The Best Intentions…

I started out this year with such hope, but after watching two short running television shows, I quickly ran into issues.  One is that people don’t tend to click on obscure television shows quite like they did obscure movies.  Two was that with no self-imposed disc a day mandate, it became much easier to decide I would do it later.  And three, if you want to watch anything on the television, do not give your daughter a Wii for Christmas. 

So I have decided to scrap my original plan as well as the second plan to watch all the Best Picture winners in order and just take a more relaxed approach to watching and commenting on movies or other DVDs that I decide to watch.  Not as exciting perhaps, but hopefully I can live with that easier and find the time to actually watch something.

Action

Action was originally planned as an adult comedy series for HBO starring Oliver Platt.  The producers of the show wanted HBO to put up more money, so they pitched the series to FOX to have a counter offer to throw at HBO.  FOX loved the show and immediately made a deal to buy it.  Somewhere along the way they lost Oliver Platt and picked up Jay Mohr.  And by moving to network television they also had to ditch the salty language and nudity.  Rather than rewriting the show for the stricter standards of network TV, they chose to bleep and pixilate the offending bits.  The series premiered in September of 1999 to stellar reviews and almost no audience.  FOX let the show run for 8 episodes and then pulled it off the air.  True to form they also aired the 8 episodes out of order.  The remaining 5 episodes were eventually aired on FX.

Action was a mean comedy.  It concerned egotistical movie producer Peter Dragon (Mohr), who has just suffered his first major flop.  The series chronicled Dragon’s attempt to make his next motion picture, Beverly Hills Gun Club.  Peter Dragon is not the kind of lovable sit com figure that people were looking for in their network comedies.  In the first scene of the first episode he verbally berates a member of the craft services crew for the studio commissary, telling him how worthless the man is and how superior he, Peter Dragon. is in comparison.  The man explains that Peter has just parked in his spot, a spot he earned as employee of the month.  When Peter asks him what he does on the lot, the man tells him and Peter asks if he got the employee of the month accolade for not peeing in the Cobb salads.  He then goes on to inform him how much money his last few films have made for the studio and tells the man who because of this he will park where ever he pleases because he is the employee of the f’ing century.  Very mean, very cruel, but very funny.  Unfortunately like Dabney Coleman’s Buffalo Bill before him, Peter Dragon was not embraced by America.

After the above exchange,we follow Peter to the premiere of his new film Slow Torture.  Along the way he and his driver, his Uncle Lonnie (Buddy Hackett) accidentally pick up a hooker (Illeana Douglas).  After the screening, Wendy, the hooker, is the only person willing to give Peter her true thoughts on the movie.  He immediately hires her as part of his production team.

Episode 2, Re-enter the Dragon, picks up with Dragon and company beginning production on Beverly Hills Gun Club.  The writer is told to start making changes to the script he wrote.  This leads into episode 3, Blood Money, where Peter attempts to secure the financing necessary from Bobby G. (Lee Arenberg), the very rich studio boss.  Bobby G. agrees to finance part of the film, but only if Peter can come up with an additional $50,000,000.  Writer Adam Rafkin (Jarrad Paul) is given more notes on changes to be made and continually gets ignored by Peter, who can’t even remember Adam’s name.

Episode 4, Blowhard, has Peter hiring his first star, Cole Ricardi.  Unfortunately Cole eventually confides in Peter that he is getting ready to come out of the closet.  Peter convinces him to keep his secret by lying, and telling Cole that he too is gay.  This leads to a friendly hug before Cole decides to give Peter a more intimate kind of affection.  Afterward Bobby G. tells Peter that he doesn’t want Cole in the lead role.  He wants a younger leading man, so Peter convinces Cole to go on and come out, breach his contract, and move to NY.

Episode 5, Mr. Dragon Goes to Washington, finds Peter testifying before Congress about violence in the movies.  After calling the congressman questioning him an old whore, Peter goes further and says that if violence in the movies is a cancer then he hopes the whole country gets cancer.  This leads to a PR expert, Connie Hunt (Amy Aquino) being called in to help reform Peter’s image.  Meanwhile a hotshot young agent tricks Adam Rafkin into leaving his agent of ten years and joining their agency.

Episode 6, Twelfth Step to Hell, features Peter looking for a new leading man.  He rejects Scott Wolf as too short, and he can’t get Tony Hawk to approach Leonardo DiCaprio with the project.  This leads to Peter pulling Holden Van Dorn (Fab Filippo) out of rehab to make the movie.  In episode 7, Dragon’s Blood, Peter finally signs a director, Titus Scroad (R. Lee Ermey) while dealing with Take Your Daughter To Work day.

Episode 8, Love Sucks, finds stress developing in Peter’s at home relationship with Wendy.  He gets more stress when he allows his assistant, Stuart Glazer (Jack Plotnick), to hire the lead actress without making her audition (or looking at a recent photo of her since she has put on 50 pounds).  Stress gets compounded when Holden goes off the wagon and is in danger of not being able to pass the insurance physical.

Episode 9, Strong Sexual Content, centers mostly on a rumor spreading about Peter and a rectally inserted frog.  Episode 10, Lights, Camera, Action!, takes place on the first day of shooting.  The crew experiences problem after problem.  A dove takes up residence on the set and ruins a take with its coos before Scroad shoots it, incurring the wrath of a humane society rep who is also disgusted by the lack of starring roles in features for birds of color, blackbirds like ravens and crows.  Holden has issues with one of his lines.  Then lead actress Reagan Lauren Busch (Jennifer Lyons) storms off because she doesn’t want the crew looking at her.  As the pressures continue to pile up, Peter has a heart attack, and as the ambulance rushes him to the hospital, he dies.  This was the last episode that aired on FOX.  They had failed to air Dragon’s Blood or Love Sucks, so this was their 8th and final episode.

Of course there were still 3 more episodes that had been filmed and did eventually see airtime on cable.  The first of those was Dead Man Floating which finds the film’s director drinking with Holden and then drowning in his own pool.  Once again Connie Hunt is called in to clean things up.  Episode 12, One Easy Piece, concerns Reagan’s difficulty in filming a sex scene.  In episode 13, The Last Ride of the Elephant Princess, Peter hires a new director, accidentally invests his own money in the picture, and then finds out that Rafkin had already sold the script to someone else under a different title.  Wendy agrees to return to her old profession for one night to seal a deal with the Rothstein brothers for all rights to the script.  After making the deal, she hands the legal papers to Peter and tells him that she is leaving to go live a clean life somewhere else.  Peter returns to the studio and the series comes to an end.

If the series had been successful, the plan was to actually shoot the movie and air it as part of the series.  It wasn’t and so Beverly Hills Gun Club was never made.

I had watched part of the final episode at some point when Action was on the air, but I hadn’t seen much of the series.  When I sat down and put in the first disc, I wasn’t sure what I was getting into.  What I got was one of the funniest shows ever on television, and one that very few people watched or remember.  I had looked at the DVD set many times at Circuit City, but never broke down and picked it up.  Eventually I found it at Big Lots for $3.  It is well worth the $3.  It is well worth the $20 to $25 that Circuit City was originally asking for it.  Because Peter Dragon is a mean character, he can get by with saying some of the meanest, yet funniest, things ever uttered on television.  And they got some stars to play along.  Salma Hayek plays herself and tears into Peter over the way he sexually harassed her when she was starting out.  Sandra Bullock plays herself and storms into Dragon’s office after finding out he had secretly made and sold a sex tape of her when they hooked up.  Other stars also pop up from time to time.

The regulars were all doing great work as well.  Buddy Hackett had some very funny moments.  Jay Mohr committed himself completely to the role of a huge egotistical asshole and gets some of the best lines because of it.  Even minor players like Arenberg’s Bobby G. and snooty restaurant maitre de, Asher played by John Vargas provide amazingly funny, if not particularly likable, characters.  The scene with secretly gay Bobby G. getting a proctology exam while discussing the movie with Peter and Wendy is hysterical, as is Asher’s dismissing of Peter after his film Slow Torture fails at the box office, or taunting him by asking if he would like some frog legs after Peter’s amphibian rumor hit the street.

I’m not surprised that Action failed, but I am sad that it did.  One of the writers, as well as the show’s story editor was the incredibly talented Will Forte who went on to SNL and MacGruber.

The 2 DVD set features a behind the scenes featurette as well as three commentaries.  The featurette isn’t bad, but could have been  longer and covered more about the way the show was aired out of order.  The commentary tracks are sadly pretty useless.  Instead of picking important episodes like the pilot, Lights, Camera, Action!, and Last Ride of the Elephant Princess to comment on, the DVD producers chose Love Sucks, Dead Man Floating, and One Easy Piece.  These are all fine episodes, but I want to hear about the first episode, the death of Peter Dragon, and the end of the series.  I would have also loved to have heard Will Forte in on the commentary.  As it is, I listened to the whole commentary on Love Sucks and about half of it on Dead Man Floating before I got fed up and gave up.  Mostly it was the producers, some of the writers, and the actor that portrayed the writer in the series sitting around quietly listening or laughing at the jokes.  There was very little behind the scenes info and half the time when someone would start to tell a juicy story they would get cut off by one of the others laughing about something in the show and derailing the conversation.  All I gathered was that Illeana Douglas may have been slightly difficult and that several members of the cast went on to play gays or lesbians in Queer as Folk or The L Word.

The show was executive produced by Joel Silver, and many of the things in the show were based on real incidents that happened to Joel or people he knew.  The series had a couple of other interesting things.  The theme was a piece by Warren Zevon called Even a Dog Can Shake Hands.  He had written an original piece for the series which the studio rejected.  The other interesting bit is that during the opening credits while Jay Mohn is sitting in a prop car talking on a cellphone, the entire current episode would play in the background through a colored filter and sped up.

I can’t recommend this series highly enough.  I loved it.  With the continuing storyline it’s a little difficult to remember where one episode ends and the next begins.  Episodes 1, 2, 4, 5, 9, and 10 are all perfect 10s.  3, 7, 8, 11, and 12 are probably 9s.  6 and 13 are possibly the weakest episodes, and they’re both 8s.  That gives the series overall a 9.3.

Police Squad!

I decided to start my year of TV on DVD with some one season wonders.  This will give me a chance to decide how this is going to work out and how best to review these DVDs.  I’m not sure I’m really prepared to do individual reviews on each episode, especially with shows that ran 100 to 200 episodes.  Those may rate a season over view.  We’ll see.

Police Squad! first aired in 1982 on ABC.  It was the TV show from the makers of Airplane!; David Zucker, Jerry Zucker, and Jim Abrahams.  I remember watching the show, but I didn’t catch every episode.  Of course it only aired 4 episodes before it was yanked off the air.  Six episodes had been filmed and the final 2 were burned off in the summer by ABC and the show was laid to rest.  My friend Dana Grooms had taped all 6 episodes and I borrowed his tapes to watch them.  I liked them, but I wasn’t bowled over either.  When they came out with The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad movie, I really wondered how they would make a decent movie out of the series.  Well they did, and they made two sequels as well. 

It seemed like forever before Police Squad! ever got the proper DVD release, but it finally did.  All 6 episodes are included with commentary on 3 of the episodes.  In addition there’s a gag reel, an interview with Leslie Nielsen, screen tests, and other bonuses.  I sat down Saturday morning and watched the first two episodes.  Today I watched the remaining 4 episodes and then rewatched the 3 with the commentary track playing. 

Police Squad! had several running gags including several in the opening title sequence.  Each episode opened with an announcer dramatically intoning, “Police Squad!  In color.”  This was followed by the introduction of the stars, Leslie Nielsen and Alan North, and then Rex Harrison as Abraham Lincoln.  Needless to say Lincoln never actually appeared in any of the episodes.  After Lincoln the celebrity guest would be announced and then quickly killed off before the credits were over.  The credits ended with the episode title being shown on the screen and the announcer reading a different title. 

Other running gags throughout the series included Frank Drebin (Nielsen) driving into something.  The original gag was that what he drove into would correspond to the episode number.  In episode 1 he hits one trash can.  In episode 3 he runs over three bikes.  Drebin’s visits to the police lab to talk with Mr. Olson (Ed Williams) who was always doing some sort of demented Mr. Wizard discussion with a young boy or girl, and his stop to talk with Johnny (William Duell) the shoeshine man who has info on everything were staples of all six episodes.  Each episode also ended with Drebin or his boss running down a list of all the criminals that had been put away in earlier episodes.  This joke would have worked better if the episodes had been aired in order.  Unlike Firefly and some other series, the DVD chooses to run them in broadcast order rather than their proper production order.  Finally the episodes alway ended with a fake freeze frame which would usually end up being broken by one of the cast members or a prop.

The first episode A Substantial Gift (The Broken Promise) is probably the best of the six.  This episode was written and directed by Zucker, Abrahams, and Zucker, so it is the absolute closest to their Airplane! style of comedy.  The episode is packed with jokes of all sorts.  There were several I caught for the first time while rewatching this episode, and then when I watched it again with the commentary playing, I caught still another visual joke I had missed just the day before.  A couple of these jokes are so subtle, you really have to be watching your TV to get them.  Two of them work off of the initial joke in the episode where Drebin mentions that the city had recently had a large number of super models turning up unconscious and naked at local laundry mats.  Unfortunately, he adds, he had been assigned to investigate a bank robbery.  It’s a cute joke, but the follow up is perfection when Drebin states he was on his way to the crime scene from the other side of town where he had been doing his laundry.  Then later as he leaves Dr. Olson and goes to question a suspect, he states in voice over that he had been attending to a personal matter.  They don’t dwell on the line and they also don’t make a major point of making sure you see sitting in the seat beside Drebin is a basket of laundry.  If you’re paying attention, you can see the top of it, but the joke is not hammered out. 

The first episode also contains a bit of word play involving the names of several characters involved in the robbery. It’s classic ZAZ style humor and very funny.

The second episode, Ring of Fear (A Dangerous Assignment), was written in part by Robert Wuhl and Tino Insana, and directed by Joe Dante.  It involves Drebin infiltrating the boxing world to take down a crime boss that is fixing fights.  It’s not a bad episode despite team ZAZ being involved only as production staff.

Episode 3 is The Butler Did It (A Bird in the Hand).  The teleplay was by Pat Proft, and the direction was by Georg Stanford Brown (who ironically was the guest star killed off at the start of episode #2).  This isn’t horrible, but even the Zuckers and Abrahams admit it’s not the most stellar of episodes pointing out how long it takes before you get to the first joke as a major flaw.  The episodes still has some pretty funny moments despite the slow start and an ending that goes on too long and then caps off with a horrible pun.

Revenge and Remorse (The Guilty Alibi) was the last episode aired during the initial run.  It involves someone blowing up judges and lawyers associated with incarcerating a professional bomber that has been released from prison.  It was written by Nancy Steen and Neil Thompson and directed by Paul Krasny.  Krasny had directed lots of TV cop shows, so he was able to give the episode a realistic feel of the genre it was spoofing.  The scenes of the bomber setting up his kills look just the way you would expect to see them on The Rookies or SWAT or any other crime show of the period.

After a four month break, ABC finally aired the last two episodes of Police Squad!.  Rendezvous at Big Gulch (Terror in the Neighborhood), another Steen and Thompson penned story gets direction from Reza Badiyi (another director of TV dramas).  This episode concerns a neighborhood being preyed on by a protection racket.  There are plenty of visual sight gags even if there are less of the pun heavy jokes you might expect from ZAZ.

The final episode of Police Squad! was Testimony of Evil (Dead Men Don’t Laugh).  This was another Wuhl, Insana, Dante episode, but it also has the distinction of being probably the worst episode of the series.  A nightclub entertainer involved in drug trafficking is murdered, so Drebin goes undercover as an entertainer to take his place.  The scene with Drebin doing his act of jokes and songs goes on way too long and is more cringe worthy than funny.  The only thing I found funny in the whole bit was how they managed to destroy one joke in an effort to make it network friendly by substituting “hot tar” for “dog crap”.  Yes, there used to be a time when you couldn’t do poop jokes on television.  I was also surprised they got away with sneaking in the puchline, “I don’t think I can take 67 more of those” on an 8 PM show back in 1982.  I can only assume that standards didn’t know the rest of the joke.  It involves flatulence and a number two higher than the one mentioned on television.  Larry the Cable Guy has been known to tell it in his shows.

Testimony of Evil does have a few cute bits, and it has Dick Miller in a supporting role, so it’s not all bad.  It’s just the weakest of the six.  I would still rather watch it than any episode of Real Housewives, any Bridal shows, or a million other shows that have crossed the airwaves.  Even Robert Wuhl in the commentary seems to state that this is not his greatest work.  He continually talks about how he doesn’t remember this or he doesn’t remember that.  He also admits the Drebin stage performance goes on too long. 

So using a scale of 1 to 10, Police Squad! gets a 9 for episode 1, a 7 for episodes 2, 4, and 5, a 6 for episode 3 and a 4 for episode 6.  That averages out to a 6.66 which we will round up to a 7.  Amazingly if I had been asked to just rate the series, I would have probably given it an 8.