To paraphrase a popular line from Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X,” you won’t land on the new CBS summer comedy “Thanks,” about the first pilgrims to settle on Plymouth Rock, “Thanks” lands on you — with a bone-crushing thud.
If you guessed that there are a lot of jokes to be made about such 1620s New-World chestnuts as heresy, plagues and hunger, you’ve got the gist of this one.
“Get up children, your boiling water’s ready,” says Polly Winthrop (Kirsten Nelson).
“Water! Can I lick the spoon?” her son William (Andrew Ducote) whines.
Premiering at 7:30 p.m. Monday on CBS-Ch. 2, veteran comedy actor Cloris Leachman (“The Mary Tyler Moore Show”) is part of the cast, but even she can’t raise the bar for everyone else — in fact, she doesn’t even have a lot of screen time she plays the shrill mother of an idealistic Englishman (Tim Dutton), who runs a trading post in the wilderness of Massachusetts.
James Winthrop (Dutton) is the head of a household that, in addition to wisecracking wife Polly includes his son William, who is not the sharpest quill in the ink pot. Other family members are Winthrop’s eldest daughter, Abigail (Erika Christensen), who at 14 already has marriage on her mind; middle daughter Elizabeth (an affecting Amy Centner), whose thinking often gets her branded as a witch (she is put in stocks for worrying that a trip to the dentist might get her infected with “tiny creatures, smaller than the eye can see”); and Winthrop’s amorous mother, Grammy (Leachman), who is perplexed by her son’s hopes for life in the New World.
“How did we ever let him convince us to leave England?” Grammy asks.
“What do you miss most about England?” James replies. “The religious persecution? The extreme poverty? The food?”
“Thanks” was crafted by Phoef Sutton of “Cheers” and Mark Legan of “Grace Under Fire,” experts on comic satire who should know better.
Sunday
“The E! True Hollywood Story” manages to make seemingly uninteresting tales (“The Brady Bunch”) enticing TV. The show scores again with the Monkees, the “Pre-Fab Four” that came from an idea in 1964 to make an American version of the Beatles. Thanks to interviews with Davy Jones, Peter Tork and Micky Dolenz (Mike Nesmith doesn’t participate, for reasons that become clear in the documentary), an interesting picture develops on the history of the group, whose NBC series was on for just two seasons, from 1966 to ’68, but who nevertheless weathered harsh media criticism to become a hit in both popular music (“I’m a Believer,” “Last Train to Clarksville”) and television (an Emmy for best comedy).
“The Monkees: The E! True Hollywood Story” (8 p.m.) launches the series’ heightened presence on E!, as the network’s highest-rated show goes to seven nights a week.
– “Does the `Scared Straight’ technique still work?” a narrator asks in an MTV special on the famed teen prevention program that premieres at 9 p.m.
The answer, based on the revelations from this harrowing trip back to New Jersey’s Rahway State Prison — scene of the original 1979 award-winning documentary — is yes, despite the fact that teen offenders seem to be more amoral than they were 20 years ago.
The one question that “Scared Straight! ’99,” which is co-produced by Arnold Shapiro, who handled the same duties for the original, doesn’t answer, however, is why there were no teenage girls visiting Rahway as they did in 1979.
But it does provide one of the funniest lines of the piece, from a convict who captures his pain, rage … and lack of culinary savvy: “A happy meal?” he yells at one kid. “I ain’t been happy for years!”
Note: Just as in the original, the language is raw and uncensored, and the subject matter is uncompromising; viewer discretion is strongly advised.
– “The Ben Stiller Show,” a quirky 1992 sketch comedy series, had a short shelf life on Fox — only 13 episodes. But it helped launch the careers of Stiller (“There’s Something About Mary”), Janeane Garofalo (“Reality Bites”), Andy Dick (NBC’s “NewsRadio”) and Bob Odenkirk (HBO’s “Mr. Show”). FX has the rights to “Ben Stiller” and celebrates with a six-hour marathon starting at 5 p.m.
n Phil Morris (“Seinfeld” finale lawyer Jackie Chiles) hosts NBC’s “You Asked for It!” an update of the 1951-’59 series where bizarre rituals, dangerous stunts and weird behavior are the order of the day (7 p.m., WMAQ-Ch. 5).
– “Restless Spirits” is a fanciful Showtime movie (7 p.m.) about the ghosts of real-life French WWI hero Charles Nungesser (Lothaire Bluteau) and his navigator Francois Coli (Michel Monty) haunting a pond visited by a young girl (Julia Wimbles), herself haunted by the death of her aviator father years before.
– “Pacific Blue,” the USA Network’s beach cops-on-bikes adventure series, begins its fifth season at 8 p.m.
– New episodes of “Intimate Universe: The Human Body,” the BBC-Learning Channel biology documentary series, make their bow on TLC at 8 p.m. Sunday and Monday.
Monday
Acting legend Anthony Quinn is profiled in “Private Screenings,” Turner Classic Movies’ biography series, at 7 p.m. The hour is a prelude to a mini-Quinn film festival Monday and Tuesday.
Tuesday
MTV’s uninspiring animated series “Downtown” debuts at 9:30 p.m. The series, which at times slips into “Ally McBeal” territory when characters’ thoughts are realized through fantasy sequences, is unique in that its characters and situations were inspired by interviews with young people in New York City.
Maybe more interviews should have been conducted because the results are a bunch of uninteresting slacker goofs led by Alex, a 24-year-old who, in the pilot, seems to want to become an adult by moving into his own place.
– Fox serves up a two-hour special on last week’s “Woodstock ’99” music festival, hosted by Danny Masterson and Wilmer Valderrama of “That ’70s Show” at 7 p.m. on WFLD-Ch. 32.
Wednesday
As part of BET Movies/Starz’s ongoing 3rd annual Pan African Film Festival, the cable network presents “Identity Pieces,” winner of the best foreign movie award from the 1999 Acapulco Black Film Festival. (7 p.m.)
Friday
This is the week of festivals. Here is American Movie Classics, starting its 7th annual Film Preservation Festival, which runs through Aug. 8.
The showcase includes movies, newsreels, silents and shorts that have been restored. American director John Ford will be highlighted and the centerpiece will be the newly restored (with AMC’s help) “How Green Was My Valley” of 1941. (7 p.m.)
– Sundance Channel is saluting African and African-American filmmakers beginning at 8 p.m. with “Drylongo,” whose name is a traditional African-American term meaning “ordinary.” It is about a college photography student (Toby Smith) whose class assignment helps shape perceptions in her neighborhood.
– It is the movie that Courtney Love didn’t want you to see. “Kurt & Courtney,” Nick Broomfield’s controversial documentary on Nirvana front man Kurt Cobain’s hard life and unfortunate death, premieres on Cinemax’s “Reel Life” documentary showcase at 9 p.m.
Saturday
“Advanced Primate Studies” is the subject, “Planet of the Apes” (9:30 p.m.) and “Escape From the Planet of the Apes” (12:15 a.m.) are the test models, as “Professor” Joe Bob Briggs” leads his “Summer School” series of films that relate — but in a humorous way to various scholarly exercises.
