Toner_Low

Pink Lady Love!

I love, love, love, love, love PINK LADY AND JEFF.

After suffering through things like DATE MOVIE, HULK, and UNDERWORLD, my definition of "bad" is genuinely refreshed. They really set a new bar.

I had only heard of PL&J as a rumor. I think the show may have been up against THE INCREDIBLE HULK or something, but I never saw it, or never paid attention to it during the amazing Fred Silverman year at NBC. It was the year that also brought us SUPERTRAIN and HELLO, LARRY.

When the DVD's came out from Rhino, I detected something that needed to be owned, and it was well worth the $40 or $50 that non-drinking, childless celibacy affords a man. (Which is a chicken-and-egg question, in and of itself.)

Jeff Altman was on contract with NBC along with David Letterman as a "hot, young talent." Altman, in the hilariously self-effacing interviews and introductions he gives on the DVD set, suspects that he was called first for the gig simply because his name was alphabetically higher.

I have a fondness for media that is so haphazardly conceived that it defies any attempt to rationally evaluate it. Stuff like this is gold. Nothing in it works, and it all doesn't work, brilliantly.

1. Poor, poor Jeff Altman. Here is a guy just a *few* years out of step. But only a few. Had he been ten years younger, he would have been a big hit on Laugh In or the Smothers Brothers. He was a little too sly to be a Borsht Belter of the Sid Caesar era, just a shade too youngish to be in the Stan Frieberg/Bob & Ray/Tom Lehrer era, and too gentle and to be as ironic as Letterman or as cutthroat as O'Donoghue's children. About five years after the variety era officially died, here's this poor guy stuck in a tux, valiantly doing his best to make a dead medium flounder for an audience that had moved on.

2. Pit him with Pink Lady, who had no sense of humor. Yes, there was a terrible language barrier, but that's not the real problem. They just look incredibly pissed off. Surliness can generally be turned against the surly, judo-style. But sometimes you meet an enemy too ticked off to really be won over. Jeff, meet Pink Lady.

3. Give them writers who are one of two things -- incompetent or hamstrung by the network. Silverman had a sense of humor that was strangely myopic. He nixed the legendary Andy Kaufman Special at ABC, forcing it to sit in the can and be sold to NBC. Before they could air it, Silverman went to NBC and squatted on it there, too. Luckily, SNL was already a monster hit, so he more or less left it alone. I actually think PL&J would have been a little "better" (by traditional standards) had he assembled a decent writing staff and instructed them to use Pink Lady only for musical numbers. Unfortunately, the show is just a beached whale of dated material. After tasting SNL and the syndicated SCTV, variety television could not be the same. I love that the show is horribly stuck between two eras, successfully enacting neither, but trying so hard to be both family-friendly *and* leisure-suitedly "hip" -- two things that rarely meet. The mind-boggling inclusion of Pink Lady perfects the ridiculousness. But with writers given free reign, and Pink Lady kept to the sidelines, I think that it would simply have gone down as a harmlessly tepid clone of the Carol Burnett show. Instead, we have something joyously weird.

4. Jim Varney was a member of the ensemble.

5. One episode included Jerry Lewis, Jim Varney, Red Buttons, Alice Cooper, and Robby the Robot. And Pink Lady. And Jeff. I watch that episode often, and always in speechless awe.

6. Each episode ended with Jeff "being tricked" into getting into a hot tub with two women who had nothing but contempt for the entire project they'd been roped into. An emblem of sexual swinging mixed with shtick that was increasingly awkward to sell. The more episodes they made, the more forced these "accidents" became. You can feel the writers' fingers straining to type them, and you can see Jeff Altman increasingly miserable. Schadenfreude ahoy!

Watching PL&J for me is like watching surgery. There is a grotesqueness to it that is horrific, yet, as with the portrait of Kramer, I cannot look away.

I have nothing but gratitude for PL&J. Most incompetence is simply dull. Try watching MYRA BRECKINRIDGE and you'll know what I mean. Honestly. Sit down to a double feature of DATE MOVIE and MYRA BRECKINRIDGE.

But this? This is something so bizarre that most people think you're making it up. For me, it defies traditional judgement. I look at it with a strange awe. I have often thought of writing a book called WHAT WERE THEY THINKING? It would simply look at the history of entertainment projects like this.

Everyone has his own definition of "bad." For me, bad is boring. Like the LOST IN SPACE movie. PL&J is not boring. Just unspeakably strange. It's in a FOR YOUR HEIGHT ONLY-category. God love it.