Bosom Buddies: Pilot

Bosom Buddies: Pilot
ABC
November 27, 1980
Sitcom
DVD
B

When this premiered on Thursday at 8:30, after Mork & Mindy, I soon had a new favorite show.  It's a little hard to sort out how I felt about the show in junior high, or how I felt seeing it again at 16, when Splash's popularity caused NBC to resurrect this program that ABC (and most folks) had too little faith in, let alone what it was like to see it appear on cable in the early '90s, with its defiant theme song-- a cover of Billy Joel's "My Life"-- replaced by the pop-souly "Try to Shake Me Loose," whose instrumental version had aired in the closing credits from the beginning.  And now, so many layers, over 35 years later.  Deep breath, here goes, let me try to untangle this.

First off, it had a young, relatively inexperienced cast:

• 32-year-old Telma Hopkins as Isabelle Hammond
• 25-year-old Peter Scolari as Henry Desmond
• 24-year-old Tom Hanks as Kip Wilson
• 23-year-old Donna Dixon as Sonny Lumet
• 22-year-old Wendie Jo Sperber as Amy

Even Holland Taylor, who plays Ruth Dunbar, was only 37 at the time (and she honestly hasn't aged much since).  With the exception of Dixon (who never quite clicked), they all have a firm hold on their characters right from the beginning.  The chemistry is strong as well, especially with Hanks and Scolari riffing together like they'd been doing this for decades.  Joel Zwick, who had directed three first season Mork & Mindy episodes, directs his first of eighteen for this show, nearly half of the total (37), and he deserves some of the credit for the pilot being as strong as it is.

But I think even more should go to creator Chris Thompson, who would write eight more episodes.  He gave the two leads sharp, hip, funny lines, like the one about Black Like Me.  At twelve, I was still too young to watch Saturday Night Live much (and it would be pretty lame that season anyway), but this was my cutting-edge show, even if the critics and others thought it was a pathetic rip-off of Some Like It Hot.  This first episode does have some SLIH moments, like when all the neighbors come by for drinks in their nighties, but this program was never just about drag humor.  When Burt and Danny wore drag in Soap's season-opener, it was supposed to be funny just to see them in wigs and dresses.  BBuddies always put an extra little spin, like in the "Macho Man" sequence pictured above.*

The other aspect of the show I need to talk about is that Kip and Henry were ad men, but they were nothing like Darrin Stephens.  They had late-Baby-Boomer pop-cultural sensibilities, which would show up in their ads but mostly in their banter.  I didn't get all the jokes at the time-- I probably laughed harder at the Margaret Trudeau reference now, in middle age with an awareness of her affairs, than I would've in the past-- but as with Mystery Science Theater later, I loved trying to keep up.  Also, the conflict between advertising and their more artistic dreams is set up here in the pilot and would play out in various ways throughout the series, something I hadn't seen much of on television, and is perhaps more poignant for being set in such an on-the-cusp time as the early '80s, when it was not yet The Eighties in the way that 1987 for instance would be but is not the '70s either.  I'll talk about that more later, and not just in reference to this show.

Mike Agresta, who was an uncredited Student on Welcome Back, Kotter, is an uncredited Office Worker here.  I don't think I have Edie Adams in anything else, but I'll note that she appears as the building manager Darlene.


*Note that the music rights issue is a complicated one for this series.  Besides "My Life," other songs would be omitted from the DVD versions and sometimes cable as well.  So I will at times watch both the DVD and VHS copies and compare them, perhaps adding my memories of what's missing from either or both.