PRIME TIME

PRIME TIME

Y’ALL COME BACK NOW, HEAR?

by Richard C. Walls

DON KNOTTS IS GOD, BUT...You can’t go home again and why bother—your memory will always be richer than the reality anyway. These two lumps of parlor philosophy were inspired by the umpteenth TV attempt to go home; that’s right, yet another ill-advised reunion show, an effort to recapture the simple glories of some alleged Golden Age. I think (my crack research team being on vacation) that this all started sometime in the 70s with a Father Knows Best reunion (a rather icky-tearful TV-movie)— since then the events have ranged from the meaningless (Gilligan) to the near-traumatic (let’s face it, gang, the Beaver’s gotten a little grotesque, dontcha think?). This latest chunk of forced nostalgia was Return To Mayberry, an NBC special which this commentator admits (with only a mild amount of embarrassment) to actually looking forward to. Not that I didn’t always despise that rash of rural comedies that flourished throughout the ’60s, but much of what made these shows seem so irritatingly irrelevant was the temper of the times—viewed from a cool distance via reruns, the whole phenomenon just seems like your basic harmless escapefrom-modernity stuff. The Beverly Hillbillies in particular I’ve found to be roughly the equivalent of an over-the-counter stress reliever... mild, but you can abuse it if you wish (try watching the show every day—but be warned that the high is a little raggedy).

But even back in that cave of memory which is (was?) the ’60s, I was always willing to put up with Mayberry’s never-never land folksiness, mainly because the characters weren’t all loveable goofiness and/or sweetness and light as you’d expect (except for Griffith’s Andy Taylor, who was a saint). Especially lifelike was Barney Fife, who was a bundle of slightly exaggerated commonman flaws—false pride, avarice, mendaciousness—all of it on a small scale, closely observed and wonderfully played by, in my humble opinion, one of the finest comic actors ever to appear on TV, Don Knotts. It wasn’t just his famous hysteria bit that Knotts had down pat—his best moments were when Barney was struggling to maintain his eternally precarious sense of worth. Knotts gave that old comedy standby, the hapless sidekick, a surprising depth of emotion and subtlety. And to top it off, the writing was quite decent—some of the deadpan humor achieved when Andy and Barney would attempt to build a conversation out of pauses and repetitions was positively Pinteresque.

The punch line: So I settled in and only stayed for one half hour...the show was really dreadful. The actual reunions between Andy and the other characters were anti-climactically casual (are Hollywood writers so coked-out they can’t even do “maudlin” right anymore?), the writing in general was blah, and the wonderful Knotts, sad to say, is just getting too old for this part— the tics and spasms of (not always) quiet desperation may be amusing, even touching, in a younger man, but in an old geezer it’s all just, well, grotesque (move over, Beav).

After 30 minutes my curiosity was sated enough for me to give into the urge to see what Jerry Falwell was up to on another channel. Much to my lack of surprise, the righteous one was announcing the start of yet another organization, the Christian AntiDefamation League. Pondering how it will never occur to Falwell that the majority of people who dislike him do so despite, rather than because of the fact he’s a Christian, I realize that there’s more than a little of Barney Fife in ol’ Jer. The self-deluding rationalizations, the unawareness when his facade is slipping. things like that. Now if he were just a little funnier...

CHUCKLES UBER ALLES: And I guess the Hogan’s Heroes reunion is never going to take place, what with Bob Crane (Hogan) having gone to that great Stalag in the sky. Personally, I think they should go ahead and do it anyway—Hogan’s demise would give it the sort of sentimental core that TV exploits so well. Have Klink be deceased tookilled in a freakish bit of post-war slapstick (slipped on a bar of soap in the shower of Spandau Prison). The plot will center around Sgt. Kinchloe (Ivan Dixon), who is now a high-ranking official in the Reagan state department (having lent Ed Meese a couple of thou back in their California days), going to W. Germany to place a wreath on Klink’s grave as part of one of those complicated good will/cold war gestures nobody can ever make sense of. Have it take place in Bitburg. Hilarity will ensue. Laugh-track optional.