Anatomy of a Re-Tool: Newhart

I was talking with someone about shows that get re-tooled -- the characters get new jobs, many supporting characters are replaced, and so on -- and how this almost always wrecks the show. But I can think of one show that was improved by re-tooling in mid-run, possibly the only successful show that actually got better when it was re-tooled: Bob Newhart's second show, "Newhart."

Most of you will remember the premise of "Newhart": Bob Newhart plays Dick Loudon, a writer of how-to books who moves to Vermont with his wife Joanna (Mary Frann). They buy an inn, the Stratford, which appeals to them for its historical value (though it turns out that the reason George Washington slept there was that it used to be a brothel). The first season found them dealing with the funny people in Vermont, funny guests at the inn, and the rest of the regular supporting cast: Leslie (Jennifer Holmes), a rich girl gaining some practical experience by working as a maid at the inn while attending Dartmouth; George (Tom Poston) the handyman; and Kirk (Steven Kampmann), a pathological liar who owns the cafe next door.

The first season was actually quite successful in the ratings, and the show was picked up for another season. But the network, the creator (Barry Kemp, who had been one of the best writers for "Taxi"), and Newhart were collectively not satisfied with the show. So over the course of the second season, various changes were made.

First, with the start of the second season, the production format of the show changed from videotape to film. (Newhart preferred working on film, which allowed for a softer kind of comedy than the hard lighting of tape: tape, he says, is more appropriate for broad sketch comedy.) Also at the start of the second season, Leslie was gone; she was too all-around nice a character to be funny. She was replaced by Julia Duffy, who had appeared in one first-season episode as Leslie's bitchy sister Stephanie. Stephanie was forced to work at the inn because her parents had cut her off from having any money. Suddenly there was a whole new source of comedy on the show: Stephanie, the spoiled rich girl, trying (not very hard) to work as a maid and live in a rural setting.

Near the end of the second season, further changes were introduced. In mid-season, the show had an episode where Dick fills in at the host of a show on a local TV station, where the producer, Michael (Peter Scolari) is an obnoxious phony. Inspired by the episode and Scolari's performance, the producers wrote an episode where Dick gets his own talk show, "Vermont Today," on that local station, with Michael as his producer. In that episode or the episode after, they introduced the idea that Michael would be Stephanie's boyfriend. These are three moves that are usually jump-the-shark moments: giving the lead character a new job, introducing a new regular, and giving another regular a steady boyfriend. But all these moves worked by expanding what the show could do.

The big problem with the show in its first season, and part of the second, was that the inn setting was very limited: there weren't a lot of people around the inn that Newhart could react to. The problem was solved by creating the TV station as a permanent location, and shuttling back and forth between Dick's home and workplace a la The Dick Van Dyke Show: now Newhart could react to the crazy guests on his TV show and to Michael, the ultimate caricature of the '80s yuppie (and a not-so-subtle parody of wonder-boy network executives like Brandon Tartikoff).



Finally, at the beginning of the third season, Kirk was dropped. The writers had spent the second season trying to find something to do with the character, even giving him a wife (Rebecca York), but the character was hard to like: his main character trait, being a pathological liar, was almost too realistic to be funny. Also, the first season had mostly shown him as Leslie's unrequited lover, and after she left, he had very little to do. Kampmann was an exceptionally talented comic -- he'd done some great work with Toronto Second City, and he'd been a writer producer on "WKRP In Cincinnati." But it was probably the right decision for "Newhart" to drop him.

With Kirk gone, his cafe was purchased by three characters, a bizarre trio of backwoodsmen whose introduction you all remember: "Hi, I'm Larry, this is my brother Darryl, and this is my other brother Darryl." They'd appeared in the first season as guest characters in the second episode, and had made enough of an impression that they were brought back for one more episode in the first season, and then several episodes in the second season. The third season took the logical step by making them regulars and giving them a reason to be near the inn (they now owned the place next door) so they could always drop by and annoy Newhart, thus giving him more stuff to react to. The audience applause when the characters entered could be annoying -- they were like the Fonzie of "Newhart" -- but their addition as regulars made the show funnier and stronger, and gave a sort of "Green Acres" vibe to the show, with Newhart as the sane man facing off against the insane locals.

The upshot of this was that by the beginning of the third season, "Newhart" had a largely different cast, a different production style, and a different job for the lead character than it had had in the first season. And everything worked better than it had in the first season. (Indeed, I'd actually argue that "Newhart" holds up better now than the original "Bob Newhart Show.") There must be other shows that undertook this kind of re-tooling and improved, but I can't think of any for the moment.

The Woodchuck...

Hinterland Who's Who, the homepage. Featuring the original theme music, plus clips and other info.

For those who aren't familiar with Canadianarcana, "Hinterland Who's Who" was a series of one-minute films produced by the National Film Board; they ran during commercial breaks on the CBC and elsewhere. They consisted of grainily-photographed films of various woodland creatures, faux-impressionist flute music on the soundtrack, and a friendly-voiced narrator giving us a few basic facts about how the creatures live. The films were so cheap-looking that even the captions couldn't keep steady on the screen, and the point of them always eluded us, since it didn't tell us a whole lot we couldn't learn by watching Hammy the Hamster, but the music was kind of hypnotic.

SCTV did a parody of the Hinterland Who's Who, part of an episode filled with CBC and NFB parodies, a way for the Second City comics to strike back at the CBC for never hiring them. The payoff comes when the friendly-voiced announcer appears on a CBC show as a "famous Canadian actor" that none of the guests have ever heard of. The parody, along with some real Hinterland Who's Who segments included as extras, is on SCTV Volume 4.

TV Blogs On DVD

Gord Lacey and David Lambert of TV Shows On DVD, which started four years ago and has since become one of the most influential home entertainment sites on the web, have started The TV Shows On DVD Blog, for stuff that doesn't fit into the main site.

The Dumbest Thing Written This Week

This may be too close to a political post, but I appreciate really dumb writing when I see it, and must call it to your attention. The Anglo-American-Canadian writer Mark Steyn, a pretty good entertainment writer turned into a very bad op-ed columnist by Conrad "Tubby" Black, was taken to task by P.Z. Myers for having written that "this is a planet overwhelmingly dominated and shaped by one species, and our kith and kin – whether gibbons or pumpkins – basically fit in in the spaces between." Myers, a professor of biology, pointed out that, you know, we live at the mercy of the natural world. In his column in the otherwise readable Spectator, Steyn offers his devastating response:

Oh dear. All I was doing was making a simple point about the scale of man’s domination, and all Professor Myers’s demolition does is confirm it. My intestinal bacteria may indeed be doing a swell job, but living in my gut isn’t exactly a beach house at Malibu. Yes, I’ve got wooden furniture. I live in the Great North Woods and the house and practically everything in it is made from those woods. But I sit on the chair, the chair doesn’t sit on me. And as for my excreta and the hard-working nematode, who gets the better end of that deal?

In a way, Professor Myers is only taking transnationalism to its logical conclusion. After all, if one is obliged to pretend that the Americans, Belgians, Greeks and Canadians are all equal members of a military alliance, it’s not such a stretch to insist that the Americans, the flatworms, the intestinal bacteria and your Welsh dresser are all equal partners in some grand planetary alliance. Nonetheless, if we are virtually the same as a chimp, the 1.5 per cent of difference counts for more than the 98.5 per cent of similarity. The Psalmist seems to find that easier to understand than the biologist does.

Yes, a popular columnist in a well-respected publication is writing a column arguing that a) Man must be the most important creature in the universe because the columnist looked around his room and decided that he was the most important thing in it, and b) Someone who relies on science and facts is comparable to someone who wants the U.N. to take over the world.

Truly stupid columns are written all the time; the cool thing about Steyn's columns is that because he can sort of write (even if many of his paragraphs are recycled from column to column), he achieves a higher level of stupidity, stupidity with a thesaurus and a Sinatra album playing on the stereo. Long may he drool.

To tie it back in with this blog, this perhaps demonstrates that entertainment writers shouldn't become op-ed columnists. It's one thing when they give up entertainment writing; it's another thing when they continue with entertainment writing, as Steyn has (he's drama critic for the New Criterion and movie critic for the Spectator), their ideological writing infects and wrecks their entertainment writing. Steyn could be annoying as a theatre writer -- his book on musical theatre, Broadway Babies Say Goodnight, alternates insightful passages with totally clueless ones, and his sneering dislike of homosexuals makes you wonder why he's writing about the theatre at all -- but he was sometimes good; his essay on Broadway director/writer George Abbott was probably the only good piece written about Abbott after his death.

But his theatre and movie reviews now are basically like his crummy ideological pieces: pitched at an ideological audience, repeating the same tired points over and over, and judging works based on how much or how little they agree with his politics (a play about Iraq is good to the extent that it shows he was right about the war all along, but bad to the extent that the author won't come right out and say he was right all along). So a writer who was good at some things winds up being a writer who does everything badly. It's probably making him a good living and getting him lots of links from people whose blogs have the words "Claremont Institute" on their blogrolls; but it's made him a lousy writer who used to be sort of good.

On the plus side, having seen good entertainment writers move over to ideological writing and lose all their ability to write anything that makes sense, I've become more convinced than ever that sticking to entertainment writing is the way to go. Which is why I can promise you that you will never see this become a political blog (even this post and my "Good Night and Good Luck" post are linked to entertainment or entertainment writing).

But if you ever see me use the term "MSM" without derisive quotation marks, or link to a site, of whatever ideological stripe, that uses the term "Developing..." then run, because that means I've left the noble cause of entertainment blogging and gone over to the Dark Side (tm).

This Budd's For Us

Just a reminder that this coming Tuesday, December 20, brings the first DVD release of a Budd Boetticher/Randolph Scott Western, namely their first Western together, Seven Men From Now.

The disc comes from the John Wayne estate (Wayne's company produced the film), which deserves praise for giving the special-edition treatment to such relatively obscure movies; DVD Beaver has a review and screenshots, and it looks great; too bad all the other Boetticher/Scott films are owned by Columbia/Sony, which hasn't made any move toward bringing them out. Maybe if Seven Men sells well, it'll change their minds.

A Song's Progress: "We're Gonna Be All Right"

Do I Hear a Waltz?, a 1965 musical adapted by Arthur Laurents from his play The Time of the Cuckoo and with a score by Richard Rodgers and Stephen Sondheim, is one of those shows that separates the mere Broadway buff from the obsessive Broadway enthusiast. This is a show that had a troubled production, didn't do all that well, was more or less disowned by its creators, and features one of the more unsympathetic heroines in the history of Broadway musicals. Still, the show has a fascination for some of us. The heroine, Leona, is difficult to like, especially since she has a sort of double role of negativity: she's both a realistically bitter and unhappy woman, and a representation of all the stuff that Laurents doesn't like about the American character (materialism, prudishness, hypocrisy, insincerity). But she brings a real and raw quality that is unusual for a musical, and is in its own way fascinating. David Lee, the co-creator of Frasier who directed a revival of Waltz a few years ago, summed it up well on a theatre newsgroup:

Leona is a complex character with a lot of "stuff" that is difficult to like. But that is what intrigues me and many others about the piece. It also, for some may be its downfall. A friend of mine put it this way: "I like Dolly Levi, but I don't have a clue who that woman is in real life. I KNOW Leona Samish. I am Leona Samish."

The score -- available on an excellent and still in-print original cast album -- fascinates and divides people as much as the character of Leona does. Rodgers and Sondheim worked together on the show for various reasons, none of which included getting along (they didn't). Rodgers was a fine lyricist who had successfully written his own words for the show No Strings, but he missed the collaborative process he had with Hart and Hammerstein, and Sondheim -- a protege of the late Hammerstein and a writer with the wit and rhyming skill of Hart -- was the obvious choice for a new project. Sondheim took the job because he was friends with Rodgers' daughter Mary, because he had worked several times before with Laurents, and because it seemed like a likely hit. The two men never liked each other and operated at cross-purposes for much of the collaboration; Sondheim came to the conclusion that musicalizing the play was a mistake in the first place, while Rodgers (who also produced the show) felt that Sondheim and Laurents were making Leona too cold and unsympathetic, and lost an argument with them over a scene where she comes off as particularly mean-spirited.

The score Rodgers and Sondheim turned out doesn't represent either man's best work, but this is a bit like saying that the Atlantic Ocean doesn't represent the world's largest ocean; it's still pretty darn large, and the score of Do I Hear a Waltz? is pretty darn good, especially in the context of the show, where the mix of romance and cynicism (sometimes in the same song, and with Rodgers's music occasionally more acerbic than Sondheim's lyrics) is all of a piece with the story and the characters.

The most famous song from the show is the title song, one of Rodgers's best waltzes and featuring one of Sondheim's best trick rhymes ("Blue-Danube-y/How can you be"). But for the obsessed Broadway fanboy, the most intriguing song in the show is one for the secondary couple, Eddie and Jennifer, called "We're Gonna Be All Right." Eddie and Jennifer are Laurents's caricature of the with-it young couple whose "perfect" marriage is falling apart, but are in denial about it. Fioria, the world-weary Italian woman who has an affair with Eddie (Fioria is Laurents's representation of how much cooler and more sophisticated Europeans are than Americans), describes them as preferring to shut their eyes and pretend that they are living the ideal.

Their big number, "We're Gonna Be All Right," occurs in Act Two, after Eddie has had the affair but before Jennifer has found out. The young couple admit just as much reality as they can stand: they admit that they have problems, but they'll work them out. What the scene needed was a song where they could express confidence that they'd get over their marital problems, while clearly remaining in denial about how deep the problems are.

For the tune, Rodgers came through with a marvelous, bouncy, catchy melody reminiscent of the kind of melodies he'd written for Hart. It's the sort of tune that can sound happy but slightly hollow -- exactly what's needed for these characters in this situation.

Sondheim came back with a lyric, and Rodgers read it and threw it out; it never made it into the show, even in rehearsal. Rodgers, never a nice guy under any circumstances, apparently rejected Sondheim's lyric, as Ethan Mordden put it, "as one smashes an unflattering mirror." The original lyrics were preserved by Sondheim and performed (while Rodgers was still alive) in the successful 1977 revue Side By Side By Sondheim. Because the lyrics are very funny, bitterly cynical, and anticipate the kind of material Sondheim would write about failed marriages for Company and Follies, the standard version of this story is that Rodgers, a fuddy-duddy, couldn't handle the truth of Sondheim's lyrics and made him tone it down. I don't think I agree with this interpretation of the story.

Sondheim's approach to the material, apparently, was to play off the fact that even though Eddie and Jennifer are a couple of naive people living in a bubble, they think they're hip and with-it -- the mid-'60s equivalent of those yuppie couples who tell you that they have solved all the problems with marriage that their parents were too stupid to fix. His original lyric for "We're Gonna Be All Right" took this into account by having Eddie and Jennifer adopt a lighthearted, fake-cynical tone. They sound like they know all about the pitfalls of marriage, but their pose of knowingness is just a pose: the more they try to sound like they know everything, the more they're in denial. Sondheim wrote three introductory verses and three refrains for the song; the first refrain goes:

If we can just hang on,
We'll have compatibility,
You musn't worry,
We're gonna be all right.
One day the ache is gone,
There's nothing like senility,
So what's your hurry?
We're gonna be all right.
Meanwhile, relax,
You'll take a lover,
I'll take a lover,
When that's played-out,
They get the ax,
We can retire,
Sit by the fire,
Fade out.
We'll build our house upon
The rock of my virility,
We'd better scurry,
We're gonna be all night.
Oh boy,
We're gonna be all right.

The song, in its original version, then segues into describing the failed marriages of other people, in a way that is highly reminiscent of the Rodgers and Hart song "He And She" from The Boys From Syracuse (about seemingly perfect marriages that have something wrong with them at the core). Sondheim's original lyric ends:

She once was quite well read,
He once was intellectual,
No one's suspicious,
They're gonna be all right.
She's nice and sweet and dead,
He's tall and ineffectual,
They look delicious,
They're gonna be all right.
Who's on the skids?
She goes to night school,
If it's the right school,
He'll permit her.
They love their kids,
They love their friends too,
Lately he tends to
Hit her.
Sometimes she drinks in bed,
Sometimes he's homosexual,
But why be vicious?
They keep it out of sight.
Good show,
They're gonna be all right.
And so
They're gonna be all right.
Heigh ho,
We're gonna be all right.

The problem with this approach to the number is, first of all, is that it's at odds with the way the characters are written elsewhere in the show; there's some hint that they consider themselves modern and worldly, but you just can't picture those lyrics coming out of those characters. The dialogue that leads into the song includes the line (from Jennifer) "You're supposed to only want me. And we're not supposed to be at each other every minute; we're supposed to be nice! Why aren't we? What's wrong? What happened?" A character who says things like that, and says them without irony, would not turn around and sing lyrics like the ones posted above.

Second, the device Sondheim was trying to use -- having characters be very articulate and apparently worldly-wise while indicating, as subtext, that they're in denial about something -- almost never works. Subtext is great in musicals, but the kind of subtext a song can handle is usually very simple subtext: the character sings about being happy when he clearly doesn't mean it. What Sondheim wanted to do was write a song where the characters sort of mean what they say, but aren't saying other things that are more important, and everything they're singing about is an attempt to dodge those more important subjects. It's the kind of thing an audience can't follow very clearly, not in the context of a three-minute musical number. Sondheim would try very much the same thing five years later in Company, where the climactic number was supposed to be "Happily Ever After," a song where the lead character would express his cynicism about marriage, with the subtext being that he just didn't want to deal with his own loneliness. The song lead-ballooned and the director made Sondheim rewrite it into a song where subtext became text (i.e. a song directly summing up the theme of the show).

So what Sondheim had come up with for "We're Gonna Be All Right" was a song that didn't fit in properly with the way Laurents was writing the characters, or the way producer/composer Rodgers saw the situation. It would never have worked in the context of the show; what it was was a great cabaret number, an example of what can happen when very talented people are collaborating without much reference to each other's ideas.

Rodgers made Sondheim write a new lyric, with a more straightforward subtext: now Eddie and Jennifer would simply proclaim that their marriage was going to be all right, while the audience would know that it wasn't. Sondheim couldn't have had much enthusiasm for the task, because the lyric he came up with, while it gets the subject right, is extremely bland and has that "written under protest" feel:

It may not all be bliss,
But every wound is treatable.
We won't go under,
We're gonna be all right.
Don't see how we can miss,
Our team is undefeatable.
I wouldn't wonder,
We're gonna be all right.
We may have had
Unhappy landings,
Misunderstandings,
We're still growing.
Some years are bad,
We're hale and hearty,
We'll keep the party
Going.
Hey, babe, let's have a kiss,
Remember, we're unbeatable.
We're gonna blunder,
We're gonna hold on tight,
Heigh-ho,
We're gonna be all right.

Nonetheless, the actual number works quite well. Eddie sings the refrain once (with a couple of interjections from Jennifer), and then the two of them stand posing like the man and wife in Grant Wood's "American Gothic." They repeat the refrain together, but now, according to the stage directions: "Their faces are dead; their voices are thin." The potential hollowness of Rodgers's perky tune has become part of the number, and the number as a whole becomes quite a bit darker and more involving than Sondheim's wacky fake-dark version would have been.

Revivals of Waltz alternate between using Sondheim's original and the Broadway version. There are things to be said for both versions: Sondheim's original lyrics are too good to lose, and his revised lyric isn't very good at all, but on the other hand, the Broadway version is a better number and more in-character. It is, if nothing else, an example of how a good Broadway musical will drop good material, even great material, in its quest to get a moment exactly right, and how a good number is more than just the song: it's a combination of music, lyrics, staging possibilities, and characterization. But most of all, it's another debate point for obsessive Broadway enthusiasts, and no show has provided more debate points than Do I Hear a Waltz? That's why we love it.

No Private-Eye Show Is Sacred

Pierce Brosnan wants to make a "Remington Steele" movie:

"The show is out on DVD now and so we have started negotiations on making a movie out of it," he says. "I think there's an audience there. There's a sentimental memory and fondness for it."

According to an interview with "Remington Steele" creator Michael Gleason, Brosnan doesn't want to do a reunion movie; he wants to produce a feature film based on the show, with new actors in the lead roles and Brosnan himself playing a different role.

Interestingly, the creator of "Moonlighting," Glenn Caron, was recently quoted as saying that he's thinking of doing a feature film based on the series, also with new actors. Throw in Michael Mann's troubled feature remake of his show "Miami Vice," and something is definitely in the Kool-Aid of creators and stars of successful and beloved '80s television shows.

As material for a feature film goes, these '80s hourlong shows are probably better prospects than the sitcoms that usually get made into features. A show like "Remington Steele" was so heavily influenced by feature films itself -- what with all the movie references in every episode -- that a feature version might make for a solid comedy/mystery/romance on the order of Charade. But then you get into the problem of any movie based on a TV show, which is that people love the shows because of the actors who inhabited the characters; when the show is a romance, and therefore its popularity is based in part on people wanting to see those particular actors/characters together, that really makes it hard to re-cast the parts.

C.L.O.

Opera critic Conrad L. Osborne is someone whose praises I have previously sung (opera, sung, get it?). Having found some of the old High Fidelity "Records in Review" volumes, I thought I'd offer a few more quotes that demonstrate his understanding of voices. Here are quotes from Osborne's reviews of recital discs by young singers -- singers who went on to achieve major stardom. Osborne's description of their debut recitals, and their strengths and weaknesses, is as good and detailed and accurate as if he'd been familiar with their work for twenty years, and his analysis of the problem spots in the singers' voices and techniques is always prescient.

(Placido Domingo)
The voice is extremely attractive and quite individual in timbre, having considerable liquidity but a good ring, too. It has some of the nasality so often found in Spanish tenors -- a product, one assumes, of linguistic influences, though perhaps of pedagogic tradition, as well. The bottom sometimes has a trace of huskiness, which he often turns to coloristic effect.
His singing is always smooth and tasteful, and from time to time strikingly beautiful. There are limitations on it: the very top seems inconsistent, with B flat the highest absolutely secure note; and it does not seem fully open-throated, with the result that the volume, though certainly satisfactory, remains on the moderate side; and there is always a certain amount of driving as the voice moves through the break.

(Luciano Pavarotti)
Pavarotti shows a meaty, wide-ranged lyric tenor, and a technique that is sufficiently complete to make him the most accomplished tenor to come out of Italy in a number of years... intonation is excellent, the top is secure at least through the C, and the tone even takes on, from time to time, the kind of spin and movement that bespeaks real freedom -- the true vocal vibrato... further, Pavarotti sings with a clean, well-knit line and with a relish for the words -- not so much as dramatic meaning but as pure sound; the beauty of the Italian language is restored.
Apart from a very occasional bleatiness when he drives the voice at the top, he shows a limitation only when it comes to grading down the dynamics; in this respect, he merely joins the group... to be sure, Pavarotti can execute decrescendos and observe markings of p or pp. But the results are apt to be strained or downright ugly.

(Montserrat Caballé)
In addition to its individual and beautiful quality, the voice clearly has size, flexibility and a wide range, with authentic chest strength -- sparingly used, I am happy to say -- at the bottom and clear, focused, steady Bs and Cs at the top (though it does not seem to be the sort of voice that opens out effulgently at the top; rather, it points, on peaks, to a very compact tone). The temperament seems genuine and large-scale; one might be reminded of the young Victoria De Los Angeles had the latter had about her something more of the diva....
Complaints? Yes, of a provisional nature, since one never knows what will turn out to be an unforgettable part of a major artist's make-up and what will harden into mannerism. Since I do not enjoy any distortion, however small, that smacks of vocal compromise, I would just as soon not hear consonants transformed for the sake of comfort -- this is not a "Casta diva," for example, but a "Gasta" diva. I aslo do not care for low phrases in which every other note is attacked with a sort of yodel, or gulp, or flip. It is certainly unnecessary and certainly disturbing to the continuity of the line; and if it has any emotional or interpretative significance (what would it be?), it is banished through indiscriminate and repeated use.

The great thing about Osborne's criticism is that you can listen to any singer after reading his reviews and hear exactly what he describes -- the good and the bad, the trade-mark devices and the mannerisms. Writing about music is difficult because you're trying the almost counter-intuitive task of describing sounds using words. I can't think of anyone who has done it better than C.L.O.

A Brief Pause

I probably won't be posting much for the next few days. Hopefully I'll have some longer posts when I return to the... cathodes? Blog-powering-things? Whatever makes a blog happen.

I leave you with this quote from that greatest of all unnecessary sequels, Gremlins 2:

Because of the end of civilization, CCN now leaves the air. We hope you have enjoyed our programming. But more importantly, we hope you have enjoyed life.

It's Like Christmas In Some Other Holiday

"The Scooby Doo/Dynomutt Hour?" who can resist such a cavalcade of coolness? Not to mention the theme song:

They've got it all together, and do you know what?
Scooby-Doo is hangin' 'round with Dynomutt!
While Scooby-Doo is tangling with a spooky ghost,
Dynomutt is doin' what he does the most!
They make a super pair,
With a super show to share,
Scooby-Doo and Dynomutt!

Seriously, I know nothing about "Scooby-Doo" except that it just will not go away (mostly because it is irresistible to kids; I don't even remember why I loved it as a kid, I only know I did), and I know nothing about Dynomutt except as fodder for "Harvey Birdman: Attorney At Law." Still, further dips into the bottomless well of crummy '70s Hanna-Barbera programming are always welcome. Dare we hope that "Inch High Private Eye" is next?

A Belsonism

TV writer and broadcaster Ken Levine (who, with his partner David Isaacs, has written for M*A*S*H, Cheers, Frasier, The Simpsons and many others) has a blog now. One of his recent posts, about "dumb" characters in TV shows, has a funny anecdote about writing for the designated dummy on Cheers, the Coach, and coming up with lines that made him seem too dumb:

In the case of the Coach on CHEERS we had a contest in a writers room to see who could pitch the dumbest Coach joke. One day we were faced with the following set-up: Sam is in his office. The Coach comes in to say he’s got a call. Jerry Belson is one of the funniest people I’ve ever met. He pitched this:

COACH: Sam, there’s a little black man in the bar who wants to speak to you.

SAM: No Coach, that’s the phone.

WINNER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

In case that wasn't clear from my description of it (read the post), that wasn't a line that was used or intended to be used on the air; Belson was pitching a line that would make the Coach even dumber than he normally was.

Incidentally, someone should compile a list of all the shows and movies contributed to by Jerry Belson as an uncredited re-writer. After he and Garry Marshall broke up, in addition to his credited work, Belson has done a lot of uncredited consulting, re-writing and polishing work. For example, he wasn't credited on Cheers but he did work on it; James L. Brooks brought him in to do some uncredited work on some Simpsons episodes, including their first flashback episode, "The Way We Was" (Belson was brought in because of his experience with The Dick Van Dyke Show and their fifty kajillion flashback shows); he did some uncredited work on the mostly-uncredited script of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and so on.

HIP Is Here To Stay

The recording company Deutsche Grammophon has a long-running series called "The Originals" where they re-package classic recordings from their catalogue. I notice that the newest batch of reissues includes Trevor Pinnock's recording of Handel's "Messiah", performed on period instruments.

Truth be told, I've never thought this was one of the very best recordings of "Messiah," though I think it may be one of the best-selling recordings of the piece, which would explain why it's been chosen for reissue in a series devoted to the label's classics. But the thing that intrigues me about this is, simply, the fact of an HIP (Historically Informed Performance) recording being included in such a series.

It wasn't so long ago that music lovers were engaged in a debate over whether HIP was here to stay or just a fad, whether it was going to take over baroque and classical performance or whether "traditional" performances would prevail. Pinchas Zuckerman, the director of the National Arts Centre orchestra in my native Ottawa (as I recall, he replaced none other than Trevor Pinnock, whose work with the orchestra wasn't particularly impressive -- not that Zuckerman's was either), used to and for all I know still does go into long tirades about how HIP musicians weren't real musicians, just people who took up the gut strings and valve horns because they couldn't get jobs in "traditional" orchestras.

And now HIP is in and of itself traditional, so much so that twenty-year-old HIP recordings are coming out in a series alongside recordings by the likes of Karajan, Fricsay and Mravinsky. Those simulated cat-gut strings and small-sized choruses are part of our musical culture now.

"Mongo Only Pawn In Game of Life."

That's a line the late Richard Pryor wrote for the movie Blazing Saddles. Best line in the picture.

Among the better blog posts I've seen about him are from Mark Evanier and Digby's Blog.

The Biopic They Need To Make

I'm not a big fan of movies about real-life actors -- most of them seem painfully unaware of the fact that actors' lives are not, for a non-actor, all that interesting. But if there's one actor whose life might make a good movie, it would have to be Lawrence Tierney. This guy's life could fill several novels, and the last few years of his life alone could make for several scenes that are both funny and creepy.

What prompted me to think of this was an anecdote on a DVD commentary for a "Simpsons" episode that Tierney guest-voiced in. The way the showrunners tell it, Tierney arrived at the studio in a limo, and the limo driver immediately drove away, saying he refused to come back to pick this guy up. Tierney screamed at somebody for making a noise, intimidated the young showrunners at every turn, and scared the entire staff half to death.

And the thing is that this was a relatively mild encounter with Tierney. When he was on Seinfeld as Elaine's father, he scared the cast and crew so much (that's real fear Jerry and George are projecting) that they never had him back again. His most famous action on the set of that episode was to carry a butcher knife under his jacket. This wasn't part of the episode; he just liked carrying the butcher knife.

And in 1999, at a screening of his 1947 movie Born to Kill (where he played yet another vicious psychopathic killer), he was in prime form, according to writer Eddie Mueller:

The actor responded to our greeting with a brusque command: "Pull my fucking arm!"....

"Don't gesture at me like that," he growled, still holding out the left like a threat. "People make fast moves around me, I react. I can't help it." Tierney favored me with the slit-eyed glower that had preceded many a barroom brawl. The moment passed. He slapped my knee and cracked a conspiratorial smile: "Help me to the head," Tierney said, reaching for my arm. "I gotta take a piss before the show."

I piloted Larry to the men's room, steered him to a urinal. Assisting in this project was a delicate young gentleman named Darrell, whom Tierney verbally abused throughout the arduous journey...

Tierney broke off a guffaw. He wrapped a mitt around my neck and jerked me toward him. His bald dome banged my forehead. Despite the dull ache this headbutt inspired, I took it as a sign of affection...

I feared Bob Wise might keel over when Tierney, miffed at what he perceived as several self-serving comments during the director's post-screening interview, hollered mightily from his back row perch: "Hey Bob, who wrote the fucking script?"

Now, I've just mentioned three anecdotes from the last decade of the man's life. Put in the really interesting stuff -- the fights, the broken bones, the stints in jail, his mother's suicide, and the fact that he rose quickly to stardom and just as quickly threw it all away -- and you've got a movie. Go raise the money. But don't let Quentin Tarantino direct it, or he'll make the whole thing a plotless love letter to Tierney.

Yip Harburg Quote of the Day

Just a random quote from my favorite Broadway lyricist, Yip Harburg. From the flop musical Flahooley, a genie muses on the contradictions of the system by which scarcity creates value:

When people magically beget
All that on which their hearts are set,
Then, having got a better lot,
They cannot get what they begot.

Puddin'!

I'm thoroughly enjoying Batman the Animated Series: Volume 4, which collects together the 24 episodes the show produced after its initial run on Fox, when it moved to the WB network. These were the "new look" Batman episodes, where longtime producer Bruce Timm re-designed all the characters to make them more angular, more streamlined, and somewhat more in line with what the same team was doing on the "Superman" animated series.

The re-designs were always controversial and I don't think they're altogether successful; the new look of the show more or less abandoned the '40s film noir look of the Fox series for a sleeker, more sci-fi look. And because a lot of the appeal of the "Batman" animated show had to do with the look and the atmosphere (even when the plot was not up to snuff, the show just felt dark and cool), the somewhat more generic look of the WB episodes brings it down a notch: it no longer has the distinction of looking and feeling unlike any other show on TV, because the look and feel is now recognizably similar to the "Superman" show. Also, some of the character designs are simplified to the point of almost seeming like different characters, and not in a good way. Poison Ivy, a character who wasn't particularly well-known before the animated show, looked like a sultry femme fatale in the Fox episodes; on the WB she looked distressingly like Kim Possible. Drawing the Joker without lips was one of those things that probably made him easier to draw on-model but generally made him less fun to watch.

The plots were, overall, more dependent on action and fighting than the Fox shows, which were (appealingly) rather leisurely for a kids' action series, and unusually dependent on character development. Also, the practice of giving Batman young sidekicks to make him more kid-friendly got a bit out of hand: here he had a new, little-kid Robin, Batgirl, and Dick Grayson as Nightwing, and most episodes included one, two or three of them.

I'm a partisan of the idea that Batman is usually better off without sidekicks; I just think he's a guy like John Wayne in Rio Bravo who wouldn't want amateurs tagging along, which means he might be okay with Dick Grayson (if we're doing Rio Bravo comparisons, Dick is clearly Colorado) but never the Commissioner's spunky daughter or some kid off the street. Actually, the best-known episode from this season, "Over the Edge," pretty much proves the point that Batman should tell Batgirl to go home and stop risking her life. There are three or four episodes in this run that have just Batman fighting villains alone, the way he usually did in the first season on Fox, and it's kind of a relief to see him without any kids hanging around.

So these episodes aren't as good as the Fox episodes, but like I said, I still enjoy them a lot. They've got plenty of great stuff carried over from the Fox seasons (the superb voice cast, Shirley Walker's music) and the slightly more modernized look of the show allows for some slightly more modern-skewing stories, like the episode with a fashion model turning evil and getting revenge on the modeling industry that has rejected her as over-the-hill. Also, the WB's Standards and Practices people were apparently more permissive than Fox's, allowing for a bit more violence than the Fox show could get away with, including a violent onscreen death. Most popular episodes in the bunch include the aforementioned "Over the Edge," the Batman-through-the-ages tribute "Legends of the Dark Knight," and "Mad Love," which Paul Dini and Bruce Timm adapted from their comic book about the origins of Harley Quinn and her masochistic obsession with the Joker.

One thing I get when watching these episodes is kind of a bittersweet, nostalgic feeling, because they're part of the end of an era. They aired on the WB in the 1997-8 season, by which time Warner Brothers had transferred most of its animated product from Fox to its own network. But the fact that WB's best animated shows generally skewed older -- appealing to teenagers, college kids and parents as much as to little kids, if not more -- had already hurt the network with the advertisers, who weren't interested in advertising toys and such on shows that didn't have a monolithically young audience. So by 1997 the WB was already in the process of phasing out the cartoons that appealed to older viewers, having cancelled "Freakazoid," halted production on "Superman," and put "Animaniacs" on semi-hiatus. But they still had "Batman" and "Pinky and the Brain" in production, and those shows aired a lot of episodes on the WB in the 1997-8 season. And with both those shows, the WB had production halted and replaced with semi-spinoffs targeted at a younger audience.

"Pinky and the Brain" became "Pinky, Elmyra and the Brain," while "Batman" was replaced with "Batman Beyond." Now, "Batman Beyond" was a very fine show and probably, overall, more satisfying than the WB run of "Batman." Still, the upshot of it was that the WB had pulled the plug on all the shows that were part of its '90s TV animation boom -- the Spielberg shows, "Batman." None of those shows would come back, and the whole idea of making daytime cartoons for the whole family, as opposed to just kids, was being steamrolled by "Pokemon" and Pokemania.

So the end of the "Batman" series, along with the end of the "Pinky and the Brain" series (which gets a shout-out in one of the WB "Batman" episodes, "Torch Song") marked the end of a particular kind of TV cartoon that no one has ever quite been able to replicate. I respect the same team's "Justice League," but the plots are of necessity so outlandish and fantastical that they're not really my thing; the special appeal of "Batman" is that it's not really sci-fi, not really fantasy, more of a psychological crime drama with funny costumes.

Because the WB pulled the plug on "Batman" and the team moved to "Batman Beyond," the WB run of "Batman" feels incomplete; there are some story ideas that seem to be set up but not followed up on with an actual episode, and a new character, the Creeper (who looks and acts like what Timm's original conception of Freakazoid might have been) was supposed to be a multi-episode character but appears only once. Would be interesting to see what the show might have done if it had run longer, but it had the longest run of any of WB's animated shows of this period, so it's hard to complain about it.

Eastern Violence

The Criterion Collection newsletter reports that they'll be releasing new DVD editions of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai, Yojimbo and Sanjuro next year. These were three of the first movies Criterion brought out on DVD, and the transfers and features left a lot to be desired; if you're thinking of picking up these movies, wait for the new discs.

Eat Hootersville Rutabagas!

MacLean's Magazine has my new article on the surprisingly far-reaching, long-lasting influence of the show Green Acres, "Hurrah For Hooterville."

One episode from the third season that I didn't have room to mention in the article was the two-part season finale "A Star Named Arnold Is Born," where Arnold the pig makes a splash in a local play called "Who Killed Jock Robin?" (playing the part of an English police dog when Columbo the trained dog is unavailable), and winds up in Hollywood, replacing a horse in a major motion picture after the horse asks for too much money. (The producer of the film expresses regret at hiring the horse instead of his first choice, Elizabeth Taylor.) Arnold decides to give up on Hollywood stardom when he meets the horse he replaced, and has a subtitled conversation with him -- Arnold's grunts and the horse's whinnies subtitled in English -- in which he learns that the horse was counting on this picture to put his son through college:

ARNOLD: Grunt, grunt. (Subtitle: "BUT IF HE DOESN'T GO TO COLLEGE THEY'LL DRAFT HIM!")
HORSE: Neigh! (Subtitle: "I WAS COUNTING ON THIS MONEY TO BE ABLE TO SEND HIM.")
ARNOLD: Grunt, grunt. (Subtitle: "I FEEL LIKE A HEEL.")
HORSE: Neigh! (Subtitle: "C'EST LA VIE.")
ARNOLD: Grunt, grunt. (Subtitle: "OH, YOU SPEAK FRENCH.")

In the scene that directly follows this scene, Lisa, Oliver and the producer speak English, and the subtitles continue to flash on the screen until Lisa turns to the camera and says "We don't need those words any more."

My article from last week, on contemporary sitcoms, is online too. I seem to be carving out some kind of niche as Sitcom Guy. It's a (freelance) living.

It's Crizappy!

Sitcoms Online has some very fine news about upcoming TV-On-DVD releases:

NewsRadio: The Complete Third Season will be coming to DVD on February 28! This is still unofficial of course, so keep it low key. If this is indeed the date, we can expect Sony to announce it in less than 2 weeks. And when they do, TVShowsonDVD.com will have full information on it!

And:

Fans of the cult hit Action have been waiting and waiting for Sony to release the show on DVD. It had been scheduled many times but was always pulled off. And we hope this time it will not be pulled again. Action: The Complete Series will come out on February 21. We can expect all 13 episodes of the 1999 FOX series starring Jay Mohr to make it on this set. Thanks to Dragonfire Films, err Sony Pictures Home Entertainment for finally scheduling the cult sitcom.

This Media Life

Terry Teachout's piece on Capote and Good Night and Good Luck is interesting, though as with any politics-related piece from Commentary magazine it's a bit heavy on certain clichés that the magazine hasn't been able to give up on since approximately 1971. For example, any piece in Commentary about the McCarthy "witch hunt" must, perhaps by law, include some variant of the following sentence, pointing out that Clooney's film does not mention:

The fact that McCarthy’s witch hunt, however irresponsible in practice, was at least nominally motivated by the existence of actual witches.

Having read this argument dozens of times, I'm never sure why it's supposed to be relevant. If anything, the fact that McCarthy siezed on "the existence of actual witches" to promote a hunt for non-witches -- e.g. Communists who weren't spies, liberals, people who looked funny -- makes it worse, not better. The fact that the "witches" existed may excuse the public for getting so scared; it has zero to do with the politicians who knew better. It is, in other words, a way of changing the subject.

Another sentence the piece could well do without is:

Here, Clooney echoes the New Left mantra endlessly regurgitated by aging baby boomers longing to assuage their liberal guilt by keeping faith with the never-to-be-questioned commandments of the 60’s.

Again, no Commentary piece is complete without an attack on the '60s and non-conservative baby boomers, but please, enough is enough. The politics of Clooney's movie are, if anything, pure '50s liberalism, or possibly '30s leftishness; the only people these days keeping faith with the never-to-be-questioned commandments of the '60s are conservatives, who are still repeating the same talking points they were repeating back in 1968. The '60s shaped conservative thinking much more than liberal thinking.

Anyway, the piece ends with some of Terry's patented blog triumphalism -- he's the friendliest blog triumphalist around, but still:

What has changed since 1958, of course, is the willingness of a fast-growing number of Americans to continue taking for granted the objectivity of the news media. With the emergence of such decentralized “new media” as blogs and talk radio, it is no longer necessary to settle for whatever news CBS and the New York Times see fit to publish.

Now, first of all, let's remember this: blogs and talk radio and the like are parasitic on "mainstream" news. When bloggers say they're talking about something the "MSM" won't report, what they really mean is that they're calling attention to "MSM" stories that they feel were not given enough prominence by said "MSM." The same goes true for all articles in opinion journals: left or right, any news stories they mentioned are stories that were at some point reported in the New York Times or on CBS. (Don't bring up the Dan Rather memo thing, okay? It just wasn't important, didn't swing the election either way, and nobody cared about it outside the blogs. The only important thing about the Rather thing was that it caused CBS to kill a far more important story on the forged Niger documents.) In other words, the decentralized "new media" does, in fact, settle 99% of the time for whatever news CBS and the New York Times see fit to publish, and always will.

Second, If you think about it, what Murrow was doing with his piece on McCarthy was very much akin to what the decentralizers are doing now: taking the news and adding the context that conventional reporting couldn't or wouldn't give. What frustrates most people today about the news media is its attempt to sidestep the question of what's true and what's false. The most persistent and valid objection to conventional reporting is that they adopt the "he said/she said" technique, which means that even if one person is telling the truth and the other is lying, they will be reported as if they are equally valid. That's the kind of reporting that was going on with McCarthy -- McCarthy says the Communist conspiracy is taking over America, Senator John Milquetoast says it isn't -- and Murrow decided that he-said-she-said couldn't give an accurate portrayal of what was going on. So he "crossed the line" into attacking McCarthy (with McCarthy's own words) and by doing so produced something more, not less, accurate than a conventionally neutral piece.

I don't think this is a particularly controversial thing to say, really; if a reporter were to write that Stalin says everything is great in Russia but John Siberiabound says it isn't, and then write the story in a way that suggests that the issue is open, anyone would call that wrong even though it's clearly not taking sides. In this case, as in many others, the objective point of view is not the neutral one: a reporter who looks at the issue objectively will have to take sides. Sometimes, of course, a liberal reporter might be blinded by his own views into confusing his opinion with objective truth. But given that conservative media critics always seem to think that an objective report would validate their own view of any situation, I can't take them seriously when they pick on the occasional moderate-Clintonite for suggesting that maybe things aren't going so smoothly in Iraq.

I would also submit that it seems a little quaint to be talking, however obliquely about liberal bias in the media at a time when so many journalists -- Bob Woodward and many others -- have been shown to be buddy-buddy with members of the Bush administration. That doesn't mean they're right-wing either; it means that journalists tend to make their living by sucking up to people in power in order to get juicy bits of gossip ("Joe Wilson's wife is..." was a piece of gossip that unexpectedly turned out to be radioactive for all sides). This is why -- and this is still not very widely understood by conservatives -- it's liberals who are most frustrated with the "MSM" now, because liberals actually believed that mainstream journalists were supposed to be truth-tellers. The fact that Bob Woodward sucks up to the Bush administration is ignored or shrugged off by conservatives; it hurts and angers liberals. And you can't discuss the media culture of today without acknowledging the fact that mainstream journalists have a decidedly non-adversarial relationship to the government.

The idea that journalists should "speak truth to power" may be a liberal cliché on a level with Commentary's store of conservative clichés, but it seems obvious that journalists should at least not be worried about pissing off people in power; once they get to worrying about that, they start repeating thinly-disguised press releases as fact, and then you get the media culture of today, which satisfies no one because it challenges no one.

If Clooney's movie has an old-fashioned "truth to power" point to make, it is at least one that, if followed, would lead to better journalism than we get today. Blogs are journalism too, and one of the reasons most conservative blogs are so bad -- and they are very bad indeed -- is the power-worship. The aptly named Power Line (which broke the Dan Rather story that no one outside of the blogs seems to care about), probably the single worst blog on the net, routinely and seriously calls President Bush a genius and the president who has articulated his worldview "more consistently and more eloquently than any President since Lincoln," while hurling accusations of treason at anyone who disagrees with them. They are political hacks who started up a blog, and whose political philosophy revolves around total devotion to the people currently in power; that's always going to happen, but it makes for terrible journalism because they dismiss (look at any of their posts, if you can stand it) any fact that doesn't confirm what they already knew to be true. They are much, much worse than any CNN or CBS journalist at ignoring facts and distorting other facts, yet they are set up as the critics of CNN and CBS.

The "decentralization" of news, in this case, has merely become the ability of people who don't want to be bothered with inconvenient facts to go and find out why they were right all along. (Happens on the left too, of course, but not as much at the moment, in part because most left-wing blogs have comments, which allow for fact-checking and challenges to the blogger, whereas most high-profile right-wing blogs don't have comments.) This is not progress, and if George Clooney wants to advocate for journalists to be a little more like Murrow and a little less like Bob Woodward, well, that may be simplistic, but it's better than what we've got now. Besides which, of course, blogger-journalists claim they're speaking truth to power too; the source of "power" they identify being that of the "MSM." The difference between speaking truth to CBS and speaking truth to a politican is that the former has only the power to report on stuff that happened; the latter has the power to make things happen. The current weird situation is one where many blogger-journalists on the right, and even a few on the left, spend most of their time railing against those with declining power (the "MSM") and the rest of the time justifying every action of those who actually have power.

Where the media goes from here, I don't know. Political blogs are mostly useful now as an echo chamber or as a political organizing tool (a way of getting together people of the same political persuasion). If anything is to revive trust in the "MSM," it'll probably be something that conservatives don't like, like more nasty reporting on Iraq or various other scandals. Why? Because muckraking, scandal-mongering and "speaking truth to power" actually increases public trust in the media, if the public thinks the scandal is important. The Murrow thing increased public trust in the media; so did the Woodward-Bernstein Watergate scandal. If the Democrats get back into power and do something really bad, and the media reports on that, that will also increase public trust in the media. (The Clinton-Lewinsky thing decreased public trust in the media, but that's because the general public, rightly or wrongly, decided that it wasn't an important issue and the media shouldn't be writing so much about it.)

Because, again, while it's hackneyed to say that the media should "speak truth to power," it's the only thing that the media can do to make more people like it. People have an instinctive distrust of politicians and people in power. The more the media is seen as being on the side of the politicians, the less they will be trusted. The conservative solution, at the moment, would push the media into being still more on the side of the politicians -- and unless you're a worshipper of politicians, that's a recipe for making most people hate the media even more than they already do. Murrow got to be loved because he embodied the adversarial relationship between journalism and politics. That's what the public likes, much more than journalists (including bloggers) who suck up to politicians, or journalists who have an adversarial relationship with other journalists. A little less media-bashing and a little more bashing from the media; that's the ticket to renewed prestige and popularity.

By the way, did I mention I hate the term "MSM?"