Jan 20, 2021

Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers

September 1974: My friends and I are in ninth grade at Washington Junior High, 13 or 14 years old, aspiring to be cool, hip, and intellectual.  So we watch all of the hip sitcoms that would later be lauded as part of the Golden Age of Television.

Like Paul Sand in Friends and Lovers.

Never heard of it?

It was famous in the fall of 1974.

MTM Enterprises was changing the face of television, making it hip, modern, and "real," set in real places like Cincinnati and Minneapolis, starring people with real home and work lives (they even had sex).  It already had two hits, Mary Tyler Moore and Bob Newhart, and Paul Sand looked like a third.

Especially when CBS put it into the fall schedule between its #1 show,  All in the Family and the Mary Tyler Moore/Bob Newhart block

I wanted to like it:

1. Cute, dour-faced comedian Paul Sand starred.
2. He was a bass player with the Boston Philharmonic (I was in the orchestra!).
3. Friends and Lovers sounded dirty.
4. There was a hot athletic older brother (Michael Pataki, left).  Maybe there'd be some beefcake.
5. And a workplace friend (Steve Landesberg, later of Barney Miller). Maybe there'd be some buddy-bonding.



I was only home to see a few episodes, and they weren't very good.

1. Paul Sand was not at all likeable -- his self-deprecating humor was...well, deprecating
2. The brother never took his shirt off, although Max Gail (later of Barney Miller) flexed in one episode.
3. And everyone was obsessed with heterosexual sex.  It was like Three's Company, a few years later.

It actually became the #25 most watched show of the season, doing better than its competition, Emergency! and The New Land, but by January it was cancelled, replaced by the mega-hit The Jeffersons.

Which also suffered from a lack of beefcake.

5 comments:

  1. Replies
    1. Not many in the 1970s, but lots in the 1980s and 1990s, and countless today. I'm currently watching "Cougar Town," where the male cast doesn't seem to own shirts. Neither did the teen hunk Charlie McDermott "The Middle." I don't care for "Scrubs," but it does tend to feature a lot of shirtless scenes. "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" was wall-to-wall beefcake. "The Good Place", about a wacky afterlife, had a muscle-hunk demon in a number of episodes. That's just off the top of my head.

      Delete
    2. You should also check out "Worst Week" (2008)starring Kyle Borheimer who spends a lot of time shirtless

      Delete
    3. Married with Children wasn't a beefcake sitcom per se, but Peggy and Marcy went to the strip club as much as Al, and in later tears, they showed David Faustino working out a lot, including in the intro. That's typically what you got in the 20th century.

      Married... depended too much on informed attributes TBH. "Bud can't get laid" works until Bud is 18 and makes my (at the time, just starting puberty) self wish I was as well. "The Bundys are poor" fails to explain their décor, which, while sometimes tacky, isn't inexpensive. Marcy the feminist neighbor probably thinks "intersectional" refers to traffic in LA. Marcy isn't even in the TERF phase; she's still in the Whitney Houston phase: "I'm every woman."

      Ironically, at the time, Roseanne was intersectional, covering issues like sexual harassment, racism, late-in-life lesbians, and child abuse. Now, look at Roseanne IRL.

      Baywatch actually had good-looking guys, who spent most of their screen time without shirts. (Michael Bergin, Jaason Simmons, and David Chokachi FTW) Or you watched fantasy action shows.

      Delete
  2. I have seen Emergency! on Nick at Nite. Linkara also did a review of a comic book adaptation featuring, of course, stolen nuclear matériel. (It is a comic book, after all.)

    It was Charlton, which means you can imagine the EMTs drinking themselves to death at the body count of Crisis on Infinite Earths.

    ReplyDelete

No offensive, insulting, racist, or homophobic comments are permitted.

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...