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BAD GRAMMER
by Daren Foster

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DAREN FOSTER PODCAST September 1 2009 - PRESS PLAY TO LISTEN

BAD GRAMMER
by Daren Foster

***Hank sank. Bundy thrives.***

The year’s 1995. You’ve been high pretty well since 1978 and next to the Bono mullet circa The Unforgettable Fire atop your head, the one thing you take very, very seriously is TV. Your most recent roommate, Brad, could not stop laughing during an episode of Married With Children. Even as high as you were, you failed to find the humour in the show. Despite your hairstyle, you like to think of yourself as more high-brow. A discerning viewer, you were, with an elevated sense of taste (again, despite the coif). You were a Frasier guy and weren’t afraid to crow about it. This led to frequent heated exchanges with whoever your roommate was at the time. On this particular occasion, it was Brad.

“Just because you think Frasier’s funny doesn’t mean Married With Children can’t be funny too,” he tells you.

You point out that wasn’t what you were saying. Frasier was funny. Maybe even the funniest sitcom ever. But that was independent of the fact that Married With Children sucked. It was not funny disirrespective of Frasier. Brad points out that ‘disirrespective’ isn’t even a word.

“What? Just because they don’t use it on Married With Children means it isn’t a word?” you ask Brad, very, very facetiously. “That would mean any word with more than 4 syllables isn’t really a word.” Ouch. Touché.

Brad tells me -- you -- to get a haircut which is completely out of line and uncalled for. You start pointing a Ranch flavoured Doritos stained finger, yelling at Brad that he’ll see. Ten, fifteen years down the road, nobody will remember Married With Children and that lump playing Al Bundy will be selling juicers on some early weekend morning infomercial. Frasier will probably still be running and still be as funny. Kelsey Grammer will still be winning Emmys.

“You’ll see, Brad. You’ll see,” you wind up, going in for another handful of Doritos. Brad moves out soon afterwards.

Flash forward nearly fifteen years to 2009. You’re still high a lot, watching a lot of TV with a slight stirring in the subconscious that there might well be a connection between the two. Frasier is not still running and had stopped being funny long before it had closed up shop. The lump playing Al Bundy, Ed O’Neill, is not selling juicers in infomercials but is starring in what may be the funniest sitcom since Arrested Development. Kelsey Grammer is starring in a risibly nerve rattling piece of garbage called Hank.

Both life and fame have funny ways of not turning out anything like you expected. What’s that Frank Sinatra once sang? You’re ridin’ high in April, shot down in May. While taking the short view may provide moments of instant gratification, the long view has a way of injecting soul soothing streams of satisfaction.

Kelsey Grammer was arguably the biggest breakout star in the immediate post-Cheers era. It didn’t hurt that he ran with his well established Cheers character, Frasier Crane, directly into a high profile spin-off. Critically, Frasier was a monstrous hit, winning 37 Emmy awards during its 11 year run including 4 for Grammer himself in the Leading Actor category. While the series lost much of its sparkle during the last 4 years or so, it’s hard to believe that someone like Grammer, who rose to fame in such pedigreed style, could allow himself to be seen strutting and fretting on the soundstage of the monumentally awful Hank a mere 5 years later. Did none of the previous creative distinction rub off and provide him with some semblance of dreck radar?

As Al Bundy in Married With Children, Ed O’Neill was showered with neither praise nor awards. While I’m sure he was able to build a nice retirement nest egg from the show which (along with The Simpsons) provided the foundation that helped build Fox into a contending network, O’Neill pretty well returned to the journeyman career he lived prior to Married With Children. Bouncing from movie to TV roles, he surfaced, if not prominently, than at least notably a couple years ago in David Milch’s much maligned but bizarrely compelling John From Cincinnati. Playing a retired widowed cop, O’Neill displayed some real acting chops as he spent much of his screen time talking to a bird. Convincingly, I might add. Now comes O’Neill in Modern Family.

It is impossible to find the right words to accurately describe just how dissimilar two shows can be while still inhabiting the same universe. While only an hour apart on the same network, Modern Family and Hank stand in stark contrast as to how the sitcom is done. Brilliantly versus abysmally.

In Hank, Grammer summons his inner Frasier, blustering and blowharding his way through the thinnest of situations; material one would’ve thought immediately rejected in the writers’ room. One episode I caught had Grammer’s eponymous character trying to teach his daughter a lesson about the virtues of hard work and earning one’s own way. Cajoling her into taking a job in an ice cream shop, the unemployed Hank, of course, winds up working beside her behind the counter and, of course, nitpicks and micro-manages his way out of a job. Yeah, it was as stunningly bad as it sounds with a syrupy coda to boot.

Modern Family doesn’t exactly break new creative ground either as it sits at the crossroads of a Christopher Guest mockumentary and Arrested Development. But unlike Hank, Modern Family’s execution is masterful. O’Neill plays the patriarch of a dysfunctional family and his Jay Pritchett is everything that Al Bundy might’ve been if he’d only been smarter, more successful and got a couple lucky breaks. Despite siring all the madness that swirls around him, O’Neill effortlessly represents the gruff heart at the centre of his Modern Family.

If Kelsey Grammer had an ounce of self-awareness and justness in him, he’d publicly disavow at least one of his Emmys and hand it over to Ed O’Neill. In one desperate, fell swoop, Grammer has managed to undercut almost every career accomplishment he’s ever achieved. And that’s saying quite a bit given his previous effort last year, Back To You. As completely forgettable as that was, it’s pure gold up against Hank. Sullied or tarnished are insufficient words to describe what Grammer has done to his reputation with Hank.

If Ed O’Neill became successful playing a one-note character, Grammer now languishes by doing the same thing. Grammer had the first laugh. O’Neill gets the last. And somewhere there’s a guy with a thinning mullet, smoking a joint and eating Doritos, wondering how he could’ve been so wrong.

Apologies to you, Brad.