Monday 4 April 2016

371 Mork and Mindy


First  viewed :  12  January  1979

This  followed  straight  after  Dick  Barton  that  Saturday  night  and  was  heartily  recommended  by  Stephen.

Mork  and  Mindy  was  a   spin-off  from  a  rather  leftfield  episode  of  Happy  Days  where   Richie  is  set  to  become  an  alien  abductee  at  the  hands  of  a  comic  alien  called  Mork  played  by  then-unknown  comedian, Robin  Williams. The  character  was  so  popular  that  work  started  on  a  separate  vehicle  for  Mork   straight  away.

Mork  and  Mindy  transported  him  to  1970s  Colorado  where  he'd  been  sent   by  unseen  boss  Orson   to  observe  earth  culture. There  he  ends  up  the  house  guest  of  a  young  journalist  Mindy  ( Pam  Dawber )  who  endeavours  to  teach  him  the  ways  of  the  world  while  learning  about  his  own  quirky  customs.

Now  I  know  I'm  in  a  minority  here  but  I  never  found  Williams  very  funny and  that  limited  my  enjoyment  of  the  show  particularly  as  he  was  given   progressively  more  space  to  improvise  which  often  left  Dawber  in  danger  of  corpsing.  The  first  series  was  phenomenally  popular  but  after  changes  to  give  it  a  more  romantic  angle,  the  ratings  fell  off  dramatically  and  it  was  cancelled  after  four  series  in  1982.

Williams  retreated  into  stand-up  before  re-emerging  as  a  major  film  star  at  the  end  of  the  eighties. Dawber  appears  to  be  a  classic  "Where  are  they  now ?  "  contender  in  the  UK  because  her  next  major  vehicle , "My  Sister  Sam"  was  never  shown  here  so  the  death,  in  a  stalker  shooting  of  her  young  co-star  Rebecca   Schaeffer  and  her  subsequent  advocacy  of  gun  control  went  unnoticed  here. In  the  US  her  steady  string  of  TV  and  film  roles  and  marriage  to  the very  hardworking  Mark  Harmon  have  kept  her  profile  relatively  high. She  made  an  appearance  on  Williams'  ill-fated  TV  series  The  Crazy  Ones  just  before  his  death.          

4 comments:

  1. So Mindy married Jethro Gibbs. You learn something every day!

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  2. She should be more concerned about getting hitched to Ted Bundy !

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  3. The series didn't fall in the ratings because of a change to a more romantic angle. In fact in S2 all the romantic little moments that worked so well in the first season pretty much disappeared. It was Network interference and the ill fated shift to a Sunday night and an attempt to get an even wider (and more mature) share of the audience taking it away from the Thursday night college student/early 20s share that had made such a hit, that hit it hard. That audience doesn't watch TV on Sunday nights, and the older audience watching Archie Bunker's Place didn't much fancy a zany alien show.

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