Tina Fey and Cloris Leachman Boost Broadcast's Fall Season
By Ed Martin TV / Video Download Archives
Forget about the strike-compromised 2007-08 broadcast season. This one is even stranger.
Consider this: We're three weeks into the 2008-09 season and the most talked star on primetime television is 82-year-old demo-buster Cloris Leachman, whose wild and wacky routines on Dancing with the Starshave kids, adults and seniors alike excitedly talking about this show. Leachman may not be a gifted dancer, but she moves around that faux ballroom with the energy and enthusiasm of a person half her age. And she brings a level of spontaneous, outrageous entertainment to primetime television at a time when it seems to be lacking those essential qualities. The witty and tirelessly kinetic Leachman first caught the public’s attention in 1970 in the debut episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, on which she was a regular for five years before starring in her own spin-off series, Phyllis, which lasted two seasons. Leachman often stole the spotlight from her gifted MTM co-stars Valerie Harper, Ed Asner, Ted Knight, Betty White and Ms. Moore herself. Almost 40 years later she’s at it again, at the shining center of the most exciting primetime show of the season so far.
I’m writing this column on Tuesday morning, well aware that Leachman – who once again received the lowest scores from the Dancing judges -- may be sent home on tonight’s telecast. It doesn’t matter. You can be sure she will be turning up on the show throughout the rest of the season, if only to sit on the sidelines and cheer for the other dancers. (Knowing Cloris, she’ll dash across the floor to congratulate them.) If I worked at ABC I would give Leachman a microphone and turn her loose backstage each week in the red room, where she brings out the best in the rest of the cast, especially 18-year-old Cody Linley of Hannah Montana fame. As funny as her dance routine was last night, her best moment came when she interrupted Linley’s backstage interview and urged him to speak in a deeper, more adult voice. I also expect Leachman to turn up on every daytime and late night talk show in the weeks to come. (With her madcap antics and filter-free show business reminiscences, Leachman more than held her own against Jay Leno and guest Jay Mohr on The Tonight Show two weeks ago.)
Continuing with the overall strangeness of the season so far, and moving beyond the boundaries of primetime, the actual hottest television show of the fall isn’t really a show at all. It’s more like a must-see micro-series: The Saturday Night Live sketches (three so far) in which Tina Fey portrays Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin with hyper-real perfection. (It’s as if Fey is the hi-def version of Palin.)
For reasons that defy ready explanation, most of the material on SNL this season has been as dull and drippy as that of its unfortunate mid-Nineties period. But the Fey-as-Palin sketches, which have opened three of the four live telecasts this fall, have energized entertainment television in a way that little else has in quite a long time. Everyone is talking about the fabulous Ms. Fey (including our own TV Maven). Indeed, I attended a social function in Westport, Conn., this past Saturday, and guests actually began leaving before 11 p.m. with the stated intent of being home and settled in front of their flat screens to watch SNL’s opening sketch, which re-created last week’s debate between Gov. Palin and Sen. Joe Biden. Several of these people told me that they haven’t been so excited about SNL since they were in college – decades ago! Isolated from the rest of the show, the surging, stand-alone popularity of the Palin sketches are perfect entertainment for the YouTube generation. (Surely they are also working wonders for Hulu, which NBC Universal owns in part.) But they have also reignited interest among members of the television generation who still enjoy watching video entertainment in the moment, before it goes viral.
One can only hope that Fey and SNL executive producer Lorne Michaels will find a way to transfer some of this wildly infectious enthusiasm over to Fey’s struggling sitcom 30 Rock when it makes its season premiere on October 30. (Michaels is also an executive producer of that program.) Would they dare go so far as to work Fey’s portrayal of Palin into that much-honored sitcom, which seems to have more awards than it does viewers?
Why not? This season, anything is possible. Just ask Leachman.
Ed Martin
Ed Martin is the chief television and content critic for MediaVillage. He has written about television and internet programming for several Myers publications since 2000, including The Myers Report, The Myers Programming Report, MediaBizBloggers a…
