Let’s make a deal with Tom Arnold: We’ll agree to stop shaking our collective head over his entertainment career, if he’ll agree to stop trading on the fact that he used to sleep with Roseanne.
Everybody needs a big break to make it in show business. Arnold has received enough breaks to necessitate a body cast. His serial good fortune gives him a kind of Larry Fortensky, lottery-winner charm, but it also causes people to closely scrutinize his work for signs of actual talent.
He met and married Roseanne, who set him up in his first sitcom, “The Jackie Thomas Show,” which had a kind of self-conscious charm in its look at a lucky guy who got his own sitcom and proceeded to drive the staff nuts. It lasted four months on ABC in the 1992-93 season.
Apparently on the theory that a guy who has had one sitcom ought to be able to have another one, he was able to try again the next year: “Tom,” about a Kansas welder building his dream home, lasted just two months on CBS.
Tom and Roseanne split, but as near as I can tell, Roseanne had alienated enough Hollywood types that they were determined to build her ex a movie career. He got to play the buddy in pictures like “True Lies” and even got decent reviews for what came across as pretty pro forma stuff.
But the vocational opportunities for beefy guys with pleasant grins proved limited. So Arnold this season returns to TV to dip another toe in the sitcom pond with “The Tom Show,” debuting at 8 p.m. Sunday (WGN-Ch. 9).
His break here is that, while the American public doesn’t exactly seem to be clamoring for comedic situations centering on Tom Arnold, his new network, the upstart WB, is looking for the kind of breakthrough, mainstream hit that helped Fox get over the hump a decade ago.
While “The Tom Show” doesn’t seem to be trying anything fresh, a la “The Simpsons,” Tom Arnold at least has a well-known name, and, well, who knows what may happen from there?
The setup is another from the self- and ex-mate-referential bag. Roseanne is everywhere between the lines.
Arnold plays Tom Amross, a TV producer newly, publicly, humiliatingly divorced from a big TV star, the queen of the daytime airwaves (which, coincidentally enough, Roseanne hopes to become when her talk show debuts next year).
He gives up his interest in their hit show in order to gain custody of their daughters, aged 9 and 13.
Unlike real life, he cannot get another job in Hollywood–hard to believe for a guy who has been running a top-rated show–and he moves the shrunken family back to his hometown of St. Paul, to produce the local morning show, “Breakfast with Charlie.”
From there things proceed at about the same level as Arnold’s trademark Midwestern smile. It’s amiable enough, but there’s not much substance or edge to it.
His daughters, especially the older one, long to go back to L.A., a conflict that resolves itself altogether too neatly.
In a nice casting touch, Ed McMahon plays Charlie, a jovial broadcast veteran who knows he is losing his hold on the audience.
Tom’s big idea is–more mild irony–to give McMahon’s character a sidekick. He comes up with a Gen X woman, who harps about the environment and doesn’t really want the job because of the early hours. Shawnee Smith plays her with irritating quirks, like a bad imitation of Vicki Lewis’ Beth character in “NewsRadio.”
For a guy who’s been acting since at least 1992, Arnold is strangely unintelligible at times. During some of his longer patches of dialogue, he seems not to be breathing right, so that “out there’s where we’re gonna smoke our cigars at night” comes out with every other word asphyxiated.
The show did get a nice break, from a publicity standpoint, when the first episode contained a couple of lines about Princess Diana. Those, of course, were written out.
But it will take more than untimely celebrity deaths, or long-ago celebrity divorces, to make this show worth devoting a half-hour to.
More promising is the WB’s other debut sitcom of the evening, “Alright Already” (8:30 p.m.), the star vehicle for comedian and “Seinfeld” writer Carol Leifer.
In the early going, this is very much a distaff “Seinfeld,” with the idea being to magnify little behavioral tics into comic potency.
But if it isn’t an original idea, Leifer is a sharp enough writer, and she’s surrounded herself with a strong enough cast, to make it, mostly, work.
Leifer–a screen presence whose somewhat whiny voice takes some getting used to–plays the owner of a Miami Beach optical shop.
Amy Yasbeck (“Wings”) is buoyant and sharp-witted as her best friend, with whom the discussion is always about how to land and keep and cope with a man.
The other key element to the show is Leifer’s family, who live in an area retirement condo. The parents are familiar but well-played versions of Jewish retirees.
The best thing about the show in the early going is the conceit that Leifer’s younger sister Jessica, who lives with the parents, is becoming a younger version of them.
“You know I love a nice hard candy,” Jessica says.
Stacy Galina (“Knots Landing”) delivers the lines with utter conviction, and the result is an hilarious deadpan portrayal.
That kind of characterization, and the generally sharp writing that Leifer brings, are the key reasons to keep an eye on “Alright Already” to see if it can develop a style that sets it apart from “Seinfeld” a little more.
