Williams is crazier than ever

The show is called The Crazy Ones, but there really, truly is only one major crazy one on display here. If you have not heard an old, rundown record playing the same tune over and over again, well, here is Robin Williams.

The veteran comedian, 62, back to front a sitcom since Mork & Mindy (1978 -1982), plays Simon Roberts, a nutty, unpredictable genius-buffoon boss who runs a chic advertising company in Chicago called Roberts & Roberts with his more practical, cold-fish daughter, Sydney (Buffy The Vampire Slayer's Sarah Michelle Gellar).

"My name is on the door now," Sydney reminds her dad, hoping to curb his eccentric, edge-of-heart-attack ways. The overgrown clown retorts: "Really? I thought that was my name spelt twice."

Oh, you must know the Robin Williams shtick, which has stuck around in various forms since, I think, 1859.

That quick rapid-fire spurt of jokes, voice impersonations and cartoonish chatter suggest a demented hyperactive lobe somewhere which might require severe excising.

"You know there's something truly wrong with you, right?" Sydney counsels her daddy. "Big time," he admits.

Series creator David E. Kelley - helming his first sitcom after more serious stuff such as Ally McBeal, Boston Legal and The Practice - must have thought that Mad Men, that stoic ad men drama, needed a madder man to spoof it.

I mean, those advertising pitches which often require a song-and-dance routine for clients are tailor-made for Williams' vaudeville talents, right?

But the saving grace is that The Crazy Ones surround him with a bunch of likeable Younger Ones, to soften him. There is Gellar's residual appeal from her beloved Buffy, of course.

But the back-up trio of James Wolk and Hamish Linklater as competing copywriter Zach and art guy Andrew, and Amanda Setton as Lauren the smartie assistant, are funny enough to spin off into their own Two Nuts And A Chick show.

Right now, though, The Crazy Ones itself is in limbo with the network suits wondering whether to cancel it. Maybe it is due to the inflated star salaries, but that is a pity because it is getting funnier and chummier.

Williams and Gellar really do share good chemistry as father and daughter.

At first it was exciting to imagine his staccato wisecracking juxtaposed with Gellar's equally quick teen-queen comebacks from Buffy (Buffy fans, there are Buffy references for you here to spot).

That is before discovering that Gellar is employed more as the humour slayer here as the straight man, sorry, woman.

It is clear that no matter how hard she tries, she is never ever going to be funny next to Whirlwind Williams.

So she stops trying and, as the show progresses, becomes more relaxed.

The Crazy Ones has the best outtakes of any series around right now, especially the hilarious cut scenes of poor Gellar cringing her face trying to contain her laughter at Williams' antics.

More crazy ones are in the highly implausible but guiltily entertaining conspiracy-thriller-drama Hostages.

I approached this show like I did the first instalment of the American Horror Story series - I imagine both as being very nutty comedies.

Funnily enough, both series star Dylan McDermott, an extremely glum man who never ever tries to be funny in all his shows but in so doing, actually ends up in some really accidentally hilarious ones.

Here, he plays rogue FBI agent, Duncan Carlisle, who seems to have some pretty serious beef with the President of the United States since he leads a gang of four tough, organised intruders who takes an entire family hostage in a grand plan to assassinate the president.

"Sometimes you have to do a bad thing for a good reason," he says. Healthcare issues? Iraq? Afghanistan? Gay marriage? Bad hair on the Republicans?

I have gone six episodes into the show and I still do not know what his gripe is, although he keeps visiting his dying wife in a hospital and ends up looking more pi**ed off each time.

This is an "event series" such as The Event and FlashForward. Meaning, something big and sinister, usually going all the way up to the commander-in-chief, aliens or evil Wall Street, is happening with little people caught right under it.

The little people here are a surgeon, Dr Ellen Sanders (United States Of Tara's Toni Collette), who is scheduled to operate on the president, and her family, who are held hostage in their big house.

The intention is to hold Sanders' family ransom for one day to force her to kill the president while she is operating on him, kind of like Homeland meets Grey's Anatomy.

But the soap-opera reality is that this arrangement will segue into 15 episodes of tense, close-call drama which stretches credibility longer than a rubber band.

Imagine a situation where the hostage family is allowed to go about everyday life openly to keep up appearances, while they are threatened with harm and tailed with GPS chips implanted into their skin.

"Even though we're not with you, we'll be with you," warns Carlisle as the conspiracy darkens into White House- Secret Service-FBI level just two winks shy of Kerry Washington's outrageous Scandal.

My jaw keeps dropping and my mouth keeps chuckling at how far the producers can keep up this preposterous charade as they scribble the story - based on an Israeli TV series - on a car boot while the car is presumably speeding down a highway.

And oh, if you wonder why the hostages do not just run like hell and maybe an unsuspecting sister might visit, well, they do that too but everybody always end up right where they started as though this is Law & Order: Groundhog Day.

Then again, I actually do marvel at the loony creativity of the writers here in trying to humanise each character.

The husband is having an affair, the son deals weed, the daughter is secretly pregnant, one kidnapper is a recovering alcoholic and the hot female baddie (half-Chinese Sandrine Holt) has money issues in which she goes out and gets beaten up by her debtors while she is holding other people captive elsewhere.

The big fun I have here is in seeing how it twists, turns and wriggles itself out of the corners it builds, and how McDermott keeps his perpetually straight and unmoving face from bursting open like an overripe water melon.

I like him. He has absolutely no sense of humour, but he is secretly very funny.

If Robin Williams impersonates this guy, it will be comedy gold.

View it

THE CRAZY ONES
Star World (StarHub TV Channel 501, SingTel mio TV Channel 301)
Mondays, 8.15pm
***½

HOSTAGES
WarnerTV (StarHub TV Channel 515)
Thursdays, 9pm
***

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