Sunday, April 3, 2022

Wu's TV Corner #2: Buffalo Bill

 


https://thegoldenhornblog.blogspot.com/2020/09/buffalo-bill.html

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0533360/

1984 NBC. "A Hero." The cult sitcom with Dabney Coleman. This is one of the season two episodes that is at the Museum of Classic Chicago Television, and is the complete broadcast with original commercials. Other episodes come and go on Youtube all the time because it does have a following. Geena Davis, Joanna Cassidy, Charles Robinson, Max Wright, John Fiedler, Meschach Taylor. This episode features Sam Whipple as Karl Shub, Jr., the rebellious son of the Max Wright character. Written by Tom Patchett and Jay Tarses, who were the show creators, and they worked with Sam Whipple on the convenience store sitcom, Open All Night, which they also created.

Buffalo Bill is a sitcom about a daytime television show in Buffalo hosted by Dabney Coleman, who happens to be a jerk. Max Wright is the general manager Karl Shub. His son has been kicked out of Georgetown for punching a priest, and he idolizes Bill, so he is given a job at the station in the hopes that he will see Bill's true colors and straighten up his life. The B story is that Bill has purchased a big screen television from a discount retailer that turned out to be defective, and took his complaints public on the show, which causes the store owner, Fat Barry, to show up at the station looking for revenge. Bill, being a coward, runs for his life from the enraged Fat Barry, but little Karl Shub shows true courage and impresses his son, who had shown little respect for his father before. 

I watched several episodes of this on Youtube a couple of years ago, and it is a good show with a good cast, but I think the reason it wasn't more successful is the fact that Bill is just so unlikable. He really is a jerk. Audiences want someone to pull for. In this episode the audience (and everyone in the cast) was hoping that Fat Barry was going to catch Bill.

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