Next week, we remember the late Quincy Jones by revisiting a certain junkyard jam of his.
Welcome to the weekly TV thread.
Last week, Teri Garr passed away at 79 due to complications from multiple sclerosis, a disease she wrote about in her 2006 autobiography Speedbumps: Flooring It Through Hollywood. It’s such a shitty way for a comedy genius who started out as a background dancer—and was a very physical performer in several of her funniest roles—to die.
In honor of Garr, the Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Young Frankenstein composer John Morris’s campy main title theme from Fresno. In that big-budget 1986 CBS miniseries from MTM Enterprises, Newhart creator Barry Kemp and his writing partners Mark Ganzel and Michael Petryni parodied ’80s nighttime soaps about wealth, power, and people who throw drinks in each other’s faces. Kemp assembled a cast that included Garr, the top-billed Carol Burnett, Dabney Coleman, Charles Grodin, future Northern Exposure Emmy winner Valerie Mahaffey, ’80s TV staple Teresa Ganzel (Ganzel’s sister), a then-unknown Michael Richards, Jerry Van Dyke (a future regular on Coach, Kemp’s hit ABC sitcom), and Gregory Harrison. As a hunky drifter named Torch, Harrison is shirtless in every scene—except for a lunchtime scene where the restaurant staff, whose French waiter was played in a cameo by Newhart’s Peter Scolari, requires Torch to put on a shirt.
Another Newhart regular, Tom Poston, appeared in only one scene as a family physician who comes clean to one of the main characters about lying to her about her parentage. Rounding out the cast were The Electric Company alum Luis Avalos as Juan, an underpaid ranch foreman who learns to stand up for himself and his off-screen family—he’s my favorite character in the miniseries, and the scene where Juan tries to revive Torch after he finds him wounded by a gunshot is one of Fresno’s most hilarious scenes—and Bill Paxton as one of Juan’s workers. A few months before Fresno’s premiere, Paxton stole a bunch of scenes in Aliens as the comic relief. In Fresno, he portrayed Billy Joe Bobb, a wrongfully imprisoned redneck who’s married to Bobbi Jo Bobb, Ganzel’s country singer character.
The late Morris channeled both his own lively score from Blazing Saddles and Jerome Moross’s epic score from The Big Country and threw in an over-the-top fanfare that’s made for a matador or Don Rickles to walk out to during one of my favorite forgotten main title themes from ’80s network TV.
Instead of oil (the most prized commodity on both Dallas, Bill Haverchuck’s favorite show, and Dynasty) or wine (Falcon Crest), the power struggles on Fresno revolved around raisins—the same industry Boimler’s family belongs to (while Boimler wants no part of it because he would rather be in space exploration) on Star Trek: Lower Decks. The Boimler family raisin farm is in Modesto, which is closer to my current location in Merced and is Lower Decks co-producer Brad Winters’s hometown, while widowed matriarch Charlotte Kensington (Burnett’s character), her loved ones, and their enemies were based in Fresno.
When CBS rebroadcast Fresno in 1989, an unnecessary laugh track was added to the miniseries. I first watched Fresno on Comedy Central in the early ’90s, and fortunately, it was the original version without the laugh track. Never released on DVD by MTM, the miniseries was one of two comedic nighttime soaps Garr starred in—she played Talon Kensington, Charlotte’s daughter-in-law and a pastiche of Fallon Carrington from Dynasty and Constance Weldon, Morgan Fairchild’s character on Flamingo Road—and it’s more entertaining than her other comedic soap, 1991’s short-lived Good & Evil, which was a multi-camera sitcom taped in front of a live studio audience instead of a single-camera comedy that was filmed exactly like a big-budget nighttime soap.
Every episode of both Fresno and Good & Evil (via old VHS recordings) is on YouTube. Good & Evil was creator Susan Harris’s second (and most likely final) attempt on ABC to recreate the magic of Soap, the Harris show that wasn’t a deadpan parody like Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and was instead a multi-cam sitcom that took daytime soap storylines about philandering husbands, sex addiction, mental illness, and mob intrigue and turned them into a screwball farce (or occasionally took them seriously, which resulted in some of the most tragic moments on a ’70s sitcom). Soap was the ’70s equivalent of Arrested Development and my second favorite old show on Comedy Central in the early ’90s. My favorite old show on that channel was Police Squad! (in color).
The two lead characters on Soap were middle-aged sisters—one rich, the other poor—who never fought, while the middle-aged sisters at the center of Good & Evil were a demure biochemist and an unscrupulous cosmetics CEO who competed over men ever since high school. Genny, played by the late Margaret Whitton, whom I remember as the villainess in Major League, was good, while Denise—Garr’s character and the single mom of a snooty prep-school teen played by Seth Green—was evil.
Good & Evil spent way too much time on the hackneyed shtick of the late Mark Blankfield as the sight-impaired George, a klutzy academic in love with Genny and the show’s attempt to channel Richard Mulligan’s hilarious moments of slapstick as Burt Campbell on Soap. In the pilot, George accidentally destroys half of Genny’s lab with his cane. The blind community lashed out against Good & Evil for punching down on blind people, and the controversy cast a pall over Good & Evil (while nobody gave a shit about the religious right’s fury regarding Soap’s raunchy storylines during its first few episodes, and Soap was able to last for about four more years on ABC). The only funny material about a blind person is Stevie Wonder as himself taking pictures and trying to play tennis in Saturday Night Live’s 1983 Canon AE-1 camera commercial parody. That fake ad made me laugh out loud when I first saw it as a kid, and it remains the funniest SNL commercial parody ever.
The scenes where Blankfield, who wasn’t blind, did Mr. Magoo shtick straight out of 1957 weren’t funny at all. The empathy Soap was full of—despite its farcical and dark-humored tone—was nowhere to be found on Good & Evil. Garr clearly relished playing a sexy schemer like Talon once again, but that wasn’t enough to redeem Good & Evil.
Both Fresno and Good & Evil had scenes where Garr tries to seduce a man by wearing nothing under a coat. Fresno’s version of the scene was funnier: Talon is topless under her coat rather than naked underneath (the coat is really short and not a fur coat like the one Denise wears for foreplay in the Good & Evil pilot), and she goes to the bunkhouse where Torch lives to doff her coat and hit on him because she assumes he’s alone. He isn’t, and he politely tells the other ranch hands to clear the room. The camera cuts to a group of schlubby ranch hands who were playing pool at the other end of the room and proceed to leave. They’re all shirtless just like Torch.
The first thing I saw Garr in was neither Fresno nor Good & Evil. It was Oh, God! on HBO, but I barely remember that movie. The first Garr movie I really paid attention to was a few years after HBO’s repetitive airings of Oh, God! alongside 1981 hit movies like The Great Muppet Caper and Tarzan, the Ape Man: It was Mr. Mom, which my dad rented from the video store. Besides being an early hit comedy for Michael Keaton, who was enjoyable in the titular role of a new stay-at-home dad, Mr. Mom was also an early success for John Hughes. I often forget that Hughes wrote Mr. Mom’s screenplay. Garr played Keaton’s ad exec wife.
“I was in love with Michael Keaton. He was very funny,” recalled Garr in a legendary 2008 A.V. Club “Random Roles” interview where she talked spicy about everybody from the Monkees to Sydney Pollack, who directed her in Tootsie (however, Keaton, Martin Scorsese, Robin Williams, Kevin “That’s not right!” Meaney, Jack Nicholson, Robert Wagner, and all of her Young Frankenstein co-stars were spared from her sharp tongue). “And it seemed like the people that made [Mr. Mom] didn’t know anything about life. They hadn’t been in a supermarket in, like, 10 years. So it was amazing that we came out with anything at all. I shouldn’t say that, God! [Director] Stan Dragoti might read this. But anyway, it was cute. It turned out well.”
Finding out from The Hollywood Reporter that Garr died was a shock because I love her performances in After Hours, a Scorsese flick I watched for the first time when it was on HBO Max during the pandemic, and Young Frankenstein. I first watched the Mel Brooks flick as research for a review of TriStar’s release of Francis Ford Coppola’s presentation of Tyler Perry’s production of Tyler Perry as Madea and Uncle Joe in Kenneth Branagh’s Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. I had trouble writing that review of the Branagh movie for the San Jose Mercury News when I was in high school because trying to meet the Merc’s deadline while juggling high-school classes and learning lines for the school play was sometimes fucking hard.
My review was a long and rambling mess that had to be trimmed a lot, but the one great thing that came out of that review was renting and experiencing Young Frankenstein, which became my favorite Brooks comedy. (I see something new every time I rewatch Young Frankenstein. I popped in my DVD of Young Frankenstein on the night after Halloween, and it was the first time I noticed that when Marty Feldman gnaws at Madeline Kahn’s fur stole, she does an angry growl at him. It’s the most adorable thing.) Garr has a great entrance scene in Young Frankenstein. She also got to deliver (in song) the film’s closing line.
I wanted to say more about Garr in the October 31, 2024 Couch Avocados header, but the header was about It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown and a certain type of network TV Halloween special Great Pumpkin gave birth to (both Disney+ and Hulu are trying to give Great Pumpkin-style Halloween specials a comeback), and I didn’t want to make the header a longer piece. Garr’s best performances were mostly in films, but she also had some great moments on the small screen. In the comments section, Simon DelMonte brought up Garr’s guest spot as Roberta Lincoln, the secretary to time-traveling agent Gary Seven, in the 1968 Star Trek backdoor pilot episode “Assignment: Earth.” The backdoor pilot was not one of those great moments. A human who was trained by aliens and given a partner in the form of an outsider to the world of espionage is a fun idea—it’s basically Green Lantern meets Steed and Mrs. Peel from The Avengers—but Star Trek executed it awkwardly. The Trekkies who love “Assignment: Earth” are fond of it mostly because of Garr’s scenes as Roberta.
Garr had such a rotten experience making “Assignment: Earth”—Gene Roddenberry was a sexist creep towards her—that she hated discussing the episode, she dismissively referred to Trek fans as “people who go to swap meets,” and she didn’t give John Byrne permission to draw her likeness in his 2008 Assignment: Earth miniseries for IDW, so Byrne’s version of Roberta ended up looking more like Sue Storm on some pages and Julie Bowen on other ones.
Friends fans—I’m not one of them—are fond of Garr’s guest spots as Phoebe’s birth mom. I’ve never seen any of those Friends episodes. And Batman Beyond fans might be fond of Garr’s voice work as Terry McGinnis’s widowed mom. That show was Garr’s first trip to Gotham since her uncredited bit part as an ice skater in the 1966 Batman episode “Instant Freeze” when she was 19. To me, Garr’s most enjoyable small-screen moments didn’t take place on Trek, Friends, Batman Beyond, or even The Bob Newhart Show, where she appeared in two episodes as Ms. Brennan, a ditzy secretary. She was perfectly cast as Talon but underused on Fresno, so my favorite small-screen Garr moments are instead David Letterman’s segments with her from his NBC and CBS late-night talk shows and her performance as a vain princess who befriends a talking frog played by Robin Williams in “The Tale of the Frog Prince,” Faerie Tale Theatre’s 1982 premiere episode and narrator/writer/director Eric Idle’s mildly raunchy take on the Brothers Grimm folktale. (“You’re very beautiful in your own bitchy way,” quips Williams to Garr at one point in the episode.)
A frequent guest on Late Night with David Letterman, Garr, who had great chemistry with Letterman, was one of the earliest examples of the Letterman guest who was always game for joining the former stand-up comic from Indiana in deconstructing and parodying the talk show format.
Unlike Johnny Carson—whom Letterman idolized (Carson’s production company also happened to produce Late Night)—or Conan O’Brien, Letterman, particularly during his Late Night era, didn’t want to make the guest look good. The act of interviewing celebrities failed to excite Letterman, who had trouble remembering the titles of his guests’ movies. What really excited Letterman in those days was throwing stuff off the roof of a building, strapping a camera onto a monkey that never sits still, or getting the Speed Racer dubbing artists to redub a Late Night rerun where Raquel Welch was the guest (one of the most surreal hours of late-night TV I’ve ever seen). Like Noel Murray said in 2015, Late Night-era Letterman was “part smartass local DJ, part Ernie Kovacs.” Garr and another Fresno star—the aforementioned Charles Grodin, who played Talon’s husband—were among the guests who understood that Late Night wasn’t an ordinary talk show, so they played along or mocked Letterman for sucking at celebrity interviewing.
Long before both his current work for Letterman’s official YouTube channel and the death of Garr, Letterman archivist Don Giller posted on YouTube all of the host’s conversations with Garr—including footage from the 1985 Late Night episode where Letterman wouldn’t stop pestering Garr to use his office’s shower while 30 Rockefeller Plaza’s AC was broken in the middle of a 77-degree New York day, until Garr finally relented and stripped down to a towel, but she kept her pantyhose on inside the shower and barked to Letterman, “I hate you!”
Whenever Letterman said something that irritated Garr or he showed zero interest in the movie she was plugging—she pointed out to Roger Ebert in 1988 (not 2012, which is what Ebert’s site erroneously says) that Letterman had an eighth-grade mentality and enjoyed trying to embarrass his guests—she good-naturedly challenged Letterman. He clearly loved to be made fun of by her every time.
I watched several of these interview segments really late on the Saturday night after Halloween, and I thought to myself, “She was right about his eighth-grade mentality, but at least he never interrupts the segment to challenge her to a game of Water War.”
A commenter below the 111-minute compilation of Letterman’s 1987-89 segments with Garr said, “She defines the term ditzy blonde!” Huh? She was far from a ditz.
“She knew literature, she knew art,” recalled Letterman producer Robert Morton to LateNighter editor-at-large Bill Carter, the same author who wrote 1994’s The Late Shift: Letterman, Leno, and the Network Battle for the Night. “She really knew film. She was friendly with Truffaut and Louis Malle.”
If you only know Garr from her film work, her performances in Fresno and “The Tale of the Frog Prince,” in addition to the massive amount of Letterman/Garr segments Giller unearthed (he has one of the greatest jobs in the world), are worth a look.
There’s no prompt today. I’ve got nothing. It’s a strange fucking week. I’m going to reduce the number of places I go to on the internet. I can’t look at any news or discussions about politics anymore because they stress me out or anger me. (I watched a ton of The Majority Report with Sam Seder and The Bitchuation Room with Francesca Fiorentini in the past few months. I have to step away from those shows now.) I disabled Google News notifications on my phone. Karen K. Ho, a Canadian art crime and business reporter I briefly talked to when I was looking for Canadian writers to interview for a book project I later aborted, frequently tells people to stop doomscrolling. It’s terrific advice. I think I’m just going to concentrate on writing these Couch Avocados headers, crossing off on my Serializd account episodes of old or new shows I just watched for the first time, and looking up Memory Alpha entries for the book I’m trying to write (but I’ve had trouble resuming my writing for it since August because of writer’s block).
The cold open in Fresno’s first episode concluded with a great line. A conquistador played by three-time Zorro actor Henry Darrow spits out a bunch of grapes another conquistador handed to him to taste, and he says with disgust, “They taste like Fresno!” The internet tastes like Fresno.