FOX’s Action (1999) — A Contextual Retrospective

On its surface, “Action” starring comedian Jay Mohr, Ileana Douglas, and Buddy Hackett is a 1999 single-camera, dark comedy about the inner workings of Hollywood. In some ways, it mirrors Robert Altman’s “The Player,” but it’s a combination of funnier and more serious.

Action premiered on the FOX television network before the name became synonymous with its right-leaning news network and was still better known for raunchier shows like “Married with Children” or cultural phenomena such as “The Simpsons” and “The X-Files.” Action was within striking distance of the absurdity of Geraldo Rivera’s exploration into a crawl space once owned by Al Capone and “Natural Born Killers,” but took a less bleeding edge approach.

Action was created by Detroit-born Hollywood veteran Chris Thompson, who had his hand in a variety of hits from  “Laverne & Shirley” to Whoopi Goldberg feature “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.”

When Action premiered it became my first appointment TV show since I abandoned “Twin Peaks” in its second season, returning only for the final episode and the “Fire Walk with Me” motion picture, though eventually for Showtime’s revival “Twin Peaks: The Return.” That will become important shortly. I only saw Action because of an ad — maybe on a restaurant TV but just as likely terrestrial radio. Something about that ad pulled me in so far that I put a TV back in my home.

Action follows Mohr’s improbably named Peter Dragon, which cuts somewhat to the chase, associating the show with fantasy. Peter is an amoral Hollywood movie producer whose only god is his next high-octane action movie. He’s a father to one daughter, and his wife has left him to live in opulence as a “beard” for his financier, closeted but hypermasculine movie executive Bobby G. Throughout the show’s short-lived, 13-episode run, Peter misbehaves on the Hollywood fringe while beginning to develop a realization that his life is not all its cracked up to be, likely reflecting creator Thompson’s evolving mindset on the film and TV business. Its earliest episodes featured cameos from Keanu Reeves, Sandra Bullock, and Salma Hayek.

So the funny thing about writing this retrospective is that it started as a post about David Lynch, an artist for whom I have an ocean of appreciation. But in the end, I realized that Chris Thompson cut to the chase and did in the open what Lynch hid behind a love for film with perhaps indulgent levels of artistic expression, if we are being polite. In the 1990s, the auteur director hinted at the dark side of being a woman in Los Angeles through his “Hollywood trilogy” of films while facing occasional criticisms for surrounding himself with nubile actresses.

Back in the 80s and 90s when David Lynch was making critically acclaimed art and pulling his name off the first attempt to film Frank Herbert’s science fiction masterpiece “Dune,” FOX was sort of the Spencers Gifts of television. While HBO and Cinemax hid behind the pay-TV argument to skirt censorship, and Lynch made “woman in trouble” movies under the cover of artistic expression, FOX made fewer apologies and essentially existed in a state of open warfare with conservative Christian parents’ groups. FOX also had shows like “In Living Color” which, despite launching the careers of several less talented Waynes Brothers, provided a home for racial and gender-orientation representation that allegedly frightened the viewers of NBC’s Saturday Night Live. Yes, the performers on In Living Color leaned into stereotypes that would be highly criticized if not cancelled today, but it never dehumanized them in the way the networks did at the time. In defiance of the moral majority, FOX was building on the success of Richard Pryor, George Carlin, and Eddie Murphy. There were no taboos, and that included Hollywood. Enter Joy Mohr, who had no small experience in this area.

Rather than Lynch’s professional if not ethical lawmen, dispossessed film noir musicians, or outright lunatics, Action’s Peter Dragon was a surly, luckless bimbo whose every silver lining was leadened with astronomic calamity. And rather than featuring troubled young women with sinister complications in need of 30 years worth of rescuing, Thompson’s female characters were canny and self-possessed. Unlike Lynch’s “Blue Velvet” virgin/femme fatale, or “Mulholland Drive’s” vindictive innocent, characters like Ileana Douglas’s Windy Ward and Jennifer Lyon’s Reagan Busch understood the misogynistic world in which they live and manipulate that system to their maximum advantage. And FOX was doing this while Lynch was working on “The Straight Story” for Disney.

What I’m saying here is that while Lynch sometimes reduced female agency to sexual license and violent outbursts, often positioning women as victims, Action was empowering its female characters. And this is not even remotely limited to its veiled criticism of the Weinstein Brothers, which has been covered extensively in a number of articles about the #metoo Movement.

Lapping In Living Color and even some contemporary media by miles, Action prodded conservative America’s squeamishness on gay characters, presenting them as morally complex and personally nuanced.

Far more than genre favorite “Firefly” would later be, Action was maligned and deserved better. It was ahead of its time. It was outlandish and crass. Maybe it had 1,000 cheap shots but they all landed.

In the end, FOX played Action’s true cliffhanger abruptly with several episodes unaired. This was its most skewering episode, wherein Wendy shows Peter her ultimate, horrifying loyalty. Peter loses the only thing that really mattered to him. And maybe that’s the best commentary on Hollywood it could have delivered.