Throwback Thursday: The Muppets (2011)

Usually on Throwback Thursday, I pull out from my desk cabinet--with my eyes closed--a movie ticket stub I didn't throw away, and then I discuss the movie on the ticket and maybe a little bit of its score, which might be now streaming on AFOS. Today, instead of drawing some random ticket, I'm going to focus today's TBT piece on the Muppets' return to the big screen after a 12-year absence, due to next Tuesday's premiere of The Muppets on ABC.

Network TV appears to be in such a sorry state this fall--original content on either streaming services or cable is where it's at these days--that the only new network comedy I'm looking forward to is ABC's The Muppets, which is being billed as "a more adult Muppet Show" (wait a minute, we've already had a more adult Muppet Show: it was called The Larry Sanders Show). As much as I love the film that was both the first Muppet feature film I ever saw and my unlikely gateway into the caper genre, the Jim Henson-directed, partially Jay Tarses-scripted Great Muppet Caper--it's my favorite of the Muppet feature films and a film subsequent Muppet films haven't surpassed, not even 2011's well-received The Muppets--TV, the medium the Muppets were created for, is where they work best and are at their funniest. I'm talking episodic TV, not movie-of-the-week TV, which was where Kermit the Frog and company spent most of the 2000s (and disappointed the franchise's most die-hard fans by starring in TV-movies like the poorly received Muppets' Wizard of Oz). Like the A.V. Club's resident Muppets fan, Erik Adams, said last year, a new take on The Muppet Show would give the Muppets' writers and puppeteers the proper space to stretch their ambitions and allow the franchise's gargantuan cast of characters to shine again in a format that's not as cramped as a two-hour movie.

But I have one huge reservation about this new weekly Muppet comedy from showrunners Bill Prady, the Big Bang Theory co-creator who got his start working for the late Henson, and Bob Kushell, and that would be the show's rehash of the confessional/mockumentary format that was popularized by The Office, Parks and Recreation and Modern Family. It's such a tired format these days that even Modern Family is starting to find ways to break away from the format, like when it told an entire story using nothing but Skype chats last season. No matter how many times Gonzo points out the tiredness of the confessional gimmick, I really wish the Prady/Kushell show would phase out the confessionals because much of the Muppet characters' appeal is due to their timelessness, and the confessionals scream out 2005.

Timelessness is also integral to why Flight of the Conchords episode director James Bobin's 2011 big-screen reboot works so well, despite occasional missteps like the film's ill-advised needle drop of Starship's 1985 radio hit "We Built This City," an anthem about maintaining the "purity" of rock n' roll that neither rocks nor rolls. Although I'm not a fan of musicals, I would rather hear another musical number written by Flight of the Conchords star Bret McKenzie--who won a Best Original Song Oscar for penning the film's clever and very Conchords-ish number "Man or Muppet"--than have to endure "We Built This City" again.



References to anger management classes and the crassness of reality TV (and terrible Starship songs) aside, Bobin's The Muppets could have come out of 1981 or 1991. There was a lot of grumbling to the press from Muppet project veterans like the retired Frank Oz about Bobin's movie before its release. They felt (no pun intended) the screenplay by lead actor Jason Segel and his writing partner Nicholas Stoller disrespected the Muppet characters by having them tell fart jokes or experience Martin-and-Lewis-ish bitter feuds. The film's story has Segel's character and his Muppet Show-loving little brother Walter, a new Muppet character voiced and performed by Peter Linz, helping Kermit (Steve Whitmire, whose most sublime bit of Muppet acting in the film has to be the distraught expression his hand gives to Kermit's face when he finds out Miss Piggy kidnapped Jack Black) to get the other stars of The Muppet Show back together after years of estrangement and unfulfilling jobs away from the limelight.

A bit of the old guard's skepticism about Segel and Stoller's screenplay is understandable because, conceptually, their screenplay is on the creaky side. Much of it is a rehash of the "Muppets put on a show to stop a greedy developer from tearing down their theater" story from 2002's made-for-TV It's a Very Merry Muppet Christmas Movie, which starred Joan Cusack as the greedy developer instead of Chris Cooper, who--despite being trained to rap by McKenzie, a skilled Beastie Boys parodist who once proved he could flow on Conchords, for a brief number where his villain character raps about himself--should never ever rap on screen again.

But otherwise, Segel, Stoller and Bobin take that "Muppets reunite to put on a show" premise and make it a timeless and effective way to reintroduce the Muppets and get a new generation of viewers to understand why the Muppets' irreverence and warmth were a big deal to those of us who grew up watching The Great Muppet Caper repeatedly or enjoying The Muppet Show and either its shtick involving Animal (the description of Animal's untold backstory in ego trip's Big Book of Racism! is hilarious: "Drunk, inarticulate and wilder than Tijuana on a Jerry Springer celebrity spring break--naturally, he's Mexican") or its various musical numbers. One of those numbers was the show's cover of Piero Umiliani's "Mah Na Mah Na," a nonsense song that resurfaces in the Segel/Stoller/Bobin movie's end credits and is notorious for originating not as a Muppet Show number but as an original song during the 1968 Italian softcore porno Svezia, inferno e paradiso (Swedish: Heaven and Hell).



How else should the Segel/Stoller/Bobin movie have reintroduced the Muppets? Put them through another half-baked parody like a Wizard of Oz remake? The "Muppets never grow apart or do fart jokes" complaints strike me as very "Gene Roddenberry won't allow the Enterprise-D officers to get into conflicts with each other"-ish. The skeptical Muppet veterans were wrong about Segel, Stoller and Bobin being too crass and cynical in their approach to bringing back the Muppets. In fact, I think Segel, Stoller and Bobin were so reverent at times about honoring the most beloved of Muppet movies, 1979's sweet-natured Muppet Movie, and pleasing the old guard (plus the Disney execs) that their movie doesn't have enough terrific little "whoa, how did that get snuck into a family film?" gags like Janice's random aside in The Great Muppet Caper about her past ("And I said, 'Look, Mother, it's my life, okeeey? So if I want to live on a beach and walk around naked...' Oh").

Fortunately, Segel, Stoller and Bobin didn't do away with the self-aware dialogue that's classic Muppets ("Didn't you see our first movie? We drive") or the occasional jokes only a few adults in the audience will understand, like the Muppets showing up on the cover of Ebony on a wall in Kermit's mansion or Rashida Jones threatening Kermit with "I will rerun Benson if I have to." I'm sure that line led to a lot of kids in the audience saying, "Mommy, who's Benson?" Segel, Stoller and Bobin also came up with the first moment in a Muppet movie that genuinely moved me and nearly made me tear up:

Whoops, not that scene. This scene:

The Muppets is noteworthy for being the first Muppet movie to take The Muppet Show and all its episodes and make them a pivotal part of the storyline. While Kermit's discovery of the crowds of fans waiting outside the Muppet Theater nearly made me tear up, some Muppet Show fans have said the film's archival audio clip of Kermit introducing guest star Bob Hope was the part of the film that first made them emotional.

That's how beloved The Muppet Show is as a variety show (variety is, by the way, a long-dead-in-America genre Neil Patrick Harris is attempting to bring back to American network TV this fall with NBC's Best Time Ever, which is loosely based on Ant & Dec's Saturday Night Takeaway from the U.K.), and the show receives a satisfying tribute in the form of The Muppets, the most enjoyable comedy movie about a variety show since 1982's My Favorite Year, director Richard Benjamin's thinly veiled movie about the making of Your Show of Shows. The Muppet Show was such a huge part of my childhood that words like "Time once again for Veterinarian's Hospital, the continuing story of a quack who has gone to the dogs" are easier for me to remember than any of the lyrics of "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Black Tie Affair: Jimmy J. Aquino's Lacuna Matata, Part 3

In this installment of "Lacuna Matata," I try my damnedest to recall another obscure TV gem that doesn't deserve to be so obscure. I promise this one's way more obscure than Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, which some people don't think was obscure enough to be the focus of a "Lacuna Matata" installment.

Whatever the hell happened to Jay Tarses, veteran comedy writer and creator of too-brash-for-prime-time, sophisticated and smart-ass TV (Buffalo Bill, The "Slap" Maxwell Story)?

While Googling desperately for anything I could find on my favorite Tarses creation, the short-lived Black Tie Affair, my search took me to a post in which the blogger writes at length about his--as well as my--favorite performance in the ultimate '80s teenage underdog flick, Teen Wolf: Tarses as the basketball coach.

I'll let "intensities" have the floor:

Unlike the great majority of Teen Wolf characters, Coach Finstock is something of a rarity in 80s teen movies--the adult authority figure who seeks neither to inspire or oppress the youth under his command. He is not motivated by a desire to teach, nor is he looking to project the failures of his own adolescence unto the kids he's teaching. In fact, Coach Finstock doesn't seem motivated by much of anything--he even seems fairly uninterested in whether the team wins or not, which as a Teen Movie coach, should really be his only concern...

The Coach offers Scott these words of wisdom, which I would consider to arguably be the greatest quote in all of film history:

"Listen, Scott, there are three rules that I live by: never get less than twelve hours sleep; never play cards with a guy who has the same first name as a city; and never get involved with a woman with a tattoo of a dagger on her body. Now you stick to that, and everything else is cream cheese."

Plopped in the middle of this clichéd, Jeph Loeb-scripted high school flick is a performance from a sharper-witted, less hackneyed movie. Methinks Tarses, not Loeb, wrote most of his own character's dialogue because the "three rules" speech sounds like it's straight out of Black Tie Affair.

If you love Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and the Harry Lockhart, Gay Perry and Harmony Faith Lane characters like I do, you'd also enjoy Black Tie Affair, a private eye genre parody/homage with a similarly reluctant and in-over-his-head hero/narrator, Dave Brodsky (a pre-West Wing Bradley Whitford). He spies on cheating spouses like Cody Man fashion catalog tycoon Christopher Cody (John Calvin), the husband and business partner of his client Margo Cody (Kate Capshaw), not because he enjoys detective work, but because this analog man in a digital world wants to be able to continue running his musty, two-story Bay Area used LP store:

"Speaking of crime terminology, what the hell do they mean by forensics? And what exactly is a bunco squad? Police talk, I hate it."

"I do insurance fraud, Polaroids and 33 1/3 LPs. Two things I don't do? Compact discs and murder."

Brodsky's investigation of Chris is complicated by both his feelings for his attractive client and the body of a murdered woman Chris discovered at his hotel:

"When she called, I thought it was just a normal job--dress up in funny clothes, sneak into a strange room, snap pictures of a couple of naked people and hope the check clears. Now it looks like murder: the World Series of the detective game. Which means I've got to get off this case prontissimo."

(Thanks, Thrilling Detective and Gray Lady archives, for keeping alive three of the only few quotes I could find from Black Tie Affair. Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum, who gave the show a C- in 1993, was out of her mind. I'll take Tarses' "manufactured drolleries" any day over the overwritten sentences that often make Schwarzbaum's reviews a chore to read.)

Adding to the other complications in Brodsky's case is his attraction to Chris' mistress, catalog supermodel Eve Saskatchewan (she and Margo were named after the rival actresses in All About Eve). Black Tie Affair gave me my first glimpse of recent Law & Order perp and '90s indie movie queen Alison Elliott (The Underneath, The Wings of the Dove), whose miniskirted appearances as Eve are another favorite memory of mine from a show that was doomed from the start.

Black Tie Affair was originally titled Smoldering Lust, but a few weeks before the NBC show's long-delayed premiere, the Peacock turned chicken and changed Tarses' original title to a less sexually charged one that they felt wouldn't offend already-pissed-off affiliates and advertisers. According to the New York Times' piece on Tarses, the network didn't even bother to tell him his show was renamed. Tarses learned about the title change from a reporter. The new title resulted in the last-minute removal of vocals from composer Patrick Williams' lite-jazz opening theme because the lyrics referred to the old title, which would have made more sense with the horny opening credits freeze-frames (a yuppie couple disrobes and makes out under the sheets) rather than Black Tie Affair.

The new title had very little to do with the show's neo-noir tone and was another in a long list of dumb titles that fail to lure us or tell us what to expect from the show or film. (Latest dumb title from a great show? Better Off Ted. Why did the person who came up with that title--I doubt it was creator/showrunner Victor Fresco--feel the need to rip off the title of John Cusack's teen suicide flick? What does Better Off Ted have to do with the show's backdrop, the research and development division of a conglomerate? And why did they have the title refer to Ted the straight man and narrator, who, despite being well-played by Jay Harrington, is the least interesting character in the ensemble? It's like if instead of Taxi, James L. Brooks called his ensemble show Alex's Garage. Why couldn't they have called it R&D? What is the deal with Grape Nuts? They're neither grapes nor nuts!)

NBC had little faith in a half-hour, laugh track-less show that wasn't quite a sitcom and wasn't quite a drama either (Tarses' Coach Finstock-style response to the Times about how to categorize Black Tie Affair was "I don't know how to describe it"), so the network burned off its episodes in a summertime Saturday night deathtrap time slot.

Besides Whitford's self-loathing yet likable outsider hero--he was like a Bay Area version of Jim Rockford and his iconoclasm reflected Tarses' outsider nature--and the clever and novel idea of having Brodsky run his agency from a used record store instead of a standard P.I. office, I also dug how Black Tie Affair wasn't an overt spoof in the mold of the Naked Gun movies and Carl Reiner's Fatal Instinct, though there were jabs at "police talk":

Mr. Tarses says he has more in mind than mere lampooning. "Sometimes it gets pretty heavy, down the road," he said, not wanting to reveal too much about pending episodes. "There are some pretty dramatic confrontations." The four main characters, he acknowledged, are not as ingratiating as Molly [Dodd] was. "I think these people all have a bit of an unsavory air to them, and you have to grow to like them," he said.

Then came the fly-covered cherry on the top of NBC's shit sundae: after four Saturday night airings, Tarses didn't get to show those dramatic confrontations he promised because the network gave up on Black Tie Affair and chose not to air the other eight episodes that were already completed, which left the show's mysteries unresolved.

Who was the mystery woman Chris found dead in bed in the first episode and who killed her? Who will Brodsky choose to bed? Margo? Eve? Or maybe even Cookie, his underappreciated and much less neurotic assistant (played by hot Korean American model-turned-actress Maggie Han, star of another short-lived gumshoe show, Murphy's Law)?

And going back to the mystery at the top of the post, whatever the hell happened to Tarses?

After the cancellations of Black Tie Affair and Public Morals, an even more controversial 1996 collabo with Steven Bochco that only aired once, Tarses the outsider vanished from the production side of TV. Perhaps he was fed up with the creative differences he kept having with network execs since the '80s. Tarses fled to BBC Radio, where he created and starred in Revolting People (2000-06), a sitcom set in Colonial-era Baltimore.

Since his disappearance, network/basic cable TV (or rather, the part of it that doesn't involve assembly-line procedural franchises and reality shows) has kept up with Tarses' brand of smart, cinematic and laugh track-less comedy, which has been carried on by his grown-up children, Matt, a former Scrubs writer/producer whose most recent credit was Worst Week, and Jamie, a network exec-turned-producer of My Boys, where their father has made a couple of guest appearances. Even so, scripted TV still needs the elder Tarses. I wonder if he has another gem like Black Tie Affair left in him. Basic cable, a place where the standards are looser than the networks' and the creative freedom Tarses used to fight for is totally encouraged, would be the perfect playground for him.

Now that the mystery of Tarses' post-Public Morals whereabouts has been solved, what about the mysteries in Black Tie Affair? A DVD release of the complete, mostly unaired series is long overdue (I refuse to watch torrents of the series). I still want to know who killed the dead chick in the hotel room.