Word: sitcoms
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Have the movies and TV spoiled us for theater? Splashy Broadway musicals still provide an experience that can't be duplicated on the screen. But straight plays these days too often seem like sitcom episodes padded out for an entire evening or like rough drafts for the Hollywood movies that will (if a play runs) surely follow. The surprise is that so many talented American playwrights--most of whom make their real money churning out screenplays--keep coming back to the stage, proving that theater can still, on those occasions when the stars and stage lights align, provide a magical...
...hiatus from show business since the end of The Arsenio Hall Show in 1994, Hall developed some potentially intriguing film projects, but he abandoned them in order to make his comeback in the world where he feels safest--TV. This week he debuts in his first prime-time sitcom, titled--with the help of input from focus-group research--Arsenio (ABC; Wednesdays, 9:30 p.m. ET). The show has all the flair of an Oxford shirt...
Arsenio plays an Atlanta sportscaster who lives with his beautiful, hardworking lawyer wife (Vivica Fox) and her Harvard-educated brother (Alimi Ballard). The plots are standard sitcom fare: he goes off to a bar with his buddies when she wants to cuddle at home; they fuss and make up. The writers have been culled from some especially bland series. Hall had a much publicized fight over "creative differences" with his former head writer, David Rosenthal, a veteran of Ellen, and replaced him with Timothy O'Donnell, who had worked on Dave's World and Growing Pains. Three other writers come...
...cultural history when sunny-eyed kindness wasn't all the rage. Going against the grain, he used niceness to build a hit show at a time--the late '80s and early '90s--when David Letterman's ironic distance set the standard for talk-show cool and a subversive little sitcom called The Simpsons first made its way onto the must-watch list of hipsters, secretaries and six-year-olds alike...
Even so, he rejected scads of previous sitcom offers. "I've been joking that I even got pitched 3rd Negro from the Sun," he says. One idea had him and Greg Evigan--a white actor currently playing a deranged gay hunk on Melrose Place--paired as two men who discover at middle age that despite obvious dissimilarities, they are brothers. Katzenberg's offer appealed because it allowed the comic the freedom to cook up the sitcom he desired...