Before there was Seinfeld, there was Nat Hiken. Which to say that, long before Larry David, Larry Charles and the other Seinfeld scribes came along, Hiken was already creating miniature comic masterpieces that were, in essence, half-hour farces complete with plot complications and multiple twists and surprises. Hiken’s first real TV masterwork was Sgt. Bilko, arguably the funniest sitcom in television history.
Amazingly, Hiken managed to capture lightning in a bottle a second time with his next sitcom, Car 54, Where Are You? Although he didn’t have a comedic genius like Phil Silvers to build the action around, Hiken did come up with one of the oddest pairings imaginable for the show’s leads: Crude, uninhibited strip-club comic Joe E. Ross, as bumbling police officer Gunther Toody, and Harvard-educated, classically trained actor Fred Gwynn as Toody’s dour, long-suffering partner Francis Muldoon.
At long last, the first season of Car 54 has been released on DVD by Shanachie Entertainment (a company for which I have some affection because they also released The Man Who Changed His Mind, my favorite Boris Karloff horror film from the 1930s). The pilot episode, Who’s For Swordfish? (originally broadcast on Sept. 17, 1961), is a prime example of how wonderfully convoluted the average Car 54 plots were.
Directed by Al De Caprio and co-scripted by Hiken and Terry Ryan, Who’s For Swordfish? opens by establishing that Toody and Muldoon’s favorite activity for Wednesdays, their traditional day off, is fishing, even if they can only afford renting a tiny little row boat to paddle around New York harbor in. One day, they spot fellow officer Dennis O’Hara (Al Henderson) riding aboard a luxurious yacht and remember that O’Hara has a wealthy brother-in-law who’s an attorney.
Longing to go after swordfish out in the bay, Toody and Muldoon start showering favors on O’Hara in hopes of guilt-tripping him into asking his brother-in-law to invite them on board his yacht. Finally, O’Hara relents and tells Toody that they have an invite… for next Thursday. (It seems the brother-in-law has an important meeting on Wednesday.)
Desperate, Toody and Muldoon go to Officers Wallace (Frederick O’Neal) and Nelson (Jim Gormley), who have Thursdays off to see if they’ll switch. They’re willing, but Wallace wants to take his kids to the ballgame and there’s no day game on Wednesday, but he can take them on Saturday. Next stop, Officers Nicholson (Hank Garrett) and Steinmetz (Joe Warren) who have Saturday off. They’re willing… if they can get Monday off instead. And so on, until a half-dozen days off have been switched around.
It looks like Toody and Muldoon will have Thursday off, but then Muldoon remembers that Thursday is the day they have to appear in court if they give out any traffic tickets. They learn from Captain Block (Paul Reed) that the only assignment that doesn’t involve traffic duty is a surveillance job that Nicholson and Steinmetz are scheduled for, so they ask to switch assignments and the whole switching rigmarole begins all over again.
Finally, Toody and Muldoon have their Thursday off. The catch is they have to be sure not to issue any traffic tickets. So it figures that, while staking out the suburban neighborhood they’ve been assigned to, Toody spots a motorist driving past a stop sign without stopping and instinctively pulls him over…
Season One of Car 54, Where Are You? is available from Amazon.
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