Word: hooperman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Bijoux, 2, the snappy (as in "Ouch!" and "Will you stop it!") brown-and- white Jack Russell terrier who stars with John Ritter in the hit series Hooperman...
Sitcoms are trying to make you cry until you laugh this season. A new term has even been coined to describe the hybrid form: dramedies. Three new series -- ABC's Hooperman and The "Slap" Maxwell Story and CBS's Frank's Place -- are ostensibly comedies, but they go for few jokes and have no laughter on the sound track. As for the more traditional sitcoms, they are tackling such heavy subjects as AIDS (Designing Women), Alzheimer's disease (The Golden Girls) and teenage drunk driving (this week's segment of Valerie's Family). On a recent episode of Kate & Allie...
...laughless comedies deliver their mixed messages more deftly, if not always more successfully. Hooperman, starring John Ritter as a San Francisco cop, is essentially a Hill Street Blues combination of crime-show action, broad comedy and "sensitive" character drama, slickly done but a bit overripe for its half-hour length. The Slap Maxwell Story, with Dabney Coleman as an oafish sportswriter, opts for a looser structure and more melancholy tone. Slap is a blustering loser who is constantly getting socked in the face, pushed around by his boss and dumped on by women; when his estranged son shows...
...other quiet comedy this season is ABC's Hooperman, created by the L.A. Law team of Steven Bochco and Terry Louise Fisher. Starring John Ritter as a San Francisco police detective who inherits a run-down apartment building, the half-hour series plays like a scrunched together episode of Bochco's Hill Street Blues without the violence. The premiere segment made some jarring missteps (a running gag about a policewoman trying to seduce a gay cop) and lunged too hard for the emotional knockout (Ritter bursting into tears over the death of his landlady). But the engaging Ritter is adept...