Allen Has Fun With First Tv Outing, ‘crisis In Six Scenes’

Woody Allen isn’t practiced at the art of making TV, which turns out to be an advantage for his first TV project, “Crisis in Six Scenes,” a wry screwball comedy available on Amazon starting Friday, Sept. 30. While held temporarily captive in the barber chair, Sidney is subjected to all manner of dismissive, withering comments about his book from his barber, as effective a send-up of critics as Tom Stoppard’s “The Real Inspector Hound.” Sidney lives with his wife, Kay (Elaine May), in the suburbs, where she works as a psychologist in a home office. Lennie becomes the radical who came to dinner, devouring all of Sid’s favorite foods, lecturing both Muntzingers on the need for radical action to right the nation’s wrongs, and hanging a Che Guevara poster in the guest room. Sid wants her out, not only because he’s terrified he and Kay will wind up in jail — where he’s sure he will be a target of other inmates because of his shapely figure — but also because she’s eating his navel oranges and the last of the sturgeon and disrupting his routine. Side trips to a screwball finale straight out of the Marx Brothers (to whom Muntzinger tips a non-existent hat as he opens the front door to unwanted houseguests) include Kay’s sessions with various clients with marital problems, a budding romance among the younger set and the radicalization of a ladies’ book club. Allen brings the whole TV-series self-consciousness bit home in the final minutes of the last episode, but he needn’t have worried. David Wiegand is an assistant managing editor and the TV critic of The San Francisco Chronicle and co-host of “The Do List” every Friday morning at 6:22 and 8:22 on KQED FM, 88.5 FM in San Francisco, 89.3 FM in Sacramento.