Her performance in the 1988 movie "Working Girl" won Joan Cusack an Oscar nomination.
When the big night came, 12 years ago this week, Cusack lost in the supporting-actress
category to Geena Davis ("The Accidental Tourist").
Several orbits later, both Cusack and Davis are in ABC sitcoms, in a season
that has shown TV's chronic rudeness to transplanted movie stars.
"The Geena Davis Show" hangs by a filament. Cusack's tailored comedy, "What
About Joan," premieres tonight.
Cusack plays a Chicago high school teacher whose array of neuroses is a constant
threat to her relationship with her boyfriend (Kyle Chandler, "Early Edition.").
Everything seems to be in place for a successful series. For starters, she
plays directly to the same histrionics she flashed so amusingly as the jilted
bride in the Kevin Kline movie "In & Out."
Cusack gets a fairly comfortable time slot hammocked between "Dharma & Greg"
and "NYPD Blue," on a night where the fading but still formidable "Who Wants to
Be a Millionaire" leads off at 8 p.m.
And "What About Joan" comes from a creative team headed by a monsignor of smart
comedy, James Brooks. His credits include "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," "The Simpsons,"
"As Good as It Gets" and "Terms of Endearment."
So why is it hard to be fully enthusiastic over Cusack's series?
Because Cusack's character, Joan Gallagher, is every bit as irritating as she
is lovable, mainly.
Cusack overplays her shamelessly. That Play-Doh face never gets a moment's
rest. Cusack is all mugging, working her jaw and mouth into a hundred contortions.
It's as if she's in a circus and not a TV show.
She pitches in with her arms. They're practically helicopter rotors; you'll
half expect her to take flight. If it's not that, she's scrunching her face and
pounding her fists on her temples.
It's fine for a while. Cusack has an early scene tonight in which she scurries
into a restaurant, late for a date with her new boyfriend, Jake (Chandler).
She sits down and while he keeps count, changes from her work clothes to her
dinner-date attire, tugging and pulling at things and making her faces. Fine.
But it grows tiresome when you realize that a little bit of Joan Cusack has
gone way too far, and she's nothing but mugging, shrieking and jangled nerves.
By the end of tonight's pilot, a viewer might wonder why Jake, after six weeks
of dating, wants to marry her.
ABC sent the second episode to critics, too, and Cusack is no more sedated
as she frets herself into a rift with Jake over sex. It'd be like sex with a Cuisinart.
Wait, never mind. For all I know, some of our fine neighbors enjoy sex with their
Cuisinarts.
Aside from the Cusack tornado effect -- there, that's better -- "What About
Joan" features a decently funny script and a supporting cast that isn't developed
in either of the first two shows.
Joan Gallagher's best buds are Broadway star Donna Murphy as a stable psychiatrist
who seems to indulge Joan's emotional outbursts, and Jessica Hecht ("The Single
Guy") as a school colleague who's sexually involved with another supporting player,
a teacher played by Wallace Langham ("Veronica's Closet"). Kellie Shanygne Williams
is quietly in the cast as yet another teacher at the high school.
But the show's only lingering impression is Cusack, flinging herself into her
first TV series as if her life depended on it.
