For fans of the cult show Mystery Science Theater 3000, it is the best of times and the worst of times. The long-awaited Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Movie, which makes gleeful fun of the silly flying-saucer epic This Island Earth, is now showing in select cinemas nationwide. A briskly selling episode guide is in bookstores, and the first videotape compiling several MST3K episodes has been released.
Yet, despite the bold ventures into other media—and a CD-ROM is due this fall as well—the critically lauded program suddenly finds itself without a home on the airwaves. Comedy Central, which has broadcast the movie-mocking series for years, effectively canceled the show by failing to renew its contract with MST3K’s production company, Best Brains. The Sci-Fi Channel has expressed initial interest in picking the show up, but if MST3K can’t find another venue, its final episode will air 4 p.m. Saturday, May 18 (although reruns will continue for some months).
At 6 p.m. Saturday, after Mike Nelson and his robot/puppets have skewered the 1970s schlocker Laserblast, Comedy Central hopes the fans—or “MSTies”—will put aside their treasured memories of the show with the debut of The TV Wheel, a new series from MST3K originator Joel Hodgson. Hodgson enjoyed a flourishing career as a standup “prop comic” in the early 1980s, although he took an exit from life in the fast lane and eventually created MST3K for a local Minnesota television station. After starring in the show and mocking “stinky cinematic suppositories” for several years, he then stepped away to pursue other interests, including brief gigs with the Cartoon Network’s Space Ghost Coast to Coast and the short-lived Paula Poundstone Show.
The TV Wheel reflects Hodgson’s fascination with props, puppetry, magic tricks and other theatrical thingamajigs. The show takes its name from the set, which is constructed (by Joel’s brother Jim) like a 32-foot turntable and revolves around a camera placed in the center. The TV Wheel is filmed in real time with no edits (except for cutaway shots to the live audience), with the rotating set and whirligig performers and puppeteers quickly changing costumes and venues.
The end result is hit-and-miss: a rapid-fire, dark-edged variety show that tries to entertain using every gimmick in the book, including marionettes, sleight-of-hand, baggy-pants slapstick, and trick photography. For example, the “Go Go Golf” sight gags parody putt-putt courses with forced perspective shots; golfing actors in the background are dwarfed by ridiculous putting obstacles (like a toaster firing giant slices of bread) that look huge up close.
Some segments, like a sinister tour through the pages of the “Giant Surprise Catalog of Professional Magic,” are brash and ingenious. Others, like a little girl showing off her spastic collection of “forbidden dances,” are annoyingly imitative of routines from the original Saturday Night Live. While The TV Wheel’s format calls for players to be as adept at physical comedy as old vaudevillians, few members of the ensemble handle the shticky material with grace. Nick Bakay, an alum of She TV and Dennis Miller’s first talk show, is an exception, as is Hodgson himself, but the latter rarely performs on-camera for The TV Wheel’s pilot.
Although quite original, The TV Wheel also seems to get some of its ideas from other comedy programs. For a sketch about the rock ’n’ roll group KISS, for example, the show borrows the puppetry style of Nickelodeon’s Weinerville, in which live actors’ heads have puppet bodies attached. And some of Hodgson’s new robotic characters look suspiciously similar to MST3K’s mechanical mugsters. In the brevity of its segments and the cast’s genial awkwardness, The TV Wheel rather weirdly resembles Laugh-In—it even footnotes “Sock it to me!” a couple of times.
It’s not very nice of Comedy Central to air The TV Wheel’s pilot immediately after the final MST3K episode—the timing implies that one show is replacing the other—but apart from streaks of pitch-black humor and encyclopedic cultural references, the programs have nothing in common. It’s doubtful that Hodgson would want The TV Wheel to be in perceived competition with his previous creation. Besides, the show lacks the continuity, cheesy movies or lovable characters that built a cult around MST3K—expect MSTies to react bitterly, as if to an unwelcome stepfather.
Comparisons aside, there’s something frantic and enervating about The TV Wheel’s elaborate format. For all the effort the cast and crew obviously put into an episode, their sketches lack the laughs that The Kids in the Hall, for instance, could provide with such consistency. The TV Wheel may be the most original show on television since Mystery Science Theater 3000, but it’s far from the funniest. It makes you wonder if Hodgson and Co. aren’t just spinning their wheels.
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