The Suits Pull No Punches at Themselves

Richard Pryor once did a comedy routine about boxing against an opponent who kept smacking himself in the head. As Pryor told it (cleaning it up a bit for a family newspaper), he yelled to his coach, “This guy’s beating up himself! What’s he gonna do to me?”

Interest groups frequently contend television beats them up by presenting misleading, negative or overly dramatic images--from Italian American activists fuming over “The Sopranos” to African Americans who protested “The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer.” Even professions join in, with lawyers, doctors and teachers occasionally getting huffy about the way they’re depicted on programs like “Ally McBeal,” “ER” and “Boston Public,” just as cops question the realism of action-packed crime shows or the police corruption on FX’s new drama “The Shield.”

There’s no question that television has a way of making characters look silly or inept, while at the same time cramming more drama into individual episodes than the average cop or doctor sees in a lifetime. Yet those who feel especially abused, mistreated or beaten up should pay attention to the way TV slaps itself around, with fresh examples arriving next week in the form of two new comedy series, ABC’s “Wednesday 9:30 (8:30 Central)” and Fox’s “Greg the Bunny.”

Call it fear and self-loathing in TV land.

When outsiders register these complaints, the theme usually boils down to this: “The world portrayed on television is not representative of my reality as a [fill in the blank]. It makes me/my group look stupid.” Indeed, if vampires, aliens and genetically engineered humans had unions, they’d doubtless voice concerns about the outrageous stereotyping on “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “3rd Rock From the Sun” and “Dark Angel.”

Minority groups also point out, with some justification, that negative portrayals of them can be especially damaging, because it might be days before a Latino cast as a drug dealer is counterbalanced by the prime-time presentation of a Latino as an upstanding citizen.

Still, it’s hard to come up with a group more unrelentingly depicted as buffoonish, self-absorbed and loathsome than television executives, whose images seem to be getting worse as we advance into the 21st century.

Whatever its merits as a comedy, “Wednesday” is a triple-threat in this regard: Not only does the ABC sitcom make TV executives look like colossal morons, ranging from neurotic and venal to flagrantly disingenuous, but it lays on inside jokes (beginning with the title) and still manages to be wildly unrealistic.

How unrealistic? Well, the action unfolds through the eyes of a fresh-faced newcomer from the Midwest with no previous TV experience (played by Ivan Sergei), just hired in a programming job at the fictitious network.

Sure, that happens every day.

“Greg the Bunny,” meanwhile, features a children’s TV show that mixes humans and puppets (the gimmick: The puppets are real), and--surprise!--another assortment of crazed producers and executives, joined by self-centered stars of both the human and cloth variety.

There is, of course, a well-established tradition of show-business denizens being portrayed as back-stabbing bottom-feeders. Hoary examples such as “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” “All About Eve” and “The Bad and the Beautiful” have given way to more recent instances such as the meddling network executives on “Sports Night” and “The Larry Sanders Show,” the get-away-with-murder studio exec in “The Player,” or the do-anything-for-a-rating producers and executives in “The Truman Show,” “EdTV” and the just-released “Showtime.”

Hookers may have a heart of gold at times on TV, but don’t hold your breath waiting for an equally benign view of Hollywood’s hucksters. In fact, the only sympathetic character that comes to mind was the network chief in Showtime’s “Beggars and Choosers,” which may have to do with him being modeled after a real network chief, the late Brandon Tartikoff, who helped conceive the show.

Though they don’t write these TV shows or films, the fact networks and studios keep buying them tells you something either about their willingness to laugh at themselves or the way they see their world--and presume the world sees them.

The definitive image, no doubt, remains Faye Dunaway’s amoral programming czar in “Network,” a film released in 1976 that seemingly becomes more prophetic with each passing day--something TV executives seem to realize, intuitively or consciously, based on some of their recent programming choices.

How else do you account for “Celebrity Boxing,” the special broadcast last week by the Fox network, which pitted notorious has-beens against each other? (Fox is repeating “Celebrity Boxing” on Thursday, by the way, no doubt as a public service to those who missed it.)

Fox led with its chin, hoping the media would rise to the bait and bash the special. For the most part, the network got its wish, generating plenty of negative articles and snide TV news coverage--even on competing channels, which ran footage from the bouts as if they were a legitimate event.

In short, Fox saw the critical drubbing as free promotion at a time when networks are so desperate for attention there’s seldom such a thing as bad press. Stripped to its core, then, “Celebrity Boxing” was a plaintive cry for help, the network’s way of saying, “We’ll take you any way we can get you.” Talk about throwing in the towel.

Given the triumph of that philosophy, the show-business stereotypes cited above don’t seem quite as far removed from reality. What they fail to explore, however, is the fact that few people got into the entertainment business aspiring to nothing more than winning a time slot, having adopted Raiders owner Al Davis’ motto “Just win, baby” in the course of running their daily rat race.

Does this explain why the TV industry characters we see on TV tend to be such caricatures--the sort of hollow, depth-free shells any interest group would rightly protest? Is “Wednesday” its own expensive form of therapy? Or is it just that television by necessity distorts reality to make it entertaining--that while there are high schools with less gunplay, sex and controversy than the one in “Boston Public,” we probably wouldn’t tune in each week to watch teachers grade papers and plan homework?

Whatever the reason, it’s probably no accident that network programmers keep smacking themselves in the head. And if “Celebrity Boxing” is truly the best they can do, one hopes they knock some sense into themselves.

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Brian Lowry’s column appears Wednesdays. He can be reached at brian.lowry@latimes.com.