TV Eye

by Belinda Acosta

I never thought much of Katey Sagal, the actress who played Peggy Bundy on Fox's Married ... With Children. It's not that I disliked her. But she didn't launch me into one of those "don't get me started," eye-rolling, hands-on-the-hip diatribes in the same way the character of Ally McBeal does. I just didn't think about Sagal, period. Now I do.

I immediately liked her as Leela, Futurama's (Sun, 7:30pm, Fox) one-eyed alien. Sagal turns in a solid performance as the confident and capable voice of reason, without paling against Bender, the drunken robot, or by playing a retiring handmaiden to Fry, the show's perpetually bewildered main character. While the entertainment press made early predictions that Bender would be the break-out character of the show, I cast a lone vote for Leela. Her no-nonsense, take-charge kind of attitude is more appealing than the over-lubricated Bender. And she's a far cry from the nail-painting sofa cushion that was Peg Bundy. Leela rocks. That, plus I really dig that purple hair. Sure, Futurama is an animated series, but I think it says something that Sagal is able to bring a fair amount of depth to an animated character.

The next time Sagal caught my attention, she was starring in the Disney Channel's Smart House, which premiered June 26. Sagal plays PAT (Personal Applied Technology), the super-chip of a computerized house that slices, dices, makes smoothies, cleans up spills, and cooks dinner on request. For most of the movie, Sagal's creamy, but computer-generated, voice is all the audience gets. After a little hacking by the family teenager (Ryan Merriman), Pat transforms herself into a virtual mom, who turns out to be part June Cleaver and part Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates) from Stephen King's Misery.

Unfortunately, Pat is more Mrs. Cleaver than Annie; otherwise, she'd take a hammer to the annoyingly perky family played by Kevin Kilner, Merriman, and Katie Volding. In spite of the high fructose content of Smart House, Sagal turns in a fun performance as Pat, thoroughly engaging within the precious few minutes she's on screen.

Katey Sagal breaks from her airheaded Married...With Children character in Disney's Smart House

Sagal starred in Married ... for 11 seasons, earning Golden Globe and American Comedy Award nominations along the way. The crassness of the show often made it the target of criticism, blamed for everything from the breakdown of the American family to tooth decay. A letter-writing campaign calling for a boycott of the show was led by Michigan housewife Terry Rakolta in 1988. The campaign backfired, bringing more visibility to the show and even more viewers.

Still, after 11 years of playing an intellectually bereft character, the potential for Sagal to find work in a business that is reluctant to cast outside what it knows could have stalled Sagal's career. Instead, she has managed to go from playing the antithesis of June Cleaver to an independent alien grrrl, to a Fifties-style, cookie-baking mom for Disney. That's a clever constellation Sagal has charted for herself, two polar opposite moms and a girl who can handle a wrench. I, for one, am interested in what other projects are in the stars for Sagal, and predict that some surprises -- heck, I'll go out on a limb and say good work -- from Sagal can be expected in the future. Stay tuned.

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Other things to watch:

The July lineup of the PBS series POV (Television with a Point of View) features three films about loyalty and identity, starting with Emiko Omori's new film, Rabbit in the Moon (7/6, 10pm, KLRU).

Omori's film memoir recounts the period during World War II when thousands of Japanese-Americans and Japanese natives were interned in camps throughout California and the West, and the scars it left behind. Archival footage and recovered home movies offer remarkable glimpses of camp life, which Omori experienced firsthand as a young girl along with her parents and sister Chizuko Omori.

"At first, this was going to be a film about the painful choices that Japanese Americans had to make during internment," Omori said. "It wasn't until I interviewed my sister Chizu that I realized that our own story was a snapshot of that time," she said.

The breakdown of the Omori family, including the mysterious death of their mother only a year after the Omoris were released, becomes the reflecting pool into which the larger experience of Japanese internment is examined. Interviews and news clippings reconstruct the events which engendered complicated feelings of distrust, displacement, and later, the rage that was felt by the Japanese toward their American captors, and toward each other. One of the most painful events discussed in the film is the internal split between the Japanese Americans Citizens League (JACL), which promoted full compliance with camp administrators, and those who chose to resist.

While the film is painstakingly constructed, it often slows under the weight of its earnest attention to detail. What refreshes the film are the many breathtaking images Omori uses to express feelings of upheaval, abandonment, or loneliness: a field of broken cups and saucers; photos of resistors trapped in shaved ice; a photo of Omori's mother submerged underwater, with what look to be pebbles dropped into the water (they turn out to be teeth).

Other POV films during the month of July include: School Prayer: A Community at War (7/20, 10pm) and The Double Life of Ernesto Gomez Gomez (7/27, 10pm). All screenings are on KLRU-TV.

Lourdes Portillo's Corpus: A Home Movie for Selena, originally scheduled for a July 13 airdate, has been postponed until August 3, according to Stephanie Wright Blado, director of communications at KLRU-TV. More on this film and the curious circumstances surrounding its pull from the July POV lineup as well as from CineFestival, the film festival hosted by San Antonio's Guadalupe Cultural Arts Center two weeks ago, will be discussed in a future "TV Eye."

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