Maybe the bleak comedy of Buffalo Bill was ahead of its time, but what can I say about Eastbound & Down?

This recap will get you up to speed on HBO's Eastbound & Down.

As this voiceover begins, on-screen Kenny is snorting coke in the locker room of his new team, the Charros:
"Over the course of my career I played on many different teams. Some I liked, some I really fucking hated. I'm not mentioning any names, but let's just say Seattle can kiss my fucking shithole.
"The best way to get a new team on your side is to trash the last team you played for. Talk shit about how their fans suck and their women have pancake titties. And if that doesn't work, then, just like prison, you pick the biggest, baddest dude on the team and you kick him in his fucking teeth."

-- pitcher Kenny Powers (Danny McBride), as he prepares
for his return to baseball with his new Mexican team,
last week on HBO's Eastbound & Down

"Karl, please, if there's anybody in the world who understands the sensitivity of women, it's me, man. You're looking at the man right here. I don't want some stupid broad sitting up there with me shooting her mouth off."

-- talk-show host "Buffalo Bill" Bittinger (Dabney Coleman), told by general manager Karl Shub (Max Wright) that the station's seemingly always warm-weather-vacationing owner, who hates Bill (except for his ratings), has decreed he's to have a female cohost

by Ken

We can cut to the chase, and I can just admit that I don't rightly know why I'm still watching Eastbound & Down, which heads into the third episode of its second season tonight on HBO. I had this idea of writing about this striking evolution in TV programming, where it's now cool to have shows about people who are unsympathetic -- or, in extreme cases, beyond unsympathetic and straight on into the realm of the repellent.

Like Kenny Powers, an utterly useless human being whose life is given fake value by the gift of a spectacular pitching career. Since he's a worthless bum, it's not surprising that him quickly burned himself out of the major leagues, and settled for leeching off people who unaccountably allow him to suck the life out of them. The fact that people continue to allow him to abuse them has a certain curiosity value but in its way, even in a made-up comedy, strikes me as depressing, maybe even enraging.

And yet I haven't stopped watching.

My original plan was to write about how the show got me to thinking about Buffalo Bill. I went so far as to order the DVDs of the 1983-84 sitcom -- all 26 episodes on three DVDs, which it turns out can be had remarkably cheap -- and watch as many episodes as time permitted. (I had it in mind to write something cute about how enjoyable it was to the series' co-creator, writer-producer-actor Jay Tarses, turn up as the crusty old sportswriter on My Boys, a terrific show coproduced by his daughter Jamie. There would have been some kind of crack about how Jamie Tarses used to be known as Jay's daughter, and now he's known as Jamie's father.)

Online you can find this description of Buffalo Bill:

A memorably barbed sitcom about a boorish talk-show host and his shabby treatment of those around him. This unsually tart comedy from Tom Patchett and Jay Tarses was novel in that the title character was thoroughly cynical when he wasn't just unlikable. Which may explain why it didn't go down well with viewers, despite a superb cast that included Geena Davis. Star Dabney Coleman later starred as a similarly arrogant character in "The Slap Maxwell Story," with no better success

Which is accurate as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough. Bill isn't just "thoroughly cynical" or even "just unlikable." He's hateful -- utterly and ruthlessly self-absorbed, seemingly incapable of any consideration for anyone but himself.

To bring life to the good quantity of nicely "barbed" writing (done or overseen by Patchett and Tarses) there was a terrific cast: in addition to Dabney Coleman as Bill and Max Wright as the long-suffering station manager, Karl, there were Joanna Cassidy as the show's director, Jo Jo; John Fiedler [above] as the Bill-worshipping stage manager, Woody; and Geena Davis as Wendy, the research assistant forced on the fact-phobic Bill -- not to mention the pre-Designing Women Meshach Taylor as Tony the associate director and pre-Night Court Charles Robinson as Newdell the makeup guy, and at least for a while Claude Earl Jones as Stan the audio guy.

Here's a scene from the episode "Buffalo Bill and the Movies." We join Bill in mid-interview with a sweetly innocent Native American gentleman who's promoting a local crafts fair. Bill, clearly intensely uninterested, has disdainfully held up a pillowcase with an image of . . a buffalo!

GUEST [turning his head to the studio audience and smiling with naive hopefulness]: Of course there will be other exhibits, such as rug-weaving, folk art, crafts, and native dance workshops. We'd like everyone to come down and join in, for what is sure to be a gay old time.
BILL [perking up, grimacing]: Gay? As in homosexual, Grey Wolf? [GUEST's face drops.] Is that what this festival is about? Gay Indian rights?
GUEST [hopefully]: It's a crafts fair.
BILL: And then I guess the whole thing breaks out into a riot, which is what happens every time you people get together and start abusing the old firewater privileges.
GUEST [still hopefully]: It's a crafts fair.
BILL [getting up and walking forward to address the camera direclty]: Right, right, right. I don't know, I don't get this. Call me, uh, alarmist, but, uh, when a bunch of homosexual Indians get together and go berserk and start driving through the streets hitting people [GUEST looks flabbergasted], I just have to ask myself, is this the kind of treatment that Buffalo, or the nation as a whole, deserves from its minorities? I don't think so. We'll be right back.
WOODY THE STAGE MANAGER: And . . . we're clear.
MAX [in the control room]: You know it's funny. If Bill doesn't push a man over, cut his back open, yank his lungs out onto the stage, I figure the show is running pretty smooth.
[Back on the set, where GREY WOLF is gone. NEWDELL the makeup man, who is Afro-American, has come onto the set during the break to fix Bill's makeup.]
NEWDELL: You know, Bill, I'm proud to work for a man who treats all minorities equally.
BILL: Yeah?
NEWDELL: Yeah.
BILL: Tell that to your brothers next time they start looting. Maybe they'll skip my place.
WOODY [rushing onto the set with a bowl of flowers, which he sets down on the table by BILL]: Everything OK?
BILL: Yeah, good. You see the skin on that Indian?
WOODY: Yeah, it wasn't even red, was it? Sort of a russet.
BILL [gesturing toward his face]: All the pockmarks, man. When are we gonna get somebody on the show with some decent skin?
WOODY [handing him cards for the next segment]: Oh, the next guest is an actress. She has good skin. I saw it in the green room. [Loudly, to everyone on the set] And . . . in five!
BILL: How are the legs?
WOODY: They -- Four! -- were -- Three! -- really -- Two! -- nice . . . [exits set]

TV wouldn't see another sitcom title character this repellent until the incandescently brilliant Jackie Thomas Show, whose creators made Jackie, the Tom Arnold character, even more successful and even more gleefully odious. Because the show failed to hold onto the enormous lead-in audience it inherited from the then-high-flying Roseanne, it was quickly deep-sixed by ABC and forgotten -- by everybody except the people who watched it and haven't seen anything like it before or since. Actually, I liked Jackie Thomas a lot better than Buffalo Bill, which i never warmed to when it aired. I'm kind of enjoying the DVDs, and I think the show deserved a better fate, but I still can't say I'm crazy about it. Apparently I wasn't alone.

But I'm less persuaded than when I set out on this quest that there's a serious link between the hateful-central-character comedy of Buffalo Bill and The Jackie Thomas Show and whatever's going on in Eastbound & Down. Because Bill and Jackie were really about the other characters, who deserved better fates than to have their livelihoods depend on their stars, and railed regularly about the injustice of their fates, though rarely to their miserable benefactors' faces. I guess I feel sorry for the people who get sucked into Kenny McBride's life too, but is their really entertainment value in seeing people whose lives are so starved that they feel them improved by contact with Kenny?

And I come back to that fact that, at least as of tonight's episode, I'm still watching.

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