Word: fresno
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...city fathers may not appreciate the etymology lesson that opens CBS's new mini-series, Fresno. But Creator Barry Kemp (a writer-producer who has worked on Taxi and Newhart) could not help noticing that Fresno, the world's raisin capital, wound up last in a 1984 ranking of American cities according to quality of life. To be sure, the quality of life for the raisin-growing Kensington family has been drying up for years. The family patriarch was crushed to death 20 years ago in a dehydrator accident. Now his widow Charlotte (Carol Burnett) spends her time sipping Bloody...
Perhaps this is the place to note that Fresno is a spoof. In a prime-time soap- opera era of evil look-alikes, characters miraculously resurrected from the dead, and whole seasons that turn out to be dreams, it is hard to tell the parody from the real goods. Fresno tries to toss stink bombs at a genre that is probably impervious to anything short of nuclear annihilation. What's more, it does so in a format virtually unheard of on TV: a comedy mini-series. No multiparter has ever managed to sustain laughs for five consecutive nights. On purpose...
...Fresno boldly disdains a laugh track, and if it were not for the network's tongue-in-cheek promos, a casual viewer might miss the joke. The cast plays it expertly deadpan, with only an occasional wink at the audience. Satiric jabs at specific soaps are few and relatively tame. The California wines of Falcon Crest have puckered into raisins. The Southern accents (in California?) have migrated from Dallas. Garr's drop-dead wardrobe and a female catfight are straight out of Dynasty. And when Tiffany searches for her father at a costume party, she assembles...
...Fresno avoids the pitfalls of most TV parody -- gimmicks and overkill -- it errs on the side of politeness. The satire is too meek, there ^ are too many dead spots and blank expressions, and the dialogue often sounds like comedy writers' Muzak. (Grodin: "I'll see us all go to our graves before we lose this ranch!" Garr: "You go to your grave; I'm going to bed.") Burnett seems especially subdued, looking in vain for the precise parodic target that would launch her into an over-the-top lampoon of the kind she mastered on her old variety series...
Indeed, a few Carol Burnett Show writers, or just one of the Zucker brothers (whose movie Airplane! was a funnier and more freewheeling spoof), might have turned Fresno into the definitive takeoff it aspires to be. Fresno seems oddly overqualified: a parody that is better plotted, acted and directed (by Jeff Bleckner) than most of the shows it satirizes. Six hours without one ludicrous cliff-hanger or evil twin? This is a mini-series that could have used a bit less taste and a little more Fresno...