DVD Review: Click and Clack As the Wrench Turns
Paramount, PBS Show Based on Magliozzi Bros. NPR Radio Show Car Talk
Oct 7, 2008
For the past 31 years, Bob and Ray Magliozzi - AKA Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers - have dispensed car humour and advice via their long-running radio show Car Talk. First broadcast on Boston's WBUR in 1977, the show has since become one of National Public Radio's (NPR) most enduring programs, with over 2 million listeners checking it out every week. So they gotta be doing something right.
Ever since 2001, executive producer Howard Grossman has been pitching to have Car Talk adapted to a sitcom format. In 2007, PBS finally listened, and unleashed Click and Clack's As the Wrench Turns, an animated situation comedy loosely based on the Magliozzis' own lives. Now the show is coming to DVD.
There's just one problem: it ain't funny.
Click and Clack: NPR Radio Show Shoehorned Into Sitcom
One of the biggest problems with As the Wrench Turns is how they portray the Tappet Brothers' personae. On the radio show, the Magliozzis simultaneously make fun of themselves and the caller, while dispensing genuinely intelligent advice about each caller's auto dysfunction.
On the TV show, the brothers' wit and wisdom are completely lost. Instead of demonstrating their extensive knowledge of cars and their workings, As the Wrench Turns reduces the Magliozzis into incompetent goof-offs, and not terribly likable ones at that.
Whether they're scamming taxpayers with a phony presidential election to raise funds for PBS, or scamming NPR by outsourcing their show to India, As the Wrench Turns doesn't play to the duo's strengths, but shoehorns them into one clichéd post-Simpsons comic scrape after another.
As Rick Kushman from The Boston Herald said, the show transforms the duo into "low-grade scam artists instead of the cheery, charming guys we know they are."
You know a show is in trouble when there's no reason to like the central characters, and that instantly puts As the Wrench Turns into the hole. Add a couple of clichéd "misfit" supporting characters: fashion hound Fidel (Juan Hernandez), erudite-but-clumsy Crusty (Cornell Womack) and gravel-voiced, racing-obsessed secretary Sal (Barbara Rosenblat), and that hole gets even deeper.
The cherry on the mudpile is continually frustrated radio show producer, Beth Totenbag (Kelli O'Hara), so named because she always carries with her a gigantic purse. Geddit? Geddit? "Totenbag"? You laughin' yet? Eh? Eh? Yeah, me neither. She's there to play the straight, er, woman to the Magliozzis' gags, but when aforementioned gags aren't working . . .
Show creators Howard Grossman and Doug Berman have demonstrated a severe lack of imagination on how to translate the Magliozzis' success to TV land, or even an understanding of what made Car Talk the long-running success it's been on public radio. This non-comedy of errors feels like something that would have played out on the Big 3 networks, not the bastion of artistic freedom that PBS purports to be.
Extra Features
"Extra features? What is this 'extra features' you keep talking about? I no understand!"
There is absolute zilch, zip and nada here, unless you count a static page with PBS's toll-free number and website listed on it.
The Final Analysis
Whatever charms Car Talk has on public radio, they obviously haven't translated over to this animated TV series. Worst of all, it's a painfully unfunny comedy. Click and Clack's As the Wrench Turns gets a 3/10.
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