"Don't die, hooker. Please don't die, hooker. This is a Christmas movie." - Film producer Peter Dragon (Jay Mohr) to Wendy Ward (Illenna Douglas) at the premiere of his film "Slow Torture"
Action: The Complete Series DVD Review
By Jude Clement
Peter Dragon (Saturday Night Live's Jay Mohr) is a movie producer, the kind whose bad behavior would make him the subject of a lurid expose in the Hollywood issue of Vanity Fair. Slow Torture, the latest film released by Peter's company DragonFire Films, has lived up to its name. Audiences stayed away in droves, causing investors to lose their money and become skittish about investing in other DragonFire productions. Not that Peter even has another project lined up. The exec's stock is so low that he cannot even get a table at his favorite posh Hollywood haunt. With his professional life spinning out of control, Peter does what any sane person would do - he hires Wendy Ward (Illeanna Douglas), a former child star and current prostitute, to be his director of development. Impressed by her.talents.he soon promotes her to Vice President of Production, much to the chagrin of Stuart Glazer (Jack Plotnick), DragonFire's much-abused head of production.
Peter finally settles on a new project: Beverly Hills Gun Club, penned by Adam Rafkin (Jarrad Paul), a nebbishy first time screenwriter whose previous claim to fame was a spec script for Full House. The script is okay, but Peter is mostly producing the movie because the company accidentally paid $250,000 for it. It seems that "Adam Rafkin" is awfully close to the name of a more established screenwriter Peter really wanted to work with.
Through it all, Peter seeks the counsel of Uncle Lonnie (Buddy Hackett), his chauffer and confidant. Uncle Lonnie always looks on the bright side. He only has one testicle, but the way he sees it, "the sac is half full."
Action is one of the rare network series to focus on a character who is 100% unsympathetic. Shows like Dallas and Dynasty feature borderline evil characters we love to hate, but they are surrounded by sympathetic characters we can relate to on a human level. Not so with Action. Crude, obnoxious Peter is undeniably the center of the show, and even the secondary characters aren't really all that nice. Here is Peter's idea of giving DragonFire employees a pep talk:
"Look, we're going to have to tighten our belts is what I'm getting to. I may have to lay a few people off. Oh yeah - I don't want to name names, but for those of you ladies that routinely confuse a hand in the blouse with sexual harassment, you might want to call that bitch Gloria Allred off my ass."
He walks directly from his speech about the financially crippled company and into a chartered helicopter in order to be whisked away to a weekend at a golf resort. Peter encourages an actor to come out of the closet by convincing him that he, too, is gay just so that the actor can be replaced with someone younger. He springs another actor from rehab when funding for Gun Club hinges on the star appearing in the film. This bad behavior is extremely funny but may put off some viewers who prefer their TV characters bland and friendly.
The series also doesn't shy away from highly sexual dialogue and plotlines. Lee Arenberg plays Stuart Gianopolis, the semi-closeted head of a movie studio who also happens to be married to Peter's ex-wife Jane (Cindy Ambuehl). Stuart is so well-endowed that he often conducts meetings in the nude so that he can intimidate his negotiating partners. Wendy may no longer be a hooker, but she proves that her new job isn't that different from her old one. She even bribes a writer with sex if only he'll finish his script. There's even an episode in which the B-story involves a rumor that Peter was rushed to the emergency room after getting a frog stuck in a very private place. Subtle? No. Funny? You betcha.
The series has a unique visual style. Animated "It's Intermission Time!" clips that once ran at drive-in movie theatres often serve as lead-ins to commercial breaks. Scene changes are demarcated by on-screen script notes ("Int., Peter's Office, Continuous"). Some title cards even proclaim "stock footage missing." Action looks nothing like any sitcom that came before it.
Action joined the Fox schedule in September 1999 and was cancelled after only eight of its thirteen episodes were aired. Maybe the series was just a little ahead of its time. It would be another three years before The Osbournes made it acceptable for bleeped language to be used for humorous effect. Entourage and other Hollywood-set TV shows wouldn't enter the zeitgeist until the following decade. The characters on Seinfeld were often misanthropic by the end of the series' run, but audiences were eased into their bad behavior since the characters behaved almost normally during early episodes. While it was never a ratings blockbuster, Arrested Development helped to expand TV's use of sophisticated visual humor.
Action pushes the boundaries of taste and language. Watching the show six years after its premiere, it is hard to believe that it once aired on network television, even with the knowledge that the bawdiest language was bleeped for the network run. (The DVD, incidentally, is uncensored.) Don't let that scare you, though. Watching Action, one realizes that this is what TV should be: smart, funny, and eccentric.
Familiar faces popping up in Action include Keanu Reeves, producer Gavin Polone, Johnny Grant, Robert Burgi (Desperate Housewives), Salma Hayek, Steve Kmetko (E!), Jules Asner (E!), Sandra Bullock, David Hasselhoff, Tony Hawk, Scott Wolf (Party of Five), Jason and Randy Sklar, R. Lee Erney, Brian George (Seinfeld), David Leisure (Empty Nest), Maya Rudolph (Saturday Night Live), and Stuart Pankin.
The thirteen episodes that make up Action: The Complete Series are divided onto two discs. The discs are housed in a standard-sized keepcase with an interior swinging arm to hold the second disc. An insert included inside the DVD case includes brief synopses of the series' episodes.
The menus are simple and functional. Viewers can play all of a disc's episodes or choose an individual one. The episodes are divided into chapters, but there are no scene selection menus.
