My In-Law, The Housefly

By Richard Zoglin

Network programmers like to think of themselves as wacky guys. Just look at the shows they put on the air. In NBC's The Fanelli Boys, four grownup brothers move back to Brooklyn to live with . . . their mother! In CBS's Evening Shade, a man is nonplussed when his wife tells him she's pregnant; he's already had a vasectomy! (Rim shot.) In Fox's Good Grief, Howie Mandel plays a nutty guy who does TV commercials for (hold on to your hats) a mortuary!

Had enough? Now try switching instead to Maniac Mansion, a family sitcom that is not so much off the wall as out of this world. Dad is a mishap-prone inventor whose botched experiments have turned his brother-in-law into a housefly and his four-year-old son into a 250-lb. clone of Benjy in The Sound and the Fury. We learn these things in the show's 10th-anniversary special -- a nostalgia trip that takes place, oddly, on the program's first episode. Weirdest of all, the series is running, virtually unnoticed, on cable's Family Channel, a new incarnation of the old Christian Broadcasting Network.

Comedy is the gasoline that keeps the networks' engines humming, but the octane level seems especially low this fall. Of the 17 new sitcoms introduced by CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox, not a single one ranks in the Nielsen Top 30. Is there a comedy glut? Or, more likely, are viewers simply recoiling against network packaging that has grown so boringly rote and predictable that all signs of life have drained out? If so, relief is at hand: increasingly offbeat shows are cropping up in out-of-the-way places on the dial. Some deserve their obscurity. Others might shrivel in the glare of too much mass-audience attention. But what they all share is an eccentric, homemade, try-anything quality.

My Talk Show, a syndicated late-night half-hour, is homemade in a literal sense. The premise is a throwback to that old Mary Hartman spinoff, Fernwood 2-Night: a housewife (Cynthia Stevenson) in the little town of Derby, Wis., has turned her living room into the set for a nightly talk show. It's a homey affair: her brother-in-law is the announcer; gray-haired Mrs. Battle, her old school nurse, is musical director; neighbors drop by to chat. So do real-life celebrities such as William Shatner and Florence Henderson.

This reductio ad absurdum of TV's talk-show mania has had funny sequences, like Jim Belushi joining in an inept neighborhood game of charades: while the women whiz through titles like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the men are stumped by Jaws. But the Hollywood-meets-the-heartland satire falls a little flat. My Talk Show is too straitlaced and good-natured; it needs a bit of the rudeness of Late Night with David Letterman. Or at least some quirkier performers. Where have you gone, Louise Lasser?

Mystery Science Theater 3000 has origins in the heartland as well: the show began life on a Minneapolis UHF station before being picked up last November by cable's Comedy Channel. Crummy old movies (Rocketship X-M, The Corpse Vanishes) are unspooled in their entirety, while three characters -- one human being and two gabby robots -- offer wisecracking commentary at the bottom of the screen.

It's the year's funniest prank. The hecklers jeer at love scenes, hoot at tacky special effects and pounce on every dumb line. Creator Joel Hodgson and his colleagues throw in savvy technical references ("I think we just flew through a dissolve," someone cracks during an airplane flight) along with a torrent of smart-mouthed ad libs. "How do we stand on fuel?" asks an onscreen astronaut. "I'm for it," comes the offscreen retort. In the tense few seconds before lift-off, a voice pipes up, "Did I leave the water running?" A scientist leans into a pair of earphones, trying to pick up a weak radio signal; the invented line is "I can't see a thing." Not since Woody Allen's What's Up, Tiger Lily? has anyone had so much fun with bad movies.

Joe Flaherty knows bad movies too; as Count Floyd, the seedy late-night host on the old SCTV comedy show, he used to introduce dreck like Dr. Tongue's 3-D House of Stewardesses. Playing the incompetent mad scientist in Maniac Mansion, Flaherty again shows a flair for sweet dimwittedness. Another SCTV veteran, Eugene Levy, is co-creator of this twisted update of The Addams Family, which was inspired by, of all things, a computer game.

Maniac Mansion has the old SCTV spirit, mixing the outrageous and the banal with nary a hint that anybody knows the difference. In one episode, Uncle Harry, who is still buzzing around the house, falls for a female fly, then has to console his jealous (and still life-size) wife. "We've got 20 years -- that's a history," he tells her. "That's something I could never have with a fly. Because they only live for -- what? -- two weeks max." Flaherty, meanwhile, is disarmingly oblivious to the havoc he is creating. When he concocts a serum that turns his shy guinea pig into a snarling monster, he simply lets the hellion loose outdoors with a cheery "Run free!"

For TV's oddball comedies, that could be a rallying cry.