TV REVIEW : Not Much Punch to ‘My Boyfriend’s Back’

Tonight at 9 on NBC (channels 4, 36, 39), it’s the movie named after a ‘60s song of the week: “My Boyfriend’s Back.” And, yes, if you watch it, you’re gonna be sorry. Hey-la, hey-la.

No, this is not a docudrama about the girl group, the Angels, that briefly hit it big with the title song back in 1963, but rather a comedy-drama about the fictional Bouffants, played for maximum cuteness by TV stars Jill Eikenberry, Sandy Duncan and Judith Light.

Fiction is truly duller than truth as a TV executive (guess which network) tracks down the three middle-aged Bouffants, whose collective hair, if not their egos, has deflated over the years, reuniting them for a live TV nostalgia special to be titled “The Warholians Who Wouldn’t Go Away”--er, “My Boyfriend’s Back.”

Playing the network exec as a self-serving, dimwitted hunk (which makes you wonder about NBC’s self-image), John Sanderford mutters such things as: “My entire television career is riding on my promise to deliver the Bouffants!” This makes him sound more like a desperate French caterer than a brilliant media VP.

His efforts are welcomed by Duncan, who’s become a housewife, and Light, who’s carried the singing torch to new lows at a bowling alley lounge--but thwarted by Eikenberry, who is an executive herself now reluctant to look back at her high-haired past.

Eikenberry is a high-powered professional not unlike the one she plays on “L.A. Law,” only here she sports a much worse makeup job (which may be intentionally ironic, since she’s supposed to be a cosmetics firm VP but probably isn’t) and is cold, unavailable and secretly insecure. Do we sense some tearful reconciliation and girlish rediscovery coming on here? Do we sense a pillow fight approaching?

A few actual oldies stars, including Mary Wells and Gary Puckett, make cameos, but writer Lindsay Harrison and director Paul Schneider show no sense of authenticity or affection for the period(s)--the early 1960s or the late 1980s.