A REVIEW OF A COMEDY LANDMARK I BARELY REMEMBER*: Adam reminds me that it's been a few years since I posted about Herman's Head. Sorry if you've heard my spiel on this before, but it's worth raising from time to time so that people don't forget our common comedy lineage, in which Herman is our patriarch.
Herman's Head was an early Fox sitcom running from, I want to say, 1985-1988, despite what that liar IMDB says about it running from 1991 to 1994. Herman's Head told the story of boring everyman office drone Herman (William Ragsdale), who was less a character than a static boundary between the more interesting people surrounding him -- the vain beauty, the chummy misogynist, the lovelorn plain girl -- and the reified character defects inhabiting his brain (the humorless overthinker, the humorless immature idealism, the humorless pansy, the unfunny sex-obsessed slob; no wonder Herman lacked a whole lot of charisma). The people on the outside of Herman bounced off of him; the people inside him rattled around, and ever so rarely, one group would make an impression on the other.
To fully understand the influence that Herman's Head has had on all of our lives, we should first think about what wouldn't exist without it. Sex and the City, certainly, is basically a remake. I'm sure I've advanced here my pet theory that the characters on that show are really facets of the same single woman -- her ambition, carnality, domesticity, and self-obsession -- and that the perfect finale would have been to pan back to see them all stuck in the real character's Herman-like (but more annoying and dressed more like an overly theatrical four-year-old making her first foray into clothes selection) head. Entourage offers a similar, if more realistic, metaphor for the components of the average male brain in young Hollywood -- status-obsession, money-obsession, fame-obsession, debased sex-obsession, with pot-obsession spread over the entire crew. Those are the obvious ones, but Herman really informed a lot of other work more subtly, from Being John Malkovich to Fight Club to Friends. It's safe to say that none of those works would have seen the light of day if Herman hadn't blazed the trail.
Of course, if the show were nothing but high-concept, it would have gone the way of its contemporaries, shows about cat-eating alien puppets, hideously creepy childlike robots passed off as real children, and gassy blue-collar dinosaurs. What saved it from that fate was its stellar cast: William Ragsdale, a man so telegenically and ubiquitously bland that he later was perfectly cast as a non-threatening romantic foil to a pre-out Ellen, and who was tragically killed by George Newburn in a territorial battle over neutered chino-wearing marriage material (a territory now known as Tedmosebia); then-unknowns Hank Azaria and Yeardley Smith, taking complementary second jobs so that they didn't have to hold out for more Simpsons money; Jane Sibbett, later better known as the first of Ross Gellar's three wives (it seemed like 40% of the recurring players on Friends came from Fox's early sitcom lineup). It was 71 episodes of a legendary cast and groundbreaking innovation that laid the foundation for the next decade of televised comedy.
And don't get me started on its companion, the Tea Leoni/Corey "the Forgotten Corey" Parker/Clea Lewis/older brother of Paul Giamatti vehicle Flying Blind.
*Due to faulty memory, some aspects of this post may be fabricated or wildly overstated
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