DVD Review: That Show with Joan Rivers

STUDIO: Topics/Film Chest | DIRECTORS: multiple | CAST: Joan Rivers
RELEASE DATE: 6/23/15 | PRICE: DVD $19.95
BONUSES: none
SPECS: NR | 11 hours | Television comedy | 4:3 standard | mono

RATINGS (out of 5 dishes): Movie | Audio  | Video | Overall

Back in the Sixties there was a format called “girl talk,” after the very popular show hosted by pioneering daytime talk host Virginia Graham. Today’s equivalent — The View, The Wendy Williams Show — rely on “dish” more than anything, but the topics that were covered on the girl talk shows still remain (albeit mostly as “filler”): segments on household items, fashion and sociological problems.

So what was Joan Rivers (Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work) doing in the middle of all this? At the time, she was not the “can we talk?” mistress of trash-talk that she later became; she was instead a “lady comic” who affected a nervous, NYC persona as she talked about her bad dates (later marital foibles), crazy family and her inadequate feelings about her looks (in this regard she was very much the female equivalent of her nightclub colleague Woody Allen, minus the intellectual references).

So it seemed natural to have her host a girl-talk show, and thus she did for a single season — That Show with Joan Rivers ran from 1968-’69, originating from WNBC in NYC. This four-disc box set includes 29 episodes from the program and it amply illustrates both Rivers’ strengths as a stand-up comic and her inability to talk about mundane household and more serious sociological topics in any kind of meaningful (or entertaining) way.

For That Show was indeed a program that stressed a theme — each episode had a specific topic and, once Joan’s great opening stand-up segment was over, the viewer was alternately amused (or condemned) to listen to a discussion about that topic for the rest of the show. Only two guests were on each panel, an “expert” on the topic and a celebrity who would try to wend his/her way through the conversation.

Joan Rivers (l.) hosts 1968’s That Show with guests Johnny Carson and nudist Lucy Hannson.

Rivers’ much-discussed (by her, in her act) husband Edgar Rosenberg was the producer of That Show and he clearly thought the “stick to the topic no matter what!” notion was a good one. This misguided belief produced episodes that are compulsively watchable because they are so patently absurd. The informational content is there, but the presence of the celebrity guest is so distracting that one can’t help but wonder why Rivers and Rosenberg didn’t drop the single-topic format after a few shows.

Like all entertaining DVD talk show collections, this box also serves as a wonderful time capsule. The show was shot in NYC, and thus the majority of the guests were from the ranks of Joan’s fellow Manhattan-based stand-up comics and Broadway performers. In some cases the pairing of celebrity guest and topic are wonderfully ridiculous: examples includes a show on burlesque with Vivian Vance, “air quality” with Arthur Godfrey, gardening with Shelley Berman, child-rearing with Barbara Walters, singles-themed resorts with Steve Lawrence, exercise with Marty Allen, marital arguments with James Earl Jones (End of the World), dining out with Rocky Graziano, and consumer fraud with Joan Fontaine (!).

While Ed Sullivan guests simply to promote a new book about his show (the author is the “expert” — presumably this was arranged by Rivers and Rosenberg to thank Ed for the many times Joan had appeared on his show), there are at least three shows that thoroughly entertaining for the right reasons. The first, about nudism, benefits from the presence of Johnny Carson (TV’s The Tonight Show), who is able to run through his repertoire of comic takes during the discussion. A later show featuring Soupy Sales winds up as a completely silly lesson in how to hang wallpaper, during which Soupy supplies several dozen good quips and physical shtick.

The hands-down best episode concerns (no surprise) the nightclub scene. Rivers has on two reviewers who speak knowledgeably about the topic, and a pre-Laugh-In Lily Tomlin (Nashville) does a rather uncharacteristically physical routine as a beauty expert (her facial contortions are what supply the laughs). The conversation is lively, ranging from how Tomlin got her first big break (her friend Madeline Kahn recommended a likely nightclub to her) to Joan’s discussion of how Woody Allen (Broadway Danny Rose) was shamed by a local newspaper critic into updating his act (he had appeared in three separate nightclub engagements around NYC over a sizeable span of time doing the same routines word-for-word).

That Show may not be what fans of the later, more self-assured Joan Rivers are looking for, but it is a joy to see her doing great stand-up routines in her original incarnation (and, like Carson, making hay when jokes bomb). The peculiar insistence on having celebrities talking about something that they are not experts on is ultimately as charming as it is misguided.

Given that the packaging indicates that these 29 episodes are from “Season 1,” one hopes there will be a second box that includes the later episodes from the series that can currently be streamed on Hulu: such oddities as shows on “boating safety” with Barbara Walters, perfume with Gena Rowlands (Love Streams), and men’s fashion with Shecky Green, as well as a stunning episode in which Joan’s later nemesis Jerry Lewis (Rock-A-Bye Baby) dispenses wisdom on how to discipline one’s children, including the type of belt he used to punish his sons with.