A___T__V___C__R__I__T__I__C__'__S
mea culpa
"King of the Hill" and "NewsRadio" look
a lot better the second time around.
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BY JOYCE MILLMAN | it's not that critics are never wrong -- we just don't like to admit it in public. We usually prefer to slink away, do our reconsidering and self-flagellation in the privacy of our hovels and then, after a respectable length of time, pop back with a fresh new take and hope our readers have short memories. The trouble is, in the world of online journalism, there's no such thing as a short memory. Our little slip-ups ("'The X-Files'? It'll never last") are archived for posterity, our fallibility ("David Letterman did a great job hosting the Oscars!") are on display at the click of a "search" button. We have no place to hide, and yet most of us would rather do anything than utter the tiny mea culpa that could lift the monkey of ill-considered opinion off our backs. Well, monkey be gone! I will now plunge in and admit to two -- and only two -- misjudgments that have been bugging me lately, regarding "King of the Hill" and "NewsRadio." Oh, I've got a few more skeletons in my filing cabinet, but I'm not copping to any of them. This is a one-time offer. Take it or leave it. In my original review of Fox's "King of the Hill," I was underwhelmed by the animated sitcom's pokiness, low-tech animation and, most of all, sentimental stuffy-dad-has-trouble-telling-kid-he-loves-him story line. "Let's face it, a major part of the appeal of cartoons is that 'toon characters can get away with stuff that flesh and blood actors can't," I wrote. "What is the point of doing an animated sitcom if the 'toons are going to behave exactly the way they do on mainstream family sitcoms like 'Home Improvement' and 'The Jeff Foxworthy Show'?" OK, let me say up front that my review was based on one advance episode, the pilot. And I still stand by my assessment of that episode; sappy and tame, the pilot remains the series' weakest offering. But "King of the Hill" got funnier, and bolder, as the season went on. Eventually, the Hills and their neighbors were doing lots of things humans couldn't get away with on network TV. Take the episode where dad Hank caught pre-pubescent Bobby smoking a cigarette and forced him to smoke a whole carton to teach him a lesson. In the process, Hank turned the kid into a nicotine fiend and re-hooked himself and wife Peggy on the joys of a fresh pack of butts. By the climax of the show, Hank, Peggy and Bobby were re-enacting "The Lost Weekend," clawing and tearing at each other over the one remaining cigarette in the house. How this episode got past the censors is beyond me, but it was a shining example of why we need Fox, despite all that cop-car-chase and alien autopsy crap it puts on. Here was an anti-smoking parable that made its point not through preaching but through humor, reveling in the dumb things people do when they've got a jones for a smoke. What I didn't catch from the pilot episode was that Hank and Peggy's low-key suburban ordinariness (creator Mike Judge drew them ultra-realistically, without the grotesquely exaggerated features of his other 'toon, "Beavis & Butt-head") is what makes "King of the Hill" work. Hank and Peggy are sensible folk, bespectacled and sturdy. Hank (his drawl is voiced by Judge) is earnest and slow to anger; Peggy, whose voice (by Kathy Najimy) has the snap of a freshly laundered bedsheet, is efficiency itself. Judge and co-creator Greg Daniels ("The Simpsons") thrust the bland Hills into crises of body and soul that all circle back to the show's theme: how difficult it is to live in a PC, multi-culti, hyper-sensitive society where the rules of acceptability change every day. In one (now classic) episode, taciturn Hank's colon freezes up when Peggy urges him to let his emotions out. In another episode, the Hills try excruciatingly hard to be sensitive to Anglo-Asian cultural differences when a Laotian family moves in next door, but they just can't get past the fact that their new neighbors are so rude. Fox originally hyped "King of the Hill" as an "All in the Family" for the '90s. But the fact that Archie Bunker was flesh and blood and Hank Hill is "only" a cartoon character suggests how locked down we've become as a society over the past 20 years, how timid and paranoid our collective sense of humor has gotten (remember the gasp of disapproval over the "Seinfeld" episode where George's fiancée died and nobody grieved?). "King of the Hill" makes us laugh at the parts of ourselves that aren't perfect. I can relate. As for "NewsRadio," which NBC is airing every night this summer -- oh, OK, twice a week -- to try to boost the show's profile, my initial take was that the show failed to deliver on its great potential for smart, edgy satire. After all, the sitcom was created and written by Paul Simms, who'd previously worked on "The Larry Sanders Show," and featured two of the most mischievous sketch comedy actors around, Dave Foley ("Kids in the Hall") and Phil Hartman ("Saturday Night Live"). But, to me, the first two episodes were disappointingly formulaic. We'd seen these dysfunctional workplace sitcom characters a dozen times before: the level-headed middle manager (Foley as radio station director Dave Nelson) and the tightly wound feminist (Maura Tierney as reporter Lisa Miller), who may or may not end up in an office romance; the pompous gasbag (Hartman as anchorman Bill McNeil); the wacky secretary (Vicki Lewis as Beth); the slow-witted office pest (Andy Dick, in a performance pitched somewhere between Chris Elliott on "Get a Life" and Andy Kaufman on "Taxi"). "'NewsRadio' could use more of the ill-tempered offbeat humor of 'Larry Sanders,'" I wrote in March '95 (not for Salon). "It's neither ha-ha funny enough nor thoughtful-funny enough." It took me a while (two years, actually) to get "NewsRadio," but I can tell you the exact moment when it clicked. I was watching a rerun (hey, it was new to me!) of the episode where wealthy, eccentric station owner Jimmy James (the wonderfully phlegmatic Stephen Root) sells all the furniture and office supplies in order to pay for Bill's hush-hush salary increase, and there was a scene where Bill was in Dave's office, which has a big newsroom-facing window that's usually covered by blinds. Well, due to Mr. James' zealous cost-cutting measures, the window was not only missing the blinds, it was missing the glass, too. At the end of the scene, Bill was leaving the office, but instead of using the door, he unexpectedly stepped through the window frame at the same moment that Mr. James was stepping in -- and as they passed each other, they mumbled, "Morning Sam," "Morning Ralph." That's when "NewsRadio" hit me like the Acme anvil. See, Sam and Ralph were a flock-protecting sheep dog and a hungry wolf in the old Looney Tunes cartoons. Their adventures always begin with a morning scene of the two grunting hello as they trudge off to work in the meadow with lunch pails in hand. As they punch in their time cards, they mumble something like, "Have a good day, Sam," "Have a good day, Ralph," then they proceed to beat the crap out of each other until quitting time. Sam and Ralph were a gray-flannel-suit era commentary on the rat race. And when Hartman and Root did their little throwaway bit, I realized that "NewsRadio" isn't just another workplace sitcom, it's the Sam and Ralph of its day, a live-action Looney Tune based on the proposition that office dynamics never change, that every workplace will have its prima donnas, its lovers, its peacemakers, its half-wits, and that these pseudo family members will collide and coexist in the same ways throughout eternity. Indeed, this past season's impressively absurd finale was set in the future in a far-off galaxy, but the co-workers at WNYX carried on as they had the week before, when it was 1997 -- Lisa was still trying to prove she was smarter than Dave, Bill was still a cruel, egotistical jackass, Mr. James was still cutting corners and, at the end, Matthew the idiot (Dick) accidentally unplugged some life-support pods and killed half the staff. This season, with former "Seinfeld" director Tom Cherones at the helm, "NewsRadio" has found its groove, a combination of surrealism and understatement. Cherones and the writers are always springing surprises on us, like the opening of one episode this season in which Bill got into a scuffle with police over a parking ticket. Filmed completely in long shot with no sound, the scene was a gem of a pantomime where other sitcoms might have gone for the big insult-a-thon. With the exception of Lewis' insufferably overripe performance as the gum-chomping, midriff-baring secretary, the "NewsRadio" cast's comedy level is tuned several notches below blaring sitcom yuks; the actors deliver their lines so quietly, they're nearly drowned out by the canned laughter. Indeed, much of the show's humor comes from its characters' low-grade desperation; behind the co-workers' bitter civility (Foley is a master of bone-dry sarcasm), you sense anarchy brewing. Everybody is wearing the doomed, clenched-jawed grin of Wile E. Coyote as he's suspended in mid-air, just before he plummets to the canyon floor. Well, I'm glad I finally got that straightened out. I feel freer
already. In fact, I have a rave review of "Murphy Brown" I'd like to take
back ...
King of the Hill NewsRadio |
