Action: The Complete Series

Sometimes—although extremely rarely—network television manages to spawn a show infinitely superior to the format. When it does, lowbrow quality control generally manages to remedy the situation STAT. Case in point: The 1999 Jay Mohr vehicle Action, an astounding and surprisingly vitriolic peek behind the curtains of Tinseltown, in all its duplicitous and sleazy glory. Mohr plays the subtly named big-time action film producer Peter Dragon, a slimeball who still doesn’t exactly have the heart (literally) for giving 100 percent of the cut-throat nastiness required to survive in the celluloid jungle … although he tries his damnedest. Unfortunately, after following a string of blockbusters with a bomb, he finds himself struggling to get his next feature financed. In a Murphy’s Law world, the results are profanely hilarious. The surprise here isn’t so much that the show got a greenlight, but that it managed to go 13 F-bomb-loaded episodes before being swatted. Fortunately, the final episode works thematically as closure, so that while wanting more, this two-disc set still ultimately satisfies with television too dangerous to have lived in its time.