And Majors projects precisely that kind of good-natured, self-effacing, handsome, middle-of-the-road, polite but manly image that women love, and guys instantly identify with and instinctively like.
The fall guy dvd series#
It's a cliche, but it's true: TV audiences don't want to watch actors on a regular basis whom they wouldn't want in their living room (interesting sidebar: has that changed with the changing TV series today?). He is, though, a perfect TV actor, a personality that viewers like seeing popping up on their TV sets. I think Majors, to his great credit, would be the first guy to admit that's he not a Shakespearian actor. Since The Fall Guy manages to carry out its prime function, if you will - to simple entertain - it's not insulting to our intelligence.Īnd seriously, you have to give Lee Majors a big part of the credit for this show's success (it was a big hit, landing 26th in the Nielsen's for the year, and going even higher in later seasons). It's all light and fun, even if a serious sub-plot tries to muscle its way into the forefront. It's directed and cut to move fast it has a generous budget and at no time do we linger on anything substantial or heavy in the ideas department. The Fall Guy, co-produced by Lee Majors, features standard, serviceable action/adventure scripts, with mysteries warmed over from a thousand other TV shows and movies you've seen before, jacked up by some pretty impressive, big screen-type stunts (sometimes cobbled from clips from big-screen movies and passed off as originals here), and served up by a cast clearly trying to have fun.
The fall guy dvd movie#
Coming out in 1981, when Burt Reynolds was the biggest box office star in the world, the empty, big-budget stunt movie was finally starting to come into its own as a genre, and The Fall Guy liberally borrowed from those theatrical successes such as Smokey and the Bandit and Hooper (as well as from Steven McQueen's final film, The Hunter, from 1980), boiling them down to workable weekly TV episodes. Happily, The Fall Guy delivers exactly what it promises. If the concept was great, the movie or TV had better live up to that promise, or the essential emptiness of the procedure was painfully obvious to all involved, especially the viewers. Now, one of the big problems with "high concept" projects (beside the general disdain that critics heaped upon the practice, charging the studios with a deliberate dumbing down of material for mass-produced hits), was actually delivering on that promise. Simple, right? You know exactly what you're going to see with that description. The Fall Guy was a perfect example: Tough-guy Hollywood stuntman uses his moviemaking skills to moonlight as a bounty hunter. The key to "high concept" was that the entire movie or TV show could be summed up in one sentence - for all departments, including production, marketing - and especially the audience. "High-concept," as I'm sure you know, was a much-maligned production guideline for movies and later television shows in the late 70s and early 80s (some attribute its inception to then-Paramount whiz-kid Michael Eisner). Watching this entire first season of The Fall Guy on DVD this past week (with no study breaks), I was more than pleasantly surprised at how much laid-back fun I had with this "high-concept" nonsense. I'm not knocking the show back then, I had nothing but good (albeit vague) feelings about Lee Majors early-80s ratings hit. You could pick up and follow the plots no matter how much you missed, and every five or ten minutes, something would blow up, or a good-looking girl (frequently that angel, Heather Thomas) would show up in some revealing get-up, giving you a nice break from that odious studying.
Larson's The Fall Guy was the kind of series I used to call a "homework show." If I needed background noise while I was studying, it perfectly served that purpose. Kiss some other guy while I'm bandagin' my knee.īut when I wind up in the hay, it's only hay, I've never been with anything less than a nine, so fine.īut somehow they just don't end up as mine.īut the hardest thing I ever do is watch my leading ladies
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