Word: washingtoon
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...tell. As cable fights for viewers in the competitive TV marketplace, it is turning increasingly to sitcoms and other network-style series. 1st & Ten, which debuted in August, follows the fortunes of a struggling pro football team owned by a sexy divorcee. Showtime's newest entry is Washingtoon, a sitcom about a naive freshman Senator. The Disney Channel last season scored with Still the Beaver, an update of the old network comedy Leave It to Beaver, and this month introduced Danger Bay, an adventure series about a family that saves animals in peril. The USA Network has just unveiled...
...newest cable sitcoms are even less adventurous. Washingtoon, which stars Tom Callaway as the dippy legislator, promises a biting look at the ways of Washington, but its political satire is toothless and its performers charmless. In 1st & Ten, the curvaceous team owner (Delta Burke) talks football as if she were reading a foreign language phonetically, and the gridiron goons who surround her (a womanizing quarterback, a dumb lineman named Bubba, an oily general manager in cahoots with the Mob) are well past sitcom retirement age. The bottom drawer in comedy's bargain basement, however, belongs to the new sitcoms showing...
Trudeau was right, of course, and though "Washingtoon" will probably never make it to Broadway's floorboards, the strip is one of the few that ably captures the irony of a liberal perspective on Washington in the '80s. One effort that comes close is James T. Pendergast's "Mrs. Gipper," which began appearing on the letters page of Rolling Stone last year, and portrays the adventures of the First Lady, surrounded by a full entourage as she galavants through the capital city, stopping off to order fast food and advise husband Ronnie on the issues of the day. Few other...
...Cynicism," wrote H.G. Wells, "is humour in ill-health." By this scale, "Washingtoon"'s humor is on the brink of terminal cancer. Like his colleagues at The Voice and every other American of liberal bent, Stamaty demonstrates that survival that which has become vital in America in the '80s; cynicism...
...attitude spawned and fed by the kind of thinking. Stamaty satirizes in "Washingtoon" when a Pentagon official testifying at a committee hearing says: "At present, Soviet defense spending causes 85 percent more damage to the Soviet economy than U.S. defense spending does to the U.S. economy. The gap is unacceptable, it must be closed...