup truck...
...Both laughed...
...Another year has truly rolled around...
...Uh-uh...
...But Hemingway hung on to his sobriety, and a leitmotif was set for one year, now another, and however many the series survives...
...From Leave It to Beaver and The Donna Reed Show to The Cosby Show and The Golden Girls, most situation comedies have been about the middle class, and a well-scrubbed, well-mannered middle class at that...
...I'm laughing at what you said...
...There have been attempts to capture blue collar America, but most of them rang false...
...Why didn't things change...
...Their prediction that NBC would yank it in a matter of weeks was wrong...
...EST) Tuesdays, Larroquette will follow Frasier...
...This year's ABC hit, Grace Under Fire—single mother of three gets work in an oil refinery—seemed more honest yet was more soap opera than comedy...
...One episode had Hemingway coping with a missing bus whose passengers included a kidney donor and a woman in labor...
...It is one thing to spend all your waking hours not needed to earn food, clothing and shelter before a flickering tube, as most Americans are said to do...
...It is obvious they have been through the requisite apprenticeships from the way they interact, how they hold their bodies, their timing...
...Roseanne has done right by blue collar America, and became a historic hit not only because it is funny but because viewers find it authentic...
...These are the night people...
...Louis two decades later...
...We were liberal...
...It is an open question whether this is what viewers at home, Americans with their own problems and terrors, want to see once they slip off their shoes and loosen their belts at the end of the day...
...said Hemingway...
...Being none of the above, I have tried to keep to what I know: why things happen in television, where the reality is and where the appearance, and which burton makes the jack-in-the-box pop out...
...After NBC made the change, ABC nervously moved Roseanne out of Tuesdays entirely...
...All in the Family, perhaps the first, reeked of didacticism and good intentions...
...With Roseanne a major attraction on ABC, NBC scheduled The John Larroquette Show in the same Tuesday evening time slot, where its ratings were counted in single digits...
...The John Larroquette Show embarks on its second year September 20...
...The '60s...
...one of the lead policemen in NYPD Blue, for example, is a recovering alcoholic who attends AA meetings...
...When you laugh, it's racist...
...When the scheduling was announced, more than a year ago, the smattering of newspaper TV writers who hailed previews of the program simultaneously denounced NBC for placing it in a suicidal position...
...Its writers seem to have read every 19th-century Russian novel...
...Before it ever went on the air, they correctly forecast that its ratings would be minuscule...
...The performers are all skilled...
...So much for political correctness...
...and the young, black owner of the lunch counter whose verbal duels with Hemingway about race are much more genuine than most documentaries...
...Even a Muslim wanted to buy me a drink," he said...
...Perhaps NBC did not want to waste another program in the impossible time period, or someone actually had enough dedication to believe secretly that ratings aren't everything...
...For the unenlightened, that is like an insurance agent earning less on commissions than he pays for gas...
...to be chained to the TV as by some horrible Dantean punishment, powerless to turn away...
...among other previous roles, she was Mozart's wife in the film Amadeus...
...After a few moments, Dexter asked, "What are you laughing at...
...Recently the mantle has fallen on those who studied communication, and now communicate about it...
...But rather than recycle what was said here last year at this time, with some names changed, I want to commend a program that has been renewed for a second year on NBC after a first year of absolutely awful ratings, very little press attention, and subject matter well out of the mainstream...
...Can there be a mass audience for a series whose comic situations grow out of tragedy, out of deprivation and subjugation...
...I am not even sure what they are...
...Gigi Rice, the prostitute, honed her craft in small film stints and dinner theater...
...Larroquette is a very tall actor who won four Emmys playing the obnoxious prosecutor in Night Court, a dimwitted program of the late '80s...
...It is another to do that as an obligation, a duty, a profession...
...Hemingway advised, "You've got a better chance of getting off if you shoot him...
...Isn't that why there was an Ozzie and Harriet...
...Eggers, the lady policeman, is Elizabeth Berridge...
...I don't know...
...Their conversation ambled about on the subject of chickens, until Hemingway said, "I know...
...Although some of the stories have been better than others, they have invariably been set in the real world...
...So what happened...
...She is a cynical, divorced Hispanic woman of middle age who brings her youngest son to work to expose him to a man's influence...
...He moved into a little office with the chalk outline of a body still on the floor, a half-empty bottle of cheap whiskey still on the desk...
...If I was drunk," he said, "none of this would bother me...
...open-minded...
...unfortunately, her former husband materializes in the bus station to harass her whenever he is not in jail...
...Many episodes refer to or feature Alcoholics Anonymous meetings...
...My generation, right...
...Dexter whooped, "Well, if He is, my people are in trouble...
...In another, he took up with a woman he met at an AA meeting not knowing she was married...
...Resting at the snack bar, she was approached by a man who asked, "What would it take to get a girl like you to go out with a guy like me...
...Larroquette is much lower than blue collar in our social order...
...Five people offered him a drink...
...In 1972 Torres, a television, vaudeville and nightclub veteran, gave a command performance for King Hassan III of Morocco...
...Then came the English majors, former aspiring novelists or writers of soulful short stories who had also studied a lot of drama, but pronounced nevertheless on how news was covered or music was played...
...You're not allowed to laugh...
...Almost everything takes place in the bus station waiting room...
...This is not unique...
...And, at 9:30 p.m...
...Now The John Larroquette Show is returning at a better time...
...Hemingway's assistant, Mahalia Sanchez, is played by Liz Torres...
...Three hundred dollars," she answered coolly...
...But it is not moralistic or preachy...
...That this is so suggests someone had guts—a word not often associated with network programming...
...The critics are complaining again about the dearth of novelty, creativity or daring...
...Nor am I sure I have the qualifications to review television programs...
...Still, it has seemed obligatory once a year to say something about the upcoming new season—to note the dying program forms and the ones rising, list traditional rivalries and upstart ventures, and above all make the same old complaints about the same old shows...
Vol. 77 • August 1994 • No. 8
