‘Action’ Filled With Promise of Mean

Is this Hollywood or East Timor?

The opening half hour of the new Fox comedy, “Action,” is so full of nasty, edgy, satirical promise that you hope future episodes don’t muck it up. Or soften it in response to blindered, evangelizing critics seeking to spread their own “family values” to all of viewerdom.

On the other hand, it makes the movie business look so demonic, they might go for it.

How dangerous is “Action”? So dangerous that just writing about the series is dicey at this point, for Fox is launching it with two back-to-back episodes Thursday night, the second of which it said was unavailable to preview.

So what you read here is about only the laugh-out-loud-funny Part 1, whose industry killing fields immediately intersect DragonFire Films, the production company operated by young, cocky, soulless Peter Dragon, whom Jay Mohr skillfully plays to the snotty, egomaniacal hilt. It’s always about him, and he likes it that way, making him one of those characters you love to hate.

When we meet Dragon, he’s a mean jerk whose professional stature in the eyes of other, more powerful mean jerks hinges on whether his violent, gory movies continue making money at the box office. Unfortunately for him, he presently has a clunker on his hands, and lurking in the wings is a comeuppance or two, including one from a waiter he dressed down for no reason.

At Dragon’s side are his fuddy chauffeur Uncle Lonnie (Buddy Hackett); his weak, gofer of a production chief, Stuart Glazer (Jack Plotnick); and former child star Wendy Ward (Illeana Douglas). She’s a hooker (yes, with a heart) when Dragon first encounters her, and such an independent spirit and astute observer of the business that he decides to bring her on board.

But not as a muse a la Sharon Stone evoking genius from Albert Brooks, for there appear to be no poets or great artists here to inspire.

Stuart: “Who’s she?”

Dragon: “She’s my prostitute.”

Stuart: “Your whore?”

Dragon: “No, my prostitute. You’re my whore.”

It’s a title that may fit the multitudes in “Action.” This means that TV now has two smartly written series portraying the entertainment business as largely cutthroat, with “Action” joining Showtime’s ever-more-likable “Beggars and Choosers” on this front.

The latter epitomizes the TV arena’s “madness incarnate” that Paddy Chayefsky so wickedly parodied in “Network.” And which Sunday’s effusive Emmys and preshow telecasts obscured behind gratuitous fawning. Rarely has “phenomenal” been lavished so often on the unphenomenal. You had the feeling that these gushers would have turned it on just as high for Calvin Coolidge had he dropped by.

TV depicting TV goes back at least as far as comedy writer Rob Petry and his sidekicks somehow coping with despotic Alan Brady in that wonderful old CBS sitcom “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” and reached a dark, savagely funny zenith on HBO in the ‘90s with Garry Shandling and “The Larry Sanders Show.”

Like Shandling’s crew, the insecure and mostly inept characters of “Beggars and Choosers” themselves project a behind-the-scenes goofy menace. But from a different perspective, with distracted network programming chief Rob Malone (Brian Kerwin) ever the punching bag, looking less and less like a survivor these days, in contrast to his ruthless development chief, Lori Volpone (Charlotte Ross), and her own, newly arrived back-stabbing Eve Harrington.

Fasten your seat belts, too, for “Action,” whose opener also finds an agent pitching O.J. Simpson to Dragon as an actor, and the young producer appalled to learn that he has mistakenly spent a fortune to buy a script from nerdy Adam Rafkin (Jarrad Paul), whom Stuart had confused with that other writer, Alan Rifkin.

Oh great, Dragon fumes, they spent $250,000 and “got the wrong Jew.”

Meanwhile, Dragon’s ex-wife (Cindy Ambuehl) lives with a gay studio chief (Lee Arenberg), whose legendary male apparatus awes and intimidates Dragon. Not to worry, his equipment is deftly obscured from our view. Just as the show’s supposedly dirtiest words are bleeped, another shrewd back door that conveys the texture of lewd language while forcing viewers to rely on their own vocabularies to plug the profanity gaps.

Not that being inoffensively offensive here is likely to get Fox off the hook with some of TV’s severest critics, who inevitably will see this series as more evidence of a medium descending into an abyss of depravity.

Just the other evening, one of them was complaining on a TV talk show that “Action” was so obscene that it had to be bleeped. He hadn’t seen it, of course, and was apparently unaware that bleeping was built into the show as a comedic device.

A frequently invoked Hollywood lament applies here: Go figure.

* The first two episodes of “Action” air at 9 and 9:30 p.m. Thursday on Fox. The network has rated it TV-MA-DLS (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17 with special advisories for suggestive dialogue, coarse language and sex).

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Howard Rosenberg’s column appears Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. He can be reached atcalendar.letters@latimes.com.

Do the Network Hop: * Why “Action” and “Roswell” are airing on networks they weren’t written for. F2