SWAMP FOXES
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Swamp Foxes is a behind-the-tube look at prime-time TV. The once popular TV series Swamp Foxes is slipping in the ratings. Jim, the director of programming, and Roger, the writer, plot to salvage their careers by setting up a fall guy, Doug, a Michigan scholar and author whose unsolicited scripts can be blamed for the show’s failure. But Doug’s scripts, once Roger doctors them up, prove enormously successful. Not only that, Doug’s treatment for a new series, The Whalers, becomes such a hot property that everyone starts kissing Doug’s ass–except Lucy (the star of Swamp Foxes), who takes a frontal approach. Eventually, Doug is exposed as an impostor. His Swamp Foxes scripts are rewrites of old MAS*H episodes, and The Whalers is a treatment of Moby-Dick. Yet in this business it hardly seems to matter, and perhaps because of the boldness of his hoax, Doug is hailed as a brilliant “idea man.”
So you see, Swamp Foxes is an extremely broad-based satire, taking on the hyena pack of programming executives, the burned-out and derivative legacy of the sitcom, the prostitution of everyone involved with prime-time TV, and the superficial cultural climate of southern California in general. And playwright Laurence Gonzales should know what he’s talking about, since he’s written for Simon and Simon and The Scarecrow and Mrs. Miller.
There’s a formula for Swamp Foxes that Gonzales didn’t create, although he learned it to the point of second nature: plot is subordinate to gags, and character is subordinate to plot. Small wonder that Doug, the central character, is also the least distinct–an uncertain wad of clay shaped and reshaped to accommodate the twists in the plot. No wonder that director B.J. Jones should hustle that plot along to the point that actors are pouncing on cues and barking at each other; the audience doesn’t have time to reflect on how stupid this show is. And even if you did stop to think, you’d be undermined and oppressed by the uncresting wave of banal witticisms. (“Diet Nam”–it’s about a fat farm in Southeast Asia.)
