New comedy series begins

Press, 13 March 1987, Page 15

New comedy series begins

When the comedy series which debuts on Two at 7.00 tonight finished being made in America, one of the two stars burst into tears.

Bronson Pinchot, the actor who plays a shepherd from a Mediterranean island who tries to settle with his uptight cousin in America, was distraught that the first "Perfect Strangers” series was completed and his costar, Mark Linn-Baker, was leaving town. “Mark is going back to New York tomorrow. You have to stop him,” Pinchot said to Tom Miller, one of the show’s executive producers. No-one could convince him that they had to stop making shows because they’d finished the planned series and were waiting for word to make another.

Luckily for Pinchot the series was a top-rater and work has continued. The first series was touch-and-go, a case of never have so few done so much so

fast. When Tom Miller and his partner Bob Boyett offered the idea for “Perfect Strangers” to an American network, the network, ABC, said that if they could make six programmes very quickly, they could put them on straight away. It was nail-chewing time all the way. As the

director, Joel Zwick, recalls, “The cast assembled for the first time one morning and three weeks later, that show was on the air. One show was on the air a week after first reading.” Pinchot, playing the strangest of shepherds, became a TV celebrity. His success really began shortly before, with 20 lines in the movie, “Beverly Hills Cop.” He played a haughty art-gallery clerk with an accent totally new to the human ear, and to everyone’s surprise, including his own, it was a show stopper. That accent, slightly modified for “Perfect Strangers,” “was inspired by an Israeli make-up woman I knew who set out to become the most elegant, fashionable, sexiest, mysterious Mata Hari who ever lived. She has developed a speech that was so elegant and syrupyi... and I did a deliberately imperfect recreation of it,” Pinchot

says. Once Pinchot was cast, there was an intensive search for Larry, the uptight cousin. The search ended, according to Pinchot, “the moment Mark walked through the door.” The actors agree there was immediate rapport and after the first scene it was easy.

Everyone agrees that Pinchot is crazy — a selfconfessed weirdo who ad libs his lines and invents strange body movements. Linn-Baker is also, while looking totally stonefaced, able to reduce Pinchot to a laughing basket case.

“He flares his nostrils at me,” Pinchot says. “He’s a big brother who can push my button. He’s a devil.” Scenes have had to be redone up to 15 times because of LinnBaker’s button pushing. “There are times,” Pinchot says, “when I think the producers are going to send us to bed without supper.”