LA Weekly from Los Angeles, California • 36

that it works standup, sketch comedy and short films into the action. Otherwise its a real sitcom, with a hooting audience, babe girlfriends, wacky pals and, ah, situations. (The brothers reluctance to touch each other was the crux of the one 1 saw.) Mama did not find me on the floor clutching my sides, but its chuckleworthy for sure, and nothing youll see any day soon on network television. Animated talk shows, prison dramas, too Where networks fear to tread BY ROBERT LLOYD soft porn from Tonys 1983 vampire film; its basically a creepy-crawly variation on Showtimes Red Shoe Dianes, with Terence Stamp in for David Duchovny as host. No surprises here a jack-in-the-box is less predictable and static cling more shocking than these oft-recast tales of demon love but the important certainty is that you get to see really good-looking naked people pretending to have sex.

Dead beyond what was ever dreamt of in the philosophy of Don Ohlmeyer. Space Ghost Coast to Coast could never have taken root on the American, Columbia or National broadcasting systems (though it might have on Fox home of The Simpsons, Tns other wittiest and most literate half-hour which, with its practiced rogue stance and youth-friendly fringe programming, comports itself like a cable Just when It teems that the snmmer's going to be nothing but boring barbecues, dull days at the beach and tired old trips abroad, word comes down from Cartoon Network that 24 new episodes of Space Ghost Coast to Coast televisions wittiest and most literate half-hour (I exaggerate for comic effect, but not by much), are lined up and ready to air have, indeed, already begun. The 3-year-old SGC2C, its publicists claim without fear of contradiction, remains the only animated talk show that is hosted by a superhero and is set in deep space." To say that it pastes bits of the late-60s superhero cartoon Space Ghost into an extraterrestrial Late Night that features interviews" with nonanimated, superpowerless celebrities upcoming guests include Beck, Charlton Heston, Jimmy Cliff and Buzz Aldrin is accurate, but hardly hints at the programs hip genius or peculiar pathos. Space Ghost, as reconfigured here, is one of the great tortured egoists of modern telefiction; his former nemesis and current bandleader, Zorak (a big bug), one of its great disgruntled foils. And the famous people of Earth have never looked so confused.

For this bounty we are grateful: six months of new episodes. Its Christmas all the way to Christmas. The most ambitious and successful of the summer debutantes is HBOs men-in-chains drama, Oz, executive-produced by Barry l.evinson and Tom Fontana (of Homicide: Life on the Street) and written in toto by Fontana. Oz (for Oswald Maximum Securin Prison) is shot in die same handheld documentary style as Homicide, with surrealist digressions wherein a wheelchair-bound inmate-narrator slams a little Greek-chorus street poetry. The cast is a well-stocked PX of newr and old outlaw tvpes: an oily neo-Nazi, a charismatic Muslim militant, Italian wiseguvs, an Irish plotter, a mild-mannered cannibalistic parricide, a family of Latino lifers.

(Stir: Its the Rainbow Goalition.) The biggest names in the cast are Tony Musante (whose only other series, Toma, ended 23 vears ago) as the local don, ghostbuster Ernie I ludson as the warden, B.D. Wong (Tony winner for M. Butterfly) as the chaplain, and Rita Moreno, putting the sex in sexagenarian, notwithstanding she plays a nun. But, as might be expected in a Levinson project, the actings very fine all around. This is, to my scattershot knowledge, the first TV series set inside a prison (excepting maybe Hogan Hemes now big in Germany, no fooling), and Fontana has set himself a tough job, giv en the no-exit setting and the lack of attractive protagonists.

(EZ Streets mined something similar the prison in that case being psychological to what bitter end we have seen.) Unlike Big House films of old, which balanced plot on a sadistic warden, a crusading priest or an innocent prisoner and promised some sort of triumph in the end, Oz is fundamentally unheroic, its possibilities for old-school satisfying closure limited: The inmates are in for a reason; the staff (which, this being television, includes a few good-looking women) mostly just do their jobs. Its not like things are going to improve were in prison as long as the series lasts. And yet: By the etui of the second episode, I was well hooked, anxious to know just how the crookies would crumble. Or not. Theres drama even in simple survival.

The summer's looking up.Q It Is a true tact ot our modern times that cable television goes (for better, for worse) where broadcast fears to, no longer cares to, never would or cannot tread. Cable stations, particularly subscription ones, are the tortoise against the broadcast networks increasingly impulsive hare; they can afford to be patient with a slow-starting show or support a prestigious loss leader. For while broadcast TV measures its failures slot by slot (the success of Seinfeld wont save the life of Mr. Rhodes), the viewer who buys HBO for movies or sports also makes possible Tracey Takes On and The Larry Sanders Show, whether he watches them or not. Its not that cable doesnt carry its complement of crap indeed its often broadcast crap in second run.

But the best cable shows go "rcri CTl 30' ril fffii 'i tiro Vt IM 1 i 23 network anyway). Cult hits dont cut it in the big leagues. While broadcasters spend the summer recycling, cable nets growing from packagers of programs into producers of their own ignore the customary hiatus to premiere new shows and new seasons of old ones. TNT has just begun the second round of its first dramatic" series. The New Adventures of Robin Hood, with Matthew Poretta a nimble Robin, cany ons of cleavage and the not unpleasant aroma of pure cheese, while Turners not-just-for-kids Cartoon Network bows two corking new originals, Johnny Bravo and Coai Chicken, and new installments of the strange and superb Dexters Laboratory.

HBO has unveiled its own new adult" cartoon, Ralph Bakshis Spicy City, along with the somewhat saucy, live-action Perversions of Science. And Showtime, which is having Showtimes All-Out Summer, has begun the runs of Stargate SG-1 (unseen, as they say, by press time) and the anthology shows The Hunger and Dead Man's Gun 22 episodes of each, the sort of long-term quick commitments broadcast networks no longer let themselves make. The Hunger, produced by big-name director freres Ridley and Tony Scott, borrows its title and air of gothic Eurotrash Mans Gun, a Western from RungFu creators Ed and Howard Spielman, tracks the misadventures of those unlucky enough to own the jinxed eponymous firearm; it boasts its own share of shagging (this is cable), but with Henry Winkler as executive producer, its more demurely presented. No surprises here, either that each episode is designed to be a morality tale reminiscent of OHenry and Rod Serling announces we have all been here before though its by no means awful. Kris Kristoffersons gravely voice-overs lend a touch of star gravitas, and I must say I found it rather well-decorated and nice to look at.

The best example of cables inexorable march toward self-production is MTV, which began basically as an outlet for three-minute ads for rock bands, then gradually moved into documentary, dance, game afld talk shows, cartoons and its own patented brand of true-life soap opera; videos now form so inessential a part of its franchise that a spur station, M2, has been created to do what MTV used to. Finally, as if to confirm its passage from puppet to real boy, the network has introduced its first live-action situation comedy, Apt. 2F. Starring comedian twins Randy and Jason Sklar, kicking it together in the Big Apple, its main nongenetic novelty is 'J DEBRA DiPAOLO 36 LA WEEKLY JULY 25 31, 1997.