A LOT OF GOOD
by ANDREW CLARK

The CBC has made the right decision by picking up The Vacant Lot for 13 more episodes. The Vacant Lot (Nick McKinney, Vito Viscomi, Paul Greenberg and Rob Gfroerer) had a good first six shows, despite what some gray-hairs have written in our nation's newspapers. Stand-out sketches were "Jesus In The Classroom" (about Jesus as a teen attending a Canadian high school -- "Your father was a carpenter?") and "Steamies" (in which a vendor gets third-degree burns from toxic hot dogs). The show's main weakness was the direction, which featured too many arty angles and not enough straight shots of the group.

What is disturbing about the TV critics' slight backlash is the ignorance it exposes. To expect a comedy show to be perfect after only six episodes is downright moronic. It takes time to build up to TV comedy speed. The Kids In The Hall discovered this, as did The Frantics, as did Second City ...

As for popularity, perhaps not every wrinkled '60s fossil sporting tie-dye Depends likes the show, but many less-aged folk do -- a recent BBM survey estimated that the last Lot episode had 550,000 viewers. The Vacant Lot are so popular that they have an Internet group -- what more '90s sign of success do you want?

(The remainder of the article does not relate to TVL and is cut from this page. The entire article can be found at Eye's website. Note: the 13 episodes he talks about were never filmed after CBC decided to go with a more family oriented line up.)