Skywalker
02-12-2008, 12:31 AM
`Frank's Place' will really cook
NEW YORK - What started out as another sitcom-simple show has turned into one of the most innovative programs on television this fall. It's called Frank's Place and - surprise! - it's not on NBC.
CBS, which took few programing risks last year and as a result failed to even dent NBC's No. 1 ranking, is ready to gamble this fall. Frank's Place, airing Saturday nights, 8 p.m., beginning in September, is the first roll of the dice.
The program takes a black yankee yuppie professor and hurls him into the thick of the twilight zone - a smokey place that time forgot, where folks love spicy food and minty drinks; where voodoo is not taboo, and where female embalmers have liquid hips like Elvis.
A place called New Orleans.
Eleven characters haunt the ``Chez Louisiane`` restaurant-lounge in Frank's Place, and every one of them is deliciously appealing - as tasty as gumbo creole.
In 22 minutes, Hugh Wilson, creator of WKRP in Cincinnati for TV and Police Academy for the movies, has crafted some of the cagiest Cajuns and most luscious Louisianans ever to grace the small screen. And he did it in California.
There's Sy Weisberger, a Jewish Southern lawyer lifted right from Tennessee Williams who goes by the nickname ``Bubba.`` And Hanna Griffin, an embalmer with greased hips and ice-cold hands. Then there's the Right Rev. Tyrone Deal, a card playing, wheeler dealer preacher who dabbles in real estate and hangs out at the bar while trying to wheedle a pulpit.
Big Arthur is a big cook who carries a big stick - a baseball bat. Miss Marie is the ``waitress emeritus.`` She only serves customers who have been coming to ``Chez Louisiane`` for 20 years or more. There's a silver-haired senior bartender named Tiger and a tall Cajun assistant chef called Shorty.
Each character is so finely tuned, so blessedly refreshing, that any one could be extracted from Frank's Place and given a spinoff show of his own. This is clear after watching only one show - the 22-minute pilot.
Tim Reid, who played Venus Flytrap on WKRP, now plays Frank, the owner of the restaurant. His wife, Daphne Maxwell Reid, is the sexy embalmer. Other than these two, you may not have seen these actors before.
But what the devil is Frank's Place? Is it a sitcom, drama, action adventure, soap? There's no hunk, no vamp, no car wreck.
Actually, Frank's Place is a hilarious hybrid of the standard situation comedy. The laughs come without a laugh track, and it looks more like a movie than a teleplay or sitcom.
Originally, Wilson's idea for the show was to feature an ex-football player who buys a restaurant in Atlanta. But Kim LeMasters, CBS vice president of programing, had another plan.
``Before we got started Kim said, `I have an idea I want to talk to you about.' He pitched us this wonderful story about a restaurant in New Orleans,`` Reid said. ``He wanted to use strong textures, blues music, interesting characters. He kept saying he wanted to make this different.``
And different is what CBS got. Wilson shaped the show so that it would center on the black community, not the French Quarter. But this is not Cosby meets Cheers.
With The Cosby Show, the fact that the actors are black is irrelevent. They could be white and not a single line would have to be altered. In Cheers, which is supposed to be about a bar in Boston, you'd hardly know it from watching the show.
But with Frank's Place there's no mistaking the fact that these folks are black and that they are in New Orleans. All the flavors of the city are there. The music, the Dixie beer, the gumbo, the accent, the attitude.
``I thought it would be interesting to show black middle-class working people rather than the usual for TV, which is drug addicts or PhDs,`` Wilson said. ``Nobody seemed to have done it before. As we fooled around with it and worked on it we kept saying, `This seems new. This seems kind of fresh.``'
Wilson stocked the cast with three actors over 65, two of them over 70, one Cajun unemployed student who had never acted before. Every one of them carries it off.
``He's a man not afraid to take a chance and do something different,`` Reid said about Wilson.
``The way he cast it, the characters were so well rounded,`` said Daphne Reid. ``The words he put into their mouths were so perfect.``
Wilson had originally planned to create the show, stock it, and then leave it after the pilot to make a movie, as he did with NBC's Easy Street, featuring Loni Anderson.
But along the way something changed.
``Right in the middle of it, it became very clear to me that this was much more fun to do than a movie,`` Wilson said. ``The problem with that is now I have to sit down and do 22.``
We can hardly wait.
http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/sptimes/access/50093273.html?dids=50093273:50093273&FMT=FT&FMTS=ABS:FT&type=current&date=Aug+9%2C+1987&author=MARK+SCHWED&pub=St.+Petersburg+Times&edition=&startpage=8&desc=%60Frank%27s+Place%27+will+really+cook
NEW YORK - What started out as another sitcom-simple show has turned into one of the most innovative programs on television this fall. It's called Frank's Place and - surprise! - it's not on NBC.
CBS, which took few programing risks last year and as a result failed to even dent NBC's No. 1 ranking, is ready to gamble this fall. Frank's Place, airing Saturday nights, 8 p.m., beginning in September, is the first roll of the dice.
The program takes a black yankee yuppie professor and hurls him into the thick of the twilight zone - a smokey place that time forgot, where folks love spicy food and minty drinks; where voodoo is not taboo, and where female embalmers have liquid hips like Elvis.
A place called New Orleans.
Eleven characters haunt the ``Chez Louisiane`` restaurant-lounge in Frank's Place, and every one of them is deliciously appealing - as tasty as gumbo creole.
In 22 minutes, Hugh Wilson, creator of WKRP in Cincinnati for TV and Police Academy for the movies, has crafted some of the cagiest Cajuns and most luscious Louisianans ever to grace the small screen. And he did it in California.
There's Sy Weisberger, a Jewish Southern lawyer lifted right from Tennessee Williams who goes by the nickname ``Bubba.`` And Hanna Griffin, an embalmer with greased hips and ice-cold hands. Then there's the Right Rev. Tyrone Deal, a card playing, wheeler dealer preacher who dabbles in real estate and hangs out at the bar while trying to wheedle a pulpit.
Big Arthur is a big cook who carries a big stick - a baseball bat. Miss Marie is the ``waitress emeritus.`` She only serves customers who have been coming to ``Chez Louisiane`` for 20 years or more. There's a silver-haired senior bartender named Tiger and a tall Cajun assistant chef called Shorty.
Each character is so finely tuned, so blessedly refreshing, that any one could be extracted from Frank's Place and given a spinoff show of his own. This is clear after watching only one show - the 22-minute pilot.
Tim Reid, who played Venus Flytrap on WKRP, now plays Frank, the owner of the restaurant. His wife, Daphne Maxwell Reid, is the sexy embalmer. Other than these two, you may not have seen these actors before.
But what the devil is Frank's Place? Is it a sitcom, drama, action adventure, soap? There's no hunk, no vamp, no car wreck.
Actually, Frank's Place is a hilarious hybrid of the standard situation comedy. The laughs come without a laugh track, and it looks more like a movie than a teleplay or sitcom.
Originally, Wilson's idea for the show was to feature an ex-football player who buys a restaurant in Atlanta. But Kim LeMasters, CBS vice president of programing, had another plan.
``Before we got started Kim said, `I have an idea I want to talk to you about.' He pitched us this wonderful story about a restaurant in New Orleans,`` Reid said. ``He wanted to use strong textures, blues music, interesting characters. He kept saying he wanted to make this different.``
And different is what CBS got. Wilson shaped the show so that it would center on the black community, not the French Quarter. But this is not Cosby meets Cheers.
With The Cosby Show, the fact that the actors are black is irrelevent. They could be white and not a single line would have to be altered. In Cheers, which is supposed to be about a bar in Boston, you'd hardly know it from watching the show.
But with Frank's Place there's no mistaking the fact that these folks are black and that they are in New Orleans. All the flavors of the city are there. The music, the Dixie beer, the gumbo, the accent, the attitude.
``I thought it would be interesting to show black middle-class working people rather than the usual for TV, which is drug addicts or PhDs,`` Wilson said. ``Nobody seemed to have done it before. As we fooled around with it and worked on it we kept saying, `This seems new. This seems kind of fresh.``'
Wilson stocked the cast with three actors over 65, two of them over 70, one Cajun unemployed student who had never acted before. Every one of them carries it off.
``He's a man not afraid to take a chance and do something different,`` Reid said about Wilson.
``The way he cast it, the characters were so well rounded,`` said Daphne Reid. ``The words he put into their mouths were so perfect.``
Wilson had originally planned to create the show, stock it, and then leave it after the pilot to make a movie, as he did with NBC's Easy Street, featuring Loni Anderson.
But along the way something changed.
``Right in the middle of it, it became very clear to me that this was much more fun to do than a movie,`` Wilson said. ``The problem with that is now I have to sit down and do 22.``
We can hardly wait.
http://pqasb.pqarchiver.com/sptimes/access/50093273.html?dids=50093273:50093273&FMT=FT&FMTS=ABS:FT&type=current&date=Aug+9%2C+1987&author=MARK+SCHWED&pub=St.+Petersburg+Times&edition=&startpage=8&desc=%60Frank%27s+Place%27+will+really+cook