Couch Avocados: TV Discussion Thread – August 8th, 2024
Accidental Star Trek Cosplay
🎵 "Here comes Bob and Carol/His wife Emily really likes him/He has five people in his group." 🎵
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The Avocado
Welcome to the weekly TV thread.

Before I begin, rest in peace to Patti Yasutake from the Asian American theater scene in L.A., Star Trek: The Next Generation, and Beef. In the East West Players company’s all-Asian American 2013 production of the original stage version of Steel Magnolias, Yasutake starred in the role Sally Field and Queen Latifah played in, respectively, the 1989 film version and the 2012 Lifetime telefilm version. (“What most people don’t know is that there are a great many Asian Americans living in the South, so this version is grounded in the truths of that experience. It’s another full circle event for me, given that I started my career at East West Players,” said Yasutake to a fan site for NCIS: Los Angeles, where Jonathan Frakes happened to direct the NCISLA episode she guest-starred in, back in 2013.)

When I posted the news of Yasutake’s passing on my blog, another Asian American Trekkie reblogged my post and wrote that she was “one of the first Asians i [sic] ever saw on TV.” Because I’m a fan of Star Trek: Lower Decks, the news of Yasutake’s passing made me say, “Oh, no, not one of the O.G. lower deckers.” She played one of the precursors to Mariner, Boimler, Tendi, Rutherford, and T’Lyn.

Yasutake’s recurring TNG character, Nurse Ogawa, and three other Enterprise-D ensigns were the focus of 1994’s “Lower Decks,” Lower Decks creator Mike McMahan’s favorite TNG episode and the basis for his animated series. TNG‘s “Lower Decks” is one of my favorite examples of the “what the main characters look like to people they ignore or are at odds with” episode. (Other examples include Batman: The Animated Series‘s “Almost Got ‘Im” episode and the Scrubs episode that was narrated by the Janitor.) Both Dr. T’Ana’s mentorship of Tendi and Chief Engineer Billups’s fatherliness towards Rutherford are reminiscent of Dr. Crusher’s kindness towards Ogawa, her protégé. (Crusher and Worf were the only mentors who came off well in “Lower Decks.” Riker was a dick to Ensign Lavelle for most of the episode, La Forge was a lousy personnel manager, and Picard made one of the worst mistakes of his career.) Yasutake was an ideal audience surrogate in “Lower Decks.” When Ogawa gasped over the death of her friend Sito Jaxa—a tragedy McMahan elegantly worked into “The Inner Fight” last season—she was us, the viewer.

I haven’t watched Beef‘s first season yet because the casting of a controversial Korean American non-actor I really dislike drew me away from the show. But maybe I should finally sit down and watch the season because I was pleased to find out earlier this week that Yasutake relished how Beef spoke to the Asian American experience, as well as the role Beef gave her to play. She said in 2023 to Tudum that “I was just elated, this many decades into my career, that a role like this would come along.”

You probably missed my introduction from my first Thursday as the new writer of the Couch Avocados column. I’ve been most active in the Avocado’s Color Outside the Lines thread and the Identify This GIF! game.

I volunteered to take over the column from Blue Adept/Fandompost a couple of weeks ago. Miscommunication took place, so on the Thursday when I planned to publish my first column, Blue posted Couch Avocados stuff right before I hit publish.

I’m on the West Coast, and I sleep really late, often at 3am or 5am Pacific. I don’t get up until about 9:30am or 10am Pacific. Last Thursday, I decided to wake up earlier than usual—about 8am, to be exact—so that I could publish my first column, and I was surprised to see both that green couch as the header image again and Blue’s usual list of new shows to come.

Blue immediately apologized, and I apologized for not being a bit more clear about when I was going to start (all I said to Blue a couple of weeks ago was “I’d like to take over as soon as possible”). However, I can’t let this type of miscommunication happen again. I’m going to do what I should have done at about 2:55am late Wednesday night last week (but a few minutes later, I said to myself, “Nah, it’s too early to post right now. Just post it when you later wake up.”) I’m going to get way ahead of the early birds who regularly chatted about TV below Blue’s columns way before I even woke up and had breakfast on the West Coast. Every late Wednesday night, I’m going to hit publish on Thursday morning’s column right before I doze off at about 2:30am or 3am.

I’m going to be doing things differently from Blue, who did a good job with the Couch Avocados column. The green couch won’t be the header image each week anymore, but if there’s one week where I’m out of ideas for header images, then welcome back, couch, to that same old place that you laughed about. (The couch’s return will probably be unlikely because I’ve been writing these posts a few weeks in advance and setting in stone many things ahead of time.) And I began a new regular feature. On most Thursdays, these posts will be short like Blur’s “Song 2.” And on some Thursdays, they’ll be long like Frank Ocean’s “Pyramids.” Today, it’s a “Pyramids.”

Last Thursday, I put the spotlight on the late Henry Mancini’s main title theme from Newhart. Today, the Original TV Score Selection of the Week is the late Patrick Williams’s fifth-season version—my favorite version—of “Home to Emily” for The Bob Newhart Show.

“Home to Emily” was composed by the late Lorenzo Music and his wife Henrietta Music. Music voiced Carlton the doorman on Rhoda and Garfield, but my favorite voice role of his is Peter Venkman during the J. Michael Straczynski era of The Real Ghostbusters. The sleepy-voiced Music and the late David Davis were the creators and original showrunners of The Bob Newhart Show, and in 2018, Davis admitted to The Hollywood Reporter that “We wanted [‘Home to Emily’] to sound like the band, Chicago, but never quite got there.”

I did a chapter on watching The Bob Newhart Show for the first time in the late 2010s—and really enjoying the late Jack Riley‘s scenes as Mr. Carlin, the funniest character on the show—in my 2020 book If You Haven’t Seen It, It’s New to You: The Movies and TV Shows Some of Us Regretted Not Catching Until Later. In that chapter, I pointed out that “The Bob Newhart Show, which was set in the city where that particular band got its name, premiered in fall 1972. And what happened to be Chicago’s big hit song of the summer of 1972? It was ‘Saturday in the Park.’ The catchiness of ‘Home to Emily’ makes so much sense now after reading [Davis’s 2018 description of it to THR]. It was a ‘Saturday in the Park’ knockoff. But it’s the coolest ‘Saturday in the Park’ knockoff ever.”

“Home to Emily” was to Bob Newhart what Quincy Jones’s “The Streetbeater” was to Redd Foxx. It became inseparable from Newhart, even during his era as innkeeper Dick Loudon. The removal of “Home to Emily” from the famous final scene of the 1990 Newhart series finale after its original airing—by either MTM Enterprises or 20th Century Fox Television, which absorbed MTM in 1997—was a fucking mistake. The melody’s reappearance was perfect because Bob went home to Emily again.

Bonus track: When Newhart died, I replayed a few times for myself jazz trumpeter Wayne Bergeron’s 2020 cover of “Home to Emily,” which he recorded as a tribute to Williams, who also composed both the super-funky theme from The Streets of San Francisco and the score to Used Cars, after his 2018 death. The second half of the recording is fantastic. Bergeron’s full-throated trumpet solo would move a grump like Mr. Carlin to tears.

One more bonus track: At 1:10, Reverend Jim, a TBNS superfan whose favorite character is receptionist Carol Kester, serenades the actress who played her, future Simpsons fixture Marcia Wallace, with lyrics he came up with for the version of “Home to Emily” from TBNS‘s first three seasons. It’s the highlight of the 1982 Taxi episode “Love Un-American Style.” 🎵 “Here comes Bob and Carol/His wife Emily really likes him/He has five people in his group.” 🎵

While Reverend Jim really liked Carol, I was late to the party on TBNS. Daria, Invader Zim, Wonderfalls, and Schitt’s Creek are other shows I didn’t get into until after their cancellation or, in the case of Schitt’s, really late in the show’s run. I covered these five shows in my first book, which I titled If You Haven’t Seen It, It’s New to You in 2019 because Late to the Party was taken by the Avocado. This leads me to today’s prompt: What were the silliest reasons you were late to the party regarding a show you ended up liking?

I have one major qualm about Newhart (it’s his anti-Asian jokes), but otherwise, both his track record as a star of two great sitcoms (and one sitcom that had an intriguing premise and a terrifically played adult daughter character, but it was ruined by CBS network exec notes) and his generosity as a sitcom lead fascinate me. He preferred to play the straight man and always wanted to surround himself with men and women who were funnier than him. Even in the one-sided phone conversations that made him a stand-up star, he was the straight man in those routines, and the funnier person was his invisible comedy partner.

Newhart didn’t have a massive ego like Bill Cosby. (See the “Created by Ed. Weinberger & Michael Leeson and William Cosby, Jr., Ed. D.” credit or the way his name dominates—or is bigger in size than—the Cosby Show end credits.) The respectability politics bozo was known for treating the Cosby Show writers like shit and pissing them off whenever he would ad-lib during episode tapings and completely dump what they wrote for him, while one of the writers, Carmen Finestra, claimed that Cosby was a good boss. Newhart never took creator credit. He was known for trusting his writers, and he was a sitcom writer’s dream to work with—I listened to the Simpsons DVD audio commentary about Newhart’s legendary Simpsons guest shot immediately after Newhart’s death, and the Simpsons writers recalled how in awe they were of him during his recording session—whereas nobody (except Finestra) says that about Cosby nowadays. (And unlike what has happened with Cosby, you never hear about Newhart cheating on his wife Ginnie, who died a year before Newhart did, and raping women.)

He wasn’t a nightmare to work with like Dennis Miller on the set of Tales from the Crypt Presents: Bordello of Blood or Tim Allen on the set of The Santa Clauses. I hear or read so many stories about the cruelty and abusive behavior of stand-ups off the stage. Newhart wasn’t like that.

You will never see the words “Newhart” and “abuse” in the same sentence. Okay, there’s one exception: The Newhart staff writers abused the catchphrase “Hi, I’m Larry, this is my brother Darryl, and this is my other brother Darryl.” But that’s about it.

The second in Newhart’s 1972-1993 trilogy of sitcoms where he starred as one half of a sane married couple who is surrounded by loonies, Newhart was a small part of my childhood. Parts of it haven’t aged well. Rebio, an ace woman who ran multiple Blogspot blogs where she reviewed TV series episodes and movies, pointed out in her 2017 negative review of the Newhart series finale that “Yes, the ending, with ‘Dick Loudon’ waking up as Bob Hartley, still married to Emily, is brilliant (Newhart’s wife came up with it), but what precedes it is sometimes unfunny and/or racist.” She’s right. It’s full of uncomfortable-to-watch shtick about Japanese businessmen (although I find the Japanese counterpart of Julia Duffy’s character, spoiled rich girl-turned-incompetent maid Stephanie Vanderkellen, to be a really funny element of the finale because she speaks exactly like Stephanie).

But Newhart soared when it did storylines about crappy local TV—in the second season, Dick became a talk show host, and he was rarely happy with the oddball guests vapid yuppie producer Michael Harris (perfectly played by the late Peter Scolari) subjected him to—and those storylines made it stand out from other sitcoms about small-town life. Parks and Recreation‘s shtick about Pawnee TV personalities was clearly influenced by Newhart‘s shtick about crappy local TV. These later seasons of Newhart were like a dress rehearsal for Newhart showrunner David Mirkin’s surreal work on Get a Life, an even funnier sitcom Mirkin—who later wrote Newhart’s awkward eulogy scene on The Simpsons—envisioned as a psychotic, grown-up take on Dennis the Menace.

San Francisco Examiner TV critic Joyce Millman, whom I remember interviewing over the phone for college radio when she was with Salon later on, was a Newhart fan. She said in the Examiner in 1990 that she loved how Newhart used the unnamed Vermont town where the Loudons ran their inn to take aim at “the worst characteristics of Americans everywhere, which happened to be the same weaknesses and prejudices that were being exploited by politicians and preachers of every stripe during the ’80s” and how the show “made some of TV’s most withering comic attacks on everything you hated about the ’80s: Yuppies, greed, anti-intellectualism, political apathy.”

The first three of those four things Millman and many others hated about the ’80s were all mocked in “Child in Charge,” a really strange episode that was produced after Mirkin left Newhart. This was how strange “Child in Charge” was: Stephanie’s wealthy parents bought the TV station where Dick hosted Vermont Today and made their baby granddaughter the new station owner. The boss baby’s first move was the firing of Dick, who fought to keep his job and spoke in baby talk on Vermont Today in front of his guest, former Democratic presidential candidate George McGovern (who appeared in “Child in Charge” as himself), to appease the new boss. “Child in Charge” writer David Lerner, a writer I never heard of before, didn’t write any other Newhart episodes, and I found out from his IMDb page that he survived the nightmare of writing for Webster, which explains a lot about “Child in Charge.”

Alex Karras and Susan Clark famously resented being a part of Webster because they signed up for a TBNS-style sophisticated comedy based on their real-life marriage, and ABC infantilized it by adding Emmanuel Lewis to their show. Both “Child in Charge” and the episode that followed it, “Seein’ Double” (Michael writes and produces a terrible sitcom pilot that’s a ripoff of The Patty Duke Show), were about the infantilization of network TV in the ’80s. In addition to mocking the popularity of Webster and the equally sappy Full House, where a toddler who regularly pooped her pants and couldn’t read yet somehow had a quip for every comedic situation, the whole idea of a Vermont TV station’s schedule becoming infantilized under a boss baby was the Newhart writing staff’s way of taking down callow yuppie executives who were being put in charge of network programming. Millman said Newhart was the forerunner of Twin Peaks. It was also a forerunner of The Simpsons‘s satirical depiction of America—whether it was its broken education system or the business of American network TV as seen in “The Itchy & Scratchy & Poochie Show”—at its worst.

My trajectory through Newhart’s sitcoms was unusual. I went from Newhart to the first season of Bob, which appealed to me because I was reading lots of comic books at the time, and it starred Newhart as Bob McKay, a Silver Age superhero comic creator who clashes with a younger writer over the younger guy’s pretentious and gritty reboot of Mad-Dog, his Silver Age creation. As a tie-in to Bob, Marvel Comics published a short-lived Mad-Dog comic that, in each issue, packaged a squeaky-clean, Silver Age-style story starring the original Mad-Dog (as seen in Bob‘s first-season opening titles) with a more angsty one starring the revamped Mad-Dog. I never read Mad-Dog, but I’m aware that Evan Dorkin, who wrote the Wolverine parody half (while Ty Templeton wrote and drew the Silver Age parody half), hated working on the comic and thought Newhart’s new sitcom stank.

Bob was a mixed bag. The funniest things about the show were Cynthia Stevenson’s performances as Trisha, Bob’s neurotic adult daughter, and “The Man Who Killed Mad Dog,” an episode Mark Evanier, who happened to be my voice acting teacher for just one day (I’ll probably go into that in another post someday), wrote about the Dr. Fredric Wertham-style jerk who blacklisted Bob and brought an end to Mad-Dog‘s original run. But I enjoyed some of Bob‘s shtick about the comics industry, and I was so disappointed when Bob dumped the comics industry premise that I quit the show.

For a long time, Newhart and Bob were the only Newhart sitcoms I ever watched. I skipped George & Leo, which paired Newhart up with Judd Hirsch. (The Taxi alum didn’t have a lot of nice things to say about George & Leo when Will Harris interviewed him about it in 2014.) I hate The Big Bang Theory—where Newhart was a frequent guest star, and he finally nabbed an Emmy for playing Professor Proton, Sheldon and Leonard’s childhood idol—so much that I’ve never watched any of its Newhart episodes. One of the many reasons why I can’t stand The Big Bang Theory was perfectly mocked by Hari Kondabolu.

And I just never got into TBNS when it was a Nick at Nite staple from 1993 to 1998. Even the amusing Nick at Nite promos for the channel’s 1997 addition of Newhart reruns, which featured a then-unknown Cheryl Hines and got Newhart to pretend to be Charlie Townsend and Steve Austin, failed to draw me to TBNS.

Look, man, I was a Bay Area Pinoy teen who admired Lapu-Lapu, Andrés Bonifacio, Spike Lee’s Malcolm X, and any band from Native Tongues. Whenever Nick at Nite got to TBNS, and it opened with a sad-eyed, middle-aged white guy walking, sitting down in an el train, and reading a newspaper, I thought, “So what’s on MTV?”

But then in 2018, I attempted to write a sci-fi novella that took place during the 1988 Hollywood writers’ strike, and I wanted to model a character after Jay Tarses. He was the co-writer of The Great Muppet Caper, my favorite Muppet movie, and the creator of one of my favorite ’90s single-camera comedies nobody remembers, the short-lived neo-noir Smoldering Lust, a.k.a. Black Tie Affair. Bradley Whitford, who starred in Smoldering Lust as a San Francisco private eye who runs his agency from a used record store, once astutely referred to Smoldering Lust as Get Smart crossed with Love, American Style crossed with Twin Peaks. The mature themes, the flawed protagonists, and the lack of canned laughter on Smoldering Lust, The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, and The “Slap” Maxwell Story were Tarses’s ways of fighting against the same kind of infantilized TV Newhart made fun of in “Child in Charge” and “Seein’ Double.”

To do some research on Tarses, I went over to Maclean’s TV critic Jaime Weinman’s old Blogspot blog. He wrote in 2006 that TBNS wasn’t all that great or funny in its first three seasons. It didn’t really take off until Tarses, whom Weinman called “the sitcom writer who seemed to want to destroy the sitcom form from within… and the guy who hated laugh tracks so much that a friend described him as having a vendetta against laugh tracks,” and his then-writing partner Tom Patchett, the future co-creator of ALF, took over the show.

“[The 1975 episode ‘The Ceiling Hits Bob’] brings in all the things we hadn’t really seen in the Music/Davis version of the show: a faster pace, darker humour, and a sense that Bob Hartley is really, really cheesed off at having to deal with these people every day,” wrote Weinman. “The sense I get from Patchett and Tarses’s conception of [TBNS] — and this probably comes mostly from Tarses — is that Bob Hartley isn’t really a particularly nice or likable guy. He’s repressed, cold, unforgiving of people’s faults, and not always pleasant to be around.”

I thought, “Hmm, fascinating,” so I decided to watch for the first time a ton of Patchett/Tarses episodes of TBNS and a few from the Music/Davis era. I didn’t want to buy Shout! Factory’s TBNS box set. At the time, Hulu carried only TBNS‘s first three seasons. All this resulted in me first watching most of the other three seasons of TBNS on Dailymotion, where they still can be found, while Hulu doesn’t carry any TBNS episodes anymore.

I never finished writing the novella. I gave up on writing it before I got to the part of the novella where the Tarses counterpart would be trying to give advice to his network exec daughter, a character I based on Tarses’s network exec daughter, the late Jamie Tarses. But I ended up liking TBNS and its sharply written depictions of a childless marriage (though he had kids, Newhart didn’t want his characters on TBNS and Newhart to be dads because he hated sitcoms about bumbling dads, and Bob marked the first time he said, “Aw, fuck it. My character can be a parent”) and a psychologist whose patients continually test his patience. I thought, “Why did I always change the channel to MTV? This shit’s funny.”

My favorite episode from the Patchett/Tarses era ended up being “Who Is Mr. X?” It was written by Bruce Kane, who wrote TBNS‘s most popular episode, “Over the River and Through the Woods,” a.k.a. the drunken Thanksgiving episode.

As Howard Borden, a not very bright airline navigator and Bob and Emily’s needy next-door neighbor, Bill Daily had a hilarious scene where a Congressman who used to see Bob about his marital problems is flummoxed by the strange mind of Howard Borden. Suzanne Pleshette killed her scene of Emily demonstrating that she’s not an early morning person. And Newhart was perfect in the scene where Bob is a disaster on live TV while a morning talk show host who reminds me of Megyn Kelly grills him about one of his former patients, a politician whose identity Bob refuses to divulge because of patient confidentiality.

If the voice of the talk show’s off-screen director sounds familiar, it’s because he was voiced by an uncredited and pre-WKRP in Cincinnati Howard Hesseman. (The future Dr. Johnny Fever’s other role on TBNS was as one of Bob’s recurring patients, Mr. Plager, a screenwriter/playwright who comes out during group therapy in a 1976 episode Brett White, an openly gay Decider writer and the most diehard TBNS fan I’ve seen since Reverend Jim, praised in 2019 for both making homophobes look foolish and showing straight viewers like myself how to be allies to gay folks.)

The morning talk show scene made me realize this was why Newhart switched to doing storylines about Dick reluctantly hosting a local talk show. Putting his characters in disastrous talk shows or tense hearings like the anti-comics-industry hearing in Mark Evanier’s Bob episode brought out the best in Newhart as a comedic actor.

“Who Is Mr. X?” was well directed by Peter Bonerz (pronounced “bonners”), who played dentist Jerry Robinson, Bob’s best friend. After Newhart’s death, Bonerz, one of the most prolific sitcom episode directors ever, is now the only member of TBNS‘s regular cast who’s still alive.

Disney, which now owns MTM Enterprises shows like TBNS, removed all of TBNS from Hulu last October. If anyone wants to rewatch TBNS in the wake of Newhart’s death, they have to go to Dailymotion, where some of the episodes that were ripped from Shout! Factory’s DVDs weren’t ripped properly.

Great timing, Disney.

Next Thursday on Couch Avocados: A legendary thing in Baltimore finally hits streaming.

It’s “Bird Flu” by the late Lor Scoota.

Okay, it isn’t. It’s older than that.