"I will not become Bob Denver!"

by Brian McKim & Traci Skene on April 7th, 2005

The above has become a catchphrase around SHECKYmagazine HQ, and for obvious reasons! We saw it in the TV Guide’s Cheers and Jeers section:

JEERS to NBC’s latest cliched Behind the Camera movie, The Unauthorized Story of Mork & Mindy, which reduced Robin Williams (Chris Diamantopoulos) to a perky yet sad clown who handles TV fame by declaring “I will not become Bob Denver” as he turns to drugs. Given the script, who’d blame him?

No comment yet from Bob Denver, we suppose. (We’re guessing it’s a direct– and authentic– quote from Williams. Does it not say a lot about the man that he would say something like that about a fellow thespian? Not nice.) And what’s with the people at TV Guide sucking up to Robin Williams like that? JEERS? Get real! (And, after all, wasn’t Robin Williams actually a “perky yet sad clown?”) We wonder if the same thugs who threatened to end Michael Chiklis’ career for portraying John Belushi in a trashy biopic leaned on poor Mr. Diamantopoulos in a similar manner. (Judging from the art that accompanied the item– Chris D. in full Mork regalia!– he won’t be starring on the FX as a dirty cop any time soon!)

We also noticed in the same issue, an item entitled “J.J. Abrams Gets Busy” tells of “the tireless 38-year-old writer-producer-director” who has three pilots in the running to apear on ABC’s fall schedule. (What it is it about the business model of Big TV that insists on throwing money at producers who have one or two hits, asking them to spin four or five plates at once, thereby destroying their ability to do just one series with any success? Even Aaron Spelling had the sense to do only one or two at a time.)

Anyway, one of the pilots, “The Catch,” is described as “a long-in-the-works pet project about grandfather-and-grandson private eyes.” (We like to call it “Heart to Heart Attack!”) The beauty part is that Don Rickles has been cast as… the older one!

We won’t know until May 17 if Rickles will be on regular network television– that’s the day that ABC announces their fall schedule.

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