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WEIRD & WILD: Pee-wee Herman bio

BIOGRAPHY: PEE-WEE HERMAN
Thursday at 10 p.m. ET, BIO Channel

So is this new Biography hour a profile of the retro kiddie character or of his actor-portrayer Paul Reubens? Either way, it's a wild ride.

Reubens started in comedy 30 years ago with L.A.'s influential improvisation group The Groundlings, where he created his Pee-wee character of a big kid in a small suit with a perpetual snit. Stand-up sellouts and a hit HBO special led to his 1980s CBS cult crossover Pee-wee's Playhouse, a color-riot of a Saturday morning children's series with enough pure strangeness (and sneaky double entendres) to lure a sizable adult following.

But "adult" proved the operative word in another sense in 1991 when Reubens was arrested in an X-rated movie theater while visiting his family in Florida. His kiddie career on the skids, the actor reinvented himself by playing an ever-changing roster of characters in Murphy Brown, Ally McBeal and memorably last season in 30 Rock and Pushing Daisies -- a show almost as DayGlo fluorescent as Reubens' old kiddie fave.

And now there's another Pee-wee Herman movie on the horizon.

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Diane Werts has been glued to the tube since she can remember, growing up in a household where the TV came on first thing in the morning and stayed on till bedtime and beyond. She worked for the USA Film Festival, then for The Dallas Morning News writing about everything from Shakespeare to macrame art to rock music (and has the hearing loss to prove it). She moved to New York's Newsday to edit their glossy TV magazine, then returned to writing about television, specializing in its stranger permutations. She's a past president of the Television Critics Association.

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