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Bagdad Cafe aired on CBS from March 1990 until November 1990 on CBS.

Brenda and Jasmine ( Whoopi Goldberg, Jean Stapleton) were in their way a female " Odd Couple"- two women with seemingly incompattible personalities who became fast friends. Brenda was the owner and operator of The Bagdad Cafe diner and motel, an isolated, fleabitten rest stop in the middle of The Mojave Desert between Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Jasmine had been traveling through the desert with her husband when their car broke down. The argument that followed was, for her, the last straw. She abandoned him and dragged her luggage through the desert until she staggerd into The Bagdad Cafe. With limited funds and no desire to return to her former life, Jasmine went to work for Brenda and took up residence in one of the rooms at the motel.

Jasmine was a perfect compliment to Brenda. She was very neat, structured and organized while Brenda was a disorganized slob. She was philsophical and optimistic while Brenda was a crude, loud-mouthed synic. The one thing they had in common was being seperated from their husbands-Brenda having thrown out her philandering Sal when she caught him in bed with a guest at the motel. Other regulars were Juney ( Scott Lawrence), Brenda's talented piano-playing son who served as the Diner's cook and was rasing his infant daughter Amarah; Debbie ( Monica Calhoun), Brenda's daughter who was much more interested in boys then in her schoolwork; and Rudy ( James Gammon), a regular at the diner who took a fancy to Jasmine. When Bagdad Cafe returned for it's second season in the fall of 1990, Rudy's nervous nephew Dewey ( Sam Whipple), unable to cope with a high-stressed job in the space industry arrived and took over as the diner's cook. Juney had departed to seek his fortune, leaving Brenda with the additional burden of rasing her granddaughter.

Whoopi Goldberg abruptly left the show after the first 9 episodes of the fall 1990 season and the show immediately sputtered to a halt.This sitcom was adapted from the theatrical film of the same name with Monica Calhoun reprising her role as Debbie.

A Review From The New Your Times

TV Weekend;
Open Season on Husbands as Comedy Stars Return

By JOHN J. O'CONNOR
Published: March 30, 1990

Two of television's most successful comedy actresses are returning to the grind of a weekly schedule. Jean Stapleton, for years the dizzy but shrewd mate to Archie Bunker on ''All in the Family,'' can be seen tonight at 9 o'clock on CBS's ''Bagdad Cafe,'' based on the 1988 Percy Adlon movie. Her co-star is Whoopi Goldberg. Tomorrow at 9:30 P.M. on NBC, Carol Burnett offers a ''special sneak preview'' of ''Carol and Company,'' an anthology series featuring a new comic sketch each week.

As a movie, ''Bagdad Cafe'' was a genial study of oddball characters, almost as if William Saroyan's ''Time of Your Life'' were transplanted West to an isolated setting in the Mojave Desert. Now, done up by Mort Lachman, Sy Rosen and Zev Braun as a typical sitcom, it has become a vehicle for wisecracks and a soundtrack that goes ''aaahhh'' whenever the camera focuses on a cute infant. Ms. Stapleton is Jasmine, who simply walks away from her husband in the middle of the desert when their car breaks down and his blood pressure rises dangerously. ''You promised me for 25 years you were going to die,'' she tells him, ''well, I'm sick of waiting.'' This is not a good season, it seems, for husbands.

Ms. Goldberg is Brenda, proprietor of the Bagdad Cafe and its adjoining motel. The cantankerous Brenda has a sexy teen-age daughter (Monica Calhoun) who's wild for good-looking clods and a musician son (Scott Lawrence) who looks after his daughter (that's where the adorable infant comes in). Brenda's husband is Sal (Cleavon Little). This one is quickly dumped when Brenda finds him in bed with another woman. Enter dusty Jasmine, lugging her suitcases and looking for a room.

Excitable Brenda and gentle Jasmine - she does magic tricks in her spare time - are opposites but clearly meant for each other in prime-time's world of insult humor. The stars seem to be enjoying themselves immensely, and Paul Bogart, a sitcom miracle worker, directs the first episode with enough aplomb to qualify himself as a master illusionist.

A Review from USA TODAY

TV PREVIEW/BY MATT ROUSH

Dishing out the same stale fare at the 'Bagdad Cafe'

Maybe CBS saw a more commercial Frank's Place in the art house comedy film Bagdad Cafe. In adapting it, however, they've come up with something closer to Mel's Diner.

Order takeout.

The 1988 movie, a precious and fuzzy fantasy about oddball drifters at a desert motel and truck stop, unfolded mysteriously, goofily, as if it were out of sync with time and logic.

As a sitcom, with studio audience enhanced by a frantic and whooping laugh track, it's right in step with the rest of the losers in the Sahara of CBS' midseason wasteland.

The series stars Whoopi Goldberg as the wronged wife and frustrated mother who runs the cafe, and she plays it minus the hair-trigger anger of the movie's C.C.H. Pounder ( Common Ground). Whoopi's sneering sassiness recalls Marla Gibbs. No improvement.

Jean Stapleton plays a new arrival who has left her hubby on the desert highway. In the movie, her role took the grotesque shape of a fat German woman with inexplicable magic up her ample sleeves.

Stapleton can still deliver a wonderfully baleful gaze and gives the role quiet dignaty, but what does this suburban matron know from magic?

At least the star casting is understandable for its marquee value, if not for its slow-to-get chemistry. Worse is what happened to the movie's most vivid character: the smitten artist given grizzled charisma by Jack Palance. As played by James Gammon, he's just another sitcom's plug-ugly coot.

Comparrisons aside-and how many saw the quirky original anyway? -Bagdad Cafe fails because it's an eccentric idea given a mainstream treatment.

Frank's Place was a ratings failure many will remember forever. Cafe isn't likely to linger long after the final clunky punch line is served up.

A Review from Entertainment Weekly

TV Review
BAGDAD CAFE
(CBS, FRI., MARCH 30, 9-9:30 P.M.)

By Ken Tucker

Rarely has a bad sitcom been better acted than Bagdad Cafe. Executive producer Zev Braun-who saw the movie Platoon, watered it down, and turned it into Tour of Duty -now has bought the rights to the 1988 Percy Adlon movie about outcasts on the outskirts of Las Vegas. Instead of watering it down, Braun has pumped it up, with stars Whoopi Goldberg and Jean Stapleton. Too bad Braun didn't hire writers who would give them the sorts of sharp lines the movie had. Whoopi Goldberg plays Brenda, owner of the rundown Bagdad Cafe and Motel. At the start of this debut episode, she finds her husband fooling around and throws him ut of the show-but just for this week. And that's good, because guest star Cleavon Little is terrific as a bristly-bearded weasel. Stapleton plays Jasmine, a middle-class housewife so fed up with her obnoxious husband that she abandons him while they're driving through the desert. On foot and headed vaguely for Vegas, Jasmine stumbles on Brenda's cafe/ motel and, having nothing better to do, decides to stick around and help out. Goldberg avoids her most annoying mannerisms, and Stapleton does the impossible-she makes you forget Edith Bunker. But with exchanges such as ''Am I disturbing you?'' ''Too late-I'm already disturbed,'' this is one doomed odd couple. C

A Review from the Los Angeles Times

TV Reviews
Goldberg, Stapleton Team in 'Bagdad Cafe'
March 30, 1990|HOWARD ROSENBERG

Whoopi Goldberg and Jean Stapleton are a match made in desert--parched and barren.

Their ample individual talents don't really mesh in "Bagdad Cafe," a new CBS comedy series based on and named after the theatrical movie "Bagdad Cafe." It premieres at 9 tonight on Channels 2 and 8, followed by another new comedy, "Sugar and Spice," which was not available for preview.

"Bagdad Cafe" finds Goldberg as Brenda, the agitated operator of an isolated roadside diner, motel and gas station in the Mojave Desert where the clientele is a sort of "Separate Tables" with tumbleweed.

Also on hand are her 16-year-old daughter, her musician son and, briefly tonight, her philandering husband, Sal (Cleavon Little). He is also the cook, sweating in the kitchen behind a wall of steam and his own cigarette smoke.

Early in the episode, Sal storms out after an argument with Brenda, which is a shame because their volatile exchanges are the only glints of humor in this first episode. Although Sal will resurface from time to time, it's Jasmine (Stapleton) who is meant to be Brenda's comedic partner, arriving on the scene after abandoning her obnoxiously tyrannical husband when their car breaks down in the desert.

Goldberg works hard and Brenda is the kind of likable, energetic character on whom a comedy can be built. However, the awkward budding friendship between Brenda and the well-meaning, super-tidy Jasmine not only doesn't click tonight, it yields no laughs. More than merely an unlikely pairing, they're an arid one.

An Article From The Chicago Tribune from May 1990.

Actress has no illusions about ' Bagdad'

Character won't match Edith

BY KENNETH R. CLARK
CHICAGO TRIBUNE

When Jean Stapleton became Edith Bunker of " All in the Family" she created one of the most endearing characters in the history of TV. Since 1980, when Edith did the unthinkable in a network sitcom and died unexpectedly of a stroke, Stapleton has been looking for a surrogate.

She admitted her new CBS role, as Jasmine, in " Bagdad Cafe," will never match Archie Bunker's " Dingbat," but she said that although she was deluged with offers after " Family," it's still the best to come along in a decade.

" It had to be something very special to interest me, something different and creative and stimulating," she said in an interview. " This is a more creative idea than anything that has come my way. This was no luncheon meeting where they say, ' What do you want to do?' I've stopped having those. I don't need anymore of those meetings, because the answer is always the same. It's: Bring me a script that's quality, with an interesting character. Bring me that; then we can talk.'"

What CBS finally brought her was not just a script; it was a movie, and Stapleton said she fell in love at first sight with Jasmine, the slightly off-center matron abandoned by her husband in the middle of the Mojave Desert, who, in the TV version , takes refuge at the " Bagdad Cafe," run by an acerbic Whoopi Goldberg. The network still has not said if the series, which will air the last of six initially ordered episodes Friday, will be on the fall schedule, but Stapleton was optimistic.

" These six shows are a blueprint, really, and everyone's so enthusiastic about it," she said. " It's not official, but I'm sure we'll go on and explore more avenues because it's a good springboard."

Meanwhile, Stapleton stays busy, not only with a full career of stage, film and TV , but with her own persional passion, which is political equity for women. As president of the board of the Washington-based Women's Research and Education Institute , she campaigns tirelessly for expansion of the role of women in public office.

" It's my way of supporting women in government," she said . " I'm useful where I can be useful. Someone said 'Isn't it all done?' and I said, ' No, it isn't, and research reveals that.' There is progress in the percentage of women in Congress, but if it is to creep along at the pace it has over the past 10 years, it will be 2050 before we get to a balance in government."

An Article From Entertainment Weekly

Pop Culture News
BAGGED CAFE
By Mark Harris
Mark Harris is a writer and former executive editor of EW.

With her movie career resuscitated thanks to Ghost and the upcoming Long Walk Home, Whoopi Goldberg didn't waste any time bidding farewell to CBS' struggling sitcom Bagdad Cafe. As executive producer Kenneth Kaufman heard the tale, Goldberg simply called network president Jeff Sagansky late in , November and announced she was quitting-effective immediately. With no time to recast her role, CBS shut down Cafe so quickly it didn't even have time to remove the Nov. 30 show's listing from TV Guide. Her walkout came as little surprise to insiders, who say the actress had been in increasingly fierce and abusive clashes with Cafe's creative team. Goldberg had no comment about her decision, letting contracts speak louder than words: Within days of her departure, she signed a film deal with Paramount.

Posted Dec 21, 1990 | Published in issue #45 Dec 21, 1990

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