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The Mullets aired from September 2003 until March 2004 on UPN.
Denny and Dwayne ( David Hornsby, Michael Weaver) were two big, goofy good-old-boys living and working in Reseda, California, in the Los Angeles suburbs in this slapstick sitcom. They ran The Mullet Boys Roofing Company, liked to party with their buddies, Gordo and Bill ( Ben Tolpin, Mark Christopher Lawrence), and loved professional wrestling. Although they sported identical mullet haircuts they were really wuite different-skinny Denny was quiet and soft-spoken while muscular Dwayne had a booming voice and a short fuse-providing what they hoped was the perfect mix of brains and brawn. Dennis and Dwayne were both smitten with Melanie ( Anne Stedman), a clerk at the convenience store where they hung out in their spare time. Their sexy doting mother, Mandi ( Loni Anderson), who was smarter than both of them combined , had recently married Roger ( John O'Hurley), the pretenious host of the game show Quizzardry, and moved into his big Beverly Hills Mansion. Roger loved Mandi but found it hard to tolerate his stepsons' lack of class and culture. They were constantly at odds but Mandi's intervention usually kept things from totally getting out of control.
The Mullets was pulled from the UPN schedule after a short run in the fall of 2003. When it returned in the spring it only lasted two more weeks.
A Review from The New York Times
TELEVISION REVIEW; Coiffures Make the Dude (He's Downwardly Mobile)
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: September 11, 2003
''The Mullets,'' a UPN sitcom that begins tonight, tries to tap into the current fascination with white lower-class Southern male culture -- nostalgie de la Boo Radley.
It is hard to pinpoint exactly who is to blame for the fad, though the actor David Spade may have played a part. His 2001 comedy ''Joe Dirt,'' also starring Kid Rock, plucked an entire movie out of the mullet, what was then a bad haircut with a relatively contained cult status. But Mr. Spade was not alone.
St. Martin's Press published ''The Mullet: Hairstyle of the Gods'' three years ago, and Web sites like mulletsgalore.com appeared before then. Even GQ magazine got swept up in Nascar chic last year with a fashion spread at the Tropicana 400, a Chicagoland Speedway race that attracted mulletheads in droves. Shops sell novelty items like Sparkling Mullet Body and Car Wash ($11.95) and Minty Frikkin' Mullet Lip Balm ($4.75)
In New York and Los Angeles the trend is mostly a case of dumbing up: the in-crowd reveling in the awfulness of 1970's and 80's music, hairstyles and television shows (Journey, Michael Bolton, ''The Dukes of Hazzard'').
But for others, particularly the young adult males that UPN covets, there is more admiration than mockery in the embrace of beer, babes, Nascar and mesh baseball hats. Mulletland is blue collar, crude and proudly provincial. For some, the mullet is the uniform of a redneck fraternity that rejects political correctness and upward mobility.
''The Mullets'' sitcom, however, does not live up to its mandate. The Mullets are the brothers Dwayne and Denny Mullet, would-be construction workers in the San Fernando Valley who live on beer, World Wrestling Entertainment's ''SmackDown!'' and nachos from the 7-Eleven. Their motto is their hairstyle (''business in the front, party in the back''), but they are basically nice boys. The pilot follows a creaky sitcom formula, and the comedy is not nearly dumb enough to measure up to ''Dumb and Dumberer.'' Nor is it clever as satire; even know-nothing viewers were raised on ''The Simpsons,'' ''South Park'' and ''That 70's Show'' and are accustomed to a bit more bite in their comedy. Mostly the show speaks to viewers tempted by the meticulously restored tackiness of yesteryear.
Loni Anderson, who in the 70's was the Pamela Anderson of her time, is accordingly cast as the Mullets' sexy mother, Mandi Mullet-Heidecker. She looks exactly as she did on ''WKRP in Cincinnati,'' though her facial expressions are now frozen in place. Mandi is newly married to a prissy game-show host, played by John O' Hurley (J. Peterman on ''Seinfeld''), but she dotes unconditionally on her sons (''Beer me, honey''), oblivious to her husband's disdain for them.
The premise is funnier than the execution. The show relies almost entirely on viewers' affection for a trend that should be passing pretty soon. It has certainly peaked as a movie device.
In some ways the mullet fad may be the modern male equivalent of the Valley girl. In 1982 Moon Unit Zappa helped her father, Frank Zappa, write the satirical song ''Valley Girl'' and became the nomenclator for an entire new subspecies -- teenage girls at the Galleria mall in the San Fernando Valley (''gag me with a spoon''). The Valley girl phenomenon spread fast, spawning jokes, television skits, books, novelty items, copycat pop songs and even a movie, ''Valley Girl,'' starring Nicolas Cage and Deborah Foreman. But by the time the movie was released in 1983, the joke had grown stale and public attention had moved on.
It is not clear who is at fault for ''The Mullets,'' but this UPN show may someday be held responsible for driving the mullet into extinction.
THE MULLETS
UPN, tonight at 9:30, Eastern and Pacific times; 8:30, Central time.
Eric Tannenbaum, Kim Tannenbaum, Bill Oakley and Josh Weinstein, executive producers; Mr. Oakley and Mr. Weinstein, writers. Produced by the Tannenbaum Company in association with Warner Brothers Television Production.
WITH: Michael Weaver (Dwayne Mullet), David Hornsby (Denny Mullet), John O'Hurley (Roger Heidecker) and Loni Anderson (Mandi Mullet-Heidecker).
An Article from The New York Times
TELEVISION: THE LOWS; Mullets at Night and Pain in the Morning
Published: December 28, 2003
There is bad television and television so bad it's good; in a recent conversation, Alessandra Stanley and Virginia Heffernan recalled the worst in both categories.
STANLEY -- It seemed so clear ahead of time that ''Coupling'' was going to be terrible, simply because it was a rip-off of a British show, that it was gratifying to realize it really was just as bad as predicted.
HEFFERNAN -- With remakes of British shows you're bringing to it all the hopes that the network has for it and all the focus groups that you imagine went into figuring out how this thing is going to work here. So you watch a few episodes longer than you might otherwise, just to see how it's going to play out.
STANLEY -- If you took away NBC's expectations, and NBC's reputation for quality television, if you stripped all that away and you just put ''Coupling'' side by side with ''The Mullets,'' would ''The Mullets'' be worse?
HEFFERNAN -- ''The Mullets'' embarrassed me because I really thought that it was a go. I liked the idea of it and those guys from ''The Simpsons'' who produced it. I thought, I want to see Loni Anderson. So I was rooting for it a little bit. But, now, what exactly was wrong with it?
STANLEY -- Besides everything? You know, it's always the writing. It wasn't clever. And the show had the sin of pride, because there was a tiny little mullet trend. You had mullet shampoos. You could just visualize that meeting with UPN, with someone saying, let's do a mullet show, and, I know, let's get Loni Anderson.
HEFFERNAN -- You get one visual gag with the hair and then one line -- ''business in the front, party in the back'' -- and the gag of saying ''Loni Anderson back on TV,'' which carries you the first few minutes. Or actually just carries you through the press release.
STANLEY -- But that wasn't the worst show. That may have been one of the worst sitcoms, although there was ''My Big Fat Greek Life,'' which, again, you knew was going to be bad. What makes a delightful movie doesn't always work on TV.
HEFFERNAN -- Also, the bloom was off Nia Vardalos by then. She had been like an undiscovered Cinderella, and when that person decides she's going to franchise her cute idea, then you start to turn on her a bit.
STANLEY -- What I remember is that because both of them, she and Steven Eckholdt, seemed quite old, their parents' pressuring them to have children seemed perfectly reasonable.
HEFFERNAN -- Right, they could hardly roll their eyes at that request.
STANLEY -- Yet they did. O.K., I think it's fair to say that the worst daytime talk show in history----
HEFFERNAN -- Oh, this was your favorite.
STANLEY -- Well, you know, I've held back because I'm a charitable person, so I've never written about ''Living It Up! With Ali & Jack,'' because very few watch it and it's just too painful and sad.
HEFFERNAN -- Ali Wentworth is the wife of George Stephanopoulos. Why didn't that make her good at it? Come on, what else do you need?
STANLEY -- As an actress she used to be cast as the unsympathetic blonde girlfriend that nobody likes. And the idea that somehow this would make her an attractive daytime host . . . it does make Jack Ford seem like a statesman. Compared to her he just seems wise and warm.
HEFFERNAN -- It's one more thing that makes it clear how much we owe to Kelly Ripa, because it's not easy to be adorable. Kelly Ripa's putting in the hours and working hard.
STANLEY -- O.K., what do you hate?
HEFFERNAN -- Well, ''The Sharon Osbourne Show'' took a turn for the tragic, as we know. The conceit of ''The Osbournes'' was that they had turned out to be a pretty normal family with all their normal problems. But ''The Osbournes'' caused them so many more problems that now they end up in real trouble. We were supposed to see a dysfunctional family, and instead we saw a functional family rendered dysfunctional by the fact of the show. And Sharon's been living that out every day on her talk show.
STANLEY -- So: Poor HBO. After all this glory, we have ''K Street.'' Unwatchable. But if you have a mean streak, there was something very satisfying about seeing Hollywood -- pretentious, self-important Hollywood -- crushed under its own delusions of political knowledge and access.
Originally the idea was lobbyists, all the deals that are made behind the scenes. And if you could actually show that, that would be amazing. But they were so enamored of James Carville and Mary Matalin, they kept the whole show about them. And Carville and Matalin are political consultants, but they're not Washington power brokers. So already the premise was wrong. And then when they just stayed with them and didn't develop a stronger fictional line, it got incredibly boring. It was admirable to try to do it, but I wished they'd tried harder.
HEFFERNAN -- It's a slightly higher-brow answer to reality shows, which no one fails to mention don't represent reality. And so the producers try to make something look more ragged, more vérité. But then they end up having to use actors because everybody's bored by straight documentary. As much as people claim to want Wiseman or Warhol versions of reality, it's pretty unwatchable.
Whereas reality shows provided so many great TV moments -- ''For Love or Money'' managed to turn up a few. And this year's ''Bachelor'' and ''Bachelorette'' had some weird and intriguing moments.
STANLEY -- The wedding, wedding, wedding. I was thinking that ABC could persuade one of them to bolt.
HEFFERNAN -- I thought it was going to be him.
STANLEY -- I was hoping that at the very last minute he would say, I can't do this. And then they could have either the reconciliation or the running away with the bridesmaid. But they failed us.
HEFFERNAN -- There's comedy in the ambivalence that goes over the faces of reality characters. It's like little operettas, that sometimes can be amazingly well done. Some of the shows got ironic about their own rose ceremonies and so forth this year, and that was both good and bad.
STANLEY -- Reality TV changes, it evolves. It's like anything else, there are gradations. You have every possible variety.
HEFFERNAN -- I'm amazed at how they were once seen as the end of civilization. Are they more air-heady than sitcoms? How is that possible?
STANLEY -- Now people will say, ''I only watch 'Survivor' '' the way they used to say, ''I only watch '60 Minutes.' ''
HEFFERNAN -- There was ''I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here.''
STANLEY -- That didn't work out as well as one had hoped. What was most satisfying about that show was Robin Leach. If anyone had a reality show before the invention of reality shows, it was he, yet he was enraged by the ruthless editing of ''I'm a Celebrity'' that portrayed him as a fat English slacker. And you realize that even he could get sucked into thinking he could be the hero of the show.
Getting back to HBO: apparently I'm the only person who liked ''Carnivale.'' And now even I've given up on it.
HEFFERNAN -- There are shows -- ''Carnivale'' may be like this -- that you really admire in the beginning. And you can only find out later if they have the addictive enzyme. Sometimes you find that three episodes in, you're not really going to watch again.
STANLEY -- I loved the first three episodes of ''West Wing'' this season when they had John Goodman. And that was actually the leftovers from Aaron Sorkin, a plot line that he had created. And then they got rid of John Goodman and now it's O.K. It's just not great.
There were other sorts of TV moments -- like Martin Bashir's Michael Jackson interview. It's hard to say. That was good bad TV.
HEFFERNAN -- I was riveted. But sometimes even I get moral qualms. And that was one time where I thought -- I mean, Bashir did come off as the villain. But knowing that he had absolute control and that he was trying to make Jackson look cretinous made me squeamish.
STANLEY -- But the fact that with absolute control he still revealed himself was interesting. He was like a Dickens character, wheedling and sympathizing and oozing and doing everything that you normally aren't privy to that journalists will do to get an interview.
Unfortunately or fortunately, a lot of times really bad TV is great TV. Because great TV doesn't have to be good, it just has to be something you can't stop watching. That covers a lot of ground.
One of my favorite low moments was Katie Couric going to Saudi Arabia just before the war and interviewing a member of the Saudi royal family. In order to be respectful of his culture she wore a gray chiffon chador. Almost down to the ankles. But then she had her legs crossed and she had high open-toed shoes and what looked like painted nails. And the way she was seated she was kind of waggling her foot in front of his face. And this is a serious interview about what the Saudis will do if we have to go to war. That's good bad TV.
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