Word: sitcoms
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...course, are as old as television itself. I Love Lucy, Mary Tyler Moore and The Cosby Show were well-designed showpieces for popular performers. But never have stars been so firmly in the driver's seat. Faye Dunaway, making her weekly-TV debut, appears in a made-to-order sitcom this fall. So do such TV veterans as John Larroquette, Valerie Bertinelli, Bronson Pinchot and Kelsey Grammer. Another group of shows has been constructed around performers with no track record, no Q rating, not even (in many cases) any acting experience at all, except on the stand-up comedy stage...
Thea Vidale, for example, is a big, boisterous comic with a lot of stage presence -- or, at least, presence over a lot of the stage. Unfortunately, her ABC sitcom, Thea, is a throwback to the broad, brackish family sitcoms of the Good Times ilk: streetwise sass drenched in sentimental mush. John Mendoza, who plays a newly divorced sportswriter in NBC's The Second Half, is a mellower, and less accomplished, performer, who is also defeated by tired gag situations -- the inept single guy who can't furnish an apartment or get a date without stumbling over his feet...
...most of the bright spots on the fall schedule can be traced to stars. Family Album (CBS) might be dismissed as just another shrill family sitcom were it not for Peter Scolari (Newhart) and Pamela Reed (Tanner '88), playing a couple who move their family back East to be closer to their aging parents. Everyone on the show is wired, from a TV-mesmerized son ("Joan Lunden's hair! What is she thinking?") to a splenetic, cigar-smoking grandfather ("I don't get it. You have your third heart attack, and everybody panics"). In the midst of this mayhem, Reed...
John Larroquette is another TV star who has learned that less is often more in the hectic world of TV comedy. In his new NBC sitcom, the four-time Emmy winner (Night Court) plays a recovering alcoholic who takes a job as night manager of a seedy St. Louis bus station. The show's wryly dispirited ambiance is reflected in an old amusement park sign hanging in his office: THIS IS A DARK RIDE. Even when the supporting cast goes over the top, Larroquette, with his lived-in face and low-key assurance, brings everything down to his own comfortable...
Madonna and Janet Jackson were the big acts booked, but the thrillingest personages backstage were a basketball player and a sitcom actor. Shaquille O'Neal was besieged by pose-with-me picture takers. And the man who turned every head was, curiously, Michael Richards, as spacy- and bemused-seeming in person as his Kramer character on Seinfeld...