Fred Willard
It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas for Fred Willard.
The veteran comic will play the father of Phil (Ty Burrell) dad in the upcoming...
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Martin Mull on Gary Unmarried, Fred Willard on Pushing Daisies
Cheers to Martin Mull and Fred Willard for being everywhere.
They made their names as talk-show hosts Barth Gimble and Jerry Hubbard on the '70s classic Fernwood 2-Night and pre-Prop 8 life partners Leon and Scott on Roseanne. Read, discuss and vote on this complete Cheer after the jump.
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Fred Willard and Chi McBride
It's a big week for Fred Willard. Not only does he play a central role in Wednesday's episode of Pushing Daisies (8 pm/ET, ABC), he also popped by CBS' Worst Week on Monday to play Sam's dad, and he'll appear on Larry the Cable Guy's Star-Studded Christmas Extravaganza Friday night (9 pm/ET, CMT).
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Fred Willard by Jason Kempin/WireImage.com
Fred Willard is getting ready to do his best Dustin Hoffman.Willard, most recently seen on the small screen in Back to You, will be guesting in two episodes of CBS' new comedy Meet the Fockers Worst Week, EW reports. He will be playing the father of Sam (Kyle Bornheimer), and he and his wife (Connie Ray) will be stopping by to meet the mom and pop of Sam's fiancée as the couple finalizes their wedding arrangements.Willard's episodes will air later in the fall. — Adam Bryant
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The good folks at WURG sure know their slapstick. It's been quite some time since I've seen good physical comedy on television, so what a thrill to see it make a comeback. Good slapstick, good slapstick. Now let's get to the better banter.I'm not sure we've had an episode yet that puts the whole crew in one situation, so this week was a change of pace. Little Gracie's 11th-birthday party was basically over before it started, because the only one of the six adults there who had steeled herself to find and catch the raccoon in the attic was Kelly, and Chuck wasn't about to let her do it. I understood his reasoning (Kelly's done everything for Gracie and Chuck wants to contribute, even if she doesn’t know he's her father), but that part felt a little far-fetched. Chuck strikes me as the kind who'll let anyone take a fall for him — in poor Ryan's case, quite literally — even Kelly, so why take a stand on this thing that he was obviously scared of?Either way, the guys on t...
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There is nothing more terrifying than having your 10-year-old classmates meet one (or both) of your parents, and I know this from experience. I felt for poor Gracie Carr, who so obviously wanted both her bully and her mother to disappear from this class trip to the station. She was probably thinking that the only upside was not having to have class.If only Kelly and Chuck knew that they were probably just making the situation worse for their daughter by wanting to confront the bully, whether through a "conflict resolution" session or the terrifying way that Kelly ended up going about it. (I'm well out of elementary school, but if tomorrow Patricia Heaton said to me, "I will come into your room while you are sleeping and I will rip your head off," I would probably faint.) As soon as Xander Tucker gets over his fear of Kelly, he's going to start bullying Gracie sevenfold. Perhaps by then Chuck will no longer be blinded by Xander's gorgeous, divorced mother and will actually be able to...
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Is it 1994? I think it must be, because lately Tia Carrere is popping up everywhere — well, if not everywhere, at least on two shows I cover, and I only cover three, so if she shows up on Friday Night Lights, I know something's up. Between her hanging out with Larry David (cocreator of Seinfeld, coincidentally on in 1994) and Kelsey Grammer (Frasier, also on in 1994) in recent weeks, I just have to wonder if I've been witness to a time warp. She did a cute job tonight, playing a woman — not a hooker, apparently — who almost managed to seduce Chuck, so it's a shame she was rather underutilized.Of course, had she actually managed to "take a ride on the Chuck wagon," as Montana so delicately put it, we wouldn't have been able to see that Chuck is, at heart, a decent guy. Sure, he only took Ryan out to dinner to prove to Kelly that he didn't donate the rude gene to Gracie, and yes, he did repeatedly try to hurry up and ditch this dinner to be with Carrere's unnamed hottie...
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Fred Willard, Back to You
On Back to You (Wednesdays, 8 pm/ET, Fox), the Kelsey Grammer/Patricia Heaton sitcom vehicle, Fred Willard plays freewheeling sportscaster Marsh McGinley, whose lead foot alarms a coworker tonight when they carpool together. Marsh is the latest in a gallery of grinning goofballs that Willard has given us over the course of a career that spans 40 years.
TV Guide: What do you enjoy about Marsh?Fred Willard: I love it that he's a sports guy and that he says whatever comes to his mind. He doesn't think things through too much. Nothing seems to perturb him. It's pretty much opposite to the way I am in real life — I tend to overthink things.
TV Guide: You have so many TV credits. An
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Well, I'll say one thing: This is the first time in recent memory I've heard the phrase, "Recorded in front of a live studio audience" outside of a 20-year-old rerun. In fact, it made me think I was too hard on last week's episode. It's a retro show in its own way, and perhaps I needed that jolt of perspective that Kelsey Grammer's little intro gave me.The newsroom of WURG certainly was all a-twitter this week. After Chuck overheard some network brass (who were in Pittsburgh for a program at Carnegie Mellon on "The changing face of network news") talking about how he's gone from one of the biggest markets in the country to being Kelly's sidekick — even going so far as to say, "I'd put a gun to my head" — Chuck decides to take the lead story for the day's news: A family that went missing while camping was finally found. To say he steals it out from under Kelly's nose wouldn't even be an overstatement, and he leaves her with the less enviable, "Building on fire!" headline....
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Clunk. That's the sound this episode made as it hit the air. You may be wondering how a show could make a physical clunk sound, but (and imagine some dramatic flare here) they found a way! It's almost as if after last week's great momentum, the powers that be decided that they didn't want to give us too much funny too fast, and so they churned out an awkwardly paced and plotted car boot of an episode.On the upside, Fred Willard's Marsh was on fire tonight, and doing his proprietary shtick that I've loved since Best in Show. From his opening where, after reporting that Jason Shaw, a Steeler, was dating a supermodel, and exclaiming, "Now that's one person I'd like to trade places with for three hours," only to insist on explaining that he meant he wanted to exchange the football player, and very emphatically not the supermodel, I knew he was back in fine form. In fact, Marsh and Gary's shared scenes were, to borrow a term, "the adorablest," of the episode. Gary's robotic delivery in r...
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