A waste of 90 minutes of my life

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

The acting is good, and the firecracker script has some excellent ideas.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

This series should be watched ONLY to either torture detainees at Guantanimo OR if you want to see something so bad that it's funny in a horrific way (sort of like PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE). Be warned, though, as I have never been able to get anyone to watch more than about 10 seconds of the show--they get up and leave and invariably ask me "why are you watching this #&#@^!".I've got to tell you the basic concept for the show. It will convince you that the programming people were either nuts or totally stoned. Jeff Altman is a horribly unfunny comedian. His timing, delivery and presence are less enjoyable than cancer. So, some network bigwigs thought they should give this terribly unfunny guy a series! BUT, to spice it up, it should also star a Japanese pop duo who speak almost no English!!! And, these Japanese ladies should also sing REALLY inane songs. Perhaps they were more popular than Pokemon in Japan, but they just couldn't make the transition to America--their music, to the average American, sounded as attractive as cats in heat. Well, the recipe for disaster was NOT yet complete. Nope---the show wasn't yet bad enough! So, they gave them a cast of supporting regulars who were even less talented than Altman! You KNOW you're in trouble when the standout star among these supporting "actors" is Jim Varney!!! Then, wrap all this together and "VOILA"--total dreck!! I do advise you, if possible, to see an episode (one episode was about all I could take)--just so you can see how bad it really was. The problem, though, is that this show was being re-broadcast on TRIO and this channel has recently dropped off the cable lineup throughout the country and is now a broad-band channel. So, if you don't get a chance to see it, I recommend you try to closely approximate the experience. First, find a family that doesn't speak any English and which has an annoying young child who thinks they can sing or tell jokes. Get a translator to tell the child to entertain you--that they should really give it their all. Then, when he or she begins, stab yourself in the head with a fork repeatedly throughout the performance. Then, remember that this is STILL better than watching PINK LADY AND JEFF!! "Know what I mean"?

I caught a showing of this variety show over on Trio, and cannot say I'm overwhelmed by this relic of the Carter Years. The idea was certainly original enough: Take a popular (and actually pretty talented) idol-singer duo from Japan, team them up with a second-banana American singer and craft a variety show around it. Nice idea, lousy execution. Where to begin...1. The writing is rivaled only by those apocryphal monkeys trying to write Shakespeare, an sad fact as Mark Evanier is easily capable of much better than this dreck (look at his consistently funny co-writing work on "Groo the Wanderer") 2. Mei and Kei are talented enough singers, and probably were talented actresses in Japan, but they didn't have enough of a command of the English language to grasp the right comic timing for the language.3. Jeff Altman DOES have enough of a command of the English language, and he couldn't make a man being tickled to death laugh.

This was from the period when NBC was horrible and Fred Silverman was running the show (no pun intended). This from the man who help develop gems like "Three's Company" and "Laverne and Shirley" for ABC and beauties like "All in the Family" and "M*A*S*H" for CBS.It baffled me that he went to NBC and came up with crap like this. How could you give a show to 2 women or anyone for that matter who could barely speak English??? I still remember both Kei Masuda and Mei Niemoto at the beginning of the show tell the audience who that night's guests will be. You could barely make out what they were saying and it was very painful to listen.Jeff Altman as well; This had to set his career back 2-3 steps. I like his comedy, but even he couldn't save this show.Every episode would always end with Mie and Kei say something to Jeff you couldn't understand, then they would remove their kimonos revealing the swimsuits they were wearing under it and would drag him fully dressed into the hot tub. It was one of the few funny things I can remember, but they did that every week and it got old fast.Clearly, not one of television's best moments.

...for if TV is indeed a vast wasteland, this was the show found at the lowest elevation near the stagnant alkaline pool. We had world hunger and want in 1980, and NBC could have spent money to solve it, but inexplicably used the funds to put this show on the air for five episodes instead.Did Fred Silverman ever notice that the ability of Keiko and Mituyo to handle English was minimal at best? Heavily padded out with guest spots to cover this rather blatant shortcoming. (The first show featured as guest star...Sherman Hemsley. Be still my beating heart.)Not to mention Silverman's failure to consider America was not exactly a massive market for Japanese "idol music," whose appeal to the Japanese is that it is entirely predictable. And yes, Jeff Altman -- with the exception of his own routine in the first show of a certain U.S. President trying to boogie -- is scathingly unfunny.I watched it out of the car-wreck syndrome, in other words it was so terrible I couldn't stop watching. And oh yes, if you stayed until the end of the show, a bikinied Keiko and Mitsuyo got into a hot tub with Jeff Altman. I guess I was easily bribed back then.