Reiner, Morton & Hayes

Creator and host Rob Reiner is hoping that his highly touted new comedy series “Morton & Hayes” doesn’t fall prey to the dreaded Spinal Tap Syndrome, otherwise known as an irony deficiency among viewers.

Granted, this slapsticky farce of a show--which airs on CBS for six consecutive Wednesdays--has little in common in tone or subject with Reiner’s sly 1984 film “This Is Spinal Tap,” except for one element: Both are spoofs that begin and end with Reiner, playing himself as straight-faced narrator, directly addressing the audience and lying about an important discovery.

With “Spinal Tap,” Reiner was fibbing about the significance of a fictitious, entirely negligible hard-rock group he was supposedly documenting. (America got the joke, albeit a little late; the film’s cultish reputation is much more inflated than was its initial box office.)

Now he’s telling a tall tale about having discovered in a vault a long-lost series of classic two-reeler comedies from the 1930s and 1940s starring the legendary screen team of Chick Morton and Eddie Hayes, which will be presented during prime time in their original form--that is, sans colorization.

Given that “Morton & Hayes,” being true to its alleged era, is the first network series since the 1960s to be shot almost entirely in glorious black and white , can a nation of unprepared viewers be expected to “get it,” or will some be reaching for the color (or worse yet, channel-changing) switch?

“It’s so tough to launch a show in the middle of summer, when you only have six episodes to educate the audience,” Reiner says, explaining the importance of pre-premiere publicity.

“We hope that when they tune in the first week, they’ll already understand what the premise of this is, and we won’t have what happened to us with ‘Spinal Tap,’ where people left the theater saying, ‘I don’t understand, why would they make a documentary about a band I never heard of, and a band that was so bad?’ Now everybody understands what ‘Spinal Tap’ was, but at the time they didn’t.”

“Morton & Hayes” exists on a slightly less parodistic level, for Reiner & Co. aren’t out to satirize bad comedy teams, but rather to pay homage to the great ones. Thus, roly-poly dimwit Eddie Hayes and his thin wiseacre pal Chick Morton--played by Bob Amaral and Kevin Pollak, respectively--are intended as a kind of affectionate recombinant of such duos as Abbott & Costello, Laurel & Hardy and even Gleason & Carney.

“If you don’t recognize the faces on the screen,” says Amaral--and there are faces to be recognized, including those of guest stars Catherine O’Hara, Penelope Ann Miller and Courtney Cox--”it really does look ‘period.’ ”

And feels it, too. Indeed, the ultra-broad comedy in these six episodes is so true to the time in tone and style that it could virtually have been lifted wholesale from the era, but for a few knowing winks to the audience (like the deliberately low-tech rear-projection visual effects) designed to get a laugh on a more modern level.

If “Morton & Hayes” is more tribute than satire, that’s only natural: How can you parody a genre that itself produced such entries as “Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein”?

The premiere episode, titled “Daffy Dicks,” is a film noir spoof in which Chick and Eddie are two hapless detectives accidentally solving a crime involving twin sisters, both played by O’Hara (of “SCTV” and “Home Alone” fame).

Future weeks include “Society Saps,” in which the two deadbeats, in search of rent money, intrude upon an elegant ball in search of rich, marriageable girls, and “Oafs Overboard,” which has the shipwrecked boys transfixed by sexy island girl Cox, who intends to use them as a human sacrifice to the local giant.

Subtle it ain’t. The show certainly is different from anything on network TV, and ironic in its own fashion, but not in a way that precludes all-inclusive belly laughs.

Says Pollak, “I think both the sophisticated and the unsophisticated palate are attracted to something that’s just simply funny. Kids will laugh because it has sort of cartoon antics, and the sophisticated palates will laugh at the reminiscence of what made them laugh in their youth--again, the pure and simple gag. I think it has a chance to attract all ages. This could be the Bradley game of television--for ages 8 to 80.”

In some ways, “Morton & Hayes” is a near-reunion of key “Spinal Tap” personnel, with actor-writers Michael McKean and Christopher Guest rejoining old partner Reiner. Guest, in particular, is heavily involved; besides being a co-executive producer, he directed several of the episodes and guest stars (no pun intended) in most of them. In “Society Saps,” he’s the crooner; in “Bride of Mumula,” the Dracula-cum-mummy. But his most important function was behind the camera.

Says Pollak of Reiner and Guest, “They were definitely Mr. and Mrs. Yoda, and Bob and I were the Jedi warriors. They knew exactly how and why every single piece of business worked, and if our instincts were right, they laughed hysterically.

“Because there is no laugh track, so much of what we’re doing has to be immediately funny--that involuntary laugh that comes before you have a chance to think about it. So there had to be silence on the set while we were performing, and a lot of times it was so funny we had to do it again because Rob is a great laugher--and couldn’t help himself, even though he set up the joke and helped write and what-not. They were both exactly what you’d want as technical advisers in the subject of The Pratfall.”

A student of every sort of comedy growing up under his famous dad Carl, Reiner--whose favorite comedians are Buster Keaton and W.C. Fields--actually had the idea for the series 13 years ago, well before he was the successful director of such smash film hits as “When Harry Met Sally,” “Misery” and “Stand by Me.” He worked over the intervening years to develop the concept with Phil Mishkin (who scripted this week’s premiere episode), even as network programmers failed to see the potential in the idea until recently.

“It just seemed like a natural to me to use the two-reeler format, the 20-minute comedy short, as a perfect marriage for half-hour television,” Reiner says. “And it was also a license to do old-fashioned comedy, to create a team that supposedly existed in the ‘30s and ‘40s. Most of the kind of comedy you see in sitcoms, if they’re doing broad, physical kind of stuff, it always seemed a little bit forced to me, in that it didn’t seem natural for a modern-day family to be engaging in that kind of comedy. This seemed like a logical way to do it.”

A pilot episode was broadcast last year--in stupefying color.

“We did the pilot in color only because we didn’t win the battle,” admits Reiner. “Luckily, by the time we went ahead with the series, (CBS programming chief) Jeff Sagansky had the foresight to realize it really should be in black and white to be true to the form. Also, I think nowadays people are more used to seeing things in black and white--from commercials to MTV videos to, of course, old reruns on Nick at Nite.”

At first, Reiner had hoped to use the chemistry of Penn & Teller or another pre-existing comedy team in the title roles. When that didn’t work out, a massive casting cattle call for individual actors and comedians that Amaral likens to “the search for Scarlet O’Hara” ensued, with thousands of hopeful applicants slowly whittled down to dozens. For the pilot, oddly enough, Pollak--who now plays wise-cracking Chick--was cast instead as the luggish Eddie, and another actor played Chick.

After the show aired last year, Reiner and CBS decided that Pollak and his then-partner looked too similar to one another--not at all in the opposites-attract tradition of Abbott & Costello and Laurel & Hardy--so Pollak switched roles and began auditioning with new, wider-berthed recruits. “Literally, the call went out for a ‘heavyset, sweet-faced, put-upon sidekick.’ And one day Mr. Jackie Gleason Eyes, Bob Amaral, walked into the room and it was immediate,” Pollak says.

“We did our two scenes cold, with no rehearsal, and after Bob left the room, Chris Guest said, ‘You guys could take those two scenes out on the road right now.’ ”

The road is exactly where the comedy teams of old polished their acts, and Pollak (who’s had two stand-up comedy specials on HBO as well as film roles in “Avalon” and the like) and Amaral (who’s done mostly cabaret and musical-comedy theater) tried not to tone down the stylized mannerisms of live performance.

Pollak notes that neither he nor his partner went back and reviewed the movies of the old screen teams in preparing for their own amalgam roles.

“My girlfriend calls me Zelig II. I’ve absorbed all this stuff over the years, so I didn’t need to go back and view it. But I did think, ‘How can I make this straight man likable and funny and not nasty like Bud Abbott?’ Because I have a memory of Bud Abbott being pretty mean. . . .

“I felt it was important to give my version of the leader character in this duo and not emulate any one guy. I wanted the show to really re-establish its type of comedy, rather than just re-create it.”

Not that he’s sure it will, or that the series will even get an order from the network for more episodes.

“Did you like the show?” Pollak queries, curious about an early viewer’s response. Answered in the affirmative, he can’t help prying further. “And you think it’s funny?” Yes. “And you think that it’s so different it doesn’t have a chance in hell of making it on television?” Welllll. . . .

One last question. “Would you consider it a breath of fresh air from--oh, not to name names, but ‘Full House’?” he asks. The answer is, of course: No question.

“Morton & Hayes” premieres Wednesday at 8:30 p.m. on CBS.