Teaming with Joe Flynn as his ne'er-do-well brother-in-law, Joey Bishop got to do plenty of shtick in this premiere episode of his comedy series, and I was glad to see it on our local nostalgia channel. But its script was way over the top.
The carefully mismatched comedy teams of yore, including the greatest like Laurel & Hardy and Abbott & Costello, used the contrast (often "dumb one/clever one") to great effect, but here it was milked to a fare thee well. At one point Bishop retorts to Flynn that the bumbler is 100% = always wrong, and that premise simply won't fly.
So the twists and turns of Bishop trying to hold onto his job after his boss unfairly fires him are increasingly lame and eventually annoying, all in service of running a one-gag story into the ground. I had extreme difficulty in watching the central scene, in which the boys are trapped unwittingly in one of those awful Reality-TV shows, somewhere between Allen Funt's groundbreaking "Candid Camera" and more recent junk like Ashton Kutcher's "Punk'd". With Joey Foreman (a trio of Joe/Joeys in the leads) browbeating poor Bishop to talk into the napkin holder at a diner, the mindlessness of the burlesque sketch is executed in such heavy-handed fashion to make an actual burlesque or vaudeville routine look subtle.
Later when well-meaning Flynn manages to cock things up over & over & over, I became exasperated. Hardly a situation one would want in the first show of a series.
Fortunately things improved, the show graduated to Color, and Joey eventually had his variety show with Regis Philbin as second banana to which I was addicted (and which had many memorable episodes, notably the one where Robert Culp after attending a screening gave a terrific testimonial to Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch" which had a profound effect on me as a budding film buff and future Sam Peckinpah fanatic.
The carefully mismatched comedy teams of yore, including the greatest like Laurel & Hardy and Abbott & Costello, used the contrast (often "dumb one/clever one") to great effect, but here it was milked to a fare thee well. At one point Bishop retorts to Flynn that the bumbler is 100% = always wrong, and that premise simply won't fly.
So the twists and turns of Bishop trying to hold onto his job after his boss unfairly fires him are increasingly lame and eventually annoying, all in service of running a one-gag story into the ground. I had extreme difficulty in watching the central scene, in which the boys are trapped unwittingly in one of those awful Reality-TV shows, somewhere between Allen Funt's groundbreaking "Candid Camera" and more recent junk like Ashton Kutcher's "Punk'd". With Joey Foreman (a trio of Joe/Joeys in the leads) browbeating poor Bishop to talk into the napkin holder at a diner, the mindlessness of the burlesque sketch is executed in such heavy-handed fashion to make an actual burlesque or vaudeville routine look subtle.
Later when well-meaning Flynn manages to cock things up over & over & over, I became exasperated. Hardly a situation one would want in the first show of a series.
Fortunately things improved, the show graduated to Color, and Joey eventually had his variety show with Regis Philbin as second banana to which I was addicted (and which had many memorable episodes, notably the one where Robert Culp after attending a screening gave a terrific testimonial to Sam Peckinpah's "The Wild Bunch" which had a profound effect on me as a budding film buff and future Sam Peckinpah fanatic.