On the weird and wacky cable service I have at home because The Man won’t let me put a dish up, there’s a rum little on-demand mini-channel thing called Screen Gems. The name will be familiar to those of you who ever mainlined stuff like The Monkees or I Dream of Jeannie on summer holiday mornings. This channel offers up a handful of those, selected seemingly at random. Why it’s doing this is anyone’s guess, but the multichannel age thumbs its nose at such lily-livered commonsensical talk, and so, there it is.
Anyway, after a brief dalliance with the one Monkees episode I must have seen every three months throughout my childhood and so could recite the dialogue as it happened (the one where they go into a toy-testing department, Tork fans) I assumed that was Screen Gems spent for me. Then a while ago Benson turned up, and through nothing more than a vivid recollection of the smell of roast beef that I’ll always associate with the theme tune, I had a look. It wasn’t half bad. Not many laughs, but still possibly the most watchable of the whole ‘sarcastic black butler versus frigid German cook’ genre. Then, the other week, along came the programme from which Benson span off, Soap.
Soap is one of those sitcoms that’s considered a landmark in America, but is hardly mentioned here. Channel 4 used to show some of the later series at odd times late at night as I recall, but the disparity in fame on either side of the Atlantic makes Seinfeld look like Dallas. It is, as the oleaginous voice of one Rod Roddy puts it at the top of every show, the story of two sisters. Mary Campbell’s the lower middle-class one, married to a loon who killed her previous husband, with one son on the run from the mob after failing to kill said loon, and another mulling over a sex change operation so he can marry his quarterback boyfriend. Jessica Tate is the other, who married a wealthy businessman who cheats on her with his secretary, and on his secretary with anyone else who’s going, is herself boffing the same tennis coach as her daughter, who’s also got the hots for a Catholic priest. And then there’s the other daughter who’s bedding congressmen, the requisite ‘wise beyond his years’ smartass kid, a Hawaiian ventriloquist with inseparable wisecracking doll, and of course Benson.
Confused? Well, you have to watch the thing closely, that’s for sure, so it’s suited to the whole on-demand format, where missing an episode is not an option. The sort of daytime soap it’s supposed to be parodying never happened over here, but that doesn’t matter. The script, created and, unusually for American comedy, mostly written by Susan Harris (later of Golden Girls fame) may suffer from the old ‘everyone talks the same way’ syndrome that’s hard to avoid with wisecracking comedy, but the performances carry it off superbly. Everyone knows about Billy Crystal’s star-making turn as Gay Jodie, but in a close contest acting honours go to Robert Guillaume’s Benson, Katherine Helmond’s brilliantly sustained airhead whitebread matriarch turn as Jessica Tate, and Richard Mulligan, whose Bert Campbell was clearly closely studied by the young Michael ‘Kramer’ Richards:
In retrospect, after we’ve been spoilt by the likes of Frasier, it inevitably seems a tad slow, and it certainly does seem a bit pleased with its mould-breaking outrageousness at times, but so does Not the Nine O’Clock News and Brass Eye. And then, this being an American sitcom, there’s The Mawkishness. Oddly, the first half dozen episodes roll by in a manic haze of plot-reversals and scene-setting with no time for a touching moment, so the first big ‘the laughter dies, leaving a tear forming in the corner of the studio audience’s collective eye’ scene comes as something of a shock. I’m told by those who know that this escalates to unbearable levels a couple of series in, and indeed the whole thing went on into the 1980s way after it should have been put out to grass, but that’s the US networks for you.
Still, even if it turns to total dross after this first series, that’s 19 episodes of class more than most can manage. Oh, and !!!!SPOILER ALERT!!!! Here’s the final ever scene. They don’t end sitcoms like that any more.
Anyway, after a brief dalliance with the one Monkees episode I must have seen every three months throughout my childhood and so could recite the dialogue as it happened (the one where they go into a toy-testing department, Tork fans) I assumed that was Screen Gems spent for me. Then a while ago Benson turned up, and through nothing more than a vivid recollection of the smell of roast beef that I’ll always associate with the theme tune, I had a look. It wasn’t half bad. Not many laughs, but still possibly the most watchable of the whole ‘sarcastic black butler versus frigid German cook’ genre. Then, the other week, along came the programme from which Benson span off, Soap.
Soap is one of those sitcoms that’s considered a landmark in America, but is hardly mentioned here. Channel 4 used to show some of the later series at odd times late at night as I recall, but the disparity in fame on either side of the Atlantic makes Seinfeld look like Dallas. It is, as the oleaginous voice of one Rod Roddy puts it at the top of every show, the story of two sisters. Mary Campbell’s the lower middle-class one, married to a loon who killed her previous husband, with one son on the run from the mob after failing to kill said loon, and another mulling over a sex change operation so he can marry his quarterback boyfriend. Jessica Tate is the other, who married a wealthy businessman who cheats on her with his secretary, and on his secretary with anyone else who’s going, is herself boffing the same tennis coach as her daughter, who’s also got the hots for a Catholic priest. And then there’s the other daughter who’s bedding congressmen, the requisite ‘wise beyond his years’ smartass kid, a Hawaiian ventriloquist with inseparable wisecracking doll, and of course Benson.
Confused? Well, you have to watch the thing closely, that’s for sure, so it’s suited to the whole on-demand format, where missing an episode is not an option. The sort of daytime soap it’s supposed to be parodying never happened over here, but that doesn’t matter. The script, created and, unusually for American comedy, mostly written by Susan Harris (later of Golden Girls fame) may suffer from the old ‘everyone talks the same way’ syndrome that’s hard to avoid with wisecracking comedy, but the performances carry it off superbly. Everyone knows about Billy Crystal’s star-making turn as Gay Jodie, but in a close contest acting honours go to Robert Guillaume’s Benson, Katherine Helmond’s brilliantly sustained airhead whitebread matriarch turn as Jessica Tate, and Richard Mulligan, whose Bert Campbell was clearly closely studied by the young Michael ‘Kramer’ Richards:
In retrospect, after we’ve been spoilt by the likes of Frasier, it inevitably seems a tad slow, and it certainly does seem a bit pleased with its mould-breaking outrageousness at times, but so does Not the Nine O’Clock News and Brass Eye. And then, this being an American sitcom, there’s The Mawkishness. Oddly, the first half dozen episodes roll by in a manic haze of plot-reversals and scene-setting with no time for a touching moment, so the first big ‘the laughter dies, leaving a tear forming in the corner of the studio audience’s collective eye’ scene comes as something of a shock. I’m told by those who know that this escalates to unbearable levels a couple of series in, and indeed the whole thing went on into the 1980s way after it should have been put out to grass, but that’s the US networks for you.
Still, even if it turns to total dross after this first series, that’s 19 episodes of class more than most can manage. Oh, and !!!!SPOILER ALERT!!!! Here’s the final ever scene. They don’t end sitcoms like that any more.
6 comments:
I first encountered 'Soap' when it was shown by LWT way past my official bedtime on Friday nights, and it's a love that's endured nearly 30 years. It's a wonderful show, and linked genetically to the no-less-wonderful and thematically-similar 'Arrested Development'. Susan Harris went on to do 'Golden Girls', where Mitch Hurwitz got his writing break. How they are related...
Arrested Development is another of those recent US shows I've 'been meaning' to pick up on for far too long. If it's a 'Soap for the naughties' (surely that's Shield, if my memories of marginally risque advertising is anything to go by?) I'll certainly give it a go.
Yes, Friday nights late. I used to quite like it but had no clue what was going on, which I suppose was the general idea, and being 11 most of it probably went over my head.
However it was a big deal at the time and was very much in the public domain as something to talk about.
I've not seen Arrested Development. But then I've never seen Peep Show either.
I thought "Soap" was fairly well-known in the UK, maybe I was just living in an LWT-area bubble where we thought it was one of the funniest shows ever.
It was supposedly taken off the air in the States after a campaign by the Moral Majority who objected to it having a gay character and boycotted firms that advertised on it so the network pulled the plug.
I'd put Soap down as the far and away the best US sitcom of the 1970s. It's certainly the only 1970s US sitcom I've gone to the bother of importing the entire series of (it's quite reasonably priced on Amazon.com).
I first happened across it during the repeats on Paramount in the 1990s, on the recommendation of my parents who loved the show when it was shown on ATV. I'd imagine it was pretty well-received in general over here, as I recall Comedy Review publishing an entire episode guide for it.
While the final series wasn't up to the standards of the first few, the final episode does include possibly the greatest yet darkest comedy line ever spoken by a character not actually in an episode (From memory - Chester answers the phone whilst waiting to hear from Jessica's kidnappers. After he replaces the receiver, he's asked "Was that the kidnapper?" "No, it was Bob asking if Chuck's here." Because Bob is Chuck's puppety alter-ego of course, suggesting that Chuck has finally become completely deranged and now wholly only able to communicate via the medium of Bob. Ah, youhadtobethere.)
Arrested Development is certainly a worthy successor to Soap, with it's gloriously intricate plotting, razor-sharp wit, subverting of the 'traditional American sitcom family' and being criminally underrated with the viewing audience. So good, someone else basically remade it, only so it's not quite as good, called it Dirty Sexy Money, and had a huge smash hit with it. No justice.
I've not bothered with Dirty Sexy Money. I suspect I'd find my attention wandering after half an hour. Perversely, I can watch 6 or more Arrested Developments through without a break. I think it's because I'm opting in rather than having to commit. There's a lot to love in AD, not least the sensation that the whole cast know precisely how good the series is and, thus, give it their all. If you've never seen it, analrapist, Afternoon Deelite and "Marry me!" will not make you laugh. If you've seen the series, they inspire Pavlovian reactions, and you will also never again hear the intro to Europe's 'Final Countdown' without sniggering.
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