A sitcom about Hitler?!

You may be surprised to discover that "Heil Honey I'm Home," a sitcom about, yes, Adolf Hitler, featured some authentic Jewish representation.

Hello there, couch potato pancakes! Today on Kveller’s Jewish TV Club, I’d like to talk about… Hitler. Haha, what a fun and silly topic, am I right? Just a little light pre-Shabbat entertainment for you about history’s most virulent antisemite! 

But in all seriousness (or lack of seriousness?), making comedy about Hitler is now a longstanding tradition. Charlie Chaplin started it back in 1940 (and some would argue, no Hitler impersonation had topped his since), Mel Brooks gave us a Hitler rap and Taika Waititi paid tribute to them both with his impression in “Jojo Rabbit.” But since this is TV club, our real question is: Can you make a sitcom about Adolf Hitler?

That’s not actually a rhetorical question. You can, and someone has, and it is called (truly, truly) “Heil Honey I’m Home!” 

“Heil Honey I’m Home!” is not only a sitcom in which Hitler and Eva Braun are the main characters, it also has Jewish representation and — I must praise this — it is authentic Jewish representation. Not because producers thought about that kind of thing back in 1990 when this show was made, but because when two Jewish actors were offered the roles of Hitler and Eva, they were like, “Eeeeeeeh, we think we’d like to play the Jewish next-door neighbors instead.”

That’s right, in very classic American sitcom style — the show was British, but it wanted to pay tribute to the classic 1950s American sitcom, and took that quite seriously, making the actors speak with an American accent — Hitler and Eva have pesky and meddling next-door neighbors, a Jewish family called the Goldensteins (of course). Caroline Gruber (who, fun fact, is the mother of Marisa Abela, who plays Amy Winehouse in the new biopic “Back to Black”) plays wife Rosa, and was apparently told that she didn’t “look Jewish” when being cast for the role (fun!) but won producers over nevertheless. Actor Gareth Marks plays her husband, Arny, and even got the blessing to play the role from his father, renowned British Jewish comic Alfred Marks. 

“My thinking was, how do you deal with a bully? There’s an argument that it’s equally good to destroy him once and for all by turning him into a joke,” Geoff Atkinson, the showrunner, told BBC in 2020 about the show’s raison-d’etre. And yet watching the one episode you can stream of the show, mostly, I have to say, Hitler comes across as kind of… adorable? That’s probably because Atkinson took a model that really is known for making even the most unlikable character sympathetic (think Archie Bunker) and copied and pasted the world’s most notorious couple into it. 

In case you haven’t gotten this yet, “Heil Honey” was not a success. Only one episode of the show, the pilot, actually aired, and the rest of the episodes of the first season have never been screened. A lot of the backlash to the show was, understandably I suppose, from people who never watched it. A sitcom about Hitler is generally just a crass premise. But watching its first episode, in which the Goldensteins crash a dinner with Neville Chamberlain and even start a conga line, I think its foil is that it’s just not very good.

It simultaneously does too much without doing enough. It doesn’t really deeply engage with the subject matter beyond the superficiality of punny punchline jokes and historical references (at least not in its first episode) and so it can’t really justify its subversive undertaking. The Goldensteins’ Jewish identity did not even get mentioned. Instead, the man responsible for the biggest mass killing of Jews offered them his best Schnapps. 

Take, for example, the animated title sequence: With a cutesy American tune playing in the background, we see Eva Braun burning a dish on the stove as gray smoke fills the screen. There’s something so viscerally awful about it when you think about concentration camps and the crematoriums, and yet it seemed nobody was there to say, “Aaah, actually, maybe this is a FRIGGIN HORRIFIC IDEA!! THERE’S A LITERAL OVEN IN THIS TITLE SEQUENCE!!! HELLO!!!”

The thing about “Heil Honey” that’s perhaps most dumbfounding is that it wasn’t nixed because of outrage from the Jewish community. It wasn’t the fact that Hayim Pinner, the secretary general of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, called the show's premise "very distasteful and even offensive” that did it. It wasn’t a scathing LA Times article that mocked the British Satellite Broadcasting for constantly touting the show’s one Jewish writer as  "American Jewish Writer Paul Wayne." 

It was canceled because Rupert Murdoch’s Sky TV took over the BSB and halted the show’s production midway through shooting its first season. So basically, just bureaucracy. And so, episodes like “Hitler in the Closet,” “A Close Shave for Adolf” and “Eva’s New Shelves” were relegated to the annals of TV history, without anyone having ever watched them. And I can’t help but think that, well, maybe that’s for the best.  

Funnily enough, Atkinson and others on the show did consider making it more meta and reminiscent of “The Producers,” having it be a show about a show about Hitler, in which the actors comment on their feelings about the scenes a la “The Office.” I think that would’ve actually made a more compelling and self-aware show.

Luckily, “Heil Honey I’m Home!” is not the only TV show that attempted to give us subversive portrayals of Hitler, and some of them were actually incredible and legitimately funny. But that’s for another edition of Jewish TV Club.  

In the meantime, let us know in the comments if you would watch “Heil Honey I’m Home!”