Word: sitcoms
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Even so, the prime-time producers themselves caution against taking their sitcoms too seriously. "Heard the one about the two brain surgeons?" asks Reo. "Their patient has just died, and one of them bursts into tears. 'Take it easy,' the other surgeon consoles him. 'We're not producing a sit-com!' " Come to think of it, the adventures of two bumbling brain surgeons could make a good gallows-humor sitcom -- provided, of course, that...
LIFE IS SWEET. Another brisk, weeny English comedy, and welcome as well. In a family out of a skewed sitcom, Mum and Dad try not to fret while their 21- year-old twin daughters offer up fun-house images of 21st century Britain: stoic and efficient or raging and aimless. Somehow, Mike Leigh's movie is hopeful. It says the nation will always survive adversity in the old-fashioned way: with a smile and a shrug...
...that familiar old TV theme. Or perhaps we should say, "Aaarggh, that cursed song again!" Just which reaction you have may define your place on the ! '90s generational spectrum. For the twenty-something crowd, the opening strains of The Brady Bunch -- the early '70s sitcom about two single-parent families that merge into one wholesome household -- recall a corny-but-lovable TV companion from childhood. For those with longer memories, it is a reminder of the insipid depths to which TV's family shows sank in the years between Leave It to Beaver and the Norman Lear revolution...
...show's cancellation in 1974 after five seasons on ABC. Now it has re-emerged, on the stage, in a bizarre bit of media reversal called The Real Live Brady Bunch. Mounted by a Chicago alternative- theater troupe, the show is alarmingly simple in concept. Episodes of the old sitcom are merely re-enacted, scene for scene, line for line. (A new episode is performed every week; a game-show parody fills out the evening...
...made some meretricious movies (we'll just mention his last two, Beaches and Pretty Woman), but in the '70s he produced some bright, populist TV comedy (Laverne and Shirley, Mork & Mindy). No surprise, then, that McNally's play, a bedroom debate for two characters, is now a superior sitcom pilot, with lots of brisk banter and a wacky supporting cast. Setting: West Side luncheonette. Owner: a menschy Greek (Hector Elizondo). Waitresses: & sleep-around Cora (Kate Nelligan) and drab, acid Nedda (Jane Morris). Mood: strenuously genial. Take on New York: it's a hard place, but ya gotta...