If you can’t beat ’em, beat ’em to the punch.
Employing the New Hampshire strategy–we may not be biggest, but we’re first in line–the fledgling WB network debuts the inaugural new sitcom of the fall television season Wednesday evening.
Be warned: After a summer of reruns, almost anything looks good, just as a boxed macaroni-and-cheese dinner can taste like heaven in a bowl if you’ve skipped lunch.
This entree–titled “Kirk,” starring Kirk Cameron and produced in part by the folks behind “Step by Step,” Hangin’ with Mr. Cooper” and “Family Matters”–boasts a better grade of ingredients than cheese from an envelope. But the fixins that make up this amiable family comedy are nothing you don’t have around the house already.
Cameron, best known from “Growing Pains” and still button cute as a young man, plays a 24-year-old new to New York who’s suddenly saddled with raising his kid siblings, hormonal boy 15, bratty boy 7, skeptical girl 13. Think “Full House,” “My Two Dads” or any number of other shows about men who aren’t ready to wear the garment of fatherhood. Think, especially, of Fox’s current drama “Party of Five,” except that this would be “Party of Four.”
“Kirk” (7:30 p.m. Wednesday on WGN-Ch. 9, the local WB affiliate) may be treading familiar ground, but at least it is not something you would feel uncomfortable watching with your mother or children in the room. And that is new turf for WB, which debuted in January with a slate dense with dismal, crude “comedies,” won low ratings (Nielsen and critical) for its misjudgments of how Americans want to spend their evenings–and brought most of those shows back for a second season anyhow.
Returning to the WB schedule on Wednesdays are “The Wayans Bros.,” featuring the lesser members of that family in a show that never grew; “The Parent ‘Hood,” the Robert Townsend vehicle that wanted to tap the family-comedy vein even as it stooped to offputting sex references; and “Unhappily Ever After.”
The last deserves its own paragraph. My television has seen heavy use in calendar 1995, and “Unhappily Ever After” has been, hands down, the worst thing to appear on it: vicious, vulgar and blatantly derivative of “Married . . . with Children,” which looked like “60 Minutes” by comparison. It was remotely funny only in one sense–the “jokes” failed so badly they’d cause you to reach immediately for the channel-changing device.
Joining that crew on Wednesdays when WB’s season starts in earnest Sept. 6 will be new episodes of “Sister, Sister,” the family sitcom ABC let go. After special “previews” this and next Wednesday, “Kirk” will settle into a new Sunday night lineup for the network-manque, officially starting Sept. 10.
Given the WB context, “Kirk” is like a breath of, well, air–with oxygen molecules and everything. Despite the initial family-keeps-Kirk-from-keeping-a-date plot and the numbingly familiar paeans to how different from Ohio New York is, the show deserves credit for doing a couple of character things that are immediately intriguing.
As 7-year-old brother Russell Hartman, Courtland Mead is not the one-dimensional brat familiar in so many sitcom half-pints. Yes, he’s shown stuck in the toilet for a cheap laugh, but he also carries real hostility over being dumped on Cameron by the aunt who had been raising the Hartman kids.
Thirteen-year-old Phoebe, played by Taylor Fry, has the same droll diction and darkly skeptical outlook displayed by Winona Ryder in the movie “Heathers.” Her cynicism and world weariness are, paradoxically, refreshing.
And the fluster that Cameron displays at his surprise responsibility–and the kids’ open doubt of him–also feel a notch more authentic than what other sitcom dads experience in similar situations.
The more the show manages to grapple with the real issues this makeshift family must face–like how Kirk, a billboard painter, manages to pay the grocery and apartment bills–the greater its chance of earning WB notice for something other than being early out of the starting gate.
– The newest strain: With a name like The Learning Channel, you’d think the cable network would be trying to, oh, impart knowledge. But the goal of its “Killer Virus” special (8 p.m., Wednesday) seems to be to impart fear–and undermine rational thought in its visits to the sites of Ebola, hantavirus and other outbreaks.
Is that Vincent Price reading the narrative? It might as well be.
