Of the nearly 50 series launched since last September, “Davis Rules” currently owns the second highest rating (“America’s Funniest People” owns the highest - but then that’s a spinoff, and a wretchedly homemade one at that). Granted, this sitcom’s premise does not quicken the pulse. Winters plays Gunny Davis, a loopy but lovable grandfather who moves in with his widowed son (Randy Quaid) to help raise his three grandsons. Now for the beauty part. Instead of handcuffing the free-winging Winters to a script, producers Tom Werner and Marcy Carsey have encouraged him - actually, instructed him - to ad-lib and improvise. The upshot is a pleasantly engaging comedy laced with bursts of pure, lunatic magic. No one seems to be getting a bigger charge than the show’s 65-year-old centerpiece. “For the first time in my life,” says Winters, “I’m really having fun.”
Every 22-minute script for “Davis Rules” contains five minutes of spaces for Winters’s impromptu riffs. Sometimes there’s a suggested topic that surfaced in rehearsal, more often just expectant ellipses trailing from a line. Whatever the ignition device, Winters never has a problem zooming into orbit. One moment he’s mocking the kids in fractured Norwegian, the next he’s advising them to handle a bully by sideswiping him with the family car (“BOOM! He’s a silhouette!”). Before retiring for the night, he announces: “I got the bedroom window closed, but the cat is halfway out. (Eye-rolling shrug) I guess it can wait ’til morning.” Speaking of cats, Winters’s weirdest improv came when one of the boys arrived home with a ventriloquist’s dummy: he scrunched into a feline crouch, curled his fingers and began hissing. “It was amazing,” recalls cast member Patricia Clarkson. “Who would think of hissing at a dummy?”
Need she ask? This is, after all, a man who in real life once climbed atop the rigging of a historical ship, informing police that he was the Man in the Moon. Until now, however, television has never figured out how to package Winters’s unpredictability. After becoming an instant legend on “The Jack Paar Show” (and inventing, in Maude Frickert, the world’s randiest grandmother), he presided over a pair of desultory variety series. Next came a one-season gig on “Mork and Mindy” that only confirmed that Robin Williams had swiped his style. He plunged into painting and writing, turning out widely lauded surrealistic works and a volume of best-selling Then producers Werner and Carsey, who know how to build sitcoms around stand-up comics (“The Cosby Show,” “Roseanne”), offered him the role of Gunny along with a creative blank check. Winters is grateful. “They’re letting me do things I’ve always dreamed of doing,” he marvels. “They’ve given me the freedom to take chances.”
Unfortunately, both “Davis Rules” and its star could use a little more domestic support. This is the kind of sitcom in which the writers give the kids lines like: “Girls are more complicated than women because they’re so… (smirk)… unformed.” Randy Quaid, though, makes a splendid foil. Wisely, he’s replaced his big-screen gooniness with geniality, playing off Winters with the sort of wary affection that John Goodman accords Roseanne Barr. The scenes in which father and son gropingly come to terms with old wounds are as touching as they are unexpected.
The irony is that Winters still harbors hostility toward his own father, an Ohio stockbroker. Shortly after meeting a NEWSWEEK reporter, he says: “I was numb for a long time because I had an old man who was hard on me from the beginning.” All that discipline, he goes on, filled his childhood with “insecurity, shyness, neuroses and paranoia.” Today Winters’s world is filled with kitsch: he’s an obsessive collector of it. The San Fernando Valley house that he shares with his wife of 42 years overflows with baseball bats, walking canes, beer steins, tomahawks, military hats, cigar boxes, cowboy guns, railroad medallions and some two dozen statues of Buddha.
All viewers care about, of course, is how Winters stuffs the spaces in his show. It’s a challenge that makes his tiny eyes gleam. Here’s Gunny trying to sell a “genuine” Indian doll to a woman tourist. “This says ‘Taiwan’,” she notes, checking the doll’s underside. “No, that’s ‘Nawiat’,” he corrects. “The Nawiat Indians.” That’s where the script leaves off and the master takes over: “It was a small tribe, only about 36 of them, a wonderful tribe. They didn’t have a chief, but they had a very strong woman. She was 6-foot-9. And rather than have all the Indians go to war when the white men came to massacre them, she hid them under her dress. And when the white men - they can be kind of crazy - saw things moving under her dress, they ran away.”
Another ignition, another BOOM! Forget the calendar: Winters rules.
