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Stupid is as stupid does
By JOYCE MILLMAN nbc's hit sitcom "3rd Rock from the Sun" is the stupidest show on TV. And I mean that in a nice way. Stupid isn't necessarily bad, especially when you're talking about sitcoms. Indeed, there was an entire period of TV history, the '60s, when stupid was king. Referred to by TV historians as the era of the "idiot sitcom" (or the "magic-com" ), it was a time of sitcoms both clever-stupid ("The Addams Family," "Green Acres," "Bewitched") and plain dumb ("The Beverly Hillbillies," "Gilligan's Island," "Hogan's Heroes") -- a time when pigs could read, women could fly and life in a Nazi POW camp was a laugh a minute. All of these shows were staunchly escapist (and Vietnam-era Americans had a lot to escape from), offering an altered reality or, at the very least, characters who had the ability to shape the world according to their whims. The stupid-coms had their roots in vaudeville and the screwball comedies of the '30s and '40s. Although not, strictly speaking, a '60s sitcom, "I Love Lucy" was the first great stupid-com, with Lucy Ricardo TV's first and greatest domestic witch (and she didn't even need magical powers, just will power). While the idiot sitcom era died out with the coming of "relevant" sitcoms like "M*A*S*H," "All in the Family," "Barney Miller" and "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," you could still glimpse orbs of stupid rattling around in the TV universe throughout the '70s and early '80s: Latka on "Taxi," "Laverne and Shirley," "Bosom Buddies," "Newhart." But with the glut of hyper-realistic family sitcoms ("The Cosby Show," "Roseanne," "Home Improvement," "Grace Under Fire") and stand-up sitcoms ("Seinfeld," "Mad About You," "Ellen"), the stupid-com all but vanished from prime time, except for "The Simpsons" and "Roseanne's" occasional '60s sitcom dream sequences. Ironically, the most successful stand-up sitcom, "Seinfeld," was responsible for the current idiot-sitcom resurgence. "Seinfeld" is, at heart, an old-fashioned escapist sitcom with a boomer-wish-fulfillment premise. Here are a bunch of adults, now pushing 40, who are completely without self-discipline. They're irresponsible, immature, they can't even be civil, and they don't care. What do they care about? Cereal. Sex. Superman. Making nit-picking bets involving cereal, sex and Superman. "Seinfeld" is brilliantly stupid. Anyway, the networks all wanted a "Seinfeld," and soon the stand-up sitcom was tapped out. But then former "Saturday Night Live" and "Wayne's World" writer/producers Bonnie Turner and Terry Turner came up with an idea so obvious, half of Hollywood is probably smacking itself in the forehead and saying, "I shoulda done that!" Seinfeld's type of stand-up comedy (actually, Seinfeld learned it all from George Carlin) depends on the comedian making observations about daily life as if he or she were from another planet. In Turner and Turner's creation, "3rd Rock from the Sun," the characters simply are from another planet. The show is really a stream of skits in which the resident aliens, who've taken on the human forms of a typically atypical '90s American family, riff on topics large and small: ATMs! Sex! Pancake restaurants! Sex! Little bottles of hotel shampoo! Sex! "3rd Rock" is shameless, in the way only a truly dedicated idiot-com can be. The High Commander (John Lithgow) takes the Earth name "Dick Solomon," and Dick jokes follow. The physical comedy is choreographed like a Marx Brothers movie; entire scenes consist of the four mismatched cast members (besides the lanky Lithgow there's an Amazonian woman, a shrimpy teenaged boy and a weird squinty guy with a very fey vibe) bouncing off each other like balls on a pool table. And the jokes keep coming, with a groaner to gut-buster ratio that varies from week to week; like the early "Simpsons," the humor veers from cheap laughs to pointed satire, often in the same scene. It is, without fail, deeply stupid. But as fast and furious as "3rd Rock" can be, it also displays (like "The Simpsons" of late, and its intergalactic predecessors "Mork and Mindy" and "ALF") some disturbing touchy-feely tendencies. Dick, who is undercover as a physics professor at an Ohio college, is in love with his colleague, anthropology professor Mary Albright, played by the deadpan Jane Curtin like Prymaat without the cone. Sometimes, Dick's efforts to understand women lead to classic stupid-com moments, like when he donned drag to attend a campus women's caucus meeting. The same episode, though, made its point in flashing neon lights -- WOMEN CAN BE SEXIST TOO -- when Dick gave a tearful speech about female insensitivity. It helps enormously that Lithgow (who won a best actor Emmy for the show) is such a Grade-A Virginia baked ham. His domed forehead, puppy dog eyes and teensy pouty lips have seldom been put to such silly use, and he can sell even the lamest sex joke. Yes, he overacts, but so does everyone else here, except for Curtin, who's got the Mindy straightman role. But, then, coolly restrained kinkiness has always been Curtin's forte, whether she's Prymaat playing hide the senso-ring with Beldar or Mary sucking Dick's finger like a Tootsie Pop. Everything about "3rd Rock" is loud and exaggerated, and after a decade of sitcom drags -- from earnest family-coms ("Family Ties") to blue-collar angst-coms ("Grace") to calcified issue-coms ("Murphy Brown") to tired workplace-coms ("Spin City") -- loud and exaggerated plays just fine. "3rd Rock" is in-your-face farce, in the tradition of "Absolutely Fabulous." And, like "AbFab," it might become insufferable, if not for the full-speed-ahead gumption of the cast, particularly Kristen Johnston as Sally, Dick's "sister," who was a macho male soldier back home. The skyscraper-sized Johnston is a pratfalling goddess; Sally's efforts to fit in as an earthwoman, to sort out a bewildering array of female societal signals, stereotypes and role models, often play like the sitcom history of women on fast-forward. When she's out on a date, she wears incongruous get-ups of girly bows and skimpy supermodel sheaths; one minute she's giggling like a demented teen queen, the next she's barrelling around giving orders because she 's bigger, tougher and smarter than any (Earth) guy. In one episode, she has a rude awakening when she gets a job as a waitress and discovers that women make less money than men -- and not only that, she's expected to come home and cook dinner for her family, too. "Dick! Permission to bitch?" she snaps, ever the good soldier. Sally is dazzlingly over-the-top. Factor in such impressively stupid touches as the Solomons' unseen commander-in-chief The Big Giant Head ("He only got to be the big giant head because he kissed the big giant butt," laments Dick) and semi-regular Wayne Knight -- Newman on "Seinfeld" -- as Sally's donut-stuffed Barney Fife policeman beau, and "3rd Rock" is a damn fine idiot-com. For the idiot-com on empty, see "Men Behaving Badly," the new NBC sitcom translated from the original British by former "Wonder Years" producer Matthew Carlson. "Men Behaving Badly" stars Ron Eldard from "ER" as Kevin and Rob Schneider (The Copy Guy from "Saturday Night Live") as Jamie, roommates so primitive they may as well be swinging from trees. They watch endless TV, drink endless beer and scratch a lot. They're slobs. They fear women, especially when they're begging them for sex. "Men" wants to be stupid but manages only to be dumb, because it can't commit to its stupidity. OK, now this is stupid: Jamie hastily uses his underwear as a filter to make coffee for the babe across the hall (the inevitable punchline: "Mmm, great coffee ... So earthy!"). And this is just dumb: Kevin has a very mature and sensible girlfriend (played by Justine Bateman), who sleeps over a lot and whose primary purpose is to show us (in scenes of excruciating off-off-Broadway soul baring) that Kevin is not a total loser and might someday become a productive adult. Duh-uh! If this show were really stupid, every episode would feature a scene where a woman flees the apartment, in double time, like visitors on "The Addams Family" and "The Munsters." Yes, to be truly stupid, a show must have the courage to be
irredeemable. Otherwise, it's merely dumb. And the difference between
stupid and merely dumb is the difference between Kramer and Urkel, "Laverne
and Shirley" and "Perfect Strangers," Vinnie Barbarino and Joey from
"Friends," "AbFab" and "Suddenly Susan." Strange as it may sound, it takes
brains to make a really stupid sitcom.
"3rd Rock From the Sun" - 8pm Sundays, NBC
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