Be Careful What You Wish For

Action debuted on September 16, 1999 and it ended on December 2, 1999 after one season and 8 episodes, although additional episodes were burned off on FX in December of ‘99 and August and September of the following year, the last three episodes were burned off. The series starred Jay Mohr as Peter Dragon, Ileana Douglas as Wendy Ward, Buddy Hackett as Uncle Lonnie, Jarrad Paul as Adam Rafkin, and Jack Plotnick as Stuart Glazer. The series was a send up on Hollywood culture, focusing on producer Peter Dragon. The series originally aired on Fox in the U.S. Action has been available on DVD, but appears to be out of print. It does, however stream on Showtime and Amazon Prime.

The candle that burns twice as bright only lasts half as long, eh? So how bright does a TV show that’s only going to last 8 episodes before the axe get to burn? The answer is “As bright as it wants to because that’s what Peter Dragon says and unfortunately for you, he’s employee of the ^%$(%$%ing millennium.” In the late 90’s, Bosom Buddies creator Chris Thompson had an idea to do a TV series about Hollywood. Rather than the usual selfcongratulatory navel gazing pap that might be pitched…he wanted to do a show about the ugly, ugly, smarmy, and just plain ugly side of making films. His idea was to follow the exploits of a foul mouthed big budget wunderkind producer who is vacuuming the carpets in his office to find the final shreds of his thrice-sold soul to sell those again for his next hit film. The premise had teeth and the initial work on it looked great, the only issue was where could you show such a series without sanitizing it? The plan was to take it to HBO, which had recently gotten into making its own series content, beginning with the prison show Oz in 1997. It was a match made in heaven…a TV show built to create newer and filthier never-before-seenin-nature cursing airing on a network where such a spectacle was not only allowed, but was likely to gather an audience. It was destiny, it couldn’t lose…and that’s why Action is getting ready to release its 22nd season this spring…oh, wait, yeah…that didn’t happen.

HBO loved the concept and wanted to make the series, they were just a little tight on cash because they were trying to start up two new shows and figured they needed to save at least some of their money to get their other freshman series (The Sopranos) off the ground…so they offered what they could but it didn’t seem enough to Thompson (and his partner Joel Silver by then). In order to get more money from HBO, the producers shopped the series around to other broadcasters to raise the interest and get a bidding war going. Boy howdy, did they succeed. The folks at Fox loved it. Seriously, they loved it. So much so that as soon as they got into the mix, HBO never had a chance…so the series that was going to focus on all the words you can’t say on broadcast television was picked up for production on broadcast television. What could possibly go wrong? The casting was inspired. Jay Mohr was ultimately cast to play the foul mouthed producer, Peter Dragon, and allowed to eat every piece of scenery that came within reach. Buddy Hackett was cast as his uncle/head of security, and Illeana Douglas was cast as Wendy Ward, the prostitute that Peter picked up the evening of his most recent premiere that just happened to be a former child star. The situations just sort of seemed to write themselves. Peter inadvertently picks up a prostitute on the way to his new screening and when she’s unceremoniously dumped onto the red carpet with him he introduces her to the crowd as “stunt woman Vicky Cox”. They were committed from square one to be crude and smarmy on every level they could imagine and if you were game at all for that kind of thing…they delivered. After the screening, Peter is talking to his president of production and asking him to go into the men’s room and listen to what they’re saying in there to get a reading on the reception to his film. In his reticence to do so, he asks who Peter’s date was. “She’s my prostitute.” “She’s your WHORE?” “No, she’s my prostitute. You’re my whore.” While the laugh there is genuine, it wasn’t nearly all that Illeana Douglas was there for. Her honest and brutal feedback of the film led to Peter bonding with her and making her part of his production company as they set out to find the film that was going to save his career after the disaster he’d just created. Over the course of the 13 episodes they produced (only 8 of which ever saw the light of day on Fox), Peter and Wendy (yes, purposefully named for the boy who never grew up) navigated the perils of finding their script (Beverly Hills Gun Club), making her pimp an executive producer so she could be released to work for him, almost selling his pre-teen daughter to a middle eastern prince as a bride for financing, keeping his star out of rehab, replacing his director who died one week into shooting, and finally finding out that the script he was producing was actually owned by the slimiest twins ever to walk the planet…leading Wendy to get the rights by donning her child star outfit as The Elephant Princess and “entertaining” them for an evening…which ended up as a level of corruption so low that she decided she was quitting the business and returning to honest work as a prostitute. From beginning to end, the show’s over-the-top view of the moral bankruptcy of Hollywood was actually refreshing as hell and to this day, more than 20 years later, that one season of that one show remains the pinnacle of TV achievement for me.