"It might be malig-nant": When good actors pretend to be crappy ones

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.

"Rock Box" Track of the Day: Tom Jones, "Sex Bomb (Peppermint Disco Mix)"

Song: "Sex Bomb (Peppermint Disco Mix)" by panties collector Tom Jones
Released: 2000
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: It's the opening title theme from Grosse Pointe, Darren Star's amusing WB spoof of his own creation Beverly Hills 90210. In one of the show's most memorable gags, Star poked fun at the fact that his 90210 characters were played by actors who were way too old to be pretending to be teens by having one of the male stars of Grosse Pointe's show-within-the-show wear a toupee. The most well-known (and busy) alum from the short-lived Grosse Pointe is Lindsay Sloane, who went on to do two more Grosse Pointe-esque inside-showbiz projects, Entourage and the wildly funny Judd Apatow production The TV Set (rent that film whenever you need to feel better after a favorite show of yours got killed by its network--or maybe you shouldn't rent The TV Set when you're mourning the loss of that show because the film's look at the TV industry can be downright depressing stuff).

Producer Mousse T.'s pretty damn catchy "Sex Bomb" remix, which sampled "All American Girls" by Sister Sledge, also turned up on the original version of The Office and The Simpsons.

From a 2000 PopMatters review of Grosse Pointe:

The opening credits of Grosse Pointe feature Tom Jones singing "Sex Bomb (The Peppermint Jam Disco Mix)," which is somewhere between scary and laughable, and also quite catchy. To a funky disco beat, he sings, "You're my sex bomb, and baby, you can turn me on / Now don't get me wrong, ain't gonna do you no harm / No, this bomb's for loving and you can shoot it far..." This sets the mood for the rest of the show — it all seems so familiar, just slightly off, maybe a little disconcerting. But it's only the beginning. Grosse Pointe is a mean, mean show — and nobody escapes the knife.

"It might be malig-nant": When good actors pretend to be crappy ones

(Originally published on Metroactive's Movie & Television Arts blog.)

The breakout performance in last spring's little-seen, wildly funny indie movie The TV Set belongs not to its star, recent Golden Globe winner David Duchovny (although in The TV Set, he's pitch-perfect as a frustrated Hollywood scriptwriter), but to an unknown actor named Fran Kranz.

Loosely based on writer/director Jake Kasdan's own experiences in the TV industry, The TV Set (which I recently Netflixed) mocks everything that's wrong with the business today, from network interference--which Kasdan had to deal with while working on one of my all-time favorite cult shows, Freaks and Geeks--to the rise of reality TV to the power trips of self-absorbed, needy actors from scripted shows. Kranz (pictured below) plays one such self-absorbed, 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).

In one of The TV Set's funniest moments, Duchovny--whose writer character is The Wexler Chronicles' showrunner--watches in horror on the show's set as the inexperienced Harper overplays the anger during a subdued dramatic scene in which the show's hero has to mourn the death of a loved one. I haven't seen any of Kranz's prior work (he'll next be seen as the lead in an actual show, the CBS midseason replacement Welcome to the Captain), so I don't know how good of an actor he really is outside of The TV Set, but his humorous turn as an overemotive ham is already one of my favorite performances in which a decent or excellent actor portrays a far less talented version of himself or herself. Here are some of my other favorites.

Derek Jacobi, Frasier ("The Show Must Go Off")
The celebrated 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. Unfortunately, YouSued doesn't have any clips of this standout Frasier ep, so 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. Speaking of Galaxy Quest...

Sigourney Weaver, Galaxy Quest
Weaver's character is a biting spoof of the uselessness of the secondary actors on certain shows that carry titles that rhyme with "car wreck." The fourth-tier actress Gwen DeMarco had two functions on her old show: to serve as eye candy and to repeat whatever the spaceship's computer said. In director Dean Parisot's 1999 sleeper--a better Star Trek movie than the last two official ones--DeMarco amusingly undoes everything that Weaver worked to accomplish 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--suggests that DeMarco's limited Tawny Madison role had some merits. The mockumentary discloses that Tawny's trademark karate kick (a nod to both Emma Peel and Erin Gray's Buck Rogers hottie, Col. Wilma Deering) inspired a whole generation of blond-wigged female "Questarians" to imitate the Galaxy Quest communications officer'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).

Alec Baldwin, SNL "Soap Opera Digest" sketch
In a 1993 sketch that's funnier than his most popular SNL bit, "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.)

Alec Baldwin, 30 Rock ("Jack-Tor")
I know it's Baldwin again, but the guy just excels at pretending to be a subpar actor, or in the case of 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 ep 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 comic 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 in which Moore appeared 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.