TV Update Two

"Twins" must set some kind of sitcom record for the biggest waste of proven talent. In one show, we've got Melanie Griffith, Mark Linn-Baker and Sara Gilbert, on a series created by David Kohan and Max Mutchnick.

Griffith may have been best known for being gorgeous from the '70s through the '90s, but given a good director and/or script, she can be quite touchingly human. Denied either here, she walks through it calcified in both performance and appearance (I suspect Botox).

Linn-Baker was so good as Peter O'Toole's sidekick in "My Favorite Year", and of course spent seven years as Larry on "Perfect Strangers." That show hasn't quite made it to the "classic" status bestowed by TV Land, and there's probably a reason. But a recent one-time-only showing of an episode during their WB television marathon did show he and Bronson Pinchot to be a servicable comic team. If not quite the reincarnation of Gleason and Carney some were calling them at the time. Here, I found myself wondering if, or maybe hoping, this was a gig he took for money, in the firm conviction it would be soon cancelled.

And Sara Gilbert. Wow. She makes me sad. She created, along with the writers, one of my favorite fictional characters ever in Darlene on "Roseanne." One of my biggest objections to the dive that series took in its final years is what they did to her character. I have a thing about series that take strong women characters and turn them into zombies, especially when they're produced by self-declared champions of feminism. But at her peak on the show, say the season between Becky leaving and Darlene going to college (some of which was written by future "Gilmore Girls" creator Amy Sherman-Palladino), she was a cynical but sensitive smartass. I have a weakness for such characters, as anyone who's read my work or, probably, knows me, will attest. Anyway, it's been what? 12 years? And it's beginning to look like she's never again going to find such a perfect melding of actress and material.

As for Kohan and Mutchnick...well, I'm beginning to suspect they must have made some sort of deal with the devil for "Will & Grace" because certainly nothing they've done before or since has been as funny as that show was in its first few seasons.

"Twins" is a show you just kinda watch and say yeah, so what's the point?