Showtime’s Golden ‘Boys’ : New Series Strives for a Strong Image of the Elderly

“The Boys” is probably the only comedy on television today that dares to permit five “old guys” to loll about on the screen talking about anything that pops into their heads--from how many items are Federal Expressed to Boise, Ida., each day to the virtues of “Nick at Nite” to whether Irving Berlin is still alive.

And it’s also probably the only show in TV history to use the phrase “take a schvitz .”

“These guys would use the word schvitz ,” said Alan Zweibel, creator-writer of “The Boys.” “They wouldn’t say, ‘I’m going to the steam room.’ I don’t know if someone in Iowa will go, ‘Huh?’ when they hear that. But that’s how these guys talk.”

Premiering as a new series on Showtime Saturday at 10 p.m., “The Boys” stars Norm Crosby, Norman Fell, Jackie Gayle, Allen Garfield and Lionel Stander as five older guys who hang out in the once-noble Excalibur Club, a replica of the Friars Club in New York. While “The Golden Girls” has proved that television viewers are willing to watch four senior citizens get themselves into and out of wacky predicaments, Zweibel believes that “The Boys” will cause viewers to see in his characters their own father, grandfather or uncle.

“Now that the baby boom generation is starting to see some wrinkles on their own faces, I think that we’re rediscovering an appreciation for our parents,” said Zweibel, 39, formerly a writer on the original “Saturday Night Live” and the co-creator of “It’s Garry Shandling’s Show.”

“I don’t think we’re as rebellious as we were back in the ‘60s and ‘70s when we did ‘Saturday Night.’ We’re looking at our parents and forgiving and then enjoying. My hope is that when people look at these older guys, that rediscovery of a certain passion will be relatable.

“It’s easier, I think, for a kid to get along with his grandparents than it is with his parents. There’s a certain sweetness to that relationship that gets lost sometimes with your parents. So I think that (this show) is a way of making peace, of saying, ‘Thank you and I love you.’ ”

And, unusual in television and our youth-crazed culture, it’s also a way to paint aging as an auspicious, vital, even delicious life process. Just by filling these men, ranging in age from 60 to 82, with humor, intelligence and a passion for living, “The Boys” makes strong statements about aging.

“Television in general has been scared off by old people. They think, ‘Yuck, who wants to see that?’ ” said Norman Fell, formerly the cranky Stanley Roper from “Three’s Company.”

“In China and other civilizations, when you get old, it’s attractive. You’re considered brighter, you have wisdom, and everyone looks up to you. But in America, wrinkles are disgusting. It’s about time we had a show that showed people with humor, wit and vulnerability, even at the advanced age of 60.

“Personally, I feel I’m the same guy that I was when I was 19, except when I look in the mirror and say, ‘Uh, who is that old man?’

“I mean great concert pianists or symphony conductors or artists can all be 72 years old, 69 years old, it doesn’t matter. They’re painting with all the white hair, and they’re brilliant. But with television and in our culture, people might be at the height of their creative powers and they just get discarded. It’s very sad.”

“I think the charm and the appeal of these characters is in the reality of the situation and the fact that somebody can get to be that old and still be funny and vital and alive,” Zweibel said. “I think it’s a great age, a great situation that should be tapped into. We won’t ever do a joke that presents old age in a negative way. We don’t have anyone acting as an old man. None of these guys think that they’re old.”

Fell and nightclub comedian Crosby (playing himself) remember that they often saw Zweibel in the Friars Club, a club for entertainers, in New York in the late ‘70s, eating lunch, looking around and constantly taking notes. Back then, they had no idea what he was doing.

“I was eavesdropping. I was stealing,” Zweibel said. “I joined the Friars Club when I was working on ‘Saturday Night Live.’ I was doing Roseanne Rosannadanna and the Samurai stuff, and I would leave and go over to the club where all these older comics and old politicians and sports guys hung out.

“I liked the discrepancy. I felt comfortable there. It was like being a kid at the Thanksgiving table when my father, my grandfather and my uncle would start debating and editorializing about the craziest things.”

Fell says he recently saw the man his character is based on having lunch at the club and the guy was wearing gray slacks and a blue blazer just as Fell does in the show. Crosby agreed that the set, the guys and the talk are like the real thing.

“You go to the club and these guys sit around in the card room just like we do on the show,” Crosby said. “And something comes on the TV and they say, ‘Look what’s going on in Poland,’ and everybody has an opinion. ‘What do you know? You’ve never been there.’ ‘So what? I once had a cousin; he read a Polish book.’

“Of course we have artistic freedom to burlesque it and make it funny, but they really do have these fierce, screaming arguments about things like who’s going to take Kareem’s place with the Lakers.”

Zweibel cautions that this show is not your basic wacky sitcom, however. There are jokes galore--everyone in the club is called “sir” so there are references to “Sir Sir John Gielgud” and one of the central characters is called “Sir Marjorie” (Janet Carroll), acknowledging that women have recently been allowed to join this once-closed male bastion.

But most episodes also contain long stretches of drama that simply reveal telling incidents in the characters’ lives. In an upcoming show, Zweibel said Fell gives a “Death of a Salesman” Willie Loman-like performance after an animal activist throws blood on his character, a furrier, as he tries to sell her a fur coat.

In Saturday’s episode, featuring a guest appearance by Tommy Lasorda, Stander, who had difficulty working as an actor in the ‘50s because of a political blacklist, plays a blacklisted writer called Sir Gene who threatens to quit the club if Lasorda, who plays himself as the Dodgers manager, is allowed to join. In a flashback to 1957, a younger member of the club (Steve Levitt) learns that Sir Gene has never forgiven the Dodgers for leaving Brooklyn because it was that news announcement that preempted his big return to television, gave him writer’s block, broke up his marriage and forced him to write nothing but what he calls “schlock” sitcoms like “Father Knows Best” for the rest of his life.

“We go seven minutes sometimes without a laugh,” Zweibel said proudly.

And then sometimes they go for the laughs.

Another episode in this first run of eight has all the boys flying out to surprise Crosby when he gets a star on Hollywood Boulevard. (Crosby actually has a star.) Taking advantage of his trip to Los Angeles, Sir Gene goes off to pitch an episode of “Alf.”

And when Crosby’s hearing aid goes dead in the middle of his big ceremony, Sir Gene removes the battery from his own hearing aid and generously inserts it in his friend’s.

“We’re doing comedy, but it has some root,” Fell said. “It’s a little more adult, it’s sometimes a bit Chaplinesque. We’re not afraid to bring a little pathos to it.”