Scarecrow & Mrs King: Funnier Than You'd Think

On the surface, Scarecrow & Mrs King appears standard 1980s fare: handsome man, pretty woman, spy stuff, chase scenes, and so on.

What makes it stand out from many of the other spy-detective-fisticuff-car-chase shows of the same time period is the wink-wink dialog and off-the-cuff interactions. The plots are fairly unimaginative, as far as weird spy plots on television tend to run along the same lines (I actually find it rather believable that spies would congregate around Washington, D.C., convinced that their tiny world of several square miles is the only reality).

Scarecrow & Mrs. King has a large number of "muttered" lines (like Lex Luthor's in Superman II), the ones that are given almost absentmindedly in passing. These are my favorite pieces of dialog (I still consider Tony's comment in NCIS about the ship the Dwight D. Eisenhower, "Shouldn't it be called Mamie?" to be one of Bellasario's funniest lines).

The surprisingly funny and clever moments in Scarecrow & Mrs. King totally pay off the effort of listening closely:

The pilot:

While trying to escape in the helicopter, Lee pauses to ask Amanda, "What are you wearing?" referring to her cub scout/den mother uniform.

"What do you care?" she squawks.

In the "A.C.M. Kid":

"Ham," Lee mutters in response to Amanda's undercover act as his ex-wife.

In "Saved by the Bells," one of my favorite episodes in which everyone thinks Amanda is The Scarecrow, top secret agent:

"I don't know how anyone could mistake me for you," Amanda tells Lee in Jackson's husky voice."You're so much taller."

"Don't forget to frisk the bad guys," she tells him later (pretending to be him). He gives her an exasperated look.

In "Sudden Death" when the bad guy instructs a football player to kill another player during a scrimmage.

"In many ways, that's much simpler than our usual play," muses the wonderful Jerry Hardin as the villain.