February 16th, 2007
1. The Dana Carvey Show
The Dana Carvey Show's star is as painfully '90s as a Primus T-shirt, but the cast reads like a Who's Who of '00s comedy: Steve Carell and Stephen Colbert—whose combined star power alone merits a DVD—received almost equal screen time, and writers included Robert Smigel, Dave Chappelle, Louis C.K., Dino Stamatopolous, and Charlie Kaufman. This dream team produced some of the most out-there sketches ever aired on network TV. Naturally, the show was cancelled after six episodes. Its demise was imminent from the first sketch; absurdist conceptual gags, like Carell and Colbert's "Waiters Who Are Nauseated By Food," obviously confused audiences who just wanted more of The Church Lady. Then there were Carvey's weekly digs at his corporate sponsors: Besides naming each episode after a different underwriter, i.e. The Taco Bell Dana Carvey Show, Carvey would openly ridicule them—memorably suggesting that a glass of Mountain Dew looked like piss, for example. That kind of subversive humor wasn't ready for prime time in 1996, but today's Colbert Report-schooled audiences would eat it up.
2. Exit 57
Here's more sketch comedy from yesteryear featuring the comedy stars of today. For 12 half-hour episodes—which originally aired on Comedy Central in 1995 and '96—five alumni of Chicago's Second City riffed on social discomfort, in sketches set in a slightly skewed Middle America. Among those improv stars? Strangers With Candy/Wigfield collaborators Amy Sedaris, Paul Dinello, and Stephen Colbert. As with The Dana Carvey Show, the Colbert factor alone should be enough to get Exit 57 preserved on disc, even though most of the sketches are readily available on YouTube. A quick recommendation: the routine where Dinello plays a shy office drone urging co-worker Mitch Rouse to check his package for venereal disease. "I think there's something wrong with my crony," Dinello gulps. "The whole cronal area is inflamed."
3. Now And Again
A victim of bad timing as much as anything else, the 1999-2000 science-fiction action series Now And Again came along a year or two before TV audiences rediscovered their thirst for tightly serialized drama. Otherwise, it might've been as big as Lost or 24. (Though even without a massive audience, the show survived for a full 22-episode season.) The charismatic, breathtakingly athletic Eric Close stars as a cloned superman shell inhabited by the consciousness of a recently deceased middle-aged businessman. In each episode, Close's government handler (Dennis Haysbert) arranges to send him on secret missions, and tries to prevent him from escaping to return to his family, who are having trouble dealing with his sudden death. Stylish, funny, exciting, and poignant, Now And Again balanced conspiracy-plot clichés with real human drama, and gave Close and Haysbert showcase roles.
4. The Many Loves Of Dobie Gillis
The classics of '50s and '60s TV aren't coming to DVD as fast as they should, probably because the people who remember them most fondly aren't big DVD buyers. But if star power still counts for something, the presence of Warren Beatty, Tuesday Weld, and Bob "Gilligan" Denver among the supporting cast of this savvy high-school sitcom might make it a viable commercial proposition. If so, a new generation could come to appreciate the dry wit of star Dwayne Hickman, whose slangy fourth-wall-breaking addresses to the camera gave Dobie a vibe unmatched by any other sitcom of its era. (Well, possibly outside of Gidget, which came along a few years later.) Plus, doesn't that new generation need to experience Denver's prototypical beatnik character "Maynard G. Krebs" firsthand, if only to understand where that cultural reference comes from?
5. Batman
It's a testament to corporate greed and intractability that Warner Bros. and Fox still haven't been able to strike a deal to release the '60s Batman series on DVD. And as the show's syndication becomes more sporadic, it demands the question: What would childhood be without it? No matter how sophisticated and cynical kids get, Batman still works on plenty of levels: as superhero spectacle, as pop-art splash, and as ironic camp. Adam West's masterfully stiff-lipped portrayal of The Caped Crusader draws most of the attention, but everything from the eye-boggling sets and warped camera angles to the theme song and guest stars (Liberace as a thug? Steve Allen as himself?) push the program into the realm of the surreally sublime. At least there are lots of ways to obtain the series through, ahem, unofficial channels. Holy bootleg, Batman!
6. The Loner
Rod Serling fought hard to keep The Twilight Zone on the air and true to his vision for its five-season run. When internal and external pressures finally led to the series' cancellation in 1964, Serling, sick of the supernatural, turned to the hoariest of clichés: the Western. The Loner—starring Lloyd Bridges as a Union soldier wandering through the post-Civil War frontier—aired for a mere seven months in '65 and '66, but its 26 episodes put an existential dent in the cowboy genre, mining the same allegory and otherworldliness as The Twilight Zone. Bridges' William Colton tackled everything from white supremacy to post-traumatic stress disorder during the course of his travels, but the show was obviously a little too raw and real for a nation just coming to grips with Vietnam: It was canceled and quickly forgotten. A few reruns popped up on TV Land in 1998, but oddness and obscurity are likely to keep The Loner alone for a long, long time.
7. Fridays
ABC's short-lived Saturday Night Live rip-off Fridays is remembered, if at all, for two things: discovering future Seinfeld star Michael Richards and creator Larry David, and an infamous episode where Andy Kaufman staged an on-air blowup over a marijuana-related sketch. But Fridays briefly outperformed SNL in the ratings during its two-year run in the early '80s, and it raised the stakes for edgy, experimental comedy about late night's greatest staples, drugs and sex. (Recurring sketches included Drugs 'R Us, Nat E. Dred, and Dick, a hapless lothario played by Richards.) Fridays also pushed the envelope with its adventurous choice of musical guests, including The Clash (in its American TV debut), The Jam, King Crimson, Fear, Devo, and The Plasmatics. Judging by stray clips on YouTube, Fridays seems like a dry run for a style of comedy that was done better later on—writers Larry Charles, Elaine Pope, and Bruce Kirschbaum would join Richards and David on Seinfeld. But what a fascinating rough draft.
8. This Life
Described as "a commentary on late 1990s life in London," This Life was universally appealing when it first aired, and it continues to be relevant a decade later, due to its realistic, warts-and-all take on a group of people trying to make sense of their lives. The show was based around lawyers living in the same house, but unlike the myriad courtroom dramas that have filled prime time, This Life had so little to do with legal proceedings that it could have just as easily been set in a hospital or a university. The characters were smart and ambitious, but also flawed in ways that made them either supremely loveable or hateable. Sure, it's a popular storytelling device, but This Life shocked a lot of people during its two-season run in 1996-97 with plenty of alcohol, drugs, and explicit gay sex. The show's ongoing popularity in its homeland led to a movie-length reunion show in January, and the whole run is available on Region 2 DVD, but for some reason, it's never made the stateside conversion. Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that the American adaptation, First Years, quickly pooped out in 2001. Fun fact that will probably be put on the front of the box if This Life ever makes it to Region 1 DVD: pre-Office Ricky Gervais discovered The Way Out, the group responsible for This Life's catchy theme music.
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