Life as a struggling actor can be a tough old game, especially when everyone is telling you that you haven’t got “the look”, so you can trust Tales From The Crypt to take things to their extremes. Taking the show’s usual, skewed look at the injustices of life and how a lack of fairness can lead to us do horrible things is Top Billing, which manages to be possibly the most satisfying episode of season 3 so far.
To create the Tales From The Crypt total package, you need a couple of things – a suitably quirky set-up filled with hard luck cases and opportunists, a good tone that manages to balance the drama with lashings of gallows humour, and a final twist that ties everything together while spelling doom for anyone dumb enough to fuck with karma. Taken on this criteria, Top Billing manages to score the adulation of a rapturous audience (ie: me) who would hurl bouquets of flowers at the players if I could.
Barry Blye is your typical Tales From The Crypt schlub, who despite his best efforts, find that life keeps repeatedly kicking him in the groin. The problem is that despite the fact that Varry is a studious wannabe thespian of some talent, he keep getting passed over for roles simply because everyone keeps telling him he simply just doesn’t have “the look”. Casting directors tell him, his agent tells him and handsome rival Winston Robbins tells him – but the truth come especially hard from that last one as Robbins gets plenty of work thanks to actually having “the look”, but has no real passion for the craft.
Life takes a further dump on his door step when he loses a role, gets fired by his agent and is dumped by his long term girlfriend all in a single day, but hope manages to keep the luckless Barry in the game when he finds an ad for a strange production of Hamlet. Believing that this role could be his last chance to fulfill his dream, Barry heads to the address only to discover that Robbins has also showed up in order to make a point. But matter start to get a little weird when the pair see how eccentric the production really is.
Headed up by volatile director, Nathan Haliwell, he claims that this version of Hamlet will surpass all other by going all in for realism, but Barry is horrified when Robbins is given the part on sight along with the dreaded “look” brought up as the reason. This is the final straw for Blye, who snaps, strangles his rival to death in a fit of jealousy and lobbies Haliwell for the part, virtually begging him for the part of Hamlet.
But here’s the thing; it turns out that Haliwell and this theatre cronies are not all that they seem and the part both Barry and Winston went for wasn’t Hamlet at all – it was for the skull of Yorick. Maybe when applying for an acting job, check that you haven’t entered the back door of an overrun lunatic asylum first…
There is so much about Top Billing that works perfectly, I’m actually unsure about where to start. The casting, direction and script all work so incredibly well together, I’m genuinely confused why this episode wasn’t picked to be part of the premiere over some of the inferior choices that were actually picked (not “Carrion Death though, that one was great). To work from the top down, I genuinely believe that Top Billing could be one of the most capably directed episode in a long time thanks to the efforts of Todd Holland, a man who honed his skills over his career helming 51 episodes of The Larry Sanders Show, and 26 installments of Malcolm In The Middle; however, before all that, he made this and everything he does it just bang on. The build-up, the subtle clues concerning the shocking twist, the timing, it’s all wonderfully delivered, but possibly best of all is the way he handles a perfect tone that unerringly knows when to be funny, when to be serious and when to go way over the top.
Fittingly for an episode about actors, the casting for Top Billing is as fun as it is surprisingly starry. Jon Lovitz’s hangdog appearance and constantly sarcastic sounding voice is so perfect for a Tales From The Crypt style-doormat, it’s frankly a shock that he hasn’t been hired before and as he weathers life’s unending blows, his inevitable snappage is hilarious pathetic. To be fair, if Tron himself was the one who kept beating me to roles, I’d probably garrotte the bastard too, but Bruce Boxleitner manages to deliver handsome smugness in a way that almost has you on Lovitz’s side until frustration drives him to murder. However, while bit parts in Tales Of The Crypt tend to be thankless affairs, here we’re graced with the presence of both Sandra Bernhard and Louise Fletcher as an unimpressed casting director and Barry’s agent respectively. They don’t actually have much to do, other that tell Barry that his face sucks, but it goes to show how hot the show was at the time when such recognisable faces could simply pop up for a bit part in a goofy horror show – Fletcher won a Oscar for God’s sake.
However, things get even more fun when we’re introduced to the theatre troupe who all are actually a clutch of escaped mental patients who have murdered the staff and turned their hospital into a makeshift stage. Leading the group is a wonderfully overacting John Austin, who consumes vast amounts of scenery from under a painted mustache and a truly bizarre, fluffy hat and it’s amusing how his blustering and bellowing is so easily mistaken for a passion for directing, when he’s actually crazier than a shithouse rat. Kudos also go to Paul Benedict’s gloriously camp props master, Beaks.
However, as good as all of the above is, it’s how well the twist comes off that truly lifts the roof off the joint. A lot of Tales From The Crypt reveals, while undoubtedly fun, often aren’t exactly nuanced affairs, however, with Top Billing, repeated viewings reveal how well Holland juggles the clues. The rows of keys on the wall of the store room; the staff only in reverse on the door; the fateful label on Yorick’s costume falling off at an inopportune moment – it’s all there, even the fact that Robbins is trying to warn Barry about his discovery when Barry kills him. However, once the jig is up and Barry realises that he’s murdered his way into the role of a literal dead man, Top Billing manages to finish everything up in a way that isn’t too abrupt. After the troupe take an axe to the horrified Barry, we cut to the night of the fateful performance with his liberated, still bloodied skull taking centre stage of the famous scene, but after Nathan complements his cheek bones, the episode goes that little bit extra just to round things off with one final, haunting image. As the police amass outside the back entrance to take back the Teasdale Home For The Criminally Insane, Todd Holland’s camera drifts down the trash strewn alleyway to reveal one last, grisly shock – the sight of the peeled skin of Barry’s head laying discarded among the detritus. Now that’s what I call an encore.
An unmitigated high point, it seems that season 3 is now really starting to pick up the pace with an episode that puts in an enviable performance. In fact, if more episodes follow Top Billing’s lead, we could be in for a hell of a season that deserves all the plaudits it receives. I do so love it when the Crypt acts out.
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