Whoopi

Leave it to Whoopi to toss the "P.C." guidelines out the window. The show is refreshing and drop dead funny. At times the humor is in your face, just as life can be. Can it be offensive? I don't think so. It's just refreshing to see and hear someone say what is on everyone's mind at the time.

The show basically points out that you can't take life too seriously.

The characters are all folks that we can identify with and may even know in passing in everyday life. The cast blends and works well off of each other. The chemistry for this ensemble works.

So tune in and enjoy the show.

I think the show has a great potential to make it. It reminds me of Married with children when it first came out. The humor is on the edge of been almost offensive to some people. But in reality, the humor is what people might be thinking but never say it out loud. I think the show is very real and that is what separates it from what is on television now. I think what will drive more people to watch the show is the controversy that it might cause because of it's edgy humor, but a lot of people will presently be surprised and addicted to the realness of the show.

Americans might not find it funny, but for us Europeans, an American sitcom taking the Mickey out of George W. Bush junior. & Co. as well as the US's current and ongoing political paranoia toward anything remotely foreign or - if you prefer - alien is like manna sent from Heaven.

Whoopi's outspokenness and her hilarious one-liners directed at conservative America made me roar with laughter - even in the not particularly well dubbed German version. Whoopi's weird sense of humor might be perceived as outrageous or even un-American by Conservatives and/or Republicans, but from the perspective of Old Europe and a middle aged European, this brand of humor is exactly what America's media need to find their balance after years of kissing Dubya's feet.

This was neither as bad as some expected nor as good as Whoopi's best work might have indicated. The emphasis on timely social and political humor is a breath of fresh air in the modern sitcom world, because producers have become gun shy about possibly offending touchy viewers. I'm sure we'll be hearing from them about how every mention of ethnicity is automatically offensive, but many of those jokes in "Whoopi" are genuinely funny. The best part of the show is the chemistry between Mavis and Nasim, the Persian handyman. The banter between the two of them, both challenging and friendly, is a strong base to build a show on. Less successful is Mavis's uptight brother and his "Afrophilic" Caucasian wife. One can easily see how they were conceived as an ironic counterpoint, but both characters are much funnier in concept than they are in execution. Maybe when they become actual characters rather than schema they will be more entertaining.

It's nice to see Whoopi Goldberg on television again, but I'm not sure about this show. It's not that basing the series around running a hotel isn't interesting. It's the characters I don't click with. They're not all that interesting. And the one-liners are pretty bland. The show is funny at times, but most of the time things are pretty average.

Anthony Rupert