‘Connecticut Yankee’: Never the Twain shall meet

Mark Twain purists better look elsewhere when NBC presents “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court”--like the song says, there have been some changes made.

The biggest change is that the Connecticut Yankee who gets transported back in time to Camelot to become the Boss is not a mature man of enormous mechanical aptitude. No siree, the Yankee is Keshia Knight Pulliam, little Rudy from “The Cosby Show.”

Also on hand are Michael Gross as King Arthur, Emma Samms as Guenevere, Jean Marsh as the evil Morgana Le Faye, Whip Hubley as Sir Lancelot and Rene Auberjonois as Merlin.

This revamped “Yankee” airs from 8 to 10 p.m. Monday on NBC.

The time slot should tell you something about the show--Twain has been tamed into family entertainment, with the teeth pulled from his biting satire.

“Obviously, this is very different, this is not pure Mark Twain,” Gross, himself a devout Twain fan, said in an interview.

“Still, it does in many ways poke a great deal of fun at the myth of Camelot, as Twain did. He found them a very superstitious people, not terribly bright in a lot of cases and no match for Yankee ingenuity. And Camelot was a very nice place to live if you were a noble, but it you were a peasant Camelot wsn’t so hot.

“The Connecticut Yankee in this case is Keshia and she manages to awe these denizens of Camelot with her 20th-Century trickery, her Polaroid camera and her Walkman.”

“Naturally, you’re not going to get much hard-bitten sarcasm and you’re not going to have his diatribe against the church--you’re not going to see that anywhere on prime-time television except maybe Maury Povich--and you’re not going to see the large scale bloodshed at the end, with people dynamited and blown to bits left and right.”

Outside of that, Mr. Twain, how did you like the TV show?

Gross got involved in the project when he was approached to play King Arthur. As a Twain admirer, he almost said yes without reading the script.

“Of course, when I saw the script I saw it was markedly different from the Mark Twain I have read,” he said.

“But I also thought there was a way for me to do something as Arthur here. Here was a man not prepared to be king. He walked past a stone one day and pulled a sword out of it and everybody dropped to their knees and he didn’t even realize it was for him. He had a lot to learn.

“The growth and the education of this man and some of the interplay between Arthur and the Yankee still provided some chances for fun. I’m not so in love with Twain that I couldn’t see the possibility of doing something new and different for myself and the audience.”

What he wanted to do for himself was indulge in a marked change in appearance and character.

“It has always been fun for me to do different things,” he said. “I’ve always been a character actor. Steven Keaton on ‘Family Ties’ was the straighest part I’ve played in years. Even with Steven Keaton I had to hide myself behind a beard, which I’d never worn before. I’ve always wanted to look different, not to look like Michael Gross.”

Since the series went off the air, he’s gone from a psychopathic killer in the TV film “The FBI Murders” to King Arthur.

He has a feature film coming out, “Tremors,” produced by Gale Anne Hurd, who produced “The Abyss,” in which he plays a survivalist who lives in a desert retreat with every kind of weapon imaginable.

“I mean, he’s a strange dude,” Gross said. “Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward star in this piece and I’m on the fringe of society. The film is a modern-day Western with a science fiction twist.”

He also is negotiating to play Shakespeare this summer in the Midwest, possibly commuting between playing Brutus in “Julius Caesar” in one town, and “As You Like It” in a neighboring state.

“When ‘Family Ties’ ended I really started thinking about so many of these great classical roles for which I am getting too old,” Gross said. “Nobody will ever let me play Romeo now. If I don’t want that to happen with some of these other roles, I have to go out and pursue some of them before no one will let me do them.”

Does he miss Steven Keaton and “Ties?”

“After living with Steven Keaton so intimately for seven years and approximately 175 episodes, I don’t miss him,” Gross said. “There’s enough of him to go around, he’s on every night in syndication so he’s as close as my television dial.”