After the first season, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman deteriorated into an off-off-Broadway nightmare—a druggy No Exit, where hell was other suburbanites—but 2-Night's new characters, plus MH regulars who will pop in from time to time, should lift the Fernwood saga out of its surreal doldrums…. Unless my instincts have gone glitchy, Fernwood 2-Night, with its Gong Show gooniness, can't fail to be a hit. Which will fill Norman Lear's bulletin board with happy returns….

I laughed at much of Fernwood 2-Night, but I didn't really like it, and I don't think it should bring silver to Lear's reputation. 2-Night is shrewdly, confidently coarse—was Norman Lear born with one nostril? taste is hardly his talisman—and the coarseness is used for a self-consciously stupid put-on effect. Except for a satirical bit about "deprogramming" a Catholic priest, the jokes here—about iron lungs, senior citizens, Vietnamese...