Those who created the new Fox drama "Jonny Zero" didn't want to be accused of hatching a mere mediocrity. No, no. This show is no halfway effort; it's completely, gracelessly and gaseously bad.
There must have been a hundred movies by now about guys named "Johnny," though admittedly few about guys named "Jonny." That dropped "h" is the sole stroke of originality in this reactionary claptrap about a tough galoot who graduates from a four-year stay at Sing Sing and quickly falls in with a bad crowd: the FBI. Jonny's old friends in the mob want him back, too. He's a celebrity of the streets, though the first couple of episodes don't give us much idea why.
Franky G as Jonny Zero, right, and GQ as his sidekick, Random, are thugs in search of a show.
(Fox)
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"Jonny," which premieres at 9 tonight on Channel 5, stars, get this, Franky G in the title role ("Franky G" would have made a better title than "Jonny Zero"). Someone named GQ, presumably no relation to the men's magazine, plays his sidekick, Random, who seems patterned partly after Ratso Rizzo in "Midnight Cowboy." Much of the episode is given over to footage of Jonny running, running, running all over town, chased by every Thom, Dik and Hairy. If he were to ask, "You wanna piece of me?" -- one of the few gangster cliches not in the script -- the whole city of New York would probably shout back "yes" in unison.
What makes him so popular, this mumbling, witless thug? It's neither his fashionable stubble nor his ostensibly manly muscles. It's his meticulously cultivated viciousness, his body count. Admirers note that he killed one victim by turning the man's head completely around -- fancy that. Another says beamingly that Jonny once killed a man with one blow -- a punch through a lung. He's faster than a pack of Marlboros.
Jonny was finally sent up the river for "involuntary manslaughter," but he is quick to point out that his victim was a mean old drug dealer. He kills only bad guys, or so he says, thus qualifying the killings as justifiable homicides. And due process? That's for sissies.
In the premiere, we hear one tale after another attesting to Jonny's rugged demeanor, his brutality, his stone-coldness. They just don't come any tougher, it seems. But then, oops, when Jonny tries to apprehend a 17-year-old girl whose stepfather hired him to find her, the girl casually tosses Jonny to the pavement and leaves him lying there in a puddle of his own chutzpah.
Jonny drives around in a hot car that has three or four bullet holes in the windshield, a blemish he appears to be proud of. The car is a bigger wreck than Jonny when he first relocates it, but in the second episode, some of his pals get together and, as they say on that very engaging MTV makeover show, "pimp his ride." That is, they spruce up the old buggy until it roars and gleams.
The car is without any competition the best thing on the show.
Jonny's supposed to be yet another terse existential hero, and the show aims to be a two-fisted film noir thriller. Or maybe, just maybe, it's all supposed to be a parody. When a cop says there's a new organized-crime task force, and tells Jonny, "We need somebody on the inside," Jonny predictably snaps, "I'm not a snitch!" and affects a Shirley Temple pout. It's too ridiculous to be believed but not funny enough to laugh at.
Maybe John Wells, who created "ER," and his fellow executive-producers and writers decided, for a prank, to make the worst crime show they could, like the group of writers who got together years ago to write the ultimate in tawdry novels, "Naked Came the Stranger." This is "Naked Came the Jonny."
We know the pesky feds will make Jonny an offer he can't refuse, or else there'd be no show -- and there's barely a show as it is. Hanging out with bad guys and working for allegedly good ones, Jonny can snarl and growl at everybody. Oh it's a cold, brutal world of dirty alleys and dark, slimy streets, but there's always an admiring babe around to soothe Jonny's savage fury. In fact, in tonight's premiere he is given a rather explicit lap dance in a strip bar, which just might rub some viewers the wrong way. It's hard to imagine this show rubbing anybody the right one.
The second episode opens with a montage of Jonny getting knocked on his tush several times in succession by a series of boxers. He needs money, so he takes a job as sparring partner at a local gym. Meanwhile, the director clutters up the story with crazy camera angles, gimmicky editing, wild pans, pointless zooms and plenty of faux sleaze. Appropriately enough under the circumstances, the episode includes a close-up of Jonny's dumb buddy stepping into a big pile of horse manure.
"Jonny Zero" is too generous a title for a series that amounts to less than nothing. The creators of the show have produced pretty much the same thing the horse did.
Jonny Zero (60 minutes) airs tonight at 9 on Fox.
