Most TV heads love Bradley Whitford because of his heroic Josh Lyman character from The West Wing, but to me, Whitford gets a lifetime pass for a much lesser-known bit of post-West Wing TV work: Burn Notice creator Matt Nix's The Good Guys, where Whitford killed it each week in his comedic role of a gung-ho Dallas police detective who still thinks he's living in the '80s. The Good Guys came and went so quickly that when I revised the following blog post about fake bad acting in May 2012, I totally forgot about The Good Guys, which had gone off the air only a couple of years before. Whitford's return to TV this fall in ABC's surprisingly funny single-camera comedy Trophy Wife has brought back memories of The Good Guys, a show I miss a lot (The Good Guys can be revisited on Amazon streaming, but it will never hit DVD or Blu-ray because it would be impossible to clear all the '70s and '80s rock songs that were featured on the show).
The funniest episode during The Good Guys' single-season run involved the Whitford cop character transforming himself into a fake Mafioso. I'm adding it to a list of my favorite instances in which a decent or excellent actor portrays a less talented version of himself or herself (the other day, I Hulu'd a Good Wife episode where Alicia and Cary hire a hilariously overwrought Chicago actress to play a mock trial witness, and if the actress who played the crappy thespian weren't so unknown, I'd add her to the post too). The Good Guys episode precedes many other moments of great fake bad acting (some of them I previously discussed in January 2008).
Bradley Whitford, The Good Guys ("Silvio's Way")
I can't believe I nearly forgot this episode, where Whitford's Dan Stark brings out of mothballs an old undercover persona of his when he attempts to bust a group of mobsters he failed to catch seven years ago because he fell asleep during his own sting operation. The best part of Detective Stark's fake Italian character Silvio is his inconsistent accent, which Whitford kept changing during "Silvio's Way" to show how terrible Stark is at acting (one moment, he's channeling Walken, and then the next, his mobster voice turns into a completely different-sounding Brando type of thing). Whitford once told an interviewer that "Silvio's Way" was his favorite Good Guys episode to shoot, even though it called for him to strip down to a green Speedo when Stark gets strip-searched and stays undressed for a ridiculously prolonged amount of time that was longer than Whitford (or any male viewer like myself who never man-crushed on Josh Lyman and paid more attention to Mary-Louise Parker) was comfortable with. But like those creepy MADtv "Parents Walking Around in Their Underwear" sketches with Michael McDonald in just a pair of Walter White tightie-whities and dress shoes ("Boy, it's hot!") and Mo Collins in a pair of granny panties, the Speedo scenes make for great comedy. "I was instructed to gain weight and this is a tip for any actor--when you're doing a television show, when the head of the network says, 'It would be great if you gained some weight, because this is kind of a dilapidated character,' the next thing coming is a script where you're in a Speedo," said Whitford to Assignment X in 2010. "So don’t do it."
Sigourney Weaver, Galaxy Quest
Weaver's Gwen DeMarco character is a biting spoof of the uselessness of the secondary actors on certain shows that carry titles that rhyme with "car wreck." DeMarco had two functions on her old show: to serve as eye candy and to repeat whatever the spaceship's computer said. In Galaxy Quest, DeMarco amusingly undoes everything that Weaver worked to accomplish in the Alien films as the iconic Ellen Ripley, one of the fiercest female characters to ever spearhead a sci-fi franchise. Well, almost everything. The little-seen Galaxy Quest 20th Anniversary Special mockumentary--an uproarious Sci-Fi Channel tie-in that was stupidly left off the Galaxy Quest DVD and Blu-ray--suggests that DeMarco's limited Lieutenant Tawny Madison role had some merits. The mockumentary discloses that Tawny's trademark karate kick (a nod to the fighting moves of both Emma Peel from The Avengers and Erin Gray's Colonel Wilma Deering from the disco-era Buck Rogers) inspired a whole generation of blond-wigged female "Questarians" to imitate Tawny's fighting moves, and that maybe Tawny was a better role for DeMarco than the one she turned down, "a small part in a Woody Allen movie" (a sly reference to Weaver's appearance in Annie Hall). Speaking of secondary actors on fake sci-fi shows...
Derek Jacobi, Frasier ("The Show Must Go Off")
The esteemed British thespian deservedly won an Emmy in 2001 for his hilarious guest shot as Jackson Hedley, a mash-up of William Shatner and future Frasier guest star Patrick Stewart. The episode involves the Crane brothers' reunion with Hedley, a stage acting mentor who introduced them to Shakespeare when they were kids. Because Frasier and Niles are elitist snobs, they're more familiar with Hedley's Shakespeare work than with his signature role, as the android sidekick on Space Patrol. The brothers are appalled to discover their acting idol has been reduced to a Galaxy Quest-like, post-show career of "hawking T-shirts and sci-fi gewgaws," so in another one of their misguided business ventures, they attempt to rescue Hedley from the sci-fi con circuit by bankrolling his stage comeback. But Frasier and Niles become even more horrified when they watch Hedley rehearse and realize maybe he isn't as great a thesp as they thought he was. To give you a good idea of Hedley's atrocious delivery, think Dr. Orpheus from The Venture Bros. suffering from diarrhea--and if he had taken elocution lessons from Jon Lovitz's Master Thespian from SNL.
Alec Baldwin, SNL "Soap Opera Digest" sketch
In a 1993 sketch that's funnier than his most popular SNL bit, the balls-deep-in-double-entendres "Schwetty Balls," Baldwin delves into his soap opera acting past (The Doctors, Knots Landing) to play Trent Derricks, the star of Doctors, Nurses and Patients. Actually, Derricks isn't that bad of an actor. That is if you overlook his tendency to give interesting pronunciations to medical terms ("We believe it might be a pole-yip. It might be the Big C: canker! It might be benig. It might be malig-nant.") and names of Ivy League universities ("There's no class at Yeah-leh Medical School that can prepare you for this!"). (The sketch can be found on the SNL: The Best of Alec Baldwin DVD but is nowhere to be found in Yahoo's "complete" SNL archive.)
Alec Baldwin, 30 Rock ("Jack-Tor")
I know it's Baldwin again, but the guy just excels at pretending to be a subpar performer, whether it's inebriated '60s variety show host Joey Montero, the Dean Martin analog in the recent live episode "Live from Studio 6H," 30 Rock's delightful homage to live TV, or Jack Donaghy, a network exec with no clue about how to say a simple line or two in front of a camera. Lorne Michaels, whose company produces 30 Rock, must really be good-humored about himself because the "Jack's outtakes" montage in this episode is clearly star/showrunner Tina Fey's jab at Michaels' stilted cameos on SNL.
Any of the actors who played Jack Horner's porn stars in Boogie Nights
Almost everyone has a favorite moment from Boogie Nights. Heather Graham stripping to nothing but her roller skates. The shout-out to I Am Cuba. Mark Wahlberg mangling that cheesy theme song from The Transformers: The Movie. The drug deal-gone-bad sequence. The end credits--for those of you with a weak bladder. For me, it's Graham stripping to nothing but her roller skates. Coming in a close second is any of the footage from Jack Horner's movies-within-the-movie, in which we glimpse the genesis of John C. Reilly's dimwitted comedic personas ("Let's get some of that Saturday night beaver..."). Amber Waves' stilted delivery right before her first sex scene with Dirk Diggler always amuses me. Julianne Moore is a whiz at portraying vacant-eyed starlets like Amber. The character has never quite left Moore: a little bit of Amber seeped into a surprisingly funny SNL Ladies Man sketch where Moore stole the show because of her performance as a ditzy spokesmodel, as well as into her Cookie's Fortune character, an amateur actress who participates in a cheesy production of Salome at the local church.
Donald Glover and Gillian Jacobs, Community ("Messianic Myths and Ancient Peoples")
The cult favorite has thrown its characters into so many situations where they've proven to be terrible actors, whether it's a Greendale Community College TV commercial, children's theater or extremely awkward PDAs. But the "Messianic Myths and Ancient Peoples" episode's brief glimpse at the religious movie directed by Shirley (Yvette Nicole Brown) and starring Troy (Glover) and Britta (Jacobs) stands out because of Troy's pronunciation of "Beatitudes" and Britta's silly dance moves.
Fran Kranz, The TV Set
The breakout performance in the wildly funny 2007 indie movie The TV Set belonged not to David Duchovny (although in The TV Set, he's pitch-perfect as a frustrated Hollywood screenwriter) but to the then-unknown Fran Kranz, who, since The TV Set, has become a favorite actor of Joss Whedon's (who's no stranger to poking fun at sucky acting) and appeared in Whedon productions like the two-season curio Dollhouse and the long-delayed Cabin in the Woods.
Loosely based on writer/director Jake Kasdan's own experiences in the TV industry, the Judd Apatow-produced TV Set mocks everything that's wrong with the business today, from network interference--which Kasdan and Apatow had to deal with while working on one of my all-time favorite cult shows, Freaks and Geeks--to the rise of so-called reality TV to the power trips of self-absorbed and needy actors from scripted shows. Kranz played one such self-absorbed and needy actor, the fictional Zach Harper, the scenery-devouring star of The Wexler Chronicles, yet another legal drama about a young lawyer in love with the one that got away (a network exec is overheard describing The Wexler Chronicles as "a little Northern Exposure, a little Ed," but the show looks more like Ed meets October Road meets Ally McBeal, except without the lame peeks into Ally's brain).
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| Sophie Devereaux (Gina Bellman), Leverage's resident grifter and expert on playing pretend |
Gina Bellman, Leverage
A comedic standout as ditzy bisexual Jane on the Steven Moffat-created Britcom Coupling, Bellman is also one of the few British actresses who can pull off an American accent, as she proved time and time again on Leverage as Sophie Devereaux, a British grifter who moonlights as a theater actress when she's not busy grifting. In the Rashomon-style episode "The Rashomon Job," Bellman's skills with many accents besides American ones fueled a terrific running gag in which each flashback retold by Sophie's Leverage teammates offered a different take on her British accent.
The chameleonic Sophie is amazing when she pretends to be someone else (whether it's as an American federal agent or as a half-Indian businesswoman) during the Leverage team's cons. But as the Leverage pilot points out in a flashback to Sophie in Macbeth and as her teammates later note amongst themselves after they're forced to endure one of her local plays, a misguided restaging of Death of a Salesman, Sophie's terrible when she has to act onstage.
Speaking of lousy versions of Death of a Salesman...
Kevin Kline, Soapdish
In this wonderfully scored (Alan Silvestri in Perez Prado mode!) and frequently quotable 1991 farce about the behind-the-scenes turmoil and ego-tripping at the fictional daytime soap The Sun Also Sets, the funniest moment of Kline's role as washed-up former Sun Also Sets star Jeffrey Anderson takes place not during the Sun Also Sets scenes. It takes place before the unhappy Jeffrey rejoins the soap (Kline's knack for farcical rage in A Fish Called Wanda won him an Oscar, and that knack is also on display in Soapdish).
Seduced by current Sun Also Sets cast member Montana Moorehead (Cathy Moriarty) into getting her rival Celeste Talbert (Sally Field) off the show, producer David Barnes (Robert Downey Jr.) decides to rehire Celeste's old on-screen (and off-screen) romantic partner Jeffrey, whom Celeste despises. Jeffrey has been out of the network TV radar for quite some time, so when David tracks down Jeffrey in Florida, he's floundering in a dinner-theater production of Death of a Salesman.
In an A.V. Club "Random Roles" interview, Kline, who actually appeared early in his career on a daytime soap (Search for Tomorrow), said that he identified with Jeffrey's experience in dinner-theater hell.
"That's the scene that got me when I read it. I just laughed out loud; that whole idea is so funny," recalled Kline. "'Don't call me Mr. Loman!' It was a good experience. 'This is not what I do! I'm a classical actor! I'm a serious actor!'"
The absurdity of delivering dramatic Arthur Miller dialogue while waiting tables reminds me of an unintentionally funny Revolutionary War/Civil War school play I saw when I was a kid. Because the junior high school's theater department couldn't afford mic packs, the students had to hold a mic in front of them as they spoke, so this resulted in long and awkward pauses between the dialogue as they handed the mic back and forth to each other. The shit was funnier than The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer.
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