The new ABC sitcom Hank is rather short on big laughs, but it’s well-stocked with good ideas and sound values. The big question is, will ABC give it a chance?
Hank is the first of two family-oriented comedies ABC is running back-to-back on Wednesday nights beginning at 8 p.m., with each show featuring a big former sitcom star.
Most TV sitcoms, and that goes double for ABC, are largely about what the great filmmaker and satirist Preston Sturges referred to as Topic A. That is because Americans presumably have nothing else on their minds–other than being murdered or having to go to the hospital, the subject matter of most TV dramas.
Hank bucks that restriction, attempting to mine humor from family relationships, romantic love, and social conditions–which used to be the central subjects of Anglo-American comedy before the relaxing and eventual discarding of social and cultural restrictions on discussions of sex freed Hollywood to parade its inner sex maniac with impunity and in fact great financial success.
The concept of Hank is this: newly fired big-business CEO Hank Pryor–played by Kelsey Grammer–moves his family out of their now-unaffordable Manhattan apartment and goes back to his hometown, River City, to start over.
Without money and servants to take care of them, the family members have to live like actual human beings. And without a job at which to hide out, Hank has to deal with his family. Those are reasonable ideas on which to build a comedy. Unfortunately the pilot episode does not try to go for many really amusing jokes, and the second episode is funnier but definitely does not conform to the contemporary trend of trying to mine as many laughs per episode as possible.
If the standard for judging a situation comedy is simply the number of laughs per episode, Hank will not do well. However, that is not necessarily the best way to look at the genre. Older classics such as The Honeymooners, The Andy Griffith Show, and Cheers were actually short dramas with varying amounts of humor deriving organically from the characters and situations, instead of cardboard characters and merely skeletal plots on which to festoon a string of double entendres and outright sexual references intended to be funny by virtue of their exceeding public vulgarity.
One could even argue that Seinfeld, far from being a “show about nothing,” did a fine job of showing the rootlessness of ’90s America and the dismaying results of the lurch into relativism.
Thus one can surely make a case that the situation comedy can be more than just jokes–and perhaps that it should be. Hank attempts to do just that, affording some insights into the characters and their situation, in particular the title character. For example, Hank’s attempt to connect with his family, as he has never done before, rightly suggests that overcoming one’s selfish impulses is essential if one is to have a truly satisfying life.
A scene in which Hank awkwardly tries to connect with his son in the pilot episode illustrates this theme and is both funny and touching in the odd way the best TV sitcoms often manage such scenes, and it shows the series has the potential to be effective.
In this fish-out-of-water scenario, Grammer’s Hank becomes the type of clueless, would-be Autocrat of the Breakfast Table character made famous by William Powell (Life with Father) and Clifton Webb (Cheaper by the Dozen, etc.) and reiterated by countless sitcom actors since then.
Like those predecessors, Hank also has a wholesomely attractive, smart wife who keeps the household running, and a pair of intelligent, quirky children who continually point out his personal shortcomings.
In addition, Hank’s attempts to get back on his feet and start up another business, suggested in the first two episodes, are both ripe for comedy and, if developed, will be a welcome treatment of an essential and characteristic aspect of American life which is all too seldom given positive attention by Hollywood: entrepreneurship.
Hank ultimately supports bourgeois, middle-American values, which is rather unusual for both ABC and contemporary TV sitcoms. As such is it quite refreshing. Mainstream critics, however, will not like it, for it does nothing to contribute to the devaluation of all values and the effort to transform the United States into an oversexed socialist paradise.
Quite the contrary. Hank doesn’t try to break any new ground, and it doesn’t grasp for too many memorable jokes. However, the characters are largely likable, and with Grammer leading the way, the show might survive if ABC gives it time.
But that’s a big if.