TV Reviews : ‘Powers’ Has Deft Cast but Mannered Lunacy

Right on cue, “The Powers That Be” is a political comedy for a political year. But good timing doesn’t necessarily equate to good fun.

Premiering at 8:30 tonight on Channels 4, 36 and 39, this NBC series from producer Norman Lear has energy, a deft cast and occasional smart humor. Yet most of its gags are so broad and strained, and its characters so brazenly dysfunctional and over the top, that its negative message about the Washington Establishment is smothered by mannered lunacy. In style and tone, in fact, “The Powers That Be” closely resembles “Good & Evil,” this season’s failed but funnier ABC comedy from Susan Harris.

The intent here is a sort of dark satire driven by greedy, corrupt characters. John Forsythe is pliable, just-a-little-bit-dumb Sen. William Powers, whose run for a fifth term has his eccentric, self-serving family and staff in a frenzy. Holland Taylor is his nasty, tyrannical, anti-Semitic, obsessively ambitious and fastidious wife, Margaret, who physically abuses her hapless maid (Elizabeth Berridge). Although Powers is a Democrat, he and his wife are funniest when slipping into a stereotypical Ron-and-Nancy mode, in which the woman’s thoughts control the man’s voice.

Meanwhile, their infantile adult daughter (Valerie Mahaffey) is a recovering anorexic whose spineless congressman husband (David Pierce) is suicidal. Powers is sleeping with his scheming chief assistant (Eve Gordon), and his image-crazed press aide (Peter MacNicol) is an imploding, tied-in-knots neurotic. About the only likable character here is the WASPy senator’s brassy, illegitimate Jewish daughter, Sophie (Robin Bartlett), whose surprise arrival tonight causes a panic and threatens to scuttle his carefully spin-doctored candidacy.

The premiere begins with a funny jolt that is later only rarely matched. Most of the episode gets swept up in a chaotic bustle that may keep you watching, but not laughing. Next week’s wildly over-ratcheted Episode 2 finds everyone but Sophie cynically seeking to turn a potential tragedy into a campaign plus.

It gets pretty ugly, opening with a mock hanging--using a drape cord--that is so dangerously inappropriate for a timeslot this accessible to young children that it’s inconceivable that NBC would approve it. By virtue of its acidic material, in fact, “The Powers That Be” in its entirety belongs on the air at 8:30 about as much as that doofus William Powers belongs in the U.S. Senate.