Hard Knocks

Very funny comedy on Showtime. I wish it was on DVD. Don't remember a whole lot about it except for Bill Mahr and his partner/brother(?), and laughing my butt off. It was probably the first in a string of made for cable comedy's that I really liked. Some of the others being the Gary Shandling Show, First and Ten, and the best Dream On.

Hard to believe this show has fallen so far down the memory hole. It was like a weird buddy cop show with Bill Maher and Tommy Hinkley. Maher was sort of the straight arrow and Hinkley was dumb and prone to erupt in violence, but it was a videotaped sitcom on Showtime. Ran sometimes in tandem with 'It's Garry Shandling's Show.' A restaurant was involved somehow.

Jim Vallely of the Funny Boys had a very funny character. He was a chef at the restaurant, and the one gag I recall from this show is him baking a cupcake that was supposed to look like Mindy Cohn from "The Facts of Life." His character was often at odds with the Renee Props character.

That's all I got, except I remember it as being a good comedy, and I remember it suddenly and unceremoniously disappearing from the schedule.

... not on VHS, DVD, or even on youtube can you find a trace of this sitcom. It was a summer show that ran on Showtime in 1987 and it's the first time I ever recall seeing Bill Maher on TV. In this show he's half of a buddy private detective team, although they don't spend much time solving mysteries. Instead the two always wound up in a theatre of the absurd combined with lots and lots of girls. Maher is the smarter detective to Tommy Hinkley's ... well...less intelligent half of the duo. The third main member of the cast was a tall brunette who appeared to be in her mid to late 30's at the time and was Maher's character's pseudo love interest. I think her character's name was Maggie and she was also in the Showtime series "Brothers". Maggie ran a restaurant and a very active love life. Maher was playing a guy much older than he actually was - he was 31 and playing a guy in his late 30's - because he and Maggie were always reminiscing about the 1960's. It had lots of lowbrow humor, and it must not have done that well in the ratings because it only ran a dozen or so episodes and was not renewed.

I'm just giving it a 6 for its personal nostalgia value to me. Like the episode in season one of the Beverly Hillbillies where Robert Osborne sees Granny carrying around canisters of old silent movies when she is moving to Beverly Hills and exclaims - "I don't understand. What would anyone want with a bunch of old movies?", it's only a curiosity because of where "they" are now.