Watch this show! From the trailer, I suspect that Shales is on target about the pilot, but it also sounds like the show is heading in the right direction...it's hard to screw up with (arguably) the funniest person on the planet.
'Wanda': You Go, Girl
By Tom Shales
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 26, 2003; Page C01
Wanda Sykes has her work cut out for her. She's here to straighten out the rest of us -- indeed, the whole wide world. She has the power, she has the tenacity, and she has the self-confidence of an entire armed infantry division.
She also has her own TV series. After years of brightening up other people's shows -- including, currently, Larry David's searingly funny (and ceaselessly praised) "Curb Your Enthusiasm" on HBO -- Sykes stars in the new Fox sitcom "Wanda at Large," premiering at 9:30 tonight on Channel 5.
Although the pilot is a pretty choppy-sloppy affair, really just a whirl of ingredients in a Waring blender, future episodes also made available for preview suggest tart and feisty possibilities. Assuming it continues to concentrate on Wanda's combative relationship with a snobbish, hoity-toity polar opposite, played by Phil Morris.
In the third show, these two archenemies -- she a liberal and he a smirky conservative -- begin mellowing toward one another, suggesting a love-hate affair may grow out of the hate-hate affair they've had so far. But the wisecracks will clearly continue, zinging through the air like blasts from ray guns in a "Star Wars" picture.
Sykes plays Wanda Hawkins, a comedian and commentator who in tonight's premiere improbably lands a job at a D.C. TV station by impressing the boss with her arsenal of blunt and sassy insults and put-downs, all straight from the spleen. He decides to make her a regular panelist on the station's terminally dull talk show "The Beltway Gang," which is where she faces Morris as Bradley, a tireless defender of the right-wing rich.
They love to exchange verbal smacks upside the head. "What put you in such a good mood?" he asks her in the second show. "All your flying monkeys come home?" She later issues a warning: "I have a black belt. And shoes to match."
When he learns she's landed a date, he asks in mock horror, "Did someone kill all the other women on Earth?" The insults would land with splats if Sykes and Morris didn't deliver them with so much vicious charm.
Sykes is spectacularly playing a character she's perfected in stand-up and on other shows, a know-it-all who truly, or at least probably, does know it all. She sees no reason to feign any imperfections or shortcomings. The courage of her convictions is insurmountable. Morris has always been a good actor, almost a parody of a pretty boy, but he blossomed most gloriously as the unforgettably shifty Jackie Chiles, a lawyer patterned after Johnnie Cochran, on "Seinfeld," sitcom's holy of holies.
Wanda and Phil are a dream date, sparring and spatting, but the producers will ruin a beautiful friendship if they let them become too chummy too soon. The show's at its best when they collide. Then it's nuclear fission.
The producers have made clumsy miscalculations, one of which is stuffing too many bland complications into Wanda's life. The adventures at the TV station with her extended family are fun to watch and have plenty of snappish crackle. But then we have to follow Wanda home and watch her tussle with her sister-in-law Jenny (Tammy Lauren), a widow raising two too-cute kiddies.
It sort of happened on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and on its nominal predecessor, "The Dick Van Dyke Show": The workplace comedy sparkles and most of the domestic home-life stuff just soaks up air time. Even at their worst moments, those shows were obviously aiming higher than "Wanda at Large," but one should play to one's strengths whether doing Chaucer or stunts on "Jackass."
Other dead-end diversions include Wanda's platonic boyfriend, Keith (Dale Godboldo), who works with her at the station and follows her home at night. Godboldo is loose and likable enough, but on the premiere, what he mostly does is chuckle at Wanda's assorted nifties. (Note to producers: We know she's funny. We don't need an audience surrogate disguised as a character to tell us to laugh.)
Now and then, out of nowhere, Wanda has a little fantasy fit, like when she imagines a ton of bricks falling on Jenny after they argue. This kind of cartoonish visual gag works on "Scrubs" and "Malcolm in the Middle," but it just gets in Wanda's way. It's not in keeping with the tenor or temper of the show.
We also have to look at the interview pieces she does for the TV station, segments that are then discussed by the pundit panel on "Beltway Gang," which means the show-within-the-show has a crowded format, much as the show does. Although most of the pieces are too long, they have funny moments. On the third episode (airing April 9), Wanda takes up the cause of reparations for the descendants of slaves, but in her own confrontational way. That is, she walks up to a man on the street and says, "I'm black. You owe me fifteen dollars and thirteen cents."
Later she rings a doorbell in an affluent neighborhood and tells the man who opens the door that his ancestors "owned" hers and thus "you owe me exactly one million dollars and two cents." Then the joke goes too far: She digs up the cadaver of the slaveholder from a cemetery and rifles through his wallet.
What a shame. It was funny for a while. The program does not seem to be in capable or accomplished hands, other than Sykes's. In an appearance on "The Tonight Show" Monday night, Sykes generated more laughter in six minutes, by herself and with no awkward sitcom complications, than does an entire episode of "Wanda at Large."
Sykes's brassy irreverence is invigorating even at its crudest. She's a gale of fresh air. Her series simply needs more of her and less of nearly everything else.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
'Wanda': You Go, Girl
By Tom Shales
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, March 26, 2003; Page C01
Wanda Sykes has her work cut out for her. She's here to straighten out the rest of us -- indeed, the whole wide world. She has the power, she has the tenacity, and she has the self-confidence of an entire armed infantry division.
She also has her own TV series. After years of brightening up other people's shows -- including, currently, Larry David's searingly funny (and ceaselessly praised) "Curb Your Enthusiasm" on HBO -- Sykes stars in the new Fox sitcom "Wanda at Large," premiering at 9:30 tonight on Channel 5.
Although the pilot is a pretty choppy-sloppy affair, really just a whirl of ingredients in a Waring blender, future episodes also made available for preview suggest tart and feisty possibilities. Assuming it continues to concentrate on Wanda's combative relationship with a snobbish, hoity-toity polar opposite, played by Phil Morris.
In the third show, these two archenemies -- she a liberal and he a smirky conservative -- begin mellowing toward one another, suggesting a love-hate affair may grow out of the hate-hate affair they've had so far. But the wisecracks will clearly continue, zinging through the air like blasts from ray guns in a "Star Wars" picture.
Sykes plays Wanda Hawkins, a comedian and commentator who in tonight's premiere improbably lands a job at a D.C. TV station by impressing the boss with her arsenal of blunt and sassy insults and put-downs, all straight from the spleen. He decides to make her a regular panelist on the station's terminally dull talk show "The Beltway Gang," which is where she faces Morris as Bradley, a tireless defender of the right-wing rich.
They love to exchange verbal smacks upside the head. "What put you in such a good mood?" he asks her in the second show. "All your flying monkeys come home?" She later issues a warning: "I have a black belt. And shoes to match."
When he learns she's landed a date, he asks in mock horror, "Did someone kill all the other women on Earth?" The insults would land with splats if Sykes and Morris didn't deliver them with so much vicious charm.
Sykes is spectacularly playing a character she's perfected in stand-up and on other shows, a know-it-all who truly, or at least probably, does know it all. She sees no reason to feign any imperfections or shortcomings. The courage of her convictions is insurmountable. Morris has always been a good actor, almost a parody of a pretty boy, but he blossomed most gloriously as the unforgettably shifty Jackie Chiles, a lawyer patterned after Johnnie Cochran, on "Seinfeld," sitcom's holy of holies.
Wanda and Phil are a dream date, sparring and spatting, but the producers will ruin a beautiful friendship if they let them become too chummy too soon. The show's at its best when they collide. Then it's nuclear fission.
The producers have made clumsy miscalculations, one of which is stuffing too many bland complications into Wanda's life. The adventures at the TV station with her extended family are fun to watch and have plenty of snappish crackle. But then we have to follow Wanda home and watch her tussle with her sister-in-law Jenny (Tammy Lauren), a widow raising two too-cute kiddies.
It sort of happened on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" and on its nominal predecessor, "The Dick Van Dyke Show": The workplace comedy sparkles and most of the domestic home-life stuff just soaks up air time. Even at their worst moments, those shows were obviously aiming higher than "Wanda at Large," but one should play to one's strengths whether doing Chaucer or stunts on "Jackass."
Other dead-end diversions include Wanda's platonic boyfriend, Keith (Dale Godboldo), who works with her at the station and follows her home at night. Godboldo is loose and likable enough, but on the premiere, what he mostly does is chuckle at Wanda's assorted nifties. (Note to producers: We know she's funny. We don't need an audience surrogate disguised as a character to tell us to laugh.)
Now and then, out of nowhere, Wanda has a little fantasy fit, like when she imagines a ton of bricks falling on Jenny after they argue. This kind of cartoonish visual gag works on "Scrubs" and "Malcolm in the Middle," but it just gets in Wanda's way. It's not in keeping with the tenor or temper of the show.
We also have to look at the interview pieces she does for the TV station, segments that are then discussed by the pundit panel on "Beltway Gang," which means the show-within-the-show has a crowded format, much as the show does. Although most of the pieces are too long, they have funny moments. On the third episode (airing April 9), Wanda takes up the cause of reparations for the descendants of slaves, but in her own confrontational way. That is, she walks up to a man on the street and says, "I'm black. You owe me fifteen dollars and thirteen cents."
Later she rings a doorbell in an affluent neighborhood and tells the man who opens the door that his ancestors "owned" hers and thus "you owe me exactly one million dollars and two cents." Then the joke goes too far: She digs up the cadaver of the slaveholder from a cemetery and rifles through his wallet.
What a shame. It was funny for a while. The program does not seem to be in capable or accomplished hands, other than Sykes's. In an appearance on "The Tonight Show" Monday night, Sykes generated more laughter in six minutes, by herself and with no awkward sitcom complications, than does an entire episode of "Wanda at Large."
Sykes's brassy irreverence is invigorating even at its crudest. She's a gale of fresh air. Her series simply needs more of her and less of nearly everything else.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company