Sam Kinison in the new Fox series ”Charlie Hoover” has been reduced not only to playing second banana to Tim Matheson and spouting second-rate lines, but he has been physically shrunken, appearing in miniature as Matheson`s alter ego.
It all seems a cruel joke.
Kinison, before the rigors and hazards of the standup circuit made him start repeating material and missing engagements, was the genuine article. His comedy was the white-hot manifestation of true demons, much as Richard Pryor`s had been.
On the other hand, Andrew Dice Clay, to whom Kinison was often unfairly compared, was a purveyor of the outrageous for shock`s sake.
It was big news when Kinison made his first TV series appearance, as a guest on ”Married . . . With Children,” the wonderfully raunchy Fox series, in December 1989. I wrote then that Kinison was ”very, very funny.” And he was, playing a guardian angel for Al Bundy in a takeoff on ”It`s a Wonderful Life.” I ended that review by stating, ”Now, if Fox could only come up with a series for Kinison to call his own.”
This is not what I had in mind.
Though the premiere episode was unavailable for screening, I have seen the second episode and can report that ”Charlie Hoover” (8 p.m. Saturday, WFLD-Ch. 32, preceeding the return of ”Get a Life”) is wrong in so many ways-format, stars and dialogue-that it is insufferably bad.
Discussing one of Matheson`s stuffy colleagues, Kinison says: ”His mother was a jackal. Check his head for three 6s.”
Offering a bit of philosophy, he says: ”To hell with honesty. Lie. Lie like your television evangelists.”
Kinison`s trademark scream, which once sounded like an alien within, in this show sounds like a lounge comic doing a Kinison impersonation. It`s hollow.
The show`s theme music is ”Wild Thing,” with new lyrics added. At one time that tune might have been an appropriate anthem for Kinison. Now it`s an ironic dirge, as Kinison has been reduced to a tiny, tame thing.
The movie gang
The last time Eliot Ness came our way, he was Kevin Costner, starring in the 1987 big-screen film called ”The Untouchables” and speaking taut, sharp dialogue written by David Mamet.
Ness is back Sunday, and he is saying such things as, ”The city`s up for grabs,” and, ”You go up against the mob, you`ll be fitted for a pine box.” And this exchange: ”I hear you been asking around about me,” says a mobster.
”You got big ears,” says Ness.
That is, needless to say, not the writing of Mamet. And ”The Return of Eliot Ness” (8 p.m. Sunday, NBC-Ch. 5), a made-for-TV movie set in Chicago in 1947, is certainly not ”The Untouchables,” lacking the style, substance and spunk of that film.
And even though this TV movie stars Robert Stack, the actor most closely associated with the title character, it is no more than an exercise in nostalgic slumming, trying to succeed not on its own merits but by tickling our fondness for Stack in the 1959-63 TV series ”The Untouchables.” (This film doesn`t use ”The Untouchables” because the name is owned by Paramount.) Stack is 72 and looks to have been visiting the same witch doctor as Dick Clark. He is just about Clark`s equal as an actor, too, further expanding his repertoire of stone faces.
Perhaps this is consciously intended as counterpoint to the flamboyance of the gangsters he has so frequently dealt with (and still occasionally does as host of NBC`s ”Unsolved Mysteries”).
Whatever the case, it`s painful to watch, as are the performances of Philip Bosco as mob boss Art Malto; Anthony De Sando, laughable as Malto`s son; and Lisa Hartman as a chanteuse/gun moll.
I`d have preferred to watch old episodes of ”The Untouchables” as this stilted romp, as Ness tries to clear the name of a former colleague by breaking up the Maltos` gun-running biz and, in the process, doing away with a bunch of pin-stripped thugs.
There is some talk of Stack returning as Ness on a regular basis, a la Raymond Burr as Perry Mason and Peter Falk as Columbo. That would be a mistake. These other programs have the advantage of solidly familiar plot structures through which their increasingly lazy stars can glide.
– With each successive role he chooses, Rick Schroder seems intent on further eradicating the cutey pie image he had when he first came to the public`s TV attention on ”Silver Spoons.”
He was chilling as he tormented poor Kate Jackson in last season`s
”Stranger at My Door.” As the title character in ”My Son Johnny” (8 p.m. Sunday, CBS-Ch. 2) he plays one of the sleaziest creeps I`ve encountered in some time.
Slickly charming, he`s a doper who returns home to con his mom (Michelle Lee) and renew his campaign of terror against his younger brother (Corin Nemec).
The boys are sons of a dad who allowed them to exercise youthful machismo. This was not older-brother-tussling-with-younger-brother stuff. This, we see in misty flashbacks, was sibling sadism.
As he resorts to his old ways (claiming to be working with the FBI), he courts the disaster that eventually arrives.
At that point things get silly, as the mother shows an incomprehensible reluctance to help her youngest son as he is tried for murder, with Rip Torn doing duty as the kid`s lawyer.
Still, as long as he`s around, Schroder`s spooky. At this rate he`ll be ready to play Charlie Manson in no time.
– Though ”Wife, Mother, Killer” (8 p.m. Sunday, ABC-Ch. 7) is based on a true story, it`s still tough to swallow.
If title character Marie Hilley (Judith Light) didn`t exhibit homicidal urges, she might have made a perfect guest on the talk-show circuit. She is a vain, fading beauty who tries to overcome her feelings of inferiority by exercising shopaholic urges.
But there`s a darker side. Among the misdeeds I recall are the poisoning murder of her husband, burning her house down and torching her car, trying to poison her daughter, bouncing checks, fooling a fool (David Ogden Stiers) into marriage, faking her own death and returning as the ”twin sister” of the
”dead” woman.
Light does her best with a daunting part, but too many years of co-starring with Tony Danza on ”Who`s the Boss?” have dulled whatever dramatic skills she might have possessed. She`s all wide eyes and fake accent, rendering her character a caricature.
– The presence of ”L.A. Law” vixen Amanda Donohue might lure you to an Arts & Entertainment movie called ”Married to Murder” (7 p.m. Sunday on the cable network).
It pays off, too, with a nicely paced story of a marriage on the rocks.
Donohue plays Jane, who is married to Steve (Peter Firth). Each is having a steamy affair and each, in wonderfully wicked ways, dreams of doing the other in.
Eventually one tries it for real, and though the film`s texture and mood- with a strange cavern filled with dead bodies, ”something in the woods”
and a dead dog named Kenny-often flirt with artifice, there`s a mood of malevolence that is quite arresting.
