Sitcoms Online - Main Page / Message Boards - Main Page / News Blog / Photo Galleries / DVD Reviews / Buy TV Shows on DVD and Blu-ray

View Today's Active Threads (No Chit Chat/Chit Chat Only) / View New Posts (No Chit Chat/Chit Chat Only) / Mark All Boards Read / Chit Chat Board

The John Larroquette Show links and theme songs at Sitcoms Online / The John Larroquette Show Photo Gallery


Sitcoms Online Message Boards - Forums  

Go Back   Sitcoms Online Message Boards - Forums > 1990s Sitcoms > The John Larroquette Show
Register Community View Today's Active Threads (No CC/CC Only) Search Photo Galleries Calendar FAQ

Notices

SitcomsOnline.com News Blog Headlines Facebook X/Twitter Bluesky Threads Instagram YouTube RSS

Additional Fox Summer 2026 Dates; BET's Lot Patrol Premiere Date
Kids Make Me Angry Sneak Peek; Shrinking Adds Karen Gillan for Season 4
Netflix's A Different World Premieres September 24; Ted Danson Joins Elizabeth Banks Apple TV Comedy
Sitcom Stars on Talk Shows; This Week in Sitcoms (Week of June 1, 2026)
SitcomsOnline Digest: New Episodes of The Simpsons Headed Exclusively to Disney+; Release Date Set for Reboot of A Different World
Disney+ Announces Brand New The Simpsons Episodes; Remembering the Sitcom Stars and Crew Members We Recently Lost
CBC 2026-27 Programming Slate Includes New Original Comedies; Jay Shetty Podcast Heads to Netflix


New on DVD and Blu-ray

Happy's Place - Season One (Blu-ray) Two and a Half Men - The Complete Series (Blu-ray) Abbott Elementary - The Complete Fourth Season (DVD) I Love Lucy - The Complete Series - 75th Anniversary Edition (DVD) The Office - The Complete Series - Superfan Extended Episodes (Blu-ray)

11/04/25 - Happy's Place - Season One (Blu-ray) (DVD)
11/11/25 - Rick and Morty - Season 8 (Blu-ray) (DVD)
11/11/25 - SpongeBob SquarePants - The Complete Fifteenth Season (DVD)
11/11/25 - Two and a Half Men - The Complete Series (Blu-ray)
12/02/25 - Tom and Jerry - The Golden Era Anthology (1940-1958) (Blu-ray) (DVD)
12/16/25 - Lippy the Lion and Hardy Har Har - The Complete Series (Blu-ray)
12/16/25 - Wally Gator - The Complete Series (Blu-ray)
01/20/26 - The Woody Woodpecker and Friends Golden Age Collection (Blu-ray)
01/27/26 - The New Fred and Barney Show - The Complete Series (Blu-ray)
02/11/26 - Tom and Jerry - The Complete CinemaScope Collection (Blu-ray)
03/24/26 - Looney Tunes Collector's Vault - Volume 2 (Blu-ray)
04/11/26 - Abbott Elementary - The Complete Fourth Season (DVD)
04/21/26 - Famous Studios Champion Collection (Blu-ray) (DVD)
05/19/26 - I Love Lucy - The Complete Series - 75th Anniversary Edition (DVD)
05/19/26 - Looney Tunes Cartoons - The Complete Series (Blu-ray) (DVD)
07/14/26 - The Office - The Complete Series - Superfan Extended Episodes (Blu-ray)
07/28/26 - I Love Lucy - The Complete Series - 75th Anniversary Edition (Blu-ray)

More Recent and Upcoming TV DVD and Blu-ray Releases / TV Shows on DVD, Blu-ray and Prime Video / DVD Reviews Archive


Search Sitcoms Online:



Donate

Please make a donation if you can help with Sitcoms Online's web hosting costs. Thanks for your support!

We receive a small commission on all DVDs, Blu-rays, CDs, Books, and any other items ordered through our Amazon.com links as an associate. Thanks for using our links for your online shopping!

Reply
 
Thread Tools Search this Thread
Old 07-14-2017, 07:55 PM   #1
TMC
Member
Forum Idol
 
Join Date: Jan 09, 2001
Posts: 124,381
Default Ahead of Its Time, ‘The John Larroquette Show’ Was Brilliant

http://splitsider.com/2017/07/ahead-...was-brilliant/

Quote:
If you don’t remember The John Larroquette Show, it debuted on NBC in the fall of 1993. It’s never been released on DVD and isn’t available to stream. Which is too bad, because the first season of the show is brilliant.

Larroquette starred as John Hemingway, who we meet at an AA meeting. He’s been sober for 36 hours and is about to start a new job as the night manager of a bus terminal in St. Louis: “I got the job because I have a masters degree in English literature, which is essential for working in a bus station. Did I mention I was the only one who applied?” Upon arriving, he learns what happened to his predecessor – the office still has the outline of the body on the floor. “He died in his sleep,” the assistant manager, played by Liz Torres, tells John. “Never even felt the bullet.”

This was the show’s tone – dark and funny all at once. And there were moments of surreal strangeness, but it was a pretty realistic show, which meant that the dark moments hit harder than if the tone veered towards the absurd.

The show managed to get uneasy humor out of the way that alcohol is present in our lives. Numerous times in the pilot episode, a character says to John “Let me buy you a drink” or “Let’s go to bar and get a drink.” It means something very different for John than the other characters. This was a network sitcom that aired a generation ago. If a character freezes in place after another character delivers a line, it’s supposed to be so the audience can laugh, not because the character has frozen in fear, all too aware of the temptation of taking a drink.

It was complicated and sometimes uncomfortable, and as the season progressed, it also went deeper. John attends AA meetings and gets a sponsor – a biker played by David Crosby. The show went through the twelve steps of AA in episodes through the course of the first season. John has to address the fact that being sober is a lot harder than he thought it would be. He is forced to confront his issues with women, his feelings about God, and tries to make amends with people, who for the most part don’t want to listen.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hNOnl5gev3g

In one episode, John’s estranged con artist mother (played by June Lockhart) comes through town. He confronts her about his dad’s death and she explains that she had a baby and an alcoholic husband and all she could do was save herself. It’s a sad moment, and by the end we understand John a little better. It’s an episode about two broken people who barely know each other, despite being related, and what makes it funny is that they’re also wise-cracking, sarcastic people.

In another episode, John tries to make amends with his ex-wife (played by Donna Mills) and see the son he left behind. His ex-wife slams the door in his face, but at the end of the episode, John’s son shows up at the bus station. His son tells John that he wants to know him, but he needs time. It’s a triumphant moment, but it doesn’t play out as one. Perhaps because it is a small victory, but that was what the show did at its best – convey the way that these small moments were great victories and the work it took to get there.

That’s not to say that there weren’t lighter and weirder episodes, but John’s alcoholism also changes the way we experience the more typical sitcom plots. In one episode, John eats pot brownies. He engages in the usual harmless idiocy that happens in these situations, but when he comes down, he has to deal with the AA newcomer he spent the opening scene trying to counsel. It’s not something the show can just laugh at and move on from without comment. His circumstances – which we were laughing at – mean something darker than they usually do in a sitcom.

In perhaps the funniest episode, a Nazi wants to rent a bus. John and Gene (played by Chi McBride) mock the Nazi and when that doesn’t get him to leave, John throws him out – though the ACLU ultimately forces him to rent the Nazis a bus. Also during the episode, an old friend of John’s comes to town because he’s writing a book about when they were younger and their misadventures, and John ponders being the night manager of a bus terminal while his peer is a well respected author.

This was more like what I saw on dramas than on other sitcoms. It didn’t look like a multi-camera sitcom. The lighting is different. It has a dimness, which adds to the moody atmosphere. More than that, the small touches spoke to me. This was a show where John hangs on the wall of his office a sign that reads “This Is A Dark Ride.”

The show’s creator and executive producer, Don Reo, has never made anything quite like this. He’s best known for creating shows like Blossom and My Wife and Kids. Reo got his start as a writer working on M*A*S*H and All in the Family, and The John Larroquette Show owes a lot to the complexity of those programs.

I don’t simply mean that the show was dark, but it had a point of view and a unique perspective on the world. I don’t know much about Larroquette, but I do know that he’s from New Orleans, he is an alcoholic, and he’s been sober for decades. He’s also a rare book collector. This was a show where characters have conversations about Beckett, where there are references for Diane Arbus and Edward Hopper. John declares Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain one of the greatest albums ever made. There were brief back-and-forths in Spanish that were not subtitled.

As if all of that was too mainstream, one episode centered around Thomas Pynchon. Gravity’s Rainbow is John’s favorite book, and he still owns a first edition of it. He’s blown away when Dexter (played by Darryl “Chill” Mitchell) quotes from it. “The author’s a good friend of mine,” Dexter says. I’m sure plenty of people thought it was a weird episode about an invented character, but after the episode I checked V. out of the library and began my lifelong obsession with the writer. Later I learned that the producers sent that script to Pynchon for his approval, which I think makes the episode even funnier.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EM98iFKu0ss

The way that John Hemingway looked at life and dealt with sobriety felt very specific. It was possible to see the connections that emerged between the character’s dark worldview and his playful nature. To see him struggle with getting older and reckoning with his life and the choices he had made was moving. The show captures being a certain age where you’re no longer young, but you’re still trying to figure out what to do with your life. I thought of the quotation by Annie Dillard: “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”

After the first season wasn’t that successful, the show was retooled and became literally and figuratively lighter. John became the day manager of the bus station and the lighting of the show became, well, that of an ordinary multi-camera sitcom. John moved into a nice apartment. He got an attractive neighbor/love interest. The show got canceled partway through its fourth season, but it didn’t stop being funny. One of the reasons the show succeeded, which I haven’t mentioned, is that it had a fantastic cast — people like Mitchell and Torres and McBride and Lenny Clarke and Gigi Rice. This was a great cast that could do anything. But the show became more generic and it lost some of that perspective and the weird, dark touches that made it so interesting in the first place.

The show has a lot in common with Mom, the show that’s currently a hit on CBS. It’s a very different TV climate today, but it was co-created by a very successful veteran producer (Chuck Lorre, in Mom’s case) and has managed to find dark humor in recovery and the effort to rebuild one’s life.

Today we love and praise half-hour shows that are funny but also manage to be much more like Louie, Girls, Atlanta, and Master of None. For one season, more than 20 years ago, John Larroquette and Don Reo made a show that could not only stand alongside them, but was possibly more ambitious. Because they made a show that aired on a broadcast network with all the restrictions that entailed, that had a laugh track, and yet was dark and strange and personal.

Maybe it should come as no surprise that it failed, but it’s a shame that they don’t get more credit. If I ran a network, I would ask Reo and Larroquette to pitch me a show. Reo co-created and is producing The Ranch for Netflix. I find the brothers played by Ashton Kutcher and Danny Masterson on that show boring, or at least characters I’ve seen before, but the characters’ parents, played by Sam Elliott and Debra Winger, and their relationship, is deep and thoughtful and complicated and really interesting. I’d love to see what Reo and Larroquette could come up with if asked to make a show about getting older, about death and art and alcohol and relationships and mortality. Because given the chance, I bet they could make something brilliant. Again.
TMC is online now   Reply With Quote
Old 07-15-2017, 07:26 AM   #2
MA
Member
Moderator
Forum Idol
 
MA's Avatar
 
Join Date: May 20, 2017
Location: New Hampshire
Posts: 127,083
Default

Great article!
__________________
~-*Mikaela*-~
MA is offline   Reply With Quote
Reply



Posting Rules
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts

BB code is On
Smilies are On
[IMG] code is On
HTML code is Off

Forum Jump


All times are GMT -4. The time now is 04:17 AM.


Although the administrators and moderators of the Sitcoms Online Message Boards will attempt to keep all objectionable messages off this forum, it is impossible for us to review all messages. All messages express the views of the author, and neither the owners of the Sitcoms Online Message Boards, nor vBulletin Solutions Inc. (developers of vBulletin) will be held responsible for the content of any message. The owners of the Sitcoms Online Message Boards reserve the right to remove, edit, move or close any thread for any reason.

Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.11
Copyright ©2000 - 2026, vBulletin Solutions Inc.