Who's the Boss?: Party Politics

Who's the Boss?: Party Politics
ABC
February 26, 1991
Sitcom
DVD
C+

Tony and Angela get involved in a senseless and expensive competition with their next-door neighbors the Harpers (Sam McMurray and Leah Ayres again), who've moved back after a year in Japan, apparently having bought their house back from Angela and exchanged their daughter who's Jonathan's age for a son who's Billy's age, turning six.  No one is the voice of reason here, although Sam and Jonathan come closest.  The episode is mildly funny in an over-the-top way, as when Angela says she's prepared to spend a quarter of a million dollars on Billy's birthday party.

Phil Doran, who wrote a couple Bob Newhart episodes, here does his first of ten, while Bob Rosenfarb wrote the episode called "The Kid" and would collaborate with Doran on those ten; Gene Braunstein is the WtB veteran among the three collaborators, with this as his twelfth of seventeen.  Josh Byrne makes his final appearance as Billy's frenemy Joey, while Ross Malinger's third and last WtB role is as Travis.  And Whose Line Is It Anyway? fans will be amused  that Ryan Stiles plays Bobo the Clown, who has ambitions as a Shakespearean actor.

The Bradys: The Brady 500

The Bradys: The Brady 500

CBS
February 9, 1990
Dramedy
DVD

D+

Talk about only for the completist!  The main problem here is the writing, by Sherwood and son Lloyd.  It's bad on several levels, including individual lines that no one could believably deliver, and I guess it's to the credit of the cast and director Bilson, who helmed four of the episodes of the final season of The Brady Bunch, that this isn't worse than it is.  Let's take it "kid" by "kid" because all six get an undercooked plot thread here:

1. Greg is still with Nora, still an obstetrician, but he starts thinking of changing specialties until a very convenient childbirth (his soon-to-be sister-in-law's nephew's) maybe (?) changes his mind;
2. Marcia, incredibly mis-recast as Leah Ayres (seriously, I kept forgetting who she was in the midst of all the Brady boys' wives and girlfriends), is still inexplicably with Wally, who lost another job, so they move in with her folks, but offer to move out but then stay and mostly react to other people's drama, and somewhere in here Wally gets a job we didn't even know he interviewed for;
3. Peter has been Flanderized into a lying slut, I think based on the fifth-season episode where his lookalike causes him to juggle two dates in one house, and the Variety pilot where he has dates with two girls who are friends, but he gets caught there, while here there are no consequences to him dating co-workers; and this is after he breaks off his fourth (!) engagement, this time to Christmas's Valerie, who's been mis-recast as poor Mary Cadorette and made into a heartless Yuppie;
4. Jan is still with Philip and they're having fun trying to conceive, after almost nine years of marriage, but she is pushing 30, so they're heartbroken about not having a baby, so they adopt a Korean girl who's afraid to hug her new grandmother (and Florence Henderson is so over the top, yes, even for her, that you can't really blame the little girl);
5. Bobby's thread gets more attention than most, as you might guess from the title, as we spend 20 minutes or 20 years following his racing career and everyone's attempts to see his big race, "The Riverdale 500" (an Archies reference?), and then he has a crippling accident, so the family reacts to that, and he recovers some but may have to spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair, but his previously never heard of girlfriend, Veejay Martha Quinn as Tracy Wagner, shows up and a scene or two later they get married;
6. And Cindy is a d.j.* who starts dating her boss, Gary Greenburg (Ken Michelman, who was Harker on M*A*S*H and doesn't seem to be old enough at 34 to be the father of a 15-year-old, let alone to play Cindy's "older man"), even though it's unclear at first (to her as well as the audience) what his marital status is (widowed) and even though it's supposed to be a big deal that he's Jewish, and yet their first date is to a hot dog stand.

(The two Brady grandsons are recast, too, but that matters less.)

The adults react to all these threads and don't at this point have their own subplots.  (Trooper that she is, 63-year-old Ann B. Davis makes with the slapstick now and again.)  Everything is so skimpily and off-handedly dealt with that VB Christmas starts to look like War and Peace in comparison.  And while the original series wasn't exactly realistic, it worked on its own level.  I watched this series at the time but felt no inclination to tape it.  And so I can't tell you if, to take the most infamous example, Marcia's one-episode alcoholism, is as bad as they say.  This is bad enough.

Moments I sort of liked:

• The Cindy/Gary chemistry isn't bad;
• Jan/Philip brings the sexy times;
• The Peter & Bobby bond is nice;
• and Dabbs Greer as the Minister reminisces, with helpful footage, about himself officiating over the chaos at Mike and Carol's wedding.

As always, many apologies, especially to stalwarts Jerry Houser (Wally) and Ron Kuhlman (Philip), that I'm limited in the number of my tags for these ginormous Brady casts.  John Wheeler, who played three different characters in the original series, shows up briefly as Wally's new boss, Joe Fletcher.  Hope Juber (AKA Hope Sherwood AKA Hope Schwartz) also had three BBunch roles and here is Erica Hopkins.  Stu Nahan, who's the Track Announcer, had been similarly typecast as Sportscaster #1 in The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan's Island.  Leonard R. Garner, Jr. returns as Bobby's pit-crew friend Howie and disappears from the episode soon after the accident.  Nick Toth and Barbara Mallory reprise their VB Christmas roles as Mr. and Mrs. Powell, the couple in the delivery room, giving arguably the worst performances in either production, especially her, no small accomplishment.

*This is ironic in light of last year's controversy over her hate talk, but then it's also ironic to hear Carol talk to Peter about his love life, considering Florence's vocal disapproval of one of Chris's four marriages.

Who's the Boss?: Heather Can Wait

Who's the Boss?: Heather Can Wait
ABC
March 21, 1989
Sitcom
DVD
B

Don Segall, who wrote one episode for M*A*S*H, co-wrote this episode where new neighbors Pam (Leah Ayres, who would be Fake Marcia on the Bradys) and Mark Harper (Sam McMurray, at the time recognizable from his years as a regular on The Tracey Ullman Show), along with their precocious 12-year-old daughter Heather, move in and annoy Tony and Angela.  The clash is similar and yet different from the Conners and the Langs in a recent Roseanne episode.  The Langs were gently mocked but they were nice people, while the Harpers use "niceness" to cover up aggression.  Tony and Angela quarrel with them, especially after T & A catch Jonathan and Heather kissing.  (Light's hyperventilation adds a whole other level to the humor.)  And the tag scene is one of those supernatural or at least peculiar ones that would pop up now and again in the second half of the series run, this time with Mona practicing voodoo.