Watching Fox Oddballs

July 31, 1988

In its effort to grab an audience share, the Fox network is trying something a little different on prime time Sunday nights, an hour of oddball comedy from 9 p.m. Half of it is pretty good.

The Fox network is not a true network in the sense that ABC, NBC, or CBS are.  Rather, it is the television arm of Twentieth Century Fox that sells blocks of in-house made programming to independent stations.  Thus far, it offers some 20 hours of programming, all on the weekends, a performance it hopes to improve upon.  Albany's WXXA on channel 23 is the local Fox outlet.

Thanks to the writers' strike, more re-runs are being run than usual, and this gives me a chance to catch up on what I missed last season.  So the "It's Gary Shandlings's Show" at 9, and "The Tracey Ullman Show" at 9:30 are new to me.

"Gary Shandling" is a lightweight delight, with odd characters and odder scripting that relies primarily on breaking the "fourth wall" to get laughs.  "Breaking the fourth wall" means that some cast member leaves the fantasy world of the set and talks directly to the audience; it gets its name from the fact that traditionally a set is made up of three walls, and the fourth is where the audience or the camera lens is.

There is nothing new about leaving the fantasy and talking to the audience, it is as old as drama itself; and Thorton Wilder's 1938 "Our Town" with its on-stage "stage manager" is a fine example of the technique.

Screen examples include silent-era comedians winking or shrugging at us, and those who remember the 1950's "Burns and Allen Show" may recall George Burns talking to us through our TV sets while he watches what is going on in his house on TV.

Shandling is a rugged looking, seamed-faced young man with a comically whiney voice that would grate one's nerves over the long term, but is barely manageable for the half-hour.  The show is laid back, easygoing and has pretty good gags ("I think you set you hair-dryer on 'stun'"), but but the bulk of the humor comes from the twists of plot as Shandling does such things as walking off the set to check what's going on on the TV monitors (shades of Burns and Allen) or checking with the script girl to see if his girlfriend Nancy (Molly Cheek) will really be scarred for life in scene four as predicted by a psychic.

 An amusing tough in last week's show has a distinguished looking actor coming on stage at the start of the show, carrying a huge numeral "I."  He announces that this is the start of scene one, and proceeds to describe what is going to happen in the scene.  Of course when Shandling begins to depart from the script, the poor fellow shows up at the wrong time with consecutive numerals in hand, accusing the star of unprofessional conduct.

This show may wear thin after a few viewings, but I've enjoyed the three episodes I've seen thoroughly.

"The Tracy Ullman Show"  is also odd, but that's about all it shares with "Shandling".  Ullman shows a lot of talent, and that is all.  The show consists of a series of little skits in which Ullman plays a lead role, rather as in the old "Carol Burnett Show."  But Burnett has a comic genius Ullman lacks, a better cast, and first-class writing.  The awful, lazy, Hackneyed scripts in Ullman's show result in moralistic little playlets that are neither entertaining,  insightful, nor amusing.

Ullman can do great dialects and can squeeze out a tear when necessary, but she is totally wasted in this mess.  With a little imagination and some good writing, the playlet format and the cast could work beautifully, but the two shows I have seen were an embarrassment.

I'll watch more Fox shows in the future, but what I have seen so far is basically a rehash o fold forms, and the innovation is truly slight, at least in these two shows.  These two efforts, one lightweighted and amusing, the pathetic, show an unimaginative attitude that bodes ill for the Fox network.

Mac Rush works in the Banner's composing room.