Tales From the Crypt: Season Three, Episode Five, "Top Billing"

Jon Lovitz had a terrific run on Saturday Night Live and then on The Critic but he struggled in the decades that followed, perhaps because there genuinely does seem to be something grubby, sad and desperate at the core of his being that makes him perfect for playing creepy, self-absorbed weasels but can be a little exhausting and off-putting in the long term.

Lovitz’s natural gift for playing bitter losers has seldom been used more effectively than in his unforgettable starring turn in “Top Billing” as Barry Blye, a self-important thespian who learns to be careful about what you wish for when he’s willing to kill for what he imagines is the role of a lifetime that ultimately proves the death of him. 

But before Barry can unwittingly die for his art, or at least his pretensions, he first endures a bleakly funny gauntlet of personal and professional humiliation at the hands of a star-studded supporting cast overflowing with ringers and scene-stealers, none more rapacious or kookily entertaining than John Astin as Nelson Halliwell, the nuttiest theater director this side of the lunatic Christopher Hewitt played in The Producers. Nelson has a mustache that looks haphazardly drawn on by someone with poor vision and only a vague sense of where his lips are. 

First up in Barry’s humiliation parade is Sheila Winters (Sandra Bernhard), a casting agent for whom Barry is not right for the part of a killer, or any other part, really, at least not without extensive plastic surgery. Then he visits an agent played by a hilariously ice-blooded Louise Fletcher, who broadcasts her disdain for someone who clearly ranks among her most annoying and least lucrative clients by flossing her teeth in front of him before coldly ending their professional relationship.

All that Barry has left is Lisa (Kimmy Robertson), a long-suffering sweetheart willing to put up with him even after the world has given up but when he returns home in a blue funk he discovers that she’s leaving him for another man. 

When someone calls Barry a loser it feels both gratuitous and redundant. Of COURSE he’s a loser. It’s his existential identity though he has deluded himself into thinking that he is a REAL actor, an ARTIST in a world of phonies and fakes and pretty faces like Winston Robbins (Bruce Boxleitner), an old acquaintance of Barry’s who has gone on to a cushy if creatively unfulfilling career acting in commercials. 

Winston’s success throws Barry’s brutal life-long failure into sharper relief. When Barry loftily announces that he’s going to be auditioning for, and playing, not just a real role but the ultimate role as the title character in a renegade production of Hamlet Winston shows up at the audition to teach his colleague an important, albeit fuzzy lesson about how suffering for your craft is for losers and in the end, it’s all a business so why not sell out?

When Astin’s cracked theatrical impresario sees the two men competing for the same role he almost instantly gives it to Winston exclusively on the basis that he has the right look. Barry is so enraged that he finally gives into the homicidal rage he has barely kept at bay all episode long and fatally strangles Winston.

This murderous gambit succeeds in getting Barry cast in a production Astin’s demented director insists will be so real and so raw that audiences will vomit prodigiously in protest or appreciation, it’s not entirely clear. All that matters is that they will be so affected by all of the art and truth that it will cause them to upchuck. 

From his very first moment onscreen, the vibe that Nelson gives off is one of violent insanity. There’s not just something a little off about him; everything about him is self-evidently bonkers. But Barry is so obsessed with proving himself as an actor that he ignores the abundant warning signs, like the director’s associate Beaks (Paul Benedict) radiating craziness so intense that it can be detected from other galaxies. 

Barry learns too late that the role he will be playing is not that of Hamlet but of Yorick and that the production is less the product of a renegade troupe than a group of criminally ill mental patients who brutally murdered the people tasked with looking after them so that they could make a gonzo snuff version of Hamlet featuring Barry’s skull in the thankless role of Yorick after it has been separated from the rest of his head and body. 

The twist in “Top Billing” isn’t much of a twist. It’s apparent from the very beginning that Astin’s unique interpretation of Shakespeare will represent a crime of both the artistic and non-artistic variety but that doesn’t matter. The abundant joy in “Top Billing” comes from its withering, jet-black portrayal of creative pretension and ambition gone murderously, dangerously awry. 

“Top Billing” works best as a ghoulish character study of a man so desperate, sad and defeated that he will do ANYTHING to reverse a decades-long losing streak blessed with perfect casting and an ideal anti-hero in Lovitz, who is funny and pathetic and way too relatable in his inherently doomed quest to get ahead in a world and an industry with no use for men who look and talk and act like him.   

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