In the early 1990s, there was a sitcom called Bob which is mainly remembered for two reasons. First, it was the third sitcom featuring and named after Bob Newhart. Second, it was about a comic book artist. The basic set-up is that Bob McKay was a comic book artist in the 1950s, but got forced out of the industry in the wake of the Senate Subcommittee Hearings on Juvenile Delinquincy. He spent several decades in the greeting card business until he's contacted by a newer publisher who wants to bring back his most popular character, Mad-Dog. The series then revolves around Bob working on this comic book revival while also dealing with the mundane domestic drama.
Well, that's the first season at least. The show got substantially overhauled for the second season, but I'll get to that in a bit.
I recall the show coming out, but the timing was such that I wasn't able to watch it. Given that it didn't last very long, and was largely forgotten almost immediately, I was pretty sure it wasn't very good and never bothered to track it down. More recently, though, I learned that Marvel had published an actual Mad-Dog comic book between the show's first and second seasons, and I became curious how the show and comic might intersect and/or overlap. So I sat down to watch the show.
It was... not good. Not even a little. The only real humor to be found was in Newhart's line delivery. The scripts were just not funny.
See, the problem was that the show wasn't built around the characters at all. Every character was a very basic archetype, which are then never built on. They're then forced into a plot where their actions are driven entirely by the needs of the plot, regardless of whether or not they make sense for even their archetype, much less their individual character. Lines of dialogue -- particularly the jokes -- are written generically in a "well, somebody has to say this" fashion and then just assigned to whichever character is physically closest without the dialogue being tailored for them. It's a series of set-up/joke line combinations inelegantly lashed together around the outline of a basic plot, and the jokes were tired thirty years earlier.
To make things even more strained, the casting was terrible. Not that any actor was particularly bad, but they were cast against their strengths and there was little visible chemistry among them. Bob's wife was played by Carlene Watkins -- who is 23 years younger than Newhart. She would've been maybe a year old when Bob created the character supposedly based on her. Watkins could maybe pass for five years older than she actually was, but she'd need to be at least 15 years older for it to make any sense and, even then, it'd still be creepy. Bob's daughter was played by Cynthia Stevenson. She was 30 years old at the time, portraying someone in their early 20s who acts like someone in their mid-teens. Tom Poston played one of Bob's old colleagues and friend. He was the right age, at least, but they made his character a sleazy womanizer; a character type very much not what Poston is best at.
The show was given a second season, but I think it must've been some kind of contractual thing. The final episode of the first season effectively kills the entire premise by having a new owner swoop in a callously fire everyone. When the second season starts, Bob is working at a greeting card company with an entirely different cast (except for Watkins and Stevenson). They even got an entirely new house set with a radically different layout, and even the show's writers were completely replaced.
But the problem remained that the show just had a group of generic stock characters. The young, energetic writer with something to prove from season one was replaced with a young, energetic salesman with dreams of becoming a writer. The older, sarcastic letterer who didn't care what anybody thought was replaced with a mid-30s, sarcastic bookkeeper who is indifferent to what anybody thinks. Jokes are assigned to whoever is standing closest without much regard to how it works for their character. Again, most of the humor comes from Newhart's line deliveries, and the only thing funny beyond that was new cast member Betty White's line deliveries.
What's interesting about all this, too, is that Marvel put out a Mad-Dog comic book to help promote the show. Kind of a meta product, it was actually a flip-book in which one half was done in a goofy Silver Age style
that was intended to represent what Bob's original comic looked like, while the other half was done in a grim-n-gritty contemporary '90s style intended to represent what the in-show revamp looked like. As creator Ty Templeton later pointed out, “The book ended up being TOO different, from front to back, to please any audience out there. To the ‘we love it violent and dark’ crowd, my half was bizarre and dumb. And to the crowd that liked the fun and satire—and the sly but naughty jokes—the other half was too mainstream-Marvel.”
Making matters worse, the entire series came out after the first season ended and the comic within the show had been axed.
I suspect the intent was to release the comic in the hiatus between seasons 1 and 2 as a way to maintain some level of interest. In the second and third issues, there's an episode guide of the entire first season to make sure readers are caught up on the whole, overall story. And for the season finale, they cite that it ends on a cliffhanger. Which it technically does, but the outcome is so blazingly obvious that I'm sure no one was in suspense over it. Which of course makes the whole point of the comic counter-productive, even if it were executed in the best way possible. Any reader who was either excited by the first season and enjoyed seeing the comic as a way to tide them over until season two, and any reader who had missed the show but came across the comic and found the premise interesting both would come back in the fall for a season two that was all-but-completely unrelated to the initial concept.
Now had the show been good -- or even half-decent -- the comic would've done at least something to keep up interest over that summer. Given the lead times ahead of publication, I'm sure no one at Marvel had even seen a single episode when they had begun working on it, and there certainly wouldn't have been ratings numbers to suggest whether it'd be successful or not. Although given how bad the show wound up being and how poorly the comic inevitably sold, I'm surprised it lasted as long as six issues. Surely, Marvel must've known both the show and the comic were a flop before issue four went to press, so I would guess there was something in their contract with CBS that said they had to publish at least six issues.
Ultimately, the ONLY thing decent about the whole shebang was the episode "You Can't Win" in which they depict a comics awards ceremony, and the show featured actual comic legends Jack Kirby, Sergio Aragones, Jim Lee, Mell Lazarus, Mel Keefer, Marc Silvestri, and Bob Kane. All of them with actual speaking parts! Of course, the only real "funny" thing about that particular episode is seeing the height difference between Lee and Silvestri when they stand next to one another. And if nothing else, the show and this episode got Jack Kirby his third acting credit!
Well, that's the first season at least. The show got substantially overhauled for the second season, but I'll get to that in a bit.
I recall the show coming out, but the timing was such that I wasn't able to watch it. Given that it didn't last very long, and was largely forgotten almost immediately, I was pretty sure it wasn't very good and never bothered to track it down. More recently, though, I learned that Marvel had published an actual Mad-Dog comic book between the show's first and second seasons, and I became curious how the show and comic might intersect and/or overlap. So I sat down to watch the show.
It was... not good. Not even a little. The only real humor to be found was in Newhart's line delivery. The scripts were just not funny.
See, the problem was that the show wasn't built around the characters at all. Every character was a very basic archetype, which are then never built on. They're then forced into a plot where their actions are driven entirely by the needs of the plot, regardless of whether or not they make sense for even their archetype, much less their individual character. Lines of dialogue -- particularly the jokes -- are written generically in a "well, somebody has to say this" fashion and then just assigned to whichever character is physically closest without the dialogue being tailored for them. It's a series of set-up/joke line combinations inelegantly lashed together around the outline of a basic plot, and the jokes were tired thirty years earlier.
To make things even more strained, the casting was terrible. Not that any actor was particularly bad, but they were cast against their strengths and there was little visible chemistry among them. Bob's wife was played by Carlene Watkins -- who is 23 years younger than Newhart. She would've been maybe a year old when Bob created the character supposedly based on her. Watkins could maybe pass for five years older than she actually was, but she'd need to be at least 15 years older for it to make any sense and, even then, it'd still be creepy. Bob's daughter was played by Cynthia Stevenson. She was 30 years old at the time, portraying someone in their early 20s who acts like someone in their mid-teens. Tom Poston played one of Bob's old colleagues and friend. He was the right age, at least, but they made his character a sleazy womanizer; a character type very much not what Poston is best at.
The show was given a second season, but I think it must've been some kind of contractual thing. The final episode of the first season effectively kills the entire premise by having a new owner swoop in a callously fire everyone. When the second season starts, Bob is working at a greeting card company with an entirely different cast (except for Watkins and Stevenson). They even got an entirely new house set with a radically different layout, and even the show's writers were completely replaced.
But the problem remained that the show just had a group of generic stock characters. The young, energetic writer with something to prove from season one was replaced with a young, energetic salesman with dreams of becoming a writer. The older, sarcastic letterer who didn't care what anybody thought was replaced with a mid-30s, sarcastic bookkeeper who is indifferent to what anybody thinks. Jokes are assigned to whoever is standing closest without much regard to how it works for their character. Again, most of the humor comes from Newhart's line deliveries, and the only thing funny beyond that was new cast member Betty White's line deliveries.
I suspect the intent was to release the comic in the hiatus between seasons 1 and 2 as a way to maintain some level of interest. In the second and third issues, there's an episode guide of the entire first season to make sure readers are caught up on the whole, overall story. And for the season finale, they cite that it ends on a cliffhanger. Which it technically does, but the outcome is so blazingly obvious that I'm sure no one was in suspense over it. Which of course makes the whole point of the comic counter-productive, even if it were executed in the best way possible. Any reader who was either excited by the first season and enjoyed seeing the comic as a way to tide them over until season two, and any reader who had missed the show but came across the comic and found the premise interesting both would come back in the fall for a season two that was all-but-completely unrelated to the initial concept.
Now had the show been good -- or even half-decent -- the comic would've done at least something to keep up interest over that summer. Given the lead times ahead of publication, I'm sure no one at Marvel had even seen a single episode when they had begun working on it, and there certainly wouldn't have been ratings numbers to suggest whether it'd be successful or not. Although given how bad the show wound up being and how poorly the comic inevitably sold, I'm surprised it lasted as long as six issues. Surely, Marvel must've known both the show and the comic were a flop before issue four went to press, so I would guess there was something in their contract with CBS that said they had to publish at least six issues.
Ultimately, the ONLY thing decent about the whole shebang was the episode "You Can't Win" in which they depict a comics awards ceremony, and the show featured actual comic legends Jack Kirby, Sergio Aragones, Jim Lee, Mell Lazarus, Mel Keefer, Marc Silvestri, and Bob Kane. All of them with actual speaking parts! Of course, the only real "funny" thing about that particular episode is seeing the height difference between Lee and Silvestri when they stand next to one another. And if nothing else, the show and this episode got Jack Kirby his third acting credit!
Here are this week's links to what I've had published recently...
