Most of the signs indicate it is still, in fact, summer. The lakefront bicycle paths are crowded with inept Rollerbladers. The Stevenson Expressway is receiving one more makeover. And the Cubs are still only about 17 games out of first place, a mark of futility they will surely surpass by season’s end.
And yet Monday and Tuesday see the unveiling of the first shows in what is named, optimistically, the fall television season. These come almost a full month before actual autumn and a good three weeks before the bulk of the new prime-time series bow.
The three overeager offerings — sitcoms all — hail from network-in-swaddling-clothes UPN, whose apparent operating motto this year could be borrowed from the worst kind of dinner guest: “If you can’t be very entertaining or very popular, be very early.”
The new shows on the big three networks make their debuts beginning with the week of Sept. 14, but Fox and the other startup network, WB, also run their newcomers up the flagpole a touch early, mostly during the week of Sept. 7.
The idea is to try to get attention before the schedule gets too crowded. The inaugural trio proves, mostly, that such a strategy can backfire. Watch the three of them and you’ll find yourself wishing that the recent labor action had been at UPN.
First, the “Good News” (8 p.m. Monday). This series, while not overwhelming, falls in the category of not half-bad and not mean-spirited, two rarities in the sitcom debut game.
But “Hitz” (8 p.m. Tuesday) and “Head Over Heels” (8:30 p.m. Tuesday) come out of the gate with all the ingredients for success of Yorkshire terriers in a greyhound race — and none of the dignity. They are ultratawdry in intention and effect, and they look like they were made on a public-access budget. An ill-aimed bow-dryer could cause the collapse of some of these sets.
“Hitz” proves to be yet another attempt to revivify the career of Andrew Dice Clay, the Freddy Krueger of scumball comedians. Put the stake of public indifference through his shriveled heart once, twice, three times. He still comes back for more.
Clay gets to play Jimmy Esposito, a misogynistic, self-impressed, medallion-wearing record-company head, which spared Clay from having to spend money on an acting coach.
He lurches about trying to intimidate the stars of his show, two young talent spotters for the company. Claude Brooks and Rick Gomez play the duo — rather ungracefully — as sort of nebbishes in hipsterville, but the fine points of interpretation don’t much matter when the material is even thinner than the set’s walls.
The show’s writers seem to think it’s more important to sprinkle in a lot of ersatz music-biz insider talk than actual jokes. It’s not even a question of the humor not working; there just aren’t many attempts, amazing for an episode that presumably received more attention from the writers than any other yet to come in the season.
The debut, for the record, hinges on the lads either signing a major act or getting fired. They get an in with rapper Coolio but, wouldn’t you know it, one of them insults the star’s mother, making it that much harder to save their necks.
And that title, “Hitz.” It’s bad enough that the young network, represented locally on WPWR-Ch. 50, is trying to keep alive a celebrity as pleasant as sewer gas. Do they really think it’s bad, in the street sense of the word, 2 spel thingz rawng, 2?
“Head Over Heels,” amazingly, is even worse, a show so bad it deserves its own, dedicated V-chip.
Because TV executives seem reluctant to commit to a situation comedy unless it has at least the outlines of a situation, this one is about two brothers — one sweet, one a Lothario — who run a Miami dating service.
But mostly it seems to be an excuse to offer up every bit of not-so-sly innuendo the writers could come up with, threaded around every excuse they could imagine to parade nubile women through the service’s offices.
Patrick Bristow, the red-headed gay friend on “Ellen,” here plays a co-worker of ambiguous sexual orientation. Peter Dobson and Mitchell Whitfield are the stars. Nobody involved need make reservations for next year’s Emmy ceremony.
“Good News,” set in a black church and joining the network’s Monday-night lineup of predominantly African-American comedies, has a number of redeeming characteristics that make the show worth keeping tabs on to see if it develops or disintegrates.
It starts with the strong premise that Rev. David Randolph (David Ramsey) is taking over a church while its domineering founder is on extended retreat.
In a well-done visual joke, Randolph, sitting in his benefactor’s enormous chair, looks like Lily Tomlin as Edith Ann. Meanwhile, most of his staff, peeved that the veteran assistant pastor didn’t get the job, quits immediately to start a new church down the street.
While not overtly religious, the writing, with moments of cleverness and thoughtfulness, seems to be trying to hew at least to the spirit of setting the show amid a Christian congregation. The pastor’s first test is to help a young man in the congregation tell his mother he’s gay; the joke pays off handsomely, and surprisingly, when she turns out to be fine with that but furious that his boyfriend is white. It is up to the concluding sermon, of course, to bring her around on that issue, as well.
And the show is also far better cast than the average startup sitcom. Ramsey is an appealing presence, if somewhat bland, and the actors in the supporting roles are, top to bottom, crisp. Rose Jackson Moye, whom Fox tried to make a star in the 1995 season’s dreadful “The Crew,” is especially effective. Moye gives her stock character, the single church secretary blatantly making eyes at the new pastor, an unpredictable and delightfully physical goofiness.
The pacing, however, is more than a touch slack, and Randolph’s reactions to events on more than one occasion seem unrelated to what just happened.
Television, UPN and this show could have done without the jive-talking janitor Little T, or the church’s body-flaunting female youth director. Some of the scenes, too, walk up to the line of exploiting stereotypes, but mostly they manage to not cross it.
“Good News” will not change the face of television comedy, but it at least presents a positive milieu and an energy to match. Unlike the other two UPN newcomers, it is not about put-downs and come-ons. For this struggling network, that is good news, indeed.
