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Buffalo Bill, one of the most critically aclaimed sitcoms of the 1980's, aired from May 1983 until April 1984 on NBC.
Surely one of the most unusual comedies of the 1980's, Buffalo Bill flouted a basic rule of series tv-that the leading character must, if nothing else, be likable. Bill Bittinger ( Dabney Coleman), was arrogant, insensitive, and a thorough cad. As the garrulous host of an inexpicably popular local tv talk show in Buffalo, New York, he regularly played the role of " star," shamelessly used everyone around him, and blamed others for anything that went wrong. He did all this, it must be said with style; Bill as played by the talented Dabney Coleman, was a fascinating character, even if he did make you squirm at times. And-honoring one of tv's other basic rules, that good must win out in the end-he usually failed to get his way. Practically everybody was on to him, and Bill spent many a lonely night after his latest scheme or attempted amorous conquest had fallen through.
Among the people Bill worked with at WBFL-TV was JoJo( Joanna Cassidy), the beautiful director of his show, with whom he had an on-again, off-again, romantic involvement. She harbored no illusions about his nature, however. Once he had proposed to her with the gallant comment, " You're better than 90% of the bimbos out there." Woody ( John Fiedler), was his mousy stage manager, who seemed incredibly naiive ( he worshiped Bill), but underneath it all, understood. Just to rub it in the little guy hapened to be extremely successful on the side, owning an auto dealership, and Bill's apartment building. Karl( Max wright), was the nervous station manager at channel 12, constantly beset by lawsuits brought on by Bill's outrageous on-air comments; Wendy ( Geena Davis), the ingenious research assistant;Tony ( Meshach Taylor), the assistant director; and Newdell ( Charles Robinson), the black makeup man, who took no grief from anyone. Bill included. Seen occasionally was Bill's daughter Melanie portayed by Pippa Peartree. Some rather sensitive subjects were delt with in this comedy setting, including JoJo's abortion ( after Bill had pompously decided for her that she should have the child), and Bill's racist dream after he had had a run-in with Newdell. The dream was filled with Zulu warriors, pushy black hookers, and other outrageous stereotypes, all in pursuit of Bill; accompanied by the music of Ray Charles's " Hit the Road Jack."
An Article From Time Magazine
A Truly Unsentimental Cad
Monday, Jul. 11, 1983 Article
Buffalo Bill wins laughs as the most outrageous man on TV
He is a hypocrite, a braggart, a coward and a misogynist. He is sycophantic, grasping, rude and vain. He is also hilarious, the most outrageous character on television. He is Bill Bittinger, a Buffalo talk-show host, brilliantly played by Dabney Coleman, on NBC's new comedy series Buffalo Bill. The character is that rarity on television, a star who is a truly unsentimental cad. His lone redeeming feature is his unredeemability. To Buffalo Bill, all women are "bimbos" to be seduced, all men rivals to be traduced. If American viewers had not lost their innocence about unscrupulous TV characters, Bill would snatch it from them.
Buffalo Bill is one of a handful of new series launched by the networks during the normally fallow summer season. The ratings for the half-hour show (Wednesdays, 9:30 p.m. E.D.T.) have been encouraging (it finished in the Nielsen top 30 shows in each of its first three weeks), the critical reaction has been appreciative, and it is a strong candidate for renewal in the fall.
Bill makes a practice of abusing his guests; they become victims, not visitors. To one, he says, "I don't care what the jury said, you look like a rapist to me." He calls a minister a "scuzzbag," a Congressman "a pimp in a business suit," an Italian chef "an immigrant with a Crock Pot." "Me," "my" and "I" are his favorite words. He is forever complaining to his wan, shell-shocked station manager, played by Max Wright, that guests are dull: "Get me ax murderers, a rapist, Freddie Silverman." When he wants to get rid of a possible cohost, he appeals to the Lord—man to man, of course: "I don't know if the concept 'You owe me one' means anything to you up there, but..."
The concept of the show originated over a year ago with Executive Producers Tom Patchett and Jay Tarses, both of whom held the same title on the Bob Newhart Show. They wanted to mold a sitcom around Dabney Coleman, who had played lecherous male chauvinists in the films Nine to Five and Tootsie. ("We loved to watch Dabney slither," says Tarses.) Along with NBC Entertainment President Brandon Tartikoff, they devised a smalltown TV personality who would sell his first-born to make it to the big time. Tartikoff calls the character "a total sleaze-bag," comparing him to Archie Bunker but without Archie's tinge of lovableness. Says Producer Dennis Klein: "The only thing civilized about Bill is that he has learned how civilization works and he can fake it."
With his darting eyes and dark mustache, Dabney Coleman, 51, seems to have cornered the market on obnoxious scapegraces. He got his first break as the sanctimonious Rev. Merle Jeeter on Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, and is currently appearing as a harried computer scientist in the movie WarGames. "I happen to think I do villains well," says Coleman. "I do them differently. I'm realistic." Indeed, unlike the sneering, comic-book persona of Larry Hagman's J.R., Coleman's Buffalo Bill is an unsettlingly familiar figure, not a caricature. "Everybody knows a Buffalo Bill," notes Tartikoff. "I know several, a couple at NBC."
Buffalo Bill is a departure. Although the character is a descendant of Ted Baxter, the buffoonish newscaster of the Mary Tyler Moore Show, Bill is the main and vain attraction while Baxter was only a foil. According to Tartikoff, "We were trying to do something different and dangerous. Dangerous meaning the possibly lousy ratings you could get by putting on a character as despicable as Bill." Like NBC's other sophisticated comedy, Cheers, Buffalo Bill will need time to find a following.
In a recent episode, after a wearying day at the studio in which he has brutalized his assistant and refused to apologize, Bill goes home alone, unrepentant. He dons top hat and tails and proceeds to do a self-adoring imitation of Fred Astaire singing "I'll go my way by myself." It defines him precisely: Buffalo Bill going his own venal way by his own egotistical self. Television often has a way of softening its most venomous characters. Don't let Buffalo Bill become an endangered species.
An Article from The New York Times
TV VIEW; HE MAY BE NO CHARMER, BUT HE IS FUNNY
By JOHN J. O'CONNOR
Published: January 1, 1984
20As producer and a writer for the situation comedy ''Buffalo Bill,'' which has returned to NBC's schedule on Thursdays at 9 P.M., Dennis Klein has explained that with a show about a ''Buffalo, N. Y., talk-show host whom critics have called a coward, a misogynist, a self-centered creep and a raving hypocrite, I have at last found a television hero I feel is real.'' Whatever might be argued about the show's reality quotient, it must be admitted that its comedic ambitions are unusually fresh. On top of this, its lead character, Bill Bittinger, is one of the oddest and most hilarious creations that television has concocted in recent years. He is the perfect yin-yang object. You can love him and hate him, most of the time simultaneously. He is not the lovable bigot that Carroll O'Connor's Archie Bunker turned into an art form. He is more the irresistible rat. Making things more complicated, he is played at a virtually perfect paranoidal-murderous pitch by Dabney Coleman.
A recent episode, for instance, opened with the conclusion of one of Bill's shows. The insanely smiling, soft- spoken host beamed down on some innocuous guests as they recited his traditional closing lines: ''Be good to yourselves, be good to each other, be good to Buffalo.'' Quickly wriggling out of an invitation to join the guests for dinner, Bill is told that the lineup for the next day will include an Impressionist artist. Bill asks what actors the guy will be imitating. Told that the man is a painter, he recovers quickly and asks if the staff knows any van Gogh jokes. Then, during a photography session to take a staff group portrait requested by a local newspaper, Bill learns that his show is being canceled to be replaced by rebroadcasts of ''M*A*S*H.'' Rising bravely to the occasion, he begins making a speech that includes several passages from the songs ''My Way'' and ''The Impossible Dream.'' The staff, having learned to expect anything, manages to look touched. Bill declares that he wants to ''get back to some charity work - God knows I miss that.'' Turning away from the crew, he breaks into bitter sobbing over the vicious blow that cruel fate has given him.
And that was only the first five minutes of the program. From there, Bill had to deal with Karl (Max Wright), the Milquetoastish station manager who seems to get excruciating headaches at the mere sight of his talk-show host (''Maybe it's just that I have a low threshold for pomposity and arrogance and selfishness'') and with Woody (John Fiedler), the gentle and supportive stage manager who also happens to have invested well and is one of the wealthier citizens of Buffalo. After Bill makes a phoney telephone call to his agent, insisting that ''I won't take a nickle less than Donahue,'' Woody offers the incensed star a job selling automobiles at his Porsche-Audi dealership. Next scene: Bill is at the showroom, his hair dyed blond for anonymity and wearing a loud sportsjacket while generally making a mess of things with the car customers.
''Buffalo Bill'' is not, obviously, your usual sit-com of cute one-liners delivered on the average of once every 30 seconds. The humor grows out of character, and the character is not the typical disarming type that is manufactured for television comedy. The show's success, though, is hardly accidental. The people behind the scenes have compiled long lists of solid comedy credits. Bernie Brillstein, one of the executive producers, has had management ties with such ''Saturday Night Live'' luminaries as Dan Ackroyd, Gilda Radner and the producer Lorne Michaels. He is the executive producer of the films ''The Blues Brothers,'' ''Continental Divide'' and ''Neighbors.'' Tom Patchett and Jay Tarses, also executive producers in addition to being the show's top writers, are former performers whose subsequent writing credits range from ''The Dick Van Dyke Show'' and ''The Carol Burnett Show'' to ''The Mary Tyler Moore Show.''
And the above-mentioned Mr. Klein has been, among many credits, the head writer and occasional director for ''Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman.'' His network biography reveals that when he grew up in the Bronx in the 1950's he was always feeling confused about the things he saw on television. He wondered why people on television hugged in half-hour intervals and spent most of their time doing nice things for others. The people he knew did not. ''Buffalo Bill'' is evidently his revenge.
Is ''Buffalo Bill'' an absurd exaggeration? I suspect not. A few years ago, there was a local New York talk- show host named Stanley Siegel who is still remembered with a kind of ambiguous fondness by most of those who managed to see his morning show. Stanley would do anything to attract attention. If his staff warned him to avoid asking a certain guest one particular question, that would be precisely the first question that Stanley would ask. A couple of days each week he would have an analysis session with his very own psychiatrist. And when he felt that the show was going especially well, he would telephone his parents on the West Coast and have them contribute to the proceedings. Stanley made the mistake of shifting from a relatively easygoing WABC to a somewhat stuffy WCBS, and he never recovered his zany momentum. He did try a syndicated series, but when his first week featured a notorious star of pornographic films and the members of a female-impersonator troupe called La Cage aux Folles, even the most sympathetic viewer couldn't help but feel that Stanley's television days were numbered.
Mr. Coleman, whose credits include the feature films ''9 to 5,'' ''On Golden Pond,'' ''Tootsie'' and ''War Games,'' in addition to television's ''Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman,'' brilliantly captures the fine madness of the Stanley Siegels of this world. Bill Bittinger is the compleat egomaniac, living one step removed from the rest of humanity except for those moments when he instinctively senses an opportunity to score a self-serving point. Turning seemingly human for a few moments, he wheedles and cajoles with what he deems to be the ultimate in charm, and then returns to being utterly and hopelessly impossible.
However, if the character is questionable, the show is clever. The marvelous supporting cast includes, in addition to those already mentioned, Joanna Cassidy, Geena Davis, Charlie Robinson and Meshach Taylor. The last two actors happen to be black, and their integration into the scripts provides a model of how the employment of black actors can be furthered on other shows. They are part of the fictional television station's crew, and the color of their skin makes no difference whatsoever. Indeed, their very presence allowed a recent episode - in which Bill fired his ''uppity'' makeup man, played by Mr. Robinson - to explore race relations with a bluntness that was rare for a half-hour television comedy.
''Buffalo Bill'' seems determined to be outrageous and to shake the average television viewer out of what is supposed to be chronic armchair lethargy. In the process, it is managing to be delightfully funny and wonderfully wicked. Television desperately needs this kind of pushing-it-to-the-limits series.
An Article From TV Guide ( Feb. 25-Mar. 2, 1984 Ed.)
Watch Out for This Country Late Bloomer
Dabney Coleman says he can sometimes be as mean-spirited as his Buffalo Bill character
By Richard Turner
Dabney Coleman is standing in front of a mirror. A bunch of studio people are hovering around, fitting him with clothes. A man with a tape measure crouches on one knee, while others stroke their chins and watch intently. They are looking at a pair of gray shoes , shoes that look, well, like the podiatric equivilant of a smoking jacket.
" There's something Beverly Hills, or Palm Springs, or Vegas about these shoes. Yea, something Vegas," Coleman says. He shoots a broad, vaudevillian wink toward the doorway, politely making the strangers there feel at home. He's enjoying himself.
He strokes his mustache. " They look like-you know , the singer, Vegas, the guy who owns Las Vegas..."( Coleman is always flailing around for words, " It's an 'm 'word," he'll say, " No , a 'c' word").
" Wayne Newton," someone says.
" Yea that's right," Coleman says, firing another wild-eyebrowed look at the door. " That," he says , " is not a plus." They nix the shoes and move on.
Life has been like this for Dabney Coleman lately. After 20 years working in relative obscurity in Hollywood ( " always playing the second person coming through the door-no, the fourth," he says), he's definately on a roll. Aside from his NBC television series, Buffalo Bill, he's done four hit motion pictures in a row ( " 9 to 5," " On Golden Pond," " Tootsie," and " War Games")and fame has ambushed him in his 50's. People are always clustered around , handing him airplane tickets, telling him when the limo will meet him at the airport, where to meet the next interviewer, occupying every waking hour. And in the midst of this maelstrom , unprepared for all the attention, puzzled and sometimes annoyed by it but gratified all the same , Coleman winks and jokes politely, maintaining above all a quality he doesn't talk about and wouldn't admit to but clearly cherishes-a sense of style.
Bathed in the glow of stardom, some celebrities pout and sulk, or speak in bored and languid tones from behind lidded eyes, or gush as if they're on stage. It's difficult to act naturally , even civilly, when the demands for your attention are showering in like asteroids. But Coleman mostly deals with all of this the old-fashioned way, as if the responsibility of his position demands that he keep up a good face. After years when no one sought him out, he feels he owes it to the world.
Today is costume-fitting for a movie obligation his agents crammed in during a break from Buffalo Bill-"Cloak and Dagger." In it he plays a father who loses touch with his son while the boy is in early adolescence, then wins him back on a fantasy level. Of kids Coleman says, " You go through a stage and you lose them." He himself has three children from two defunct marriages. " It's no one's fault; there's nothing you can do about it."
Coleman is now drinking coffee with his feet up, dressed casually and impeccably in a white sports shirt with sunglasses tucked in the front, white socks, Adidas sneakers and corduroy pants. He looks like a refugee from a country club. He plays tennis every day and is conceded to be the most feared raquetman on the Hollywood celebrity circuit.
As he talks, he often squints abstractly off into space, a brow-bunched gaze that looks like he's fending off smoke billowing up into his face. ( He's quit smoking for the moment on a bet with some movie pals, more for the competition of it than anything else, he says)Coleman has perhaps the most mobile and expensive face on television-it's a wonder no one spotted him for comedy until he was cast as Merle Jeeter in Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, his big break-but it's not a soft, sqirmy-face. It's tough, full of deep-reflecting peerings into the sunset, jaw set like Clint Eastwood, a revine furrowing down his forehead. It's a serious look, and it's part of him, but just as quickly it will disolve, when he's acting, into a parody of Mariboro-Man machismo, a self-seriousness borne of insecurity.
He continues in bringing up children , he says, the important thing is discipline, " not Brady Bunch discipline. And discipline of course, is love."
Coleman's not preaching-he's too self-effacting for that-but he actually does talk like this. Although he has been in Hollywood for two decades, he still has something of the cortly Southern gentleman about him, the kind who stands up when a woman comes into the room, says a co-star.He grew up in Texas and went to the Virginia Military Institute before going into the Army. In the bizarre scheme of things in Hollywood, Coleman doesn't seem like a square or a cornball, exactly, but he does seem to embody older values that come from the heartland. " There's something really American about him," says his young Buffalo Bill co-star Geena Davis.
Coleman is talking about a " peeve" of his, complaining that corporate executives and American businessmen-who possess " dignity, pride in their work, pride in their product" and who are " what this country's all about"-are continually portrayed in movies and on TV as " blowhards." On the screen-like the way they always filmed the Japanese High Command under yellow light-these businessmen are always huffing and puffing at the end of a long conference table in a smoke-filled room. He's right about this longstanding Hollywood myth, but he also admits that he played precisly this kind of industrialist in " 9 to 5." Obviously, Coleman's not dogmatic about these things. He " leans toward a Republican philosophy," but admires Jane Fonda, her " courage" over Vietnam. " I respect that commitment," he says.
Furthermore , he has nothing but contempt for TV producer's he's worked with " who somewhere along the line traded their integrity for a rating."
Maybe that's why, on the set of Buffalo Bill some weeks later, there's an atmoshere of ratings-be-damned. The writers and actors do every show as if it's their last, a free ride to take chances and let the buffalo chips fall where they may. As a result, there's nothing in the scripts that succumbs to the temptation to give Bill any redeeming qualities, those Bill-learns-a-lesson moments where in a burst of revelation he sees the error of his ways. The producers count on Coleman himself to keep Bill just this side of making viewers reject him. " There's something about Dabney Coleman, his ability to communicate that pathos," says Tom Patchett, who, with Jay Tarses, created the show specifically for Coleman. And there has never been a character as authentically repugnant yet perversely bearable as Bill Bittinger. He's not Archie Bunker" because Archie was underdog-he symbolized blue-collar people scraping to survive," says Patchett. " Bill has the world by the short hairs-he has no excuses for his behavior." And J.R. Ewing is simply unmitigated evil: He's smooth and slick; so is Bill, but you can see the wheels turning with him. J.R.'s awesome -but Bill, you see him flailing."
Coleman is cool and professional throughout this week's episode, which concerns racial paranoia. During a draining and complicated sequence, he wears huge Ray Charles sunglasses that block half his face, but the performance is still amazing, his face a sqirming mass of paranoia, his mouth gnawing away in furious toothlessness and his body feinting back and forth: it makes up for the fact that he can't use his eyes. The crew nearly disrupts the takes by laughing so hard.
Coleman's importance to Buffalo Bill borders on the one man show-sometimes it seems like the fine ensemble characters serve no other purpose than to make us wonder why humans are so wimpy and masochistic as to put up with someone like Bill-but Coleman doesn't act like he owns the place ( even though he owns one quarter of the show). The Red Sea doesn't part when he walks onto the set. He's intense and knit with concentration before each scene-clenching his features, running his fingers through his hair, grabbing cigarettes from an assistant ( work time is excluded from the quit-smoking bet). But he jokes with the crew and never complains. " You never get the feeling that he's the star and we're the extras,"says co-star Charles Robinson.
Everyone always asks whether Coleman himself is as much of a creep as the quintessential version he plays on Buffalo Bill, and it's become part of his interview repertoire to talk about what a mean guy he was at VMI, hazing the younger cadets. Maybe so, but it really doesn't ring true, and publicity considerations may cause him to fancy calling himself an S.O.B. On the tennis court, he concedes he can be a holy terror. " I'm not a big fan of John McEnroe," he says one day while sitting in his beach condominium and waving a cigar," but I play a lot like him. I'm testy and emotional, so I identify totally with him. You're mad at yourself even if you win, and you're depressed if you don't play up to your standards."
If Coleman is churning inside on the tennis court and in general, there's got to be a reason why he doesn't show it, why he's such a strange amalgam of angry egotism and courtly casualness. It's a respect he has for that sense of style, for form. He admires Lee Trevino, the fiercely competitive golfer who didn't make it until later in life than most in his profession, and who's nearly always relaxed and charming. Asked if there was less pressure when he was acting in small roles for so many years, he answers, " When they asked Trevino that question, after he'd spent all that time going from club to club taking on people for money , he said, " I'll tell you what's hard-playing for $50." Is Coleman bitter about all those years laboring unsung? " I was frustrated ," he says , " but a lot less frustrated than the actors parking cars and waiting on tables and giving tennis lessons." He claims he wasn't ever truly ambitious-until now; he likes the way things are breaking these days.
But if success came late to Coleman, he says it's partly because he's a late bloomer." Making a movie with Cloris Leachman shortly before Mary Hartman, a movie so forgetable he can't even remember the name, he says he had a breakthrough. " I was too up-tight, there wasn't enough devil-may-care, I didn't take enough chances." The key, he says in an urgent whisper, is to wait. " Wait...wait...wait," he rasps. " It's like a baseball player trying to hit the curve ball-to wait literally that one-thousandth of a second."
A few weeks later, after a visit to see his accountants, he's drinking double expresso at Harry's Bar in Century City. If he's lucky and can fit in it, he'll be able to play a set or two of tennis. He's saying how he dislikes open shirts and jewelry and trying to explain why-though he's dressed casually today and has no fewer than 10 jogging suits in his closet-he insisted on being photographed for this article wearing a suit and tie.
"The whole world, " he's saying, " everything's changed . When I lived in New York 20 years ago and we went to the theater, you put on a suit and tie.You go there now, you see sneakers , T-shirts. Everything is relaxed, kind of a natural thing that's come over us, probably as a result of the '60's. It's a facade, but it seems more natural. The old actors of the '30's and '40's , their voices were very refined ( he mimics stentorian tones, lovingly) and there was a certain kind of theatrical presentation they had that you don't see anymore: Louis Calhern, John Barrymore, and Basil Rathbone."
Well Louis Calhern probably didn't have to put up with all this press attention, either, the demands of which got so intense for Coleman that he had to skip a pilgrimage to Wimbleton last summer because of it. He's genteel and ingratiating with a tv crew in his apartment one day, the small condo so empty it looks almost like a photo studio anyway-a weight room, some decorator furniture, a kid's bunk bed. There are a couple of scripts, a bottle of half-gone Margaux on the kitchen counter, an empty fireplace. This is just an occasional home base, and he hasn't had time to fix it up. " No social life," he says. " I see my girlfriend ( actress Laura Devon), my kids and that's it."
A TV cameraman stares at a photograph of a beach scene, a fancy gift from Universal for " Cloak and Daggar."
" You like it?" Coleman says. " It's yours."
Later Coleman talks about the things he wishes he had time for. Like sailing, real sailing-not the stamped-out status symbols" at the Marina in Los Angeles. Long ago , he and his brother were on a 28-foot boat off the 'coast near Corpus Christi, Texas, sailing in the canals. Coleman has never forgotten the feelings, the scene: they pass a workers' villiage, a dirt-under-the-fingernails place where oil riggers and roughnecks live in Quonset huts. They glide silently by in their sailboat when four or five dirty little kids come out and stare wide-eyed at them.
Coleman acts it out, exploding his eyes like a rock thrown into a pond. Over the water they hear one of the kids say just one thing: " You sure have a pretty boat."
" Pretty boat, Coleman is saying, shaking his head, not at all embarrassed in the telling. " It reminded me of Shane."
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