There was no way that a
concept this high-fallutin’, this conceptual, would fly. It was too
difficult, too cerebral, too complicated for a twenty-three minute situation
comedy.
Perhaps – at least at
first – the producers were persuaded by network executives to dumb it down
and make it more palatable; perhaps they were strongly advised to smooth out
the edges (and the edge). The idea itself was intriguing: a situation comedy
about a fictional mayor of New York and his offbeat staff – now that
sounds like a winning stew. Given the right chemistry, it could even be
funny! Construct it as one of those workplace comedies in which a staff of
employees functions as the traditional American family. The office becomes
the living room, and each timecard puncher takes on a characteristic of a
relative. It worked for The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Taxi,
WKRP In Cincinnati and even Cheers. It’s a recipe for success:
mix in a few zingers, dampen with an occasional “special episode,” add a
cozy timeslot and you’ve got yourself a hit on your hands. Simply sit back
and watch the laughter (and the ratings) build.
Certainly, that would have
been enough. However, the talented powers behind Spin City (former
producers of the smart Family Ties) decided instead to raise the
stakes and increase the wattage to a near-blinding brilliance. They took a
conscious (and daring) roll of the dice and actually showed much respect for
the intelligence of its audience. The result: delivery of a new kind of
workplace sitcom that came roaring out of its suffocating cubicle, ready or
not, with multi-tiered stories that could not easily be explained in a TV
Guide synopsis.
As one of the most
under-appreciated sitcoms of the last quarter century, the most amazing
aspect of Spin City is its very storyline: it’s a show not about the
mayor, but about the deputy mayor, and his attempts to make right, or
spin, the mistakes of his boss and his staff. It’s a show about
(among other things) comically correcting faux pas and the fine art
of apologizing to the offended without being sorry. This complication would
be enough to make the typical viewer’s head spin (did the average Joe know
that there even was a deputy mayor?), but the feat was accomplished
without anybody feeling woozy. It was a project that took one of the biggest
dilemmas of its time – political correctness – and explained it comically,
exposed it, ripped it apart and handed it back to the offended party, while
all of those who “got it” snickered with satisfaction.
Remember, this was in the
very age of spin, when smart, popular politicians like Bill Clinton were
being exposed as human beings and even the most unconnected Americans were
becoming more media savvy – even aware enough to realize what spin
was and exactly when it was being spun at them.
This was also the age of
the Grand Poobah of New York City, Rudy Giuliani, who amazed cynics by doing
something that no pollster thought could ever be done since the days of
Fiorello: be a politician and -- at the same time -- be popular, respected
and beloved! The timing was more than perfect and less than likely: a sitcom
about a well-received mayor and his staff running a very serious operation
was not the stuff of audience building, but lightning struck here, in this
very time and place. This show would not have worked even ten years before,
and it would probably never happen again. However, for a few short, winning
seasons, it stayed on the air, and remained consistently smart, funny and
highly rated. It was a pocketful of miracles all by itself.
Spin City
grooves to a rhythm like no show before it. There are no standardly equipped
sitcom quips. You never know what’s coming, after years of being conditioned
to the contrary. The typical setup and comeback isn’t there. What you’re
expecting is not what you’ll get – at last! What you’ll get is better.
In this last golden age of
the television sitcom (the 1990s), either-you-get-it-or-you-don’t series
like Seinfeld and Roseanne consciously (and not
self-consciously) marched to a different drummer. The dreck that had been
vomited up for years was suddenly replaced by a new and surprising,
meandering pace, never veering lazily into Dum-Dum Land. The music of the
dialogue was definitively branded, the banter űber-definitive to the
series and always in tune with the attitude, the characters slightly more
intricate and hard to pigeonhole. The writing was more hyper-written
and yet it somehow sounded more real. Shows like these suddenly made the
average sitcom seem even blander than usual, and the shows that desperately
tried to catch up seemed like they were trying too hard. It was too late for
them. They were still waltzing along but the band had already changed to a
tango.
The creators of Spin
City did not opt for the obvious New Yawkah charactahs
from Central Casting – everyone here gives a Bronx cheer to the stereotypes
(once fresh to TV audiences twenty years before). Sure, the cast is often
crude and rude, but like New York itself, the sophistication eventually
shines through.
The show would not have
worked without Michael J. Fox’s understated hipness and static-cling-type
energy; he doesn’t zig-zag so much as he zag-zigs; he’s the ripple that
causes the waves. He plays the workaholic smartass who runs the most complex
city in the world, the power behind the power. It’s barely an acceptable
premise, and yet his intelligence and his natural gift for acting (proven
over and over and over again, even before the debut of this series) makes it
solidly believable – and human – and damn funny. He’s like a vibrating
washing machine stuck on the spin cycle, exercising constant and alertly
automatic spin control. Even when his red flags go up, we tense up along
with him: from a typo on the Mayor’s speech (who reads “the magic of Santa”
as “the magic of Satan”) to the cute little National Spelling Bee champion
who, in actuality, is a pyromaniac. The funny is how Fox uses his
brains and quick resources to rescue the Mayor from these pickles.
This two-DVD set
disappoints in only one way: it’s a “best-of” compilation, subtitled
“Michael J. Fox: His All-Time Favorites.” This amounts to twenty-two
excellent, memorable episodes worthy of reruns; however, hopefully a
complete series on DVD is not being bypassed in exchange for this. Fox
personally introduces each episode in the collection. Although it’s always
good to see him, he offers little insight other than a quick and unnecessary
summing up of what you are about to see, the humble act of how he had very
little to do with the episode’s success, and the obligatory hailing of his
co-stars, which always reeks a little too much of show biz phoniness.
Not that Fox isn’t the
real deal and that his co-stars don’t deserve to be hailed. His Honor the
Mayor is not played but owned by the brilliant Barry Bostwick, in a
virtual tour-de-force. He plays the blue-blooded, emotionally stunted
figurehead who bumbles his way through crisis after crisis, barely aware of
what is going on around him, leaving the mess for his befuddled staff to
disinfect. This description sounds crass, but Bostwick plays the role with
such delicate care that, in less talented hands, it would have been just
plain funny instead of what it is: downright hilarious in an out-loud
manner. This is evident when he awards a contract to the sanitation
department with the “coolest logo,” or when he reluctantly admits to viewing
MTV’s The Real World: Uncensored by meekly fessing up, “The alcoholic
girl takes her shirt off.” The line is delivered with marvelous precision.
And when he meets the Pope, he is impressed by His Eminence’s intelligence,
confiding to his aide, “Did you know he speaks Polish?” His cluelessness is
the stuff of awe; it takes a very smart actor to play a character this dumb.
He sums it up definitively when he sighs in frustration, “This city, I tell
ya. Somebody oughta do something.”
Richard Kind, playing the
awkward, cheap-ass press secretary, is an acquired taste. However, once you
set your watch to his warped delivery, you’re comfortably in his time zone.
There may be nothing funnier on television than when he gets his clumsy bear
of a motor going. For instance, in one of the most politically incorrect
moves of the series (literally!), he relocates to Harlem to save money on
rent but disguises his thriftiness by pretending to connect with the African
American community. Hearing him say “I hear ya, girlfriend,” with a quick
snap of the fingers, is worth the price of admission. Or when an exasperated
reporter asks him in the press briefing room, “Paul, I thought we had time
for one more question,” he answers, “yes, but just the question. Not the
answer.” And he means it. Or, while innocently standing by the candy machine
and mistakenly taking a misfired bullet in the head by an elderly security
guard, he says, “When I bite into a York Peppermint Patty, I get shot.”
Perhaps the biggest
surprise of the series is the mega-metamorphosis of genius comedic actor
Alan Ruck, in the role of Stuart Bondek. Best remembered for his portrayal
of the geeky Cameron in Ferris’ Bueller’s Day Off, Ruck contributes
his own spin in Spin City: here he’s still the nerdy outcast,
but he turns the nerd inside out and wears it with the tag showing. He’s a
squinty-eyed, crew-cutted cad, out of touch with his emotions only because
he’s repressed them beyond recognition. His character is creepily confident
and eerily quiet, the employee most likely to go postal while wearing his
expensive suit and bookworm’s glasses; yet he’s never afraid to display his
freaky sexual attitudes out loud. He’s not just thinking lusty thoughts –
he’s saying them. As his occasional foil, Carter Heywood, Michael Boatman
turns in his usual fine performance (he was one of the bright spots in the
dreadful Arli$$) as the poster boy for political correctness: a gay
black man. He plays it straight acting and straight appearing, but is not
beyond an occasional flamboyant turn for the sake of a laugh. When Stuart
winces at Carter’s hazelnut mint cream coffee in the break room, Stuart
says, “Oh, great. Now you’ve turned the coffee gay.” To which, Michael J.
Fox’s character replies, “You can’t turn coffee gay, Stuart. It’s born that
way.”
The women in the series
are underused. The fine work of Connie Britton as Nikki Faber goes
unappreciated for most of the series. The show’s only weak link is when the
writers try to shoehorn in a romantic relationship between her and Fox, a
la Sam and Diane on Cheers. It comes out of nowhere, goes
nowhere, and the writers mercifully let it fizzle. To add insult to injury,
Heather Locklear is brought on in a winning performance as Caitlin Moore,
the Mayor’s re-election campaign manager. As in her million other series,
Locklear is all things to all people, but that obligatory
will-they-or-won’t-they romance storyline between her and Fox is tiresome
and tacked on. The chemistry is there (how could it not be between two such
competent actors), but when they’re not flirting, the characters work best.
For instance, when an old ‘80s tape of Star Search turns up at the
office and reveals that Caitlin was a not-very-good contestant singing
“Flashdance: What A Feeling,” you can’t help but laugh at the ridiculous
idea, and at the fact that Locklear is a such a good sport about it. Upon
watching the dreadful (but hilarious) performance, Nikki comments, “I’m
guessing that the star search didn’t end that day.”
Minor misfires also
include Jennifer Esposito, who plays the Brooklynese “Working Girl” Stacey
Paterno, as Mike’s secretary. Again, here was a potentially great character
who eventually evaporated. And Victoria Dilliard as
Fox’s smart, no-nonsense secretary was barely ever given anything to do,
although she exhibited wide open skies of promise. Also, it took the entire
series to find out why the character of James Hobert (Alexander Chaplin), a
naïve, corn-fed hick from the Midwest, was hired as the speechwriter for the
mayor of the most cosmopolitan city in the world. It was a baffling choice,
and there was always an uneasy feeling of miscasting about this character.
However, in the last episode, Fox explains that James was brought on because
he spoke the way “he wanted the mayor to sound.” Fair enough. Sold.
Sadly, Fox made the
difficult decision to leave the show in 2000 due to his battle with
Parkinson’s disease. The series continued on with the excellent Charlie
Sheen in the role of the spin slinger, not exactly eclipsing Fox but
bringing to the table that playboy/frat boy sense of humor that has become
Sheen’s ticket to ride on television. Even though the show did not lose any
of its punch, it somehow lost its hold on the public and left the air a
couple of
seasons later.
Fox’s parting episodes are
included in this collection, and they are poignant but not overly sappy.
What sticks in your mind, however, is not so much Fox’s tearful final
curtain call, but an earlier episode in which he is standing on the bow of
the Staten Island Ferry, his arms outstretched a la Leonardo DiCaprio
in Titanic. He is shouting, “I AM DEPUTY MAYOR OF THE WORLD!” It’s
funny as anything, but what makes it touching is the view of the skyline in
front of Fox, with the World Trade Center gleaming in the foreground. It
reminds us of that Clinton-Giuliani era of joyous stability. We didn’t know
how content we were before the world changed forever, with Fox balanced firmly
on that boat, happiness gushing out of his big heart. The Twin Towers spread
out in front of him, all of us unaware of what was to come
and what we were leaving behind. You can
still recapture some of that lost magic in this terrific DVD collection.
For more information
about Parkinson’s Disease – and how you can help – log on to
www.michaeljfox.org or call 1-800-708-7644.
Ronald Sklar
Copyright
©2004 PopEntertainment.com.
All rights reserved. Posted: October 20, 2004.
