Arts & Entertainment
TELEVISION JEWS:
Emit, Jewish Is
Too Jew's
TV's fall
season offers
old stereotypes and
new characters
Series with Jewish
characters include,
clockwise from top,
"Will 6. Grace,"
The Education of §-
Max Bickford"
"Mind of the
Married Man,"
"Inside Schwartz,"
"Bob Patterson,"
and "Danny"
On page 69:
The Jewish Bunch,
clockwise fi-om top l
Mike Binder, Daniel Stern,
Miriam Shor, Richard
Dreyfus, Oded Fehr,
Jason Alexander, Debra
Messing, Breckin Meyer.
JN
10/19
2001
72
SALLY OGLE DAVIS
Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles
he new television season is upon us.
African American and Latino groups
are making the expected protests
about the lack of people who look
like them before and aft of the camera, and the
Jews are — as usual — adding up their TV IQ
on the fingers of one hand.
If there aren't many "brothers" out there,
there are even fewer "Members of the Tribe,"
and those that are there are not particularly
Jewish Jews, if you know what I mean.
Take the show about a 40-something, newly
divorced father, Danny — the first fall series
canceled, after just two episodes. In that CBS
series, Danny, played by Daniel Stern, looked
like he was Jewish, sounded like he was Jewish,
but his live-in father was played by Polish
American Robert Prosky, and his kids Sally
and Henry came across as just, well, kids.
Ah, but wait, Danny was described in the
program notes as "adapting to his single life
one neurotic step at a time." Neurotic is televi-
sion-speak for Jew.
The whole subject made the producers of
the show, which, by the way, was set in that
hotbed of neuroses, Portland, Ore., a trifle
nervous. "It's implied," one of the show's pro-
ducers told this reporter. "It's not an overt
kind of thing. You don't get it rammed down
your throat. It wasn't about his Jewish life —
it was about his life."
Actor Daniel Stern himself, however, seemed
more relaxed about the idea of playing a Jewish
man with a thing about basketball. "I was happy
to be Jewish on the show," he said. 'And I liked
sort of putting it out there. And I wanted to put
it out there in a sort of funny way. I thought
that might be something that I hadn't seen." -
That's.because he hadn't seen the pilot for
Inside Schwartz (see sidebar).
Adam Schwartz is also Jewish and a basket-
ball nut. It's not implied — he tells you that
right off the bat, even though he's played by
non-Jew Breckin Meyer.
"I want to be the first Jew to win the slam-
dunk contest," Schwartz declared in the pilot
episode. His more realistic dream is to become a
sports announcer. Even if he hadn't told us, we'd
know he was Jewish, because his sidekick is a
perfectly marvelous young Jewish woman played
by former Detroiter Miriam Shor (Hedwig and
the Angry Inch), who is ready and waiting for
him to make his move on her. (We know she's
Jewish because she's smart-mouthed and quirky.)
Executive Producer Stephen Engel says he
wasn't sure how the network would react to a
show built around a Jewish character. And he
wasn't the only one.
"My father called while I was doing the show,"
Engel said. "He said, 'You know I don't interfere
in your work, but this show you're doing, are you
sure about the title? You know Schwartz is a
Jewish name. I don't know how the rest of
Ameri.ca [is] going to respond to this.'"