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A Eulogy: The Paula Poundstone Show
Television Review (1993)
Only with time, and with a little frustrated temperament will we see how television's sorry posterity elects to view the elegant remains of The Paula Poundstone Show.
Granted, it was a short life: it lasted just two weeks -- two episodes, two hours, minus commercials, in TV time. And if you believed in the immutability of odds, then you had to know that TPPS was quite doomed from the outset.
ABC had been struggling for over a decade to find a show capable of surviving their airless 9:00 p.m. Saturday slot for more than a single season. Who could forget Lime Street, or Heart Of The City. We all recall, of course, O'Hara, The Young Riders, and Crossroads. ABC's 9 spot on Saturday night was where shows went to die. Twelve shows in eleven years had aimed for the Nielsen ratings bull's-eye, fired, and fallen back. TPPS joined their sad ranks this past week -- two shows and out. I didn't even get a chance to tape either of the episodes; now all I'll have to remember them by is their glorious absence.
TPPS didn't fit well into any of the standard categories that exist for post-1960 prime-time television. It was a solo-act variety show with a kooky, too-tall gamine as hostess, star, and compass. With her politely skewed way of looking at the world, Poundstone's most efective routines were achieved simply by virtue of her own wide-eyed maturity; it was this wised-up nature that helped her readily accept the fact that her show had to be an unprecedented success in order to survive the sudden death of cancellation brought about by critical raves and low ratings. It's a TV cliche by now: An "A" from TV Guide, an "A" from Entertainment Weekly -- they're money in the bank , but only if viewers actually tuned in and watched.
TPPS was funny and unpredictable, but it was most of all Poundstone and her wooden stool and her oval rug and her delectable way with both the camera and her audience. Dressed in a sort of colorfully hybrid rodeo clown/leggy supermodel anti-fashion, host P.P was able to shepherd her viewers through sixty minutes of stand-up, audience Q-and-A, bits of stage business, and location interviews with a spry Zen ease. P.P and her writers [MST3K's Joel Hodgson among them] made fun use of charts and models to demonstrate various visual concepts on stage. However, they seemed to intuit the knowledge of what can happen to your act when it's become nothing but a stream of graphs and props [Rich Hall, Ross Perot, e.g.]. TPPS had all the necessary signposts of sturdy American postmodern kitsch, but without all the usual attendant clutter.
On a sparse stage in an exposed-beam warehouse set, P.P. taught us about Nielsen ratings -- in an unpleasant bit of foreshadowing -- by using a chart of viewership levels and Oreo cookies to represent share points.
So if I sound a bit jaded and a little angry that ABC's done what they've done, then you're right. I'm selfish, and I've lost something of value to me. And although this may seem a rather ephemeral thing to express a sense of loss over, 1) It was enjoyable and had that spark of uniqueness, and 2) I'm entitled.
Hip environmental tips led us into a commercial, the music provided by a live, in-house, black British female doo-wop a capella sextet. Back from commercial now, and over to Sam Donaldson, reading Maurice Sendak's Where The Wild Things Are in its entirety. [This one scene stands out in my mind as one of the most sublime, most right moments of 1990s television. ABC's Donaldson, with his Halloween-ready eyebrows and Spock ears, read Sendak by a fireplace, with jack-o-lanterns scattered out across the bare stage. And as he was narrating, really selling the story with low, basso tones for the monsters and a higher, more plaintive voice for the boy, the director cut to show us close-ups of a half-dozen various faces in the audience, watching. None of these people were under 35, yet each appeared genuinely and absolutely entranced by the manic incongruousness of it all: A funny-looking, well-respected newsman reading an illustrated children's book out loud to grownups in a TV studio on a Saturday night.
And during all this, Poundstone knelt on a nearby rug, propping her chin atop her stool and looking on in wonderment as Donaldson cast his spell.]