Brian Damage
10-31-2011, 03:27 PM
3. Too Close For Comfort, “A Portrait Of Henry”
Though superficially a goofy Ted Knight vehicle about a curmudgeonly cartoonist and the darn young people upending his conservative values, the early-’80s sitcom Too Close For Comfort often took the anxiety implicit in its title to some surprisingly dark places. Most famous of these is no doubt the episode where Knight’s constant foil, the nutty, flamboyant Monroe (Jim J. Bullock) is kidnapped by two women and raped, only to have everyone laugh it off—a storyline so scarring to the young generation that witnessed it, there’s an entire website dedicated to therapeutically reliving the awful memory. But even more horrifying was the Oscar Wilde-riffing “A Portrait Of Henry,” in which, after accidentally injuring Monroe and becoming wracked with guilt over whether he might have done it on purpose, Knight’s character becomes taunted by his own recently acquired self-portrait, which grows more hideous and malevolent with each passing hour. By the time the painting finally comes to life—its eyes glowing menacingly, its brows cruelly arched—a thousand painting-related phobias have already bloomed.
http://www.avclub.com/articles/jack-the-ripper-in-the-23rd-century-21plus-unexpec,64110/
Though superficially a goofy Ted Knight vehicle about a curmudgeonly cartoonist and the darn young people upending his conservative values, the early-’80s sitcom Too Close For Comfort often took the anxiety implicit in its title to some surprisingly dark places. Most famous of these is no doubt the episode where Knight’s constant foil, the nutty, flamboyant Monroe (Jim J. Bullock) is kidnapped by two women and raped, only to have everyone laugh it off—a storyline so scarring to the young generation that witnessed it, there’s an entire website dedicated to therapeutically reliving the awful memory. But even more horrifying was the Oscar Wilde-riffing “A Portrait Of Henry,” in which, after accidentally injuring Monroe and becoming wracked with guilt over whether he might have done it on purpose, Knight’s character becomes taunted by his own recently acquired self-portrait, which grows more hideous and malevolent with each passing hour. By the time the painting finally comes to life—its eyes glowing menacingly, its brows cruelly arched—a thousand painting-related phobias have already bloomed.
http://www.avclub.com/articles/jack-the-ripper-in-the-23rd-century-21plus-unexpec,64110/