Take Queen For A Day, that vintage radio and TV game show where someone with a hard-luck story got the royal treatment, and sprinkle in Candid Camera so that the person being feted doesn't know he's on TV. That's the premise of TV Land's latest foray into original programming, Make My Day. Judging by the charming first episode, if they can find personable-enough unsuspecting do-gooders, this little show has the potential to deliver a lot of delight week after week.
They may have led with their ace. John Castellano is a Staten Islander, avid guitarist, and league bowler who owns a music shop and loves the New York Giants and The Sopranos. The show opens with a montage of John's civic activities and details the set-up: With the help of John's family and co-workers, they've set up fifty hidden cameras all over his daily routine — in his bedroom, breakfast nook, bathroom (only for scenes of brushing teeth … so far), front yard, music store, and in the cars and locations to which he will be whisked away on his adventures. It's the half-hour format and the multiple cameras in each setting that make Make My Day work. The editing between shots is zippy, and the fly-on-the-wall perspective is enhanced with a kind of Mission: Impossible-esque ubiquity.
In this premiere episode, John starts his day by encountering a blond ("statuesque," he emphasizes to his co-workers later) who's having car trouble in front of his house. After pushing her car off the street (and dinging the secret camera van in the process), she gives him Eric Clapton tickets and asks him for a quick ride to her job as a concert promoter. While John's telling this story to the music store staff, wide receiver Amani Toomer (still a New York Giant as of filming, but a Kansas City Chief as of this Tuesday) comes into the store and asks for a quick guitar lesson from a delighted John Castellano, who insists on giving the football star the guitar of his choice with "the full Castellano package." Toomer leaves him with an autographed football. "Did you feel his hands? His hands were soft!" John exclaims to his employees.
Then the cell phone that Toomer "accidentally" left in the store goes off. Would John please bring it to him? John hops in Toomer's Town Car and gets chauffeured to a bowling alley where Toomer happens to be rolling some frames with Vincent Pastore, "known on The Sopranos as Big Pussy," the narrator informs us with a distinct lack of inhibition. They invite John to join them, naturally ("People were so upset when you got killed, 'cause, you know what, you're a very likeable character," John earnestly informs Pastore), and the action escalates when Pastore insists on gambling with the two sharps in the next lane (actually professional bowlers). "How about one frame for a thousand dollars?" he suggests, alarming John: "Oh no, don't do that!" he warns, adorably frightened. But naturally he beats the pro's 9 pins with a strike.