Pink Lady (1980) User Reviews

One of the most astonishing shows I've ever seen...

[heckles · 25 June 1999]

...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.

This is on DVD? This is a joke right? No? Oh,no!

[happipuppi13 · 1/10 · 4 December 2005]

I honestly cannot believe this show actually made it to DVD! Aaaaaagh! What next??? "Hello,Larry?" "Supertrain"? I saw this when I was 11 and even though they say kids will laugh at anything,that's not necessarily true.

I watched Pink & Jeff go through their cue card read shtick but I sat there as blank faced & confused as Bart & Lisa Simpson when they don'tunderstand their parents. Un-funny! Those girls could not sing at all but yet,managed to squeak into the bottom American top 40 with,"Kiss In The Dark".

The worst thing ever perpetrated on this show...They said Cheap trick was the musical guest one night,so I tune in and guess what? It's nothing more than the video for "Dream Police"!!! What a rip-off! Cool that I saw the video but that's just false advertising. No stars for this joke! A bad one at that! 5 weeks was 4 too many!

Cruel and Unusual

[screenwriter-972-149612 · 1/10 · 5 May 2021]

Incredibly strange and yet not strange enough. Words fail. Jeff Altman's stories (he has dozens) about what went on and what went into this show are far more entertaining than this...this...whatever it was. Thrown together by Sid and Marty Kroft each week and personally bankrolled by them, this thing looked like it was created out of desperation. How bad was it? Legend has it that the Krofts noticed a big whole in the show during a live rehearsal and made a panic call to Lorne Greene to come over and do a bit. They had to pay him when he arrived. Handed him some lines. Told him to improvise the blocking and wished him luck. Stuff like that happened every week and it showed. Little known fact; everyone who signed of on this show was assured by their manger that The Pink Ladies spoke fluent English. Neither could say more than 'hello'.

If you ever get to see the Jerry Lewis episode you'll know what visual Hell is like.

simply the worst TV series ever,..

[planktonrules · 13 March 2006]

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"?

Bakabakashii no terebi desu...

[macross_sd · 11 June 2004]

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.

Awesome Show--Wish There Were 100 Episodes

[curtis-8 · 18 September 2011]

First, let me be very clear: "Pink Lady" was not a good variety show. It was a pretty horrible one most of the time. BUT it WAS at the same time a truly awesome show. The 70s also gave us variety shows from Donnie and Marie, the Mandrell Sisters, Captain and Tennile and many, many others. All of them sucked--lame comedy, bad music, horrible production values. That was the standard in the 70s--especially from producers Sid and Marty Kroft. "Pink Lady (and Jeff)" rises above all these by being just plain weird. Casting two unknown Japanese pop stars along with a homegrown but not really any better known comedian was so stupid a thing to do that it bordered on genius. In other words no one in their right mind would have thought of it. The result 30 years later is a great 1980 time capsule of the clash between American Crap-Lame culture and the rising Japanese pop culture that you're not going to see anywhere else. Lots of jokes are made at the girl's expense--especially by semi-regular Sid Caesar, who does a recurring samurai bit that makes John Belushi's old SNL routine look PC by comparison. But the Pink Ladies get their digs in as well, making fun of Altman's non-celeb status, height, and lack of manliness. And its even funnier when you can tell that they have very little idea what they're even saying.

The culture clash plus the language barrier plus the really poor taste plus the ultra lameness of the comedy bits, mixed in with the super-peppy, semi-sexy disco performances (in English and Japanese) by the perky, super happy Pink Lady makes for a late 70s Variety Show parody you could not make up today. It is a time capsule of stupid fun that makes me nostalgic for the days when "crap TV" was good natured goofiness instead of "reality" show meanness.

Screw the 21st century! BRING BACK PINK LADY AND JEFF!

Utterly Brutal!!

[goleafs84 · 19 February 2004]

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.

who, what, where, how, WHY??

[tailfeather · 15 August 2000]

I also watched this for the car wreck syndrome. Any second I thought for sure a head would come rolling across the stage. (you just never knew). I just loved when Jeff Altman and Pink Lady would try to talk to each other...you know, the usual banter of a variety show. It was funny because they couldn't understand what each other was saying. Altman would try to make a joke, Pink Lady would look at him, then at each other, and giggle. Very surreal...

I thought I was the only one...

[michaelmonte · 30 August 2000]

There's a special place in my heart for the "summer replacement series" and Pink Lady always springs to mind. ALL of the people I know think I'm making it up when I tell them about this marvel of programming. I didn't even remember Jeff Altman on the show, just the two girls. My favorite part was the "Letter to Home" segment near the end of the program, where they "read" their letter in phonetic English. It haunts me...

More painful than a root canal

[Monika-5 · 9 August 2003]

I was only a baby when this show aired. When I grew up, I borrowed the DVD set from my boss. Next to My Big Fat Greek Life, this is the worst TV show I have ever seen. Unfunny sketches, Mie and Kei singing in badly broken English to bad disco songs, Jeff Altman royally embarrassing himself...need I say more? It was fun to see a young Jim Varney (later of "Ernest" fame) in the sketches, he was the best part of the show. The DVD set should be used for revenge/torture purposes only!

The horror ... the horror

[Randi-5 · 28 December 2002]

Pink Lady and Jeff is widely considered one of the worst shows ever made for

television. I didn't think anything could be worse than "That 80s Show," but Pink Lady is.

The sketches are horrendous; as we sat around watching the DVDs (a gag gift

my friend gave his brother), we argued about whether they had actual writers, or the performers made it up as they went along. My best guess is that the writers had a big bottle of tequila and a bunch of funny cigarettes in the writing room.

File this one under "so bad it's funny." I can't imagine watching it alone, but if you're with a bunch of friends who want to make fun of it, the DVD's worth a

view.

Everybody gotta start someplace...

[Micheaux · 20 July 2011]

I cannot add much more to what has been said, save a few things. An indication of the quality of this show could have been gleaned from a TV Guide promo. A photo showed two dialog balloons above the stars heads:

Jeff: You girls are the biggest thing in Japan. Mie or Kei: Oh no, Jeff! The biggest thing in Japan is Godzilla!

This show was pretty awful, but it may be slightly unfair to single it out, for it was merely part of a horrible trend of the time. Television did what it could in the early days to be what it was trying to supplant, news, movie AND substitute for live theater, hence, the variety show. There were some people that either surrounded themselves with talent (Ed Sullivan) or featured talented and versatile casts (Your Show of Shows/Caesar's Hour or The Carol Burnett Show). By the late seventies, if you had one or two top forty songs, you got a variety show! This would include this show AND the show that featured the Starland Vocal Band ("Afternoon Delight").

So, instead of jumping on the "how bad was this show!" bandwagon, let's look at what happened to some of the performers afterward.

Sid Caesar - A legend, to be sure, but reading his autobiography one finds that he did what he could to succeed. He played Mie and Kei's father, using his Japanese double-talk. In one sketch, with mime and double talk, he berated how they dressed and during rehearsal they looked down with shame, a genuine reaction. That takes some skills. The other interesting fact is that some time later, he mentions a show that he did not get a part in and he also felt that the character would be limiting. That show was "Cheers".

Jeff Altman - Like Roger Kabler (if you remember "Rhythm and Blues" I empathize), a good comic in a bad situation. Show biz in general suffers from the malaise of "if it worked once...". Altman was/is a solid stand-up comic, but not equipped to the variety show format, a style that didn't fit Bill Cosby, either.

Jim Varney - A sadly underrated actor. I was no fan of the onslaught of "Ernest" movies, but "Hey Vern, It's Ernest", his TV show featured a glimpse of his talent. He played a drill sergeant, a very frumpy matron and a scary villain-type, all quite convincingly.

So, yes the show was bad but most any endeavor has an upside. As a matter of fact, in the "Starland Vocal Band" one cast member sat on a throne giving out comedy pronouncements. He hated it down to his doublet, but he eventually went on to having his own show, which proved wildly successful, so hats off to David Letterman!

Freddy Silverman, Programming Genius

[Brett_Buck · 7 September 2002]

Ahh, for the halcyon days of Freddy Silverman! Supertrain, Sheriff Lobo, Hello Larry, and the nadir, Pink Lady and Jeff. I can't imagine why network executives have such a poor reputation for intelligence. I mean, who could have predicted that an obscure Japanese duet, appealing primarily to little girls carrying "Hello Kitty" lunchboxes, wouldn't be successful on American network TV? Oh, and by the way, they *don't speak English*. Sounds like a sure-fire hit to me.

I enjoy surrealism as much as the next guy, but seeing the girls mouthing the punch lines to jokes, and laughing on cue, was quite disturbing. And poor Jeff Altman, this was below even his dignity. At least they had Ernest.

Absolutely pathetic. A test pattern would have been more entertaining.

So bad

[johnston.scot · 18 August 2003]

This show was so bad it went right past "so bad it's good," and wound up as bad again. Really bad.

It's painful to watch this and consider that the people involved probably had families who loved them and thought highly of them, only to be confronted with the reality of this tragic show.

No one should be forced or permitted to watch this show, even by accident.

good try

[lesterkunitaka · 12 March 2018]

The Japanese duet were very talented, but NBC did not hold up there part, these singers deserve better what they got. it was a good idea but poorly produce. after the series was cancelled, they were still very popular.

DVD Set treatment????

[gjung01 · 16 August 2002]

I have seen DVD sets for such TV shows as MASH, The Sopranoes and X-Files. I was surprised to see this tv show get the same treatment. I actually have a memory of this show but it was only the end when Pink Lady came out in their bikinis and the hot tub. I must have shut out the rest of the show as a defense mechanism.

I remember lots of variety shows were on TV around that time like "The Brady Bunch Variety Hour." These shows were the epitome of cheese but when done right were campy fun and an escape from inflation and gas lines. I have not watched this show as an adult and should probably do so but I want to leave well enough alone. If I see the whole show, I'll realize that I was better off not remembering much of this show. It's interesting that even the most obscure shows will get the DVD treatment giving people a wide selection at their finger tips. I was surprised to read about the type of guests that came on as well as Jim Varney and Jeff Altman being regulars.

Maybe good taste is merely a subjective term and it is good to save the good, the bad and the ugly from yesteryear to give people a full 3-D view of a point in time and that is the purpose of bringing Pink Lady...and Jeff to DVD. It couldn't have been for the money.

The Final Nail in Freddy's Coffin

[Sargebri · 28 September 2003]

Many people cite "Hello Larry" as the show that ended Fred Silverman's run as head of N.B.C.. However, this piece of crap was the one that made the network's executives say enough is enough. When old Fred was at C.B.S. he was hailed as a genius for making them more hip (despite the fact that he was responsible for the purge that got rid of many of the most popular shows on that network because of their rural appeal). He also was hailed as the man responsible for making A.B.C. the most popular network on television while he was there. Unfortunately when he got to N.B.C. his midas touch disappeared. And if it wasn't bad enough that he virtually destroyed N.B.C., he also basically ruined the career of young up and coming comic Jeff Altman. The only good thing to come out of this show though was that Pink Lady never was heard from again.