Messages from Melonville
By JAY COCKS
SCTV is the funniest show on the air and maybe the best too
Video central is no longer New The York City, or Studio City, or even beautiful downtown Burbank. It is a place called Melonville, and it is not on the map. It exists only as the fictive setting for NBC's SCTV (for Second City Television), a show that originated in Canada and is the fastest, smartest 90 minutes on any TV channel, anywhere.
Melonville is headquarters for the program's SCTV satellite net work. Its production offices are located between an H&R Block tax center and a nuclear-waste disposal dump. SCTV President Guy Caballero, a sleazebag in a modified Panama and a white three-piece blend, appears frequently on-camera to bilk, berate or fawn before his audience. Un like one former President of the U.S., who did not like to be photo graphed in his wheelchair, President Caballero will not show up in public without his. He has no physical need for it, understand; he merely finds it useful for inviting viewer pity and respect and boosting the totals on one of his periodic -- and thoroughly fraudulent -- telethons.
SCTV Station Manager Edith Prickley, who favors rhinestone-studded glasses and a leopard-skin coat to match her rakish chapeau. has had several programs of her own -- a cooking course, a talk show that was a literal conversation stopper and an outdoor safari documentary that never got much farther than the parking lot. None of them has done particularly well, perhaps because Mrs. Prickley has the anxious friendliness of a piece of misfired puffed wheat and a laugh like the lullaby of a yak.
As a programmer, Mrs. Prickley has a record at least as distinguished as Fred Silverman's. Among her winners: The Sammy Maudlin Show, a Caballero-in-spired festival of show-biz glitz presided over by a rump-bussing host and a couple of regular guests, Entertainer Lola Heatherton, whose specialty is a piercing rendition of New York, New York, and Funnyman Bobby Bittman, whose jokes are as tarnished as his gold chains; and The Great White North, a public service program in which two dim-bulb brothers, Bob and Doug McKenzie, swill brew, cook back bacon and discuss such issues as the lack of parking space at doughnut restaurants.
Mrs. Prickley barely has time with all this to book movies for Monster Chiller Horror Theater, which is hosted by Count Floyd, the dipso anchorman of the SCTV news, masquerading in vampire dress. Certainly she never has time to screen her selections. One week's entry was Dr. Tongue's 3-D House of Stewardesses, in which the actors attempted to achieve the illusion of objects flying from the screen by swaying like pendulums. This was followed by Whispers of the Wolf ("Boy, sounds really scary, eh, kids!" howled the Count), which turned out to be an essay in abject despair by Ingmar Bergman, complete with a dwarf, camera compositions like geometry proofs and racked dialogue like "Life makes me vomit" -- all of it rendered in subtitles that were almost obscured by dirt in the corner of the projector.
To thank for all this, we have the seven benign loonies of the real SCTV: John Can dy, Joe Flaherty, Eugene Levy, Andrea Martin, Rick Moranis, Catherine O'Hara and Dave Thomas, who also write and stage most of the material they perform. NBC, an outfit that sometimes looks like a Caballero/Prickley collaboration played straight, has kept SCTV on late weekend nights almost as a poor relation of the net work's much vaunted Saturday Night Live. In fact, some SNL originals (Dan Ackroyd, Gilda Radner) came from Canada's Second City troupe, which nurtured SCTV.
The new SNL, extensively overhauled and buffed to a fine gloss, has registered some gains from the disasters of last season. Up against its pale predecessor, the new SNL looks pretty good. But then so would Richard Simmons' exercise show. The writers of SNL still work too hard at being Big City hip. On SCTV, they act as though they never heard of hip and could care less.
That may be one advantage of doing a show in Canada. The SCTV troupe writes and rehearses in Toronto, shoots in Edmonton, and launches the results to the world outside in the same reckless way they are alleged to have sent up the SCTV satellite, which looks suspiciously like a hotdog rotisserie.
On SCTV the performers mesh closely, in part because many of them have been together for six years and also because they seem more interested in laughs than personalities. This is not a group of co medians; this is an ensemble of fine comic actors.
Not since the high old days of the Ernie Kovacs Show has anyone used the tricks and techniques of television to make such comic cap ital; such consistently capital comedy and such deadeye, fall-down-laughing satire has not been seen since Monty Python, and maybe even Your Show of Shows.
Last summer NBC ordered up nine new 90-min. segments. These have included a ruthless parody of a feminist musical revue, staged at a dinner theater, called I'm Takin ' My Own Head, Screwin' It On Right, and No Guy 's Gonna Tell Me That It Ain 't, and an SCTV movie of the week, starring Bobby Bittman as Julius Caesar, who is assassinated because Rome cannot stand his one-liners. Promised in the near fu ture is The Battle of the PBS Network Stars, featuring Economists John Kenneth Galbraith and Milton Friedman in a spirited bicycle race.
The SCTV troupe frets about keeping the quality consistently high under pro duction demands from the network. Even though they have shown no signs of flag ging, they know and worry about the possibility of network pressures eventually di luting the show. "It's important for our group to have control," says Rick Moranis who once brought off a pluperfect rendering of Woody Allen acting Robert De Niro's mirror soliloquy in Taxi Driver. "I SCTV becomes a Carol Burnett show for kids, we'll quit." Talk is cheap, though They all know Guy Caballero would never accept their resignations.
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