Adamantium
04-16-2006, 01:00 PM
While I don't have all the dates and authors of each of these articles, I will get them as soon as I can. For now, sit back and enjoy certain articles that were in either TV Guide or Entertainment Weekly from early 1995 through 1999. Just so there's no confusion, I'll just say it. These are NOT my words. These are real articles by real writers.
NBC: NewsRadio (Day and time TBA) This comedy takes us behind the scenes at a high-pressure New York City radio station, where we find SNL vet Phil Hartman and Get Smart's Andy Dick. "It's not about a bunch of people who hang out at an office and discuss their dating lives," says executive producer Paul Simms (The Larry Sanders Show).
NewsRadio (CC) - Comedy
Debut: Wisconsinite Dave Nelson (Dave Foley) lands a job as news director at a New York radio station and finds himself matching wits with staffers. In the opener, Dave gets an odd reception from the station owner, who expects him to fire his own predecessor (Kurt Fuller). Lisa: Maura Tierney. Bill: Phil Hartman. Jimmy: Stephen Root.
The Ratings
Good 'NewsRadio'
Flourishing where The Martin Short Show and Something Wilder flailed, NBC's NewsRadio debuted in a static-free 26th place. The Tuesday sitcom, starring Phil Hartman and Dave Foley, held nearly the entire viewership of its lead-in, Wings (25th). The same cannot be said for NBC's other new Tuesday comedy, Pride & Joy (38th), which lost more than 20 percent of the Frasier (17th) audience.
The Couch Critic
by Jeff Jarvis
NewsRadio
NBC, Tuesdays, 8:30 P.M./ET
NewsRadio is a hilarious ensemble comedy about an eccentric all-news radio station: WKRP in Cincinnati meets The Mary Tyler Moore Show meets Murphy Brown, with a nod to CNN. There's nothing gigantically new in that. But sometimes it's the little things that make me like a show. And this show's filled with likable little things.
Take the casting of Dave Foley as the star, playing the station's neophyte news director. Foley's an unknown Canadian who looks so generic I couldn't place him at first. But then I realized he's from The Kids in the Hall a very funny Canadian comedy troupe whose members are ripe for discovery. I like that.
Or take Phil Hartman, who wisely fled Saturday Night Live (and you have to like him for that). Instead of going off and insisting on top billing in his own show, he joined this team as the deep-voiced, egotistical, political, butt-nuzzling anchor.
Or take the funniest man on NewsRadio. Stephen Root as the station owner, who hires a new news director and then makes him fire the old one. It's impossible to say whether Root's playing an idiot or a business shark; in any case, he is a very clever parody of every boss alive.
This cozy ensemble is filled out with Maura Tierney as a reporter who first wants Foley's job - and then wants his body, Andy Dick as the offic ditz, Vicki Lewis as a thorny secretary, Khandi Alexander as a co-anchor and Joe Rogan as a hunk. Except for Hartman, the cast was plucked from obscurity. In fact, the people behind the camera are almost better known that the stars: Three guys from The Larry Sanders Show - Brad Grey, Bernie Brillstein, Paul Simms - are executive producers, and James Burrows of Cheers and Frasier is director. Burrows is a genius at comic timing. He is to sitcoms what Leonard Bernstein was to music: the maestro.
You see Burrows' brilliance in one show built on two well-used gags: sex and legendary lothario Joey Buttafuoco. The running Buttafuoco gag revolves around an embarrassing if obvious mispronounciation of the name - a punch line that long since has been old hat on sixth-grade playgrounds (let alone on Dave Letterman's show). But here it's played just right - it's funny again. Burrows even manages to freshen up the old sexual-tension tango he strung out for years on Cheers as he choreographs Foley and Tierney ping-ponging between love and hate and falling into bed just to get it over with. He makes even that still funny.
So expect the expected of NewsRadio. There are no new sits in this sitcom, no brave experiments, and few known names. All this show has is good casting, acting, writing, and timing. All it has is a little thing called talent.
Choice Reruns
If you missed the splendid midseason sitcom NewsRadio (NBC, Aug. 3, 9:30-10 p.m.) during its limited run last spring, NBC is giving you another chance to catch it by reairing it in the stellar post-Seinfeld time slot (it will return to Tuesdays at 8:30 p.m. in the fall). If you saw it before, watch it again - and this time pay special attention to the fine-tuned ensemble work of Vicki Lewis as WNYX's gum-snapping secretary and Stephen Root as the station's blissfully above-it-all owner. Both can steal scenes from stars Dave Foley and Phil Hartman - no small feat that.
Winner
'NewsRadio'
Loser
'Hope & Gloria'
Both shows were launched on NBC last season in comfy time slots. Both were tested this season on Sundays at 8:30. And both saw different results: Hope & Gloria (No. 99) couldn't hold the Mad About You audience - leading to a demotion to Saturdays and then removal from the lineup - while NewsRadio (No. 35) easily held Mad's base and helped knock CBS' Almost Perfect onto Monday nights. "Sure, we were nervous," says NewsRadio exec producer Paul Simms. "But we seemed to hit a groove, and the move proved to be a confidence builder." NBC is so confident, NewsRadio will anchor the new Must See Wednesday this fall. As for Hope & Gloria, "it was segmented in its appeal, very female, and not enough of them," says NBC's Littlefield.
Hartman is already doing a brilliant job in a difficult role. After all, how does anyone do a boob anchorman without aping the definitive one, Ted Knight's Ted Baxter? But Hartman has figured out how to do it. His Bill isn't just a fool - he's a mean fool, someone who relishes making other people squirm. It's a testament to Hartman's stylized yet genuine charm - that he makes Bill as likable as he is.
As for Foley, well, I can't say I was a big Kids in the Hall fan; call me picky, but there's something about a show being simultaneously smug and fey that rubs me the wrong way. But in this sitcom, Foley has a quality that sets him apart from other comic actors: He knows how to portray a shy, polite, introverted man who is not a total dweeb. His Dave is also smart and resourceful. Foley's shrewed, understated style here is much closer to that of the English comic Rowan Atkinson than to any American model.
Hope & Gloria, by contrast, is a much more standard sitcom. Stevenson plays Hope, a shy, straitlaced woman whose husband has recently left her. Her across-the-hall neighbor is Gloria (Jessica Lundy), a brassy hairdresser. This show too has a boob broadcaster: Hope is an associate producer for a Pittburgh TV talk show hosted by Dennis Dupree, played by Growing Pains' Alan Thicke. Unlike Hartman, Thicke opts for a virtual Ted Baxter impersonation, which quickly becomes a real pain. It also looks as if H & G is going to commit a brazen rip-off of Home Improvement's never-fully-seen next-door neighbor with a gasbag character named Roma (Dee Dee Rescher) who lives behind a window shade in the apartment across the air shaft.
Lundy overdoes her hardheaded but gold-hearted role, even if Hope got a nice line out of it in the pilot: "You talk tough, but deep down inside, you're just a big mushy-gush." But Stevenson is endlessly subtle as the dithery Hope. And if I tell you that one of the funniest things I've heard all year is the way she delivers the punchline, "I'm like on of George O'Keefe's paintings - I'm all pistol and stamen!" you'll just have to tune in to see why. NewsRadio: A- Hope & Gloria: B
**
1999
**
Remote Patrol
Keeping a watch on TV by Bruce Fretts
Can NBC’s NewsRadio snatch renewal from the jaws of cancellation one more time?
After taping what might be NewsRadio’s sign-off installment, creator Paul Simms takes a seat on the L.A. set and waxes philosophical: “If this is our last episode, it seems somehow perfect that it’s our 97th. That’s emblematic of our whole NewsRadio history - just a little bit short.”
Even though it’s been one of TV’s most consistently hilarious sitcoms, the show Simms jokingly refers to as “the longest-running failure in network history” has been a perennial ratings underachiever. Of course, NBC certainly didn’t further the series’ cause by moving it nine times in four years. “We were able to build an audience two or three times,” says the show’s droll star Dave Foley. “We got into the top 20 on Tuesday and Sunday. But then Wednesday killed us.”
This season, NBC returned the series to Tuesdays at 8:30 p.m. - ironically, the same slot in which it premiered - and it has built on its lead-in, 3rd Rock from the Sun (another victim of incessant schedule shuffling). Still, NewsRadio ranks only 75th overall, so the company had to wrap another season unsure if it’ll be their last. “We’ve shot what we thought would be the final episode four or five times before,” says Simms, a Larry Sanders Show veteran. “But there’s so much more uncertainty this year.”
The waiting seems even more excruciating for Simms because he’s excited about a concept that could completely reinvent the show for next fall. In this season’s two-part finale (airing April 27 and May 4), WNYX owner Jimmy James (the deeply funny Stephen Root) leaves New York City to run a small A M station in New Hampshire and tries to persuade his employees to come with him. If NewsRadio is renewed, the entire staff will trade the concrete jungle for the Granite State. “It’ll give us a whole new environment and a new set of problems,” says Simms.
It’ll also take NewsRadio out of the urban office-sitcom market, which has become overcrowded in recent seasons with such inferior product as Suddenly Susan and Working. Vicki Lewis has even wondered aloud about the eerie similarities between her NewsRadio character and Kathy Griffin’s wacky redheaded coworker on Suddenly Susan (“She plays a character named Vicki - I guess that’s a coincidence”). But Simms isn’t charging plagiarism: “I can’t claim that anyone copied us when most evidence points to the fact that no one ever saw us.”
To distinguish itself from the pack, NewsRadio has lately become less grounded in the gritty details of workplace life. “Once so many other shows started mining the same territory, we abandoned it and tried to get more fanciful and outlandish,” explains Simms. The surrealism only increased this season as larger-than-life Jon Lovitz joined the cast following the death of fellow SNL alum Phil Hartman.
NewsRadio survived that tremendous loss, and it still has a shot at seeing another season (NBC probably won’t decide until new entertainment president Garth Ancier starts work in May). But if this is the show’s sayonara, how will NewsRadio ultimately be remembered? “I’d like it to be remembered every night at 11 o’clock on a local station in every town in America,” says Simms, happy that his sitcom went into syndication this season. “I’d like people to look at the show and say, ‘Hey, how come I didn’t see this when it was on?'”
And now much later. This is EW's review on the first and second season's DVD release in May of 2005.
NewsRadio: The Complete First and Second Seasons
Dave Foley, Phil Hartman
Unrated, 10 hrs., 59 mins., 1995-95 (Sony) TV Series
Set in New York's WNYX radio station, where one could be stalked by Santa or attend a rat's funeral, this smart, silly sitcom with a supposed lack of heart was always an issue for NBC. But the network needn't have worried: We all knew love was the only thing keeping this dysfunctional family - acerbic anchors Bill (Hartman) and Catherine (Khandi Alexander), high-strung paramours Dave (Foley) and Lisa (Maura Tierney), somewhat mentally challenged outcasts Matthew (Andy Dick) and Joe (Joe Rogan, and aloof eccentrics Jimmy (Stephen Toot) and Beth (Vicki Lewis) - from killing one another. Extras The gag reel is fun, but nothing tops the dishy group commentaries on 20 of the 29 episodes. While cast and crew recall the late Hartman's professionalism, Rogan and Dick's love/hate relationship, and why the actors were collectively banned from an awards ceremony (Lewis blames their penchant for stealing wine from other tables and Dick's asking Helen Hunt to autograph his penis), creator Paul Simms gets some much-needed therapy: He and his writing staff finally address the fallout from Simms' overhearing the scribes' "bitch session" (inspiration for the ep of the same name), and then-NBC Entertainment president Warren Littlefield admits - finally! - that the network made a mistake shuffling the show's time slot. A- Mandi Bierly
The next week, the DVD made The Must List.
#2 - NewsRadio - Blessed with a sterling ensemble (Phil Hartman, Andy Dick) and crisp writing, seasons 1 and 2 of this smart sitcom sparkle afresh on tidbit laden DVDs.
I'll add more when I get the energy to.
NBC: NewsRadio (Day and time TBA) This comedy takes us behind the scenes at a high-pressure New York City radio station, where we find SNL vet Phil Hartman and Get Smart's Andy Dick. "It's not about a bunch of people who hang out at an office and discuss their dating lives," says executive producer Paul Simms (The Larry Sanders Show).
NewsRadio (CC) - Comedy
Debut: Wisconsinite Dave Nelson (Dave Foley) lands a job as news director at a New York radio station and finds himself matching wits with staffers. In the opener, Dave gets an odd reception from the station owner, who expects him to fire his own predecessor (Kurt Fuller). Lisa: Maura Tierney. Bill: Phil Hartman. Jimmy: Stephen Root.
The Ratings
Good 'NewsRadio'
Flourishing where The Martin Short Show and Something Wilder flailed, NBC's NewsRadio debuted in a static-free 26th place. The Tuesday sitcom, starring Phil Hartman and Dave Foley, held nearly the entire viewership of its lead-in, Wings (25th). The same cannot be said for NBC's other new Tuesday comedy, Pride & Joy (38th), which lost more than 20 percent of the Frasier (17th) audience.
The Couch Critic
by Jeff Jarvis
NewsRadio
NBC, Tuesdays, 8:30 P.M./ET
NewsRadio is a hilarious ensemble comedy about an eccentric all-news radio station: WKRP in Cincinnati meets The Mary Tyler Moore Show meets Murphy Brown, with a nod to CNN. There's nothing gigantically new in that. But sometimes it's the little things that make me like a show. And this show's filled with likable little things.
Take the casting of Dave Foley as the star, playing the station's neophyte news director. Foley's an unknown Canadian who looks so generic I couldn't place him at first. But then I realized he's from The Kids in the Hall a very funny Canadian comedy troupe whose members are ripe for discovery. I like that.
Or take Phil Hartman, who wisely fled Saturday Night Live (and you have to like him for that). Instead of going off and insisting on top billing in his own show, he joined this team as the deep-voiced, egotistical, political, butt-nuzzling anchor.
Or take the funniest man on NewsRadio. Stephen Root as the station owner, who hires a new news director and then makes him fire the old one. It's impossible to say whether Root's playing an idiot or a business shark; in any case, he is a very clever parody of every boss alive.
This cozy ensemble is filled out with Maura Tierney as a reporter who first wants Foley's job - and then wants his body, Andy Dick as the offic ditz, Vicki Lewis as a thorny secretary, Khandi Alexander as a co-anchor and Joe Rogan as a hunk. Except for Hartman, the cast was plucked from obscurity. In fact, the people behind the camera are almost better known that the stars: Three guys from The Larry Sanders Show - Brad Grey, Bernie Brillstein, Paul Simms - are executive producers, and James Burrows of Cheers and Frasier is director. Burrows is a genius at comic timing. He is to sitcoms what Leonard Bernstein was to music: the maestro.
You see Burrows' brilliance in one show built on two well-used gags: sex and legendary lothario Joey Buttafuoco. The running Buttafuoco gag revolves around an embarrassing if obvious mispronounciation of the name - a punch line that long since has been old hat on sixth-grade playgrounds (let alone on Dave Letterman's show). But here it's played just right - it's funny again. Burrows even manages to freshen up the old sexual-tension tango he strung out for years on Cheers as he choreographs Foley and Tierney ping-ponging between love and hate and falling into bed just to get it over with. He makes even that still funny.
So expect the expected of NewsRadio. There are no new sits in this sitcom, no brave experiments, and few known names. All this show has is good casting, acting, writing, and timing. All it has is a little thing called talent.
Choice Reruns
If you missed the splendid midseason sitcom NewsRadio (NBC, Aug. 3, 9:30-10 p.m.) during its limited run last spring, NBC is giving you another chance to catch it by reairing it in the stellar post-Seinfeld time slot (it will return to Tuesdays at 8:30 p.m. in the fall). If you saw it before, watch it again - and this time pay special attention to the fine-tuned ensemble work of Vicki Lewis as WNYX's gum-snapping secretary and Stephen Root as the station's blissfully above-it-all owner. Both can steal scenes from stars Dave Foley and Phil Hartman - no small feat that.
Winner
'NewsRadio'
Loser
'Hope & Gloria'
Both shows were launched on NBC last season in comfy time slots. Both were tested this season on Sundays at 8:30. And both saw different results: Hope & Gloria (No. 99) couldn't hold the Mad About You audience - leading to a demotion to Saturdays and then removal from the lineup - while NewsRadio (No. 35) easily held Mad's base and helped knock CBS' Almost Perfect onto Monday nights. "Sure, we were nervous," says NewsRadio exec producer Paul Simms. "But we seemed to hit a groove, and the move proved to be a confidence builder." NBC is so confident, NewsRadio will anchor the new Must See Wednesday this fall. As for Hope & Gloria, "it was segmented in its appeal, very female, and not enough of them," says NBC's Littlefield.
Hartman is already doing a brilliant job in a difficult role. After all, how does anyone do a boob anchorman without aping the definitive one, Ted Knight's Ted Baxter? But Hartman has figured out how to do it. His Bill isn't just a fool - he's a mean fool, someone who relishes making other people squirm. It's a testament to Hartman's stylized yet genuine charm - that he makes Bill as likable as he is.
As for Foley, well, I can't say I was a big Kids in the Hall fan; call me picky, but there's something about a show being simultaneously smug and fey that rubs me the wrong way. But in this sitcom, Foley has a quality that sets him apart from other comic actors: He knows how to portray a shy, polite, introverted man who is not a total dweeb. His Dave is also smart and resourceful. Foley's shrewed, understated style here is much closer to that of the English comic Rowan Atkinson than to any American model.
Hope & Gloria, by contrast, is a much more standard sitcom. Stevenson plays Hope, a shy, straitlaced woman whose husband has recently left her. Her across-the-hall neighbor is Gloria (Jessica Lundy), a brassy hairdresser. This show too has a boob broadcaster: Hope is an associate producer for a Pittburgh TV talk show hosted by Dennis Dupree, played by Growing Pains' Alan Thicke. Unlike Hartman, Thicke opts for a virtual Ted Baxter impersonation, which quickly becomes a real pain. It also looks as if H & G is going to commit a brazen rip-off of Home Improvement's never-fully-seen next-door neighbor with a gasbag character named Roma (Dee Dee Rescher) who lives behind a window shade in the apartment across the air shaft.
Lundy overdoes her hardheaded but gold-hearted role, even if Hope got a nice line out of it in the pilot: "You talk tough, but deep down inside, you're just a big mushy-gush." But Stevenson is endlessly subtle as the dithery Hope. And if I tell you that one of the funniest things I've heard all year is the way she delivers the punchline, "I'm like on of George O'Keefe's paintings - I'm all pistol and stamen!" you'll just have to tune in to see why. NewsRadio: A- Hope & Gloria: B
**
1999
**
Remote Patrol
Keeping a watch on TV by Bruce Fretts
Can NBC’s NewsRadio snatch renewal from the jaws of cancellation one more time?
After taping what might be NewsRadio’s sign-off installment, creator Paul Simms takes a seat on the L.A. set and waxes philosophical: “If this is our last episode, it seems somehow perfect that it’s our 97th. That’s emblematic of our whole NewsRadio history - just a little bit short.”
Even though it’s been one of TV’s most consistently hilarious sitcoms, the show Simms jokingly refers to as “the longest-running failure in network history” has been a perennial ratings underachiever. Of course, NBC certainly didn’t further the series’ cause by moving it nine times in four years. “We were able to build an audience two or three times,” says the show’s droll star Dave Foley. “We got into the top 20 on Tuesday and Sunday. But then Wednesday killed us.”
This season, NBC returned the series to Tuesdays at 8:30 p.m. - ironically, the same slot in which it premiered - and it has built on its lead-in, 3rd Rock from the Sun (another victim of incessant schedule shuffling). Still, NewsRadio ranks only 75th overall, so the company had to wrap another season unsure if it’ll be their last. “We’ve shot what we thought would be the final episode four or five times before,” says Simms, a Larry Sanders Show veteran. “But there’s so much more uncertainty this year.”
The waiting seems even more excruciating for Simms because he’s excited about a concept that could completely reinvent the show for next fall. In this season’s two-part finale (airing April 27 and May 4), WNYX owner Jimmy James (the deeply funny Stephen Root) leaves New York City to run a small A M station in New Hampshire and tries to persuade his employees to come with him. If NewsRadio is renewed, the entire staff will trade the concrete jungle for the Granite State. “It’ll give us a whole new environment and a new set of problems,” says Simms.
It’ll also take NewsRadio out of the urban office-sitcom market, which has become overcrowded in recent seasons with such inferior product as Suddenly Susan and Working. Vicki Lewis has even wondered aloud about the eerie similarities between her NewsRadio character and Kathy Griffin’s wacky redheaded coworker on Suddenly Susan (“She plays a character named Vicki - I guess that’s a coincidence”). But Simms isn’t charging plagiarism: “I can’t claim that anyone copied us when most evidence points to the fact that no one ever saw us.”
To distinguish itself from the pack, NewsRadio has lately become less grounded in the gritty details of workplace life. “Once so many other shows started mining the same territory, we abandoned it and tried to get more fanciful and outlandish,” explains Simms. The surrealism only increased this season as larger-than-life Jon Lovitz joined the cast following the death of fellow SNL alum Phil Hartman.
NewsRadio survived that tremendous loss, and it still has a shot at seeing another season (NBC probably won’t decide until new entertainment president Garth Ancier starts work in May). But if this is the show’s sayonara, how will NewsRadio ultimately be remembered? “I’d like it to be remembered every night at 11 o’clock on a local station in every town in America,” says Simms, happy that his sitcom went into syndication this season. “I’d like people to look at the show and say, ‘Hey, how come I didn’t see this when it was on?'”
And now much later. This is EW's review on the first and second season's DVD release in May of 2005.
NewsRadio: The Complete First and Second Seasons
Dave Foley, Phil Hartman
Unrated, 10 hrs., 59 mins., 1995-95 (Sony) TV Series
Set in New York's WNYX radio station, where one could be stalked by Santa or attend a rat's funeral, this smart, silly sitcom with a supposed lack of heart was always an issue for NBC. But the network needn't have worried: We all knew love was the only thing keeping this dysfunctional family - acerbic anchors Bill (Hartman) and Catherine (Khandi Alexander), high-strung paramours Dave (Foley) and Lisa (Maura Tierney), somewhat mentally challenged outcasts Matthew (Andy Dick) and Joe (Joe Rogan, and aloof eccentrics Jimmy (Stephen Toot) and Beth (Vicki Lewis) - from killing one another. Extras The gag reel is fun, but nothing tops the dishy group commentaries on 20 of the 29 episodes. While cast and crew recall the late Hartman's professionalism, Rogan and Dick's love/hate relationship, and why the actors were collectively banned from an awards ceremony (Lewis blames their penchant for stealing wine from other tables and Dick's asking Helen Hunt to autograph his penis), creator Paul Simms gets some much-needed therapy: He and his writing staff finally address the fallout from Simms' overhearing the scribes' "bitch session" (inspiration for the ep of the same name), and then-NBC Entertainment president Warren Littlefield admits - finally! - that the network made a mistake shuffling the show's time slot. A- Mandi Bierly
The next week, the DVD made The Must List.
#2 - NewsRadio - Blessed with a sterling ensemble (Phil Hartman, Andy Dick) and crisp writing, seasons 1 and 2 of this smart sitcom sparkle afresh on tidbit laden DVDs.
I'll add more when I get the energy to.