Years: 2001-2002
Seasons: 1
Episodes: 9
Created by: Ben Edlund
Main Cast:
Patrick Warburton as The Tick
David Burke as Arthur
Nestor Carbonell as Batmanuel
Liz Vassey as Captain Liberty
One of the best things about going over a bunch of canceled TV shows is that, while there are always the obvious “gone too soon” series with rabid fanbases, occasionally you’ll find something brilliant that hardly anyone remembers and that you didn’t even know existed. This is certainly the case with The Tick, a show that deserved at least a couple full seasons to grow, but was sadly cut short after a mere nine episodes. While it does maintain some cult popularity (what the hell doesn’t these days?), it definitely deserves the kind of fan worship that helped created the Firefly movie and brought back the dead Futurama and Family Guy.
I haven’t read the comic books, nor have I ever seen the successful cartoon version, but apparently The Tick was always a parody of the superhero genre, and the man himself was kind of a bumbling dumbass with super strength. In this version he’s played by Patrick Warburton, famous for playing Puddy on Seinfeld. Warburton plays the Tick as somewhat slow, borderline retarded at times but generally good-natured. He doesn’t mean harm, he’s just an idiot, and his stupidity sometimes leads to things inadvertently getting destroyed. Imagine Homer Simpson without his asshole streak, and you get the idea. He’s teamed up with his idealistic sidekick Arthur, who has no real super powers and works as his frustrated voice of reason. You see, Arthur became a superhero because he wants to do good in the world, to make it a better place for everyone. He’s a rookie at this kind of thing, and more often than not gets tossed around rather than tossing other people around. He and the Tick share an apartment, and sometimes have Odd Couple-like exchanges, such as the Tick leaving the cap off the toothpaste and whatnot. It’s funnier than it sounds, trust me.
The two are also usually accompanied by two friends, the boner-inducing Captain Liberty and the ridiculous Latin lover, Batmanuel. Captain Liberty works for the government, which is unfortunately only explored briefly in the series when some nude photos of her turn up in a local stroke magazine, putting her job in jeopardy. Like the Tick, she seems to legitimately have superpowers, and can easily beat the crap out of villains without much trouble. She is frequently joined by Batmanuel, her occasional fuck buddy who takes every opportunity to get back into her pants. He has an ridiculously high opinion of himself, and typically evaluates things on how it would benefit him the most. He drives around in the “Manuelmobile,” which is just an old car that he loves so much that he takes up two parking spaces for it, just to make sure it has room. His superpowers are a little more dubious, and in a few episodes we get to see people kick the crap out of him. He’s played by Nestor Carbonell, who also plays the eyeliner enthusiast Richard Alpert on Lost.
While occasionally battling supervillains, the show deals more with the day-to-day problems that plague a superhero, such as getting a license to fight crime, dealing with the judicial system while putting a supervillain on trial, “coming out” as a superhero to your friends and family, etc. The best way to describe this show is to mention what executive producer Larry Charles had in mind for it. He basically wanted the characters to share a friendship similar to that in Seinfeld, which he wrote a bunch of episodes for (he’s also directed several episodes of Curb Your Enthusiasm). I personally love the idea of Seinfeld with superheroes, and even in it’s embryonic phase, you could see where the show was going with that concept. The small annoyances that take up a superhero’s life make for the funniest jokes, such as Batmanuel needing a ride from Captain Liberty to pick up the Manuelmobile from the repair show, and Arthur trying to get the Tick out of the apartment so he can screw an old high school crush. What doesn’t work so well are the more obvious jokes that spring from the Tick just being an idiot. There a scene in one episode where Arthur and the Tick see a document written on extremely rare paper, and you pretty much already know what’s going to happen with the Tick grabs it. Also, when the Tick enters Arthur’s apartment for the first time, he starts guessing where all the secret devices are, which leads to him almost completely destroying the place. The dumb jokes get even worse when Batmanuel and Captain Liberty try to explain to him was sex is, and when another hero keeps removing his glasses, therefore bouncing back and forth between his superhero and secret identities.
There are a number of reasons why this show failed, but the most baffling one has to do with FOX under-promoting it due to them not owning the series. I understand that running a major TV network is complicated business, but why the hell would you even green light an expensive show like The Tick and then not even try to make it successful? Further, they botched the scheduling for this show, and put it up against NBC’s “Must See TV” lineup, where it didn’t stand a chance. Wouldn’t it make more sense to put this show on after The Simpsons? The humor is so similar that at least some of their fans would stick around and keep watching. I know that networks make enough money that they can just chalk something up as a loss and forget about it, but the total indifference that the network had with The Tick is mind-boggling.
What if it was a hit? The first season of any show is usually the weakest, as everyone is fumbling around trying to find an appropriate rhythm. The idea behind The Tick was so good that it probably would have had a strong run of at least a couple great seasons. There is so much about the daily lives of superheroes that never gets addressed in comic books because of how mundane they are, and a show like this could take that and run with it. It would basically operate “between the panels,” so to speak. In order for that to work it would have to had been a huge hit, due to the budget needed to produce each episode. Even with a lower budget, I think the show would still have been great, and I wish that they had the opportunity to do something like that Chinese restaurant episode of Seinfeld or something. More than anything, I just want to see more of Batmanuel. Now that’s a character I’m going to miss.
Recommended for: People who really wanted to like Mystery Men, comic book fans with a sense of humor, people who love bad “Latin Lover” stereotypes.
Monday, December 13, 2010
Monday, December 6, 2010
Heil Honey I’m Home!
Year: 1990
Seasons: None
Episodes: 1 (allegedly there were 7 made)
Created by: Geoff Atkinson
Main Cast:
Neil McCaul as Adolf Hitler
Denica Fairman as Eva Braun
Gareth Marks as Arny Goldenstein
Caroline Gruber as Rosa Goldenstein
Patrick Cargill as Neville Chamberlain
Laura Brattan as Ruth
The problem with trying to do a faithful parody of classic 50s sitcoms is that the style of humor used in those shows has been ditched for a reason. Like everything else, humor evolves. These shows come with all kinds of expectations on how humor worked when they were written; hence it’s no longer an acceptable joke to walk on stage wearing a dress and just stand there. With some jokes what used to be a punchline is now a build-up to another punchline. If you follow the old style too closely and don’t make any attempt to do something new with the jokes, people aren’t going to enjoy the show. They’re just going to find it corny and unfunny.
The only way to clear that hurdle is to give the show memorable, interesting characters that the audience cares about and wants to watch. And here we have the biggest issue with the show Heil Honey I’m Home! The show revolves around Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun living together as a loving couple in an apartment. Since they are the main characters, you the viewer are forced to like them, or at least smile when spending time with them. They live next door to two annoying Jewish stereotypes, named Arny and Rosa Goldenstein. The show operates on the premise of being a long lost sit com (or “hit com” according to the text that opens the program) created by a TV executive called Brandon Thalburg Jnr. that has been found in a Burbank backlot, and involves the wacky day-to-day misadventures of Hitler trying to go about being a good husband while at the same time invading other countries.
Out of seven allegedly filmed episodes, only one ever made it on the air. Viewers thought that it was in poor taste and were shocked, yes, shocked that someone dared make a sit com with Nazis in it. The plot of the aired pilot revolves around Neville Chamberlain coming to the Hitler’s home for dinner to discuss his “Czechoslovakia nonsense.” His irritating neighbors Arny and Rosa are expecting a visit from their creepy niece Ruth, who looks and acts like Marla Hooch from A League of Their Own. Because Hitler hates the Goldensteins (not only for coming over uninvited, but also for being fucking annoying. And Jewish), he tells Eva not to let them know about Chamberlain’s visit. Rosa comes over for a visit while Hitler’s out doing things, and for no other reason than probably just hating her husband, Eva lets her know who their visitor is through a long, unfunny game of charades. Rosa excitedly tells Arny about it, and they decide to fix their niece up with Neville for a date.
The Goldensteins pop in, Hitler yells at Eva about it, and they come up with the idiotic plan of getting the Goldensteins drunk, so that when they pass out they can carry them back to their own apartment and as far away from Chamberlain as possible. Predictably, the Goldensteins stay perfectly awake when Chamberlain arrives, and are even more obnoxious than when they’re sober. Chamberlain is played as a doofus, who loves the wacky antics of the Goldensteins when he sees them. An example of this comes when, for no apparent reason, Chamberlain starts singing I’m a Little Teapot, which ends with the studio audience wildly applauding, as if he did something mind-blowing. When he asks to speak to Hitler privately in the kitchen, it’s revealed that he brought along a treaty for Hitler to sign promising “peace in our time.” When Chamberlain leaves the kitchen Hitler chucks the treaty into the ice box, telling the audience he has no intention of signing it.
When Hitler comes back he sees Chamberlain, Arny, and Eva in a conga line chanting “I came I saw I conquered,” then joins in. Ruth finally pops in and is introduced to Chamberlain, and her cock-shriveling strangeness does little to scare him away. She even asks him “you want a lock of my hair for your wallet?” Out of nowhere, the Goldensteins drunkenly tell Chamberlain about Hitler hiding tanks and planning on invading more countries, and then somehow pull out a copy of the missing treaty and try to read what it says. This thankfully leads to Hitler yelling at them to get out. After the disastrous dinner party, Hitler signs the treaty to prove that he’s a “nice Hitler,” and Chamberlain makes him promise “no more naughty little invasions.” After Chamberlain leaves with Ruth for their date, Hitler and Eva get cozy on their couch. Eva lovingly calls Hitler “Mr Sausage” and he calls her his “Hootchie Cootchie Girl.” The end.
I’m not one who gets offended over Hitler jokes, but I do get offended over bad, annoying humor, and this show was loaded with it. Keeping with the “classic sit com” feel, Hitler sounds like the Vlasic Pickles Stork (who’s name is Jovny, by the way), but is clearly a take on Ralph Kramden, with Eva Braun being a take on Alice. Switching shows, the Goldensteins play more like Fred and Ethel Mertz than Ed and Trixie Norton. The jokes are typical, with Arny talking shit about his mother-in-law, the dinner party gone bad, the botched attempt to hide something important, etc. It’s actually pretty similar to another parody of classic sit coms, Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s That’s My Bush! Hell, they both even end with an exclamation point. A big difference has to do with how they decided to work with this format. Parker and Stone added bad taste plots involving aborted fetuses and botched lethal injections. This show just added some hated historical figures and said things like “I’m a bad little Hitler” and hoped for the best. It wasn’t exactly razor-sharp parody.
Even though there have been comedy shows about the Nazis before, this one is notably different because regardless of how bad the humor is, you can’t help be sympathize with Hitler and want him to succeed over the course of the show. You are just as annoyed as he is with his Jewish neighbors. You want the treaty he hides to stay hidden. If this show became a hit, then millions of viewers would grow to love being with this character. That’s how these shows work. Therefore, it’s a little disingenuous when people watch the pilot and say “it wasn’t that bad” or claim that it’s no different from the other Nazi comedies. No shit this show was immediately yanked off the air. It inadvertently asked the viewers to love Hitler.
This type of show only works as a short skit. When stretched out to half an hour, it gets old really quick. If it found an audience, it would probably have had the typical short run that most British sit coms have, and be remembered as “that strange comedy with Hitler in it.” It’s hard to tell what would have happened once the show ran through all of the standard sit com plot devices, but it seems strange to think that the creators expected this to have a long run at all. I can only imagine that the show would have lasted around 30 episodes before fatigue set in and the novelty of having Hitler as your leading man wore off. A good story arc may have been interesting, though thank god we were spared an episode where Hitler tries to persuade the Goldensteins to go camping.
Recommend for: fans of bad parodies, people who thought The Honeymooners needed more Nazis.
Seasons: None
Episodes: 1 (allegedly there were 7 made)
Created by: Geoff Atkinson
Main Cast:
Neil McCaul as Adolf Hitler
Denica Fairman as Eva Braun
Gareth Marks as Arny Goldenstein
Caroline Gruber as Rosa Goldenstein
Patrick Cargill as Neville Chamberlain
Laura Brattan as Ruth
The problem with trying to do a faithful parody of classic 50s sitcoms is that the style of humor used in those shows has been ditched for a reason. Like everything else, humor evolves. These shows come with all kinds of expectations on how humor worked when they were written; hence it’s no longer an acceptable joke to walk on stage wearing a dress and just stand there. With some jokes what used to be a punchline is now a build-up to another punchline. If you follow the old style too closely and don’t make any attempt to do something new with the jokes, people aren’t going to enjoy the show. They’re just going to find it corny and unfunny.
The only way to clear that hurdle is to give the show memorable, interesting characters that the audience cares about and wants to watch. And here we have the biggest issue with the show Heil Honey I’m Home! The show revolves around Adolf Hitler and Eva Braun living together as a loving couple in an apartment. Since they are the main characters, you the viewer are forced to like them, or at least smile when spending time with them. They live next door to two annoying Jewish stereotypes, named Arny and Rosa Goldenstein. The show operates on the premise of being a long lost sit com (or “hit com” according to the text that opens the program) created by a TV executive called Brandon Thalburg Jnr. that has been found in a Burbank backlot, and involves the wacky day-to-day misadventures of Hitler trying to go about being a good husband while at the same time invading other countries.
Out of seven allegedly filmed episodes, only one ever made it on the air. Viewers thought that it was in poor taste and were shocked, yes, shocked that someone dared make a sit com with Nazis in it. The plot of the aired pilot revolves around Neville Chamberlain coming to the Hitler’s home for dinner to discuss his “Czechoslovakia nonsense.” His irritating neighbors Arny and Rosa are expecting a visit from their creepy niece Ruth, who looks and acts like Marla Hooch from A League of Their Own. Because Hitler hates the Goldensteins (not only for coming over uninvited, but also for being fucking annoying. And Jewish), he tells Eva not to let them know about Chamberlain’s visit. Rosa comes over for a visit while Hitler’s out doing things, and for no other reason than probably just hating her husband, Eva lets her know who their visitor is through a long, unfunny game of charades. Rosa excitedly tells Arny about it, and they decide to fix their niece up with Neville for a date.
The Goldensteins pop in, Hitler yells at Eva about it, and they come up with the idiotic plan of getting the Goldensteins drunk, so that when they pass out they can carry them back to their own apartment and as far away from Chamberlain as possible. Predictably, the Goldensteins stay perfectly awake when Chamberlain arrives, and are even more obnoxious than when they’re sober. Chamberlain is played as a doofus, who loves the wacky antics of the Goldensteins when he sees them. An example of this comes when, for no apparent reason, Chamberlain starts singing I’m a Little Teapot, which ends with the studio audience wildly applauding, as if he did something mind-blowing. When he asks to speak to Hitler privately in the kitchen, it’s revealed that he brought along a treaty for Hitler to sign promising “peace in our time.” When Chamberlain leaves the kitchen Hitler chucks the treaty into the ice box, telling the audience he has no intention of signing it.
When Hitler comes back he sees Chamberlain, Arny, and Eva in a conga line chanting “I came I saw I conquered,” then joins in. Ruth finally pops in and is introduced to Chamberlain, and her cock-shriveling strangeness does little to scare him away. She even asks him “you want a lock of my hair for your wallet?” Out of nowhere, the Goldensteins drunkenly tell Chamberlain about Hitler hiding tanks and planning on invading more countries, and then somehow pull out a copy of the missing treaty and try to read what it says. This thankfully leads to Hitler yelling at them to get out. After the disastrous dinner party, Hitler signs the treaty to prove that he’s a “nice Hitler,” and Chamberlain makes him promise “no more naughty little invasions.” After Chamberlain leaves with Ruth for their date, Hitler and Eva get cozy on their couch. Eva lovingly calls Hitler “Mr Sausage” and he calls her his “Hootchie Cootchie Girl.” The end.
I’m not one who gets offended over Hitler jokes, but I do get offended over bad, annoying humor, and this show was loaded with it. Keeping with the “classic sit com” feel, Hitler sounds like the Vlasic Pickles Stork (who’s name is Jovny, by the way), but is clearly a take on Ralph Kramden, with Eva Braun being a take on Alice. Switching shows, the Goldensteins play more like Fred and Ethel Mertz than Ed and Trixie Norton. The jokes are typical, with Arny talking shit about his mother-in-law, the dinner party gone bad, the botched attempt to hide something important, etc. It’s actually pretty similar to another parody of classic sit coms, Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s That’s My Bush! Hell, they both even end with an exclamation point. A big difference has to do with how they decided to work with this format. Parker and Stone added bad taste plots involving aborted fetuses and botched lethal injections. This show just added some hated historical figures and said things like “I’m a bad little Hitler” and hoped for the best. It wasn’t exactly razor-sharp parody.
Even though there have been comedy shows about the Nazis before, this one is notably different because regardless of how bad the humor is, you can’t help be sympathize with Hitler and want him to succeed over the course of the show. You are just as annoyed as he is with his Jewish neighbors. You want the treaty he hides to stay hidden. If this show became a hit, then millions of viewers would grow to love being with this character. That’s how these shows work. Therefore, it’s a little disingenuous when people watch the pilot and say “it wasn’t that bad” or claim that it’s no different from the other Nazi comedies. No shit this show was immediately yanked off the air. It inadvertently asked the viewers to love Hitler.
This type of show only works as a short skit. When stretched out to half an hour, it gets old really quick. If it found an audience, it would probably have had the typical short run that most British sit coms have, and be remembered as “that strange comedy with Hitler in it.” It’s hard to tell what would have happened once the show ran through all of the standard sit com plot devices, but it seems strange to think that the creators expected this to have a long run at all. I can only imagine that the show would have lasted around 30 episodes before fatigue set in and the novelty of having Hitler as your leading man wore off. A good story arc may have been interesting, though thank god we were spared an episode where Hitler tries to persuade the Goldensteins to go camping.
Recommend for: fans of bad parodies, people who thought The Honeymooners needed more Nazis.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Arrested Development
Years: 2003 - 2006
Seasons: 3
Episodes: 53
Created By: Mitchell Hurwitz
Main Cast:
Jason Bateman as Michael Bluth
Portia de Rossi as Lindsay Fünke
Will Arnett as Gob Bluth
Tony Hale as Buster Bluth
Michael Cera as George Michael Bluth
David Cross as Tobias Fünke
Alia Shawkat as Maeby Fünke
Jeffrey Tambor as George Bluth
Jessica Walter as Lucille Bluth
It’s really hard to do smart, Simpsons-style humor in a live-action format. It’s even harder when you don’t have a LOL SPIDERPIG ROFLMAO character like Homer Simpson leading the action. Add to that a story arc which makes it harder to enjoy episodes unless you’ve seen each one before it, and you have a show that’s going to have a very short lifespan. Regardless of how brilliantly funny Arrested Development was, it’s amazing that it managed to survive long enough to reach three seasons and wrap up in a satisfactory manner. And fans, you need to bow down and start kissing Fox’s hairy beanbags for keeping the show on for as long as they did, because instead of botching a brilliant show with network bumbling, Fox actually kept it alive longer than any other sane network would have. As much as fans would like to argue this point, the show’s ratings were godawful, and it was consistently the lowest-rated comedy on TV. Even putting it in a coveted time slot following The Simpsons didn’t help, as viewers switched channels even before the Gracie Films lady could go “shush.” Fox was losing money by keeping this show alive. You should thank them for it.
For the millions upon millions of you who skipped it, the show is about the wealthy Bluth family, who’s patriarch (George Bluth) is the CEO of the Bluth Company, a company that builds mini-mansions. After making his wife Lucille the CEO, George Sr. gets arrested by the SEC for blowing money on ridiculous “personal expenses” and other potentially illegal activities. Their son Michael is then asked to run the company, and thus the show begins, with Michael acting as the responsible one looking after his son (George Michael, who wants to fuck his cousin) his mom, his two brothers (the shitty magician and Segway enthusiast Gob and the borderline retarded Buster) his sister (the attention-starved and materialistic Lindsay), her husband (the closeted never-nude Tobias), and his niece (the rebellious Maeby). After that, the story starts getting complicated, and the story attempts to remedy this by a series of flashbacks that occur during the show that attempt to bring viewers up-to-speed whenever a previous plot point gets mentioned. The show deals with the family coming to grips with George Sr. being in jail, Michael’s attempts to run the company smoothly, his siblings constantly sucking money away from the company and spending it on bullshit, his son trying to deal with lusting after his cousin, Tobias wanting to become an actor, and many other smaller plot points that are a hell of a lot funnier when you’re watching them than just seeing them described.
When this show first came out, I remember hearing a lot about how great it was. I decided to give it a shot, and what I saw was annoying and unfunny. Therefore, I never bothered tuning back in, making me part of the reason why the show failed (I had a Nielson box, so fuck you, my viewership was important!). Years later some coworkers started telling me that I had to give the show another chance, swearing that if I watched it from the beginning, I would enjoy it more. Someone even went so far as to leave their copies of seasons one and two in my box at work, so I relented. I watched the first episode, then the second, and I kept going for several episodes. And I found out that they were right, that this was an amazing show that deserved all the praise it got. I’ve only gone through the show once, but the episodes were so densely packed that I have the urge to start rewatching them, just to catch the jokes that I missed the first time around. And that episode I saw that sucked ass? When I saw it the second time it was great.
Of course, this is exactly why people stayed away from the show in droves. You just can’t have a show like this on a major network and expect it to be a hit. The most successful shows have something for everyone, and there just wasn’t enough simple, dumb humor in this show for it to be a success. The casual viewer needs to be able to dip into it at any point and immediately have enough information to enjoy it, and as funny as they were, the flashbacks just weren’t effective in conveying the information you needed to know. Without seeing the pilot episode where George Michael gets kissed by Maeby as a way to freak out their parents, his attraction to her just comes off as creepy. I mean, even after seeing the pilot it’s still creepy, but at least there’s a grounding to some previous experience the two had. It also didn’t help that the main characters were a bunch of unlikeable assholes. Once again, without following the whole story, Michael comes off as a selfish prick that doesn’t want to help his family, and the family comes off as a bunch of greedy cocksuckers who can’t stand him or each other. Also, because many jokes rely on the audience’s previous knowledge of past episodes, they fall flat for viewers tuning in for the first time. It’s like shooting a baby in the kneecaps and expecting it to walk. It’s ain’t gonna happen, son.
Finally, the show was remarkably consistent, with the exception of a couple repeated jokes near the end that didn’t work. I wasn’t wild about Buster’s hook hand, but that may have been dealt with further as the series progressed (maybe I’ll love it when I rewatch the series. Who knows?). Everyone seemed to be on fire during all three seasons, and it’s hard to tell when it would have started to lose steam. If the show was a hit then the season three finale would clearly have ended differently, as everyone involved seemed to know that the end was coming and that they’d have to wrap things up. And considering that no other networks bothered to pick the show up, and that no one can even pull everything together to get the movie made, it seems safe to say that the story ended with the finale.
Recommended for: elitists, people who watch The Daily Show/Colbert Report, fans of The Office, Simpsons fans that didn’t piss their pants laughing over “Spiderpig,” people who say “quite” a lot.
Seasons: 3
Episodes: 53
Created By: Mitchell Hurwitz
Main Cast:
Jason Bateman as Michael Bluth
Portia de Rossi as Lindsay Fünke
Will Arnett as Gob Bluth
Tony Hale as Buster Bluth
Michael Cera as George Michael Bluth
David Cross as Tobias Fünke
Alia Shawkat as Maeby Fünke
Jeffrey Tambor as George Bluth
Jessica Walter as Lucille Bluth
It’s really hard to do smart, Simpsons-style humor in a live-action format. It’s even harder when you don’t have a LOL SPIDERPIG ROFLMAO character like Homer Simpson leading the action. Add to that a story arc which makes it harder to enjoy episodes unless you’ve seen each one before it, and you have a show that’s going to have a very short lifespan. Regardless of how brilliantly funny Arrested Development was, it’s amazing that it managed to survive long enough to reach three seasons and wrap up in a satisfactory manner. And fans, you need to bow down and start kissing Fox’s hairy beanbags for keeping the show on for as long as they did, because instead of botching a brilliant show with network bumbling, Fox actually kept it alive longer than any other sane network would have. As much as fans would like to argue this point, the show’s ratings were godawful, and it was consistently the lowest-rated comedy on TV. Even putting it in a coveted time slot following The Simpsons didn’t help, as viewers switched channels even before the Gracie Films lady could go “shush.” Fox was losing money by keeping this show alive. You should thank them for it.
For the millions upon millions of you who skipped it, the show is about the wealthy Bluth family, who’s patriarch (George Bluth) is the CEO of the Bluth Company, a company that builds mini-mansions. After making his wife Lucille the CEO, George Sr. gets arrested by the SEC for blowing money on ridiculous “personal expenses” and other potentially illegal activities. Their son Michael is then asked to run the company, and thus the show begins, with Michael acting as the responsible one looking after his son (George Michael, who wants to fuck his cousin) his mom, his two brothers (the shitty magician and Segway enthusiast Gob and the borderline retarded Buster) his sister (the attention-starved and materialistic Lindsay), her husband (the closeted never-nude Tobias), and his niece (the rebellious Maeby). After that, the story starts getting complicated, and the story attempts to remedy this by a series of flashbacks that occur during the show that attempt to bring viewers up-to-speed whenever a previous plot point gets mentioned. The show deals with the family coming to grips with George Sr. being in jail, Michael’s attempts to run the company smoothly, his siblings constantly sucking money away from the company and spending it on bullshit, his son trying to deal with lusting after his cousin, Tobias wanting to become an actor, and many other smaller plot points that are a hell of a lot funnier when you’re watching them than just seeing them described.
When this show first came out, I remember hearing a lot about how great it was. I decided to give it a shot, and what I saw was annoying and unfunny. Therefore, I never bothered tuning back in, making me part of the reason why the show failed (I had a Nielson box, so fuck you, my viewership was important!). Years later some coworkers started telling me that I had to give the show another chance, swearing that if I watched it from the beginning, I would enjoy it more. Someone even went so far as to leave their copies of seasons one and two in my box at work, so I relented. I watched the first episode, then the second, and I kept going for several episodes. And I found out that they were right, that this was an amazing show that deserved all the praise it got. I’ve only gone through the show once, but the episodes were so densely packed that I have the urge to start rewatching them, just to catch the jokes that I missed the first time around. And that episode I saw that sucked ass? When I saw it the second time it was great.
Of course, this is exactly why people stayed away from the show in droves. You just can’t have a show like this on a major network and expect it to be a hit. The most successful shows have something for everyone, and there just wasn’t enough simple, dumb humor in this show for it to be a success. The casual viewer needs to be able to dip into it at any point and immediately have enough information to enjoy it, and as funny as they were, the flashbacks just weren’t effective in conveying the information you needed to know. Without seeing the pilot episode where George Michael gets kissed by Maeby as a way to freak out their parents, his attraction to her just comes off as creepy. I mean, even after seeing the pilot it’s still creepy, but at least there’s a grounding to some previous experience the two had. It also didn’t help that the main characters were a bunch of unlikeable assholes. Once again, without following the whole story, Michael comes off as a selfish prick that doesn’t want to help his family, and the family comes off as a bunch of greedy cocksuckers who can’t stand him or each other. Also, because many jokes rely on the audience’s previous knowledge of past episodes, they fall flat for viewers tuning in for the first time. It’s like shooting a baby in the kneecaps and expecting it to walk. It’s ain’t gonna happen, son.
Finally, the show was remarkably consistent, with the exception of a couple repeated jokes near the end that didn’t work. I wasn’t wild about Buster’s hook hand, but that may have been dealt with further as the series progressed (maybe I’ll love it when I rewatch the series. Who knows?). Everyone seemed to be on fire during all three seasons, and it’s hard to tell when it would have started to lose steam. If the show was a hit then the season three finale would clearly have ended differently, as everyone involved seemed to know that the end was coming and that they’d have to wrap things up. And considering that no other networks bothered to pick the show up, and that no one can even pull everything together to get the movie made, it seems safe to say that the story ended with the finale.
Recommended for: elitists, people who watch The Daily Show/Colbert Report, fans of The Office, Simpsons fans that didn’t piss their pants laughing over “Spiderpig,” people who say “quite” a lot.
Monday, November 22, 2010
Five Canceled Shows I Really Want to See on DVD
There are a ton of shows that probably will never make it to DVD, and this is especially true of canceled shows. Unless there is a strong cult demanding it, why should time and money be spent on something that was a failure to begin with? Anyhow, with instant view and internet streaming being increasingly popular ways to get shows, it may be easier for some of the more oddball and unloved shows to come back in some form. Here are some shows that I’d like to see:
Babes
A short-lived sitcom about three fat sisters living together. I don’t expect that this show went far beyond fat jokes and the typical sitcom emotionalism that you get when trying to make characters sympathetic, but I’ve been wanting to see this show ever since I missed its first run on Fox years ago. It was apparently produced by Dolly Parton, which makes me want to see it even more because I fucking love Dolly Parton. It also stars Wendie Jo Sperber, who played Linda McFly in the Back to the Future films and has one of the greatest fat girl names I’ve ever heard. Unfortunately, Sperber died of breast cancer a few years ago, and was the subject of a documentary. Hopefully this bit of exposure will lead to this show eventually getting aired on Hulu or Netflix. I mean, how hard can it be to digitize 22 half hour episodes?
Hardcore TV
A dumb, nudity-heavy sketch comedy show that ran on HBO for awhile. I saw it when I was a kid and laughed my ass off, though, much like MTV’s The State, I highly doubt that the humor is going to hold up when I watch it as an adult. It had such skits as Fairy Tales From the Darkside and a painfully unfunny bit where a guy with a shitty Jamaican accent recounts TV shows. As with all sketch comedy shows, it was hit and miss, but I remember enough funny bits to want to rewatch it, such as Raging Bullwinkle and Cindy’s Sex Talk. One skit of Sex Talk had a man happily discussing his relationship with an inflatable doll, but becomes disgusted when a caller asks for his opinion on inflatable sheep. He ends the skit by describing his future as being “very happy, but very chaffed.” See, that’s the kind of stupid joke that makes me miss the show.
Woops!
A notorious and stupid sitcom about the survivors of a nuclear holocaust. This was another travesty from the Fox network, and while most of its short-lived run was typically lame sitcom jokes, there was allegedly one episode where the find Santa Claus and discover that he’s a serial killer. There were only 13 episodes, but I’d be willing to sit through that just to see this murderous Santa episode. Another thing about the show that intrigues me is the typo in the title. There’s supposed to be an “h” in there. I know that I’m a linguist and should therefore not be bothered by such trivialities as orthography, but it still grates on me for some reason.
You’re in the Picture
A classic show that aired once, and was so shitty that host Jackie Gleason spent the entire next episode apologizing for the show and going into detail about why this piece of shit got aired in the first place. I’ve seen a bit of the second episode and loved it, and I’m increasingly coming to the opinion that Jackie Gleason was one of the funniest mother fuckers that ever lived. In fact, if there is a heaven and I get to go there, I want to see Jackie Gleason describe in detail why EVERY show that ever got canceled was a failure. Anyhow, this is a show that I want to see both for the shitty game that takes up the first (and only) episode of the show, and the half-hour apology Gleason gives the audience in the second. There ought to be a rule where the stars of every canceled show does the same in front of a studio audience, effectively apologizing for wasting their time with this crap.
The Ripping Friends
John K.’s unsuccessful follow-up to Ren & Stimpy, this one focuses on the somewhat homo-erotic adventures of a group of muscular supermen who go around and fight crime. I’ve seen a couple episodes, and the humor is every bit as disgusting and suggestive as Ren & Stimpy, which makes me scream in frustration at the fact that it is still only available in its entirety in Australia. If his short-lived gay sex version of Ren & Stimpy can get a DVD release, then surely the same can be done for The Ripping Friends.
Babes
A short-lived sitcom about three fat sisters living together. I don’t expect that this show went far beyond fat jokes and the typical sitcom emotionalism that you get when trying to make characters sympathetic, but I’ve been wanting to see this show ever since I missed its first run on Fox years ago. It was apparently produced by Dolly Parton, which makes me want to see it even more because I fucking love Dolly Parton. It also stars Wendie Jo Sperber, who played Linda McFly in the Back to the Future films and has one of the greatest fat girl names I’ve ever heard. Unfortunately, Sperber died of breast cancer a few years ago, and was the subject of a documentary. Hopefully this bit of exposure will lead to this show eventually getting aired on Hulu or Netflix. I mean, how hard can it be to digitize 22 half hour episodes?
Hardcore TV
A dumb, nudity-heavy sketch comedy show that ran on HBO for awhile. I saw it when I was a kid and laughed my ass off, though, much like MTV’s The State, I highly doubt that the humor is going to hold up when I watch it as an adult. It had such skits as Fairy Tales From the Darkside and a painfully unfunny bit where a guy with a shitty Jamaican accent recounts TV shows. As with all sketch comedy shows, it was hit and miss, but I remember enough funny bits to want to rewatch it, such as Raging Bullwinkle and Cindy’s Sex Talk. One skit of Sex Talk had a man happily discussing his relationship with an inflatable doll, but becomes disgusted when a caller asks for his opinion on inflatable sheep. He ends the skit by describing his future as being “very happy, but very chaffed.” See, that’s the kind of stupid joke that makes me miss the show.
Woops!
A notorious and stupid sitcom about the survivors of a nuclear holocaust. This was another travesty from the Fox network, and while most of its short-lived run was typically lame sitcom jokes, there was allegedly one episode where the find Santa Claus and discover that he’s a serial killer. There were only 13 episodes, but I’d be willing to sit through that just to see this murderous Santa episode. Another thing about the show that intrigues me is the typo in the title. There’s supposed to be an “h” in there. I know that I’m a linguist and should therefore not be bothered by such trivialities as orthography, but it still grates on me for some reason.
You’re in the Picture
A classic show that aired once, and was so shitty that host Jackie Gleason spent the entire next episode apologizing for the show and going into detail about why this piece of shit got aired in the first place. I’ve seen a bit of the second episode and loved it, and I’m increasingly coming to the opinion that Jackie Gleason was one of the funniest mother fuckers that ever lived. In fact, if there is a heaven and I get to go there, I want to see Jackie Gleason describe in detail why EVERY show that ever got canceled was a failure. Anyhow, this is a show that I want to see both for the shitty game that takes up the first (and only) episode of the show, and the half-hour apology Gleason gives the audience in the second. There ought to be a rule where the stars of every canceled show does the same in front of a studio audience, effectively apologizing for wasting their time with this crap.
The Ripping Friends
John K.’s unsuccessful follow-up to Ren & Stimpy, this one focuses on the somewhat homo-erotic adventures of a group of muscular supermen who go around and fight crime. I’ve seen a couple episodes, and the humor is every bit as disgusting and suggestive as Ren & Stimpy, which makes me scream in frustration at the fact that it is still only available in its entirety in Australia. If his short-lived gay sex version of Ren & Stimpy can get a DVD release, then surely the same can be done for The Ripping Friends.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Police Squad!
Years: 1982
Seasons: 1
Episodes: 6
Created by: Jim Abrahams, David & Jerry Zucker
Main Cast:
Leslie Nielsen as Detective Frank Drebin
Alan North as Captain Ed Hocken
Peter Lupus as Officer Norberg
A long time ago, spoof movies actually had jokes in them. What counts as “funny” changes all the time, of course, but this genre seems to have changed a lot in recent years. The way the genre has narrowed in focus happens all the time in different formats. For example: punk rock, in it’s inception, used to include such diverse bands as The Ramones, Patti Smith, X, The Clash, Wire, Blondie, The Dead Kennedys, and Television. Now, bands that are identified as “punk” all sound like bratty versions of The Ramones. It just happens. Spoof movies now seem to have narrowed into films that shoot rapid-fire pop culture references at the audience, punctuated by various “funny” acts of violence against certain popular figures and the inclusion of gross-out visuals. As you can tell, I don’t like this development, but I’m not going to hop on the bandwagon and say that people who love Friedberg and Seltzer films (or Family Guy, which is similar in approach) are all idiots. Humor changes, and I haven’t changed with it. Such is life.
So what does this have to do with Police Squad!, the short-lived show that later turned into the successful Naked Gun film series? Well, it reminded me of why I used to really love spoof movies: they had jokes. Recurring jokes that worked even through six episodes. Clever jokes that sometimes took a minute to fully process. Lots and lots of jokes, packed in as densely as those classic Simpsons episodes. It’s rare for me to laugh audibly while watching something alone, but that happened a lot more than I expected while watching this series, and for the life of me I can’t understand why this show wasn’t a hit.
The show follows the adventures of Detective Frank Drebin, who’s shockingly less idiotic here than he is in the Naked Gun films. Each episode follows him solving different cases, usually helped by his partners Ed and Norberg. He follows the typical procedures of interviewing suspects and gathering evidence, and everything is neatly tied up at the end of each episode. Less ambitious in scope than the Naked Gun films, the crimes dealt with usually involve murder and bribery, the topics typically covered in cop shows. What’s great about Police Squad! is that Frank Drebin is such a memorable character, and the recurring gags are so funny that the show gets a lot of milage out of this familiar genre, and not once in this short, six episode run does anything feel stale.
Some of the recurring gags include a celebrity guest star being murdered in the opening credits, Frank’s inside source/shoe shine guy being an expert on pretty much everything (provided you pay him), the scientist Ted demonstrating something disturbing or dangerous to a child before Drebin checks up on him, and the “freeze frame” during the final credits, which is usually just Frank and Ed standing perfectly still while a bunch of other crap goes on in the background. The problem with describing these gags, and with describing humor in general, is that you actually need to see the show in order to understand why it’s funny. The whole show is played deadpan, which is crucial to the humor in it. If everyone played each scene with a smirk on their face and a “I know this is funny” expression, it would destroy the humor and cause each joke to fall flat on it’s face. Granted, not every joke works in this show, but far more succeed than don’t.
What I loved about this show was the amount of talent involved. The creators of this show knew their shit, coming from such spoof hits as The Kentucky Fried Movie and Airplane!, so this was one of those cases where you could be fairly certain that you’d be watching a high-quality show. Also, while watching the show I noticed that Joe Dante directed a couple of episodes. For those who don’t know, Joe Dante is a fantastic and sadly underrated director, responsible for the two Gremlins films and the brilliant Matinee (he also did Looney Tunes: Back in Action, which is strangely hated by a lot of people who probably never even watched the fucking thing). While this show would be different from something like Get Smart, there’s no reason why a genre spoof show shouldn’t have been a success, even if these kind of shows typically don’t last long.
I hate the expression “too good to last” because of the snobbishness that it implies, but that does seem to be the case with this show. Apparently the rapid-fire pace of the jokes just didn’t connect with the audience. One reason given for the show’s cancelation was that in order to enjoy the show, the viewer had to pay close attention to it. In a way, that’s true. This is not a show that you can watch while doing other things, since there’s always something going on in the background, or a visual gag that doesn’t have dialog specifically pointing at it. Even now, if you’re watching the show and surfing the web, it’s a guarantee that you’re going to miss half the jokes. This goes a long way toward explaining why a TV show that demands your attention may fail, but a movie version of the exact same thing can be a huge success, since you can’t multitask in a movie theater (unless you’re a douche on their cellphone). Therefore, Police Squad! was a failure that was yanked off the air after a mere four episodes, and the Naked Gun was a big hit that spawned two sequels and both brought on a revival of the spoof genre and made Leslie Nielsen a star. I may be wrong, but aside from Star Trek, I can’t think of another TV failure that went on to have such a huge impact when adapted into a film.
Recommended for: comedy fans, people who love spoof movies with jokes, Naked Gun fans, people who would have liked the Naked Gun movies if OJ wasn’t in them
Seasons: 1
Episodes: 6
Created by: Jim Abrahams, David & Jerry Zucker
Main Cast:
Leslie Nielsen as Detective Frank Drebin
Alan North as Captain Ed Hocken
Peter Lupus as Officer Norberg
A long time ago, spoof movies actually had jokes in them. What counts as “funny” changes all the time, of course, but this genre seems to have changed a lot in recent years. The way the genre has narrowed in focus happens all the time in different formats. For example: punk rock, in it’s inception, used to include such diverse bands as The Ramones, Patti Smith, X, The Clash, Wire, Blondie, The Dead Kennedys, and Television. Now, bands that are identified as “punk” all sound like bratty versions of The Ramones. It just happens. Spoof movies now seem to have narrowed into films that shoot rapid-fire pop culture references at the audience, punctuated by various “funny” acts of violence against certain popular figures and the inclusion of gross-out visuals. As you can tell, I don’t like this development, but I’m not going to hop on the bandwagon and say that people who love Friedberg and Seltzer films (or Family Guy, which is similar in approach) are all idiots. Humor changes, and I haven’t changed with it. Such is life.
So what does this have to do with Police Squad!, the short-lived show that later turned into the successful Naked Gun film series? Well, it reminded me of why I used to really love spoof movies: they had jokes. Recurring jokes that worked even through six episodes. Clever jokes that sometimes took a minute to fully process. Lots and lots of jokes, packed in as densely as those classic Simpsons episodes. It’s rare for me to laugh audibly while watching something alone, but that happened a lot more than I expected while watching this series, and for the life of me I can’t understand why this show wasn’t a hit.
The show follows the adventures of Detective Frank Drebin, who’s shockingly less idiotic here than he is in the Naked Gun films. Each episode follows him solving different cases, usually helped by his partners Ed and Norberg. He follows the typical procedures of interviewing suspects and gathering evidence, and everything is neatly tied up at the end of each episode. Less ambitious in scope than the Naked Gun films, the crimes dealt with usually involve murder and bribery, the topics typically covered in cop shows. What’s great about Police Squad! is that Frank Drebin is such a memorable character, and the recurring gags are so funny that the show gets a lot of milage out of this familiar genre, and not once in this short, six episode run does anything feel stale.
Some of the recurring gags include a celebrity guest star being murdered in the opening credits, Frank’s inside source/shoe shine guy being an expert on pretty much everything (provided you pay him), the scientist Ted demonstrating something disturbing or dangerous to a child before Drebin checks up on him, and the “freeze frame” during the final credits, which is usually just Frank and Ed standing perfectly still while a bunch of other crap goes on in the background. The problem with describing these gags, and with describing humor in general, is that you actually need to see the show in order to understand why it’s funny. The whole show is played deadpan, which is crucial to the humor in it. If everyone played each scene with a smirk on their face and a “I know this is funny” expression, it would destroy the humor and cause each joke to fall flat on it’s face. Granted, not every joke works in this show, but far more succeed than don’t.
What I loved about this show was the amount of talent involved. The creators of this show knew their shit, coming from such spoof hits as The Kentucky Fried Movie and Airplane!, so this was one of those cases where you could be fairly certain that you’d be watching a high-quality show. Also, while watching the show I noticed that Joe Dante directed a couple of episodes. For those who don’t know, Joe Dante is a fantastic and sadly underrated director, responsible for the two Gremlins films and the brilliant Matinee (he also did Looney Tunes: Back in Action, which is strangely hated by a lot of people who probably never even watched the fucking thing). While this show would be different from something like Get Smart, there’s no reason why a genre spoof show shouldn’t have been a success, even if these kind of shows typically don’t last long.
I hate the expression “too good to last” because of the snobbishness that it implies, but that does seem to be the case with this show. Apparently the rapid-fire pace of the jokes just didn’t connect with the audience. One reason given for the show’s cancelation was that in order to enjoy the show, the viewer had to pay close attention to it. In a way, that’s true. This is not a show that you can watch while doing other things, since there’s always something going on in the background, or a visual gag that doesn’t have dialog specifically pointing at it. Even now, if you’re watching the show and surfing the web, it’s a guarantee that you’re going to miss half the jokes. This goes a long way toward explaining why a TV show that demands your attention may fail, but a movie version of the exact same thing can be a huge success, since you can’t multitask in a movie theater (unless you’re a douche on their cellphone). Therefore, Police Squad! was a failure that was yanked off the air after a mere four episodes, and the Naked Gun was a big hit that spawned two sequels and both brought on a revival of the spoof genre and made Leslie Nielsen a star. I may be wrong, but aside from Star Trek, I can’t think of another TV failure that went on to have such a huge impact when adapted into a film.
Recommended for: comedy fans, people who love spoof movies with jokes, Naked Gun fans, people who would have liked the Naked Gun movies if OJ wasn’t in them
Monday, November 8, 2010
Twin Peaks
Years: 1990-1991
Seasons: 2
Episodes: 30
Created by: David Lynch and Mark Frost
Main Cast:
Kyle MacLachlan as Special Agent Dale Cooper
Michael Ontkean as Sheriff Harry S. Truman
Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer and Maddy Ferguson
Ray Wise as Leland Palmer
Richard Beymer as Benjamin Horne
Sherilynn Fenn as Audrey Horne
Lara Flynn Boyle as Donna Hayward
James Marshall as James Hurley
Dana Ashbrook as Bobby Briggs
Every once in awhile the planets line up in a certain way and something really strange becomes a national phenomenon. When this happens, The Singing Nun prevents Louie Louie from being a number one hit song, Tiny Tim’s wedding becomes one of the highest rated TV events of all time, and the director of Eraserhead has a show where housewives discuss how dancing midgets, bald giants, and a woman who speaks to a log are connected in the murder of a local high school girl. For one glorious moment in the early 90s, David Lynch became a mainstream success with his murder mystery show Twin Peaks, doing the impossible by bringing his art house stylings into middle America through prime time TV. In the process, he only compromised on one important point, but even that compromise helped create one of the most powerful and disturbing episodes in TV history. But more on that in a bit.
Twin Peaks has Lynch’s fingerprints all over it, but it wasn’t his alone. The co-creator was Mark Frost, a writer who previously wrote and directed several episodes of 80s phenomenon Hill Street Blues. Frost cowrote several episodes of Twin Peaks and even directed the season one finale, and it’s been suggested that Frost was responsible for keeping the show progressing in an orderly fashion, while Lynch packed on the stranger elements and imagery. As someone familiar with Lynch’s work, this makes perfect sense, since telling a story via traditional means has never seemed to hold much interest for Lynch.
The story behind the show is as simple as they get. A teen (Lara Palmer) living in the small town of Twin Peaks is found dead one day, and an FBI agent and the town sheriff get to work trying to solve the crime and find the killer. In the double-length pilot episode, we get introduced to pretty much every important figure in the show. The groundwork is also laid for some of the other, less interesting plot developments, such as the burning down of the sawmill and such. The FBI agent is Dale Cooper, who uses a number of unconventional means to try to find the killer. This includes throwing rocks at bottles and dream interpretation. While the investigation goes on, the rest of the town tries to cope with the murder, and everything from Lara’s dad jumping on her casket during the funeral to local “bad girl” Audrey trying to help Cooper out by going undercover at a whorehouse in Canada are part of the “moving on” process.
I know I’m in the minority by saying this, but the pilot episode blows. The acting in it is atrocious, and the interesting moments don’t help make it a more enjoyable experience. Some actors got better, but a couple (especially Andy and ugh, Bobby) stay bad throughout the show. It’s only when the series proper kicks off and Agent Cooper begins the investigation that the show turns great. There’s something about Cooper’s wide-eyed enthusiasm for pretty much everything that makes his character so entertaining to watch, and almost everyone else gets a moment to shine. Apparently, because TV viewers are impatient dickheads, the network demanded that Lynch reveal the killer sooner than he wanted. The problem here is that Lynch never intended on doing such a thing, and in fact stated that if he were to reveal the killer at all, it would be in the final episode of the series.
Let’s stop for a moment here and think about this for a minute. The network had a hit show on their hands, but viewers were starting to leave. In their infinite wisdom, they decided to switch its timeslot to Saturday night at 10, when hardly anyone watches TV in the first place. Then, instead of slowly building to the reveal, they forced the revelation seven episodes into the second season, effectively destroying a show that used the murder mystery as its reason for being. Before discussing that reveal episode, I’d like to state that Lynch was absolutely right for being pissed off about this, and if I wasn’t already so jaded by watching all these canceled shows, I’d say that I was shocked that they’d sabotage it so quickly. Also, if you have any intention of watching the show and would like to stay in the dark about who the killer is, stop reading now.
Throughout the show, references have been made to a certain man named “Bob,” though they have always been sorta cryptic and unclear. As it turns out, “Bob” is an evil spirit that lives in the woods, and he possessed the body of Lara Palmer’s father Leland and used him to rape and murder her and, in the reveal episode, murder her identical cousin Maddy as well. As lame as this sounds, it leads to one of the most shocking moments I’ve ever seen in a TV show, and an episode that counts as one of the best things Lynch has ever filmed. The entire episode, except for an awkward, unfunny diner scene, leads up to Benjamin Horn being arrested for Lara’s murder, and everyone meeting at the local bar The Roadhouse. Julie Cruise sings one of her strangely out-of-place atmospheric ballads and Cooper watches with the Log Lady. Suddenly Cooper gets a message from The Giant, who tells him “It is happening again.” The scene cuts to the Palmer residence, with Leland straightening his tie in the mirror and seeing Bob in the reflection. Maddy comes down and Leland runs at her, punching her in the face and strangling her. Lynch films it mostly in slow motion with Leland and Bob alternating, with his demonic laughter mixing with Maddy’s screams. The effect is extremely unsettling, and it’s something that really needs to be seen rather than described.
And then it all falls apart. Two episodes later Leland is arrested, dies, and the mystery is solved. Then what? Remember in Lost when the Oceanic Six got off the island, and the writers came up with the lamest possible bullshit imaginable just to get them back? This is what happens with the main premise of your show is yanked away. Twin Peaks WAS the Lara Palmer story, and without that, everything fell to pieces immediately. The show started relying on dumb humor, pushed Cooper to the background, and came up with some of the worst shit imaginable. The most boring character on the show (James) had several episodes dedicated to some bullshit plot outside of the town. Andy kept going on about his sperms, and decided to buddy up with some guy who fucked and possibly impregnated his girlfriend. Both Cooper and Audrey, instead of hooking up with each other, hooked up with some randomlove interests, played by Billy Zane and Heather Graham. I have seriously never seen less romantic chemistry than each of these characters had with their boring-ass love interests. The show got so fucking atrocious so fast that it actually took some doing for me to finish this goddamn thing.
The show did start to pick up near the end, and that is probably the most tragic thing about Twin Peaks. Cooper’s former partner Windom Earle turns up as an insane, chess-obsessed murderer. Even though his character was handled poorly, it was still better than what was going on beforehand. There’s a beauty pageant in Twin Peaks, and Earle kidnaps Cooper’s boring girlfriend. Everything culminates with Cooper going into the woods and once again turning up in the strange “red room,” where everyone talks strangely and nothing makes sense. Lara’s there. Bob’s there. Earle’s there. Bob apparently kills Earle and everything goes batshit insane until Cooper finally comes out. The episode ends with Cooper looking into the mirror and seeing Bob’s reflection after smashing his head into it. He starts laughing maniacally while asking “Where’s Annie?” The end.
If the show ended with the resolution of the Lara Palmer plot, it would be remembered as one of the greatest shows of all time. However, because of the network forcing a quick resolution and the writers having no idea what to do next, the show is now one of the most famous instances of jumping the shark in existence. That the show could reach the highs it did and then turn into a boring, unfunny piece of shit so quickly is pretty damn sad. I have no idea if the show’s quality would have held up had Lynch and Frost got what they wanted and left the murder of Lara unsolved until the very end. Finding out new things about how fucked up she was made the show great, and made her a fascinating character. As it is, everyone has moved on, and there will never be anymore stories in the town of Twin Peaks.
Recommended for: Lynch fans, fans of bizarre mysteries, adventurous TV viewers, midget acting aficionados, men who refer to their sperm as “sperms”, people who like logs.
Seasons: 2
Episodes: 30
Created by: David Lynch and Mark Frost
Main Cast:
Kyle MacLachlan as Special Agent Dale Cooper
Michael Ontkean as Sheriff Harry S. Truman
Sheryl Lee as Laura Palmer and Maddy Ferguson
Ray Wise as Leland Palmer
Richard Beymer as Benjamin Horne
Sherilynn Fenn as Audrey Horne
Lara Flynn Boyle as Donna Hayward
James Marshall as James Hurley
Dana Ashbrook as Bobby Briggs
Every once in awhile the planets line up in a certain way and something really strange becomes a national phenomenon. When this happens, The Singing Nun prevents Louie Louie from being a number one hit song, Tiny Tim’s wedding becomes one of the highest rated TV events of all time, and the director of Eraserhead has a show where housewives discuss how dancing midgets, bald giants, and a woman who speaks to a log are connected in the murder of a local high school girl. For one glorious moment in the early 90s, David Lynch became a mainstream success with his murder mystery show Twin Peaks, doing the impossible by bringing his art house stylings into middle America through prime time TV. In the process, he only compromised on one important point, but even that compromise helped create one of the most powerful and disturbing episodes in TV history. But more on that in a bit.
Twin Peaks has Lynch’s fingerprints all over it, but it wasn’t his alone. The co-creator was Mark Frost, a writer who previously wrote and directed several episodes of 80s phenomenon Hill Street Blues. Frost cowrote several episodes of Twin Peaks and even directed the season one finale, and it’s been suggested that Frost was responsible for keeping the show progressing in an orderly fashion, while Lynch packed on the stranger elements and imagery. As someone familiar with Lynch’s work, this makes perfect sense, since telling a story via traditional means has never seemed to hold much interest for Lynch.
The story behind the show is as simple as they get. A teen (Lara Palmer) living in the small town of Twin Peaks is found dead one day, and an FBI agent and the town sheriff get to work trying to solve the crime and find the killer. In the double-length pilot episode, we get introduced to pretty much every important figure in the show. The groundwork is also laid for some of the other, less interesting plot developments, such as the burning down of the sawmill and such. The FBI agent is Dale Cooper, who uses a number of unconventional means to try to find the killer. This includes throwing rocks at bottles and dream interpretation. While the investigation goes on, the rest of the town tries to cope with the murder, and everything from Lara’s dad jumping on her casket during the funeral to local “bad girl” Audrey trying to help Cooper out by going undercover at a whorehouse in Canada are part of the “moving on” process.
I know I’m in the minority by saying this, but the pilot episode blows. The acting in it is atrocious, and the interesting moments don’t help make it a more enjoyable experience. Some actors got better, but a couple (especially Andy and ugh, Bobby) stay bad throughout the show. It’s only when the series proper kicks off and Agent Cooper begins the investigation that the show turns great. There’s something about Cooper’s wide-eyed enthusiasm for pretty much everything that makes his character so entertaining to watch, and almost everyone else gets a moment to shine. Apparently, because TV viewers are impatient dickheads, the network demanded that Lynch reveal the killer sooner than he wanted. The problem here is that Lynch never intended on doing such a thing, and in fact stated that if he were to reveal the killer at all, it would be in the final episode of the series.
Let’s stop for a moment here and think about this for a minute. The network had a hit show on their hands, but viewers were starting to leave. In their infinite wisdom, they decided to switch its timeslot to Saturday night at 10, when hardly anyone watches TV in the first place. Then, instead of slowly building to the reveal, they forced the revelation seven episodes into the second season, effectively destroying a show that used the murder mystery as its reason for being. Before discussing that reveal episode, I’d like to state that Lynch was absolutely right for being pissed off about this, and if I wasn’t already so jaded by watching all these canceled shows, I’d say that I was shocked that they’d sabotage it so quickly. Also, if you have any intention of watching the show and would like to stay in the dark about who the killer is, stop reading now.
Throughout the show, references have been made to a certain man named “Bob,” though they have always been sorta cryptic and unclear. As it turns out, “Bob” is an evil spirit that lives in the woods, and he possessed the body of Lara Palmer’s father Leland and used him to rape and murder her and, in the reveal episode, murder her identical cousin Maddy as well. As lame as this sounds, it leads to one of the most shocking moments I’ve ever seen in a TV show, and an episode that counts as one of the best things Lynch has ever filmed. The entire episode, except for an awkward, unfunny diner scene, leads up to Benjamin Horn being arrested for Lara’s murder, and everyone meeting at the local bar The Roadhouse. Julie Cruise sings one of her strangely out-of-place atmospheric ballads and Cooper watches with the Log Lady. Suddenly Cooper gets a message from The Giant, who tells him “It is happening again.” The scene cuts to the Palmer residence, with Leland straightening his tie in the mirror and seeing Bob in the reflection. Maddy comes down and Leland runs at her, punching her in the face and strangling her. Lynch films it mostly in slow motion with Leland and Bob alternating, with his demonic laughter mixing with Maddy’s screams. The effect is extremely unsettling, and it’s something that really needs to be seen rather than described.
And then it all falls apart. Two episodes later Leland is arrested, dies, and the mystery is solved. Then what? Remember in Lost when the Oceanic Six got off the island, and the writers came up with the lamest possible bullshit imaginable just to get them back? This is what happens with the main premise of your show is yanked away. Twin Peaks WAS the Lara Palmer story, and without that, everything fell to pieces immediately. The show started relying on dumb humor, pushed Cooper to the background, and came up with some of the worst shit imaginable. The most boring character on the show (James) had several episodes dedicated to some bullshit plot outside of the town. Andy kept going on about his sperms, and decided to buddy up with some guy who fucked and possibly impregnated his girlfriend. Both Cooper and Audrey, instead of hooking up with each other, hooked up with some randomlove interests, played by Billy Zane and Heather Graham. I have seriously never seen less romantic chemistry than each of these characters had with their boring-ass love interests. The show got so fucking atrocious so fast that it actually took some doing for me to finish this goddamn thing.
The show did start to pick up near the end, and that is probably the most tragic thing about Twin Peaks. Cooper’s former partner Windom Earle turns up as an insane, chess-obsessed murderer. Even though his character was handled poorly, it was still better than what was going on beforehand. There’s a beauty pageant in Twin Peaks, and Earle kidnaps Cooper’s boring girlfriend. Everything culminates with Cooper going into the woods and once again turning up in the strange “red room,” where everyone talks strangely and nothing makes sense. Lara’s there. Bob’s there. Earle’s there. Bob apparently kills Earle and everything goes batshit insane until Cooper finally comes out. The episode ends with Cooper looking into the mirror and seeing Bob’s reflection after smashing his head into it. He starts laughing maniacally while asking “Where’s Annie?” The end.
If the show ended with the resolution of the Lara Palmer plot, it would be remembered as one of the greatest shows of all time. However, because of the network forcing a quick resolution and the writers having no idea what to do next, the show is now one of the most famous instances of jumping the shark in existence. That the show could reach the highs it did and then turn into a boring, unfunny piece of shit so quickly is pretty damn sad. I have no idea if the show’s quality would have held up had Lynch and Frost got what they wanted and left the murder of Lara unsolved until the very end. Finding out new things about how fucked up she was made the show great, and made her a fascinating character. As it is, everyone has moved on, and there will never be anymore stories in the town of Twin Peaks.
Recommended for: Lynch fans, fans of bizarre mysteries, adventurous TV viewers, midget acting aficionados, men who refer to their sperm as “sperms”, people who like logs.
Monday, November 1, 2010
Ren & Stimpy “Adult Party Cartoon”
Years: 2003 - 2004
Seasons: 1
Episodes: 9
Created by: John Kricfalusi (John K.)
Main Cast:
John Kricfalusi as Ren
Eric Bauza as Stimpy
As a fan of animation, there was probably no revival that I looked forward to more than Ren & Stimpy. I loved the show during its first run, and always wished that it would somehow find its way back on TV, with creator John K. at the helm again and free to do all the weird, gross-out stuff that Nickelodeon chopped out of the show. My dreams were answered, somewhat, when Spike TV approached John K. to do an “adult-oriented” version of the show, and to go wild. Well, he did, and the results were mixed, to be charitable. But first, a brief history.
Ren & Stimpy was a classic cartoon that attempted to bring back the beauty of the old Looney Tunes cartoons and classic animation in general. Not only that, but it also added the kind of gross-out humor that kids adore, and the show was a phenomenon. Part of what made the original Ren & Stimpy so great was all of the crazy shit that was slipped under the radar. It was definitely a kid’s show, but one so bizarre and scary that there was something thrilling about watching it. It was loud, gross, strange, and most of all, joyous. The giddy enthusiasm that ran through those original shows was a “lightening in a bottle” moment, one that was effectively destroyed when Nickelodeon fired the creator of the show, dumped Spumco (the company he founded to create the show), and created a brand-new studio just for the series called Games. The shows that followed tried hard to duplicate those first two magic seasons, but they were either gross without being funny, or just plain idiotic. The show was canceled, John K. went on to create his only other show (the doomed Ripping Friends, still unavailable in its entirety on DVD), and Ren and Stimpy just faded away.
A full ten years after he was shit-canned from the show, along comes Spike TV with the proposal for a new Ren & Stimpy show. Now he had all the freedom he wanted to make the show as gross and out there as possible. He approached Billy West to come back and voice Stimpy again, but was turned down because West didn’t think the new shows were funny, and due to his extensive work in cartoons, thought that this decidedly adult offering would harm his career (not that this prevented him from frequently appearing on the Howard Stern show). A new guy named Eric Bauza came in to do Stimpy, and all was in place for the glorious revival.
The results were a lot different than many fans expected. Although it was always hinted at, now the show flat-on states that the duo are gay lovers. This revelation comes to a head in the two-parter called Stimpy’s Pregnant, which actually seems like a logical extension from the classic Son of Stimpy episode. Ren’s psychotic nature goes completely off the rails into serial-killer territory, as evidenced by the frog torture scene in the Ren Seeks Help episode. John K. also created a two-part sequel to the classic Fire Dogs episode which serves as an hour-long unfunny in-joke about his friend Ralph Bakshi. Things finally completely fell apart with the Naked Beach Frenzy episode, which was so chock full of bouncing tits and erections that advertisers left the show in droves, and Spike immediately gave the show the ax.
All that said, was the show funny? Well, here’s a test to see if this show is right for you. In Naked Beach Frenzy, there’s a scene where Ren & Stimpy pose as bathroom attendants in order for Ren to see (and grope) two naked girls. While they’re stripping, one of the braindead girls mentions how fancy the bathroom is and then chucks her panties to Ren. They hit him in the face, and with a shit-eating grin on his face he says “nothing but class here, sister,” and then takes a huge sniff of her panties. If you found that funny, then you may like the show. It goes that low, and stays there. It wallows in being the most disgusting and childish thing you’ll see on TV, and the fact that it does this so gleefully actually has some charm to it. There are also some fucking terrifyingly creepy moments, like the frog torture I mentioned earlier. John K.’s sense of humor is somewhat difficult to warm up to at times. There’s an extended make-out session between Ren’s parents that goes on much, much longer than it needs to, going from funny to uncomfortable because of how long that scene lingers. The marriage of creepy episodes like Ren Seeks Help with joyously stupid episodes like Naked Beach Frenzy makes this an unfortunately uneven series. If someone’s first exposure to the new Ren & Stimpy was the Fire Dogs sequel, they would be completely justified in switching it off and not bothering to tune back in.
Fire Dogs 2 brings me to another issue: this show lasted for only nine episodes, with three of those being two-parters. I don’t understand why John K. felt the need to make two-part episodes when so much was riding on this. Fire Dogs 2 was worse than even the post-Spumco Nickelodeon shows, and this story was stretched out to over two episodes. Also, and this is probably going to go into uncomfortable territory, but let’s consider the network’s audience. Spike TV is the unabashed network of bros, mooks, and douchebags. They’re proud of this label and wear it with honor. John K. knew this and thus created an episode chock-full of gigantic bouncing tits and borderline-retarded bimbos called Naked Beach Frenzy. This is something that bros would laugh at, so it makes sense. You know what else is a trademark of bros? Intense homophobia. Therefore, it was a shocking lack of insight on John K.’s part to blatantly make Ren & Stimpy gay lovers in both the Onward and Upward and Stimpy’s Pregnant episodes. All the gross out humor in the world isn’t going to make a homophobe warm up to a cartoon where the stars are gay lovers, even if one of them still lusts after women. A lame defense was offered saying that they are characters in the same vein as the Three Stooges, who weren’t “really” plumbers but played them in certain episodes. That doesn’t work here, because sexuality and rotating jobs are completely different ideas, and as far as I know, nobody has ever advocated the murder of plumbers.
So we have two episodes that probably turned off the bro audience (Onward and Upward and Stimpy’s Pregnant), an episode that was more creepy than funny (Ren Seeks Help), an unfunny two-parter (Fire Dogs 2), and an episode that couldn’t even be aired on cable (Naked Beach Frenzy). There was also another two-parter called Altruists, which was a tribute to the Three Stooges and probably fit the best with the classic older episodes. Another factor that probably doomed this show from the start was that successful adult-oriented cartoons seem to be overly-reliant on pop culture references, timeliness, and having some kind of political stance. Absolutely none of that belongs in Ren & Stimpy, so the adults tuning in to this show would have to be exceptionally comfortable with laughing at dumb, gross-out humor without giving the justification that the humor is actually “smart.” It would have taken a huge amount of patience on Spike TV’s part to continue putting money into this series, so it’s hardly a surprise that it got canceled so quickly. Really, the only audience I can think of for this show is die-hard John K./Spumco fans (like myself), and there’s really not enough of them to keep a show like this on the air. Therefore, short of a major revival of interest, this was probably the last chance for these two characters to get on the air again.
If another network ever decides to give them another chance, for god’s sake, keep it as a demented kid’s show. I’ve seen what John K. is capable of when he’s working with no restrictions, and it isn’t pretty.
Recommended for: John K. fans, deviants, fans of funny-looking drawings, the gloriously immature, people who thought Ren & Stimpy needed more gay sex.
Monday, October 25, 2010
The Adventures of Superpup
Year: 1958
Seasons: None
Episodes: 1 unaired pilot
Created By: Whitney Ellsworth
Main Cast
Billy Curtis as Bark Bent/Superpup
Ruth Delfino as Pamela Poodle
Angelo Rossitto as Terry Bite
Harry Monty as Professor Sheepdip
Frank Delfino as Sergeant Beagle
Sadie Delfino as Wolfingham/Montgomery Mouse
Quick, what do you do when the star of your superhero TV show commits suicide, eliminating the most recognizable and famous face for the title character? If your answer is, “replace the cast with midgets wearing gigantic dog heads and load it up with humor even a five year old would find unsophisticated,” congratulations. You’re qualified to be a TV producer, if the unaired pilot for The Adventures of Superpup is any indication.
This odd concept for a TV show was done in a rush after the unfortunate suicide of the first famous Superman actor, George Reeves. Because Superman has always appealed to kids, the producers decided to make Superman even more kid-friendly by changing the entire cast with dogs and giving them dog names. Therefore, Clark Kent is now Bark Bent, Lois Lane is now Pamela Poodle, and The Daily Planet is now The Daily Bugle (I’ve heard good things about their photographer, though the anti-superhero slant of their stories is troubling, to say the least). Because regular-sized people wearing oversized dog heads would look ridiculous, the producers opted for a cast of midgets for all the roles, leading to strange sights like Bent’s boss Terry Bite climbing on top of his desk to talk to Bark and Pamela. If this wasn’t enough, a really horrendous-looking mouse puppet lives in Bark’s desk, and his purpose in the show is to both tell the viewer what’s going on and to occasionally make bad jokes. The unaired pilot that I saw is included on the amazingly comprehensive DVD set Superman Ultimate Collector’s Edition, and is half color, half black and white. I’m not too sure why only half is in color, but I like to imagine that the producers knew they had a piece of shit on their hands and just said “fuck it” in the middle of colorizing the damn thing.
The story starts out in the office of the Daily Bugle, with Bark Bent, Pamela Poodle, and their boss Terry Bite talking about how great Superpup is. The plot proper involves the evil Professor Sheepdip escaping from jail via a hacksaw. His bumbling partner somehow has the keys for the outer door and after a painfully long gag of him not being able to find the right key, lets him out. This kickstarts a drawn-out race between Sergeant Beagle and the evil duo. When they finally get back to Sheepdip’s lair he pours some green food coloring and Alka-Seltzer to a glass of water, which creates an atomic explosion when a paper airplane gets dipped in it and chucked out a window. This potion is then carelessly poured into a bottle with a fuse, and is then given to the dumbass sidekick to sneak into the Daily Bugle using a grandfather clock as a disguise. Because everyone is wearing oversized dog heads, no one much notices or cares when the walking clock comes in. It’s so brazen about it’s entry that it doesn’t even bother trying to sneak it, rather, it uses the main entrance. It moseys around the Daily Bugle until it’s sitting directly in front of Terry Bite’s desk. After fucking around trying to find a light for the fuse, dumbass sidekick gets out of the clock and asks Terry for a light, which Terry grumblingly provides. Realizing that he just got “tricked,” he calls for Bark Bent to come in and get rid of the clock (why would a reporter be called in to do such a job?). Bent then springs into action and becomes Superpup! After chucking a bunch of random crap out the window for comedic effect, he finally realizes that the huge, inappropriately-placed grandfather clock may be the danger, so he grabs it and flies out the window. Superpup then tricks the dumbass sidekick into giving him his address by asking him for his address, and once given that information proceeds to drop the entire clock on Sheepdip’s HQ. The bottle of colored water that previously caused an atomic blast with a ridiculously small amount now only has the power to blast open the clock and leave both Sheepdip and dumbass sidekick laying on their backs, confused and sad.
Onto Plan B. Sheepdip decides to kidnap Pamela Poodle by inviting her over for tea. She comes over and is promptly jostled about by the nefarious criminals. They then tie her up to a rocket pointed at the moon and light the fuse, since they’re dicks and just like fucking with people for no reason (they don’t ask for a ransom or anything, so “they’re just dicks” seems like the only explanation for this scheme). Superpup arrives, unties Pamela, and instead of breaking the fuse or somehow stopping the rocket from going off, he just leaves. The rocket then “shoots” into the air, and remains stationary on a gray background while sparks shoot out the end. To indicate that it’s actually flying and in the air, the rocket sometimes turns creakily downwards on a slant. For some reason, the rocket smashes into the bad guy’s getaway car, once again leaving them dazed and sad. This time Sergeant Beagle shows up and arrests them, Superpup flies off, Pamela fawns over how awesome he is, and Terry just kinda stands around looking pissed. The announcer promises further awesomeness with the following message: “be with us again next week when your product, the best of it’s kind in the world, presents Superpup!”
If the plot summary didn’t make it clear, this pilot sucks ass, and is only worth watching if you’re a fan of “so bad it’s good” entertainment. I wouldn’t go so far as to say it falls into that category, but it certainly was an interesting experience. The cheapness of everything is pretty glorious, and the way the dog heads remain expressionless does a great job of preventing the viewer from forming any kind of attachment to these characters. The humor is pretty dismal, but there was one scene that I thought was legitimately funny. The bad guys are driving away after lighting the rocket, and the desk mouse pops up to explain why the car they’re using now is different from their getaway mobile. According to the mouse, it’s because they didn’t want to mess up their nice car. I thought this was a clever nod at how cheap this pilot was, so I have to give the producers credit for it.
Could it have been successful? The early years of television actually had quite a bit of creepy kids shows, and if I look at Superpup in the context of Clutch Cargo and those fucking marionettes that kept swinging around in various children’s programing, it doesn’t seem that out of place. I don’t imagine the scripts would have gotten any better, and the humor would probably have stayed at the same idiotic level as it was in the pilot. Thus, if the show actually made it on the air and became a hit, it probably would enjoy a cult following today among fans of creepy kids shows. I think the show works best in its current form, as an incomplete non-starter. It was painful enough just watching one of these fucking things. I don’t think I could stand an entire season of it.
Recommended for: Diehard Superman fans, midget acting aficionados, dog lovers, parents who hate their children.
Monday, October 18, 2010
Star Trek: The Original Series
Years: 1966 - 1969
Seasons: 3
Episodes: 79 (Or were there 72? Or 73?)
Created By: Gene Roddenberry (and uncredited others)
Main Cast:
William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk
Leonard Nimoy as Mr. Spock
DeForest Kelley as Leonard “Bones” McCoy
James Doohan as Montgomery “Scotty” Scott
Nichelle Nichols as Uhura
George Takei as Sulu
Walter Koenig as Chekov
Majel Barrett as Nurse Chapel
Star Trek: The Original Series (TOS) is to canceled TV shows what Hebrew is to dying languages: the One Example that brings hope, since both were brought back from the dead and eventually flourished (though in different ways, obviously). It almost seems pointless to recap the phenomenal story of how Trek was resurrected, but the keypoints boil down to the following:
Star Trek was pretty much on the verge of cancelation from the get-go.
It was saved for another season by intense fan interest and letter writing campaigns.
When the show was finally yanked off the air, it became a huge success through syndication.
This success led to eleven films, five additional TV series, countless novels, games, and other tie-ins, as well as becoming such a part of pop culture that everyone knows what “beaming up” means and what a Vulcan’s ears look like.
The plot of the show is simple enough: A group of explorers (mainly human but with an alien aboard) led by the fearless Captain James T. Kirk travel the galaxy, hopping from planet to planet looking for unknown life forms. Every single time they find new life, and even times when they don’t, disaster strikes and the crew of the Starship Enterprise must defeat the alien menace or solve the problem. That’s pretty much it. The alien on the crew is Mr. Spock, a half human/half Vulcan with pointy ears who prides himself on his lack of emotion and dependence on logic. This leads to the exceedingly annoying part of the show where various members of the crew (especially the ship’s doctor, Leonard “Bones” McCoy) bitch him out for not letting his emotions dictate life or death situations. Also aboard is Chief Engineer and Scottish stereotype Montgomery “Scotty” Scott, glamorized secretary and token hot black girl Uhura, Helmsmen and token hot Asian Hikaru Sulu, and navigator with a shitty wig and embarrassing fake Russian accent Pavel Chekov. Another cast member is Nurse Chapel, notable because her credentials for getting aboard the Enterprise consist of her getting her Tribble pounded by Trek-creator Gene Roddenberry, and that’s about it.
Though Captain Kirk is now synonymous with Star Trek, in the original pilot there was a different captain named Christopher Pike. The pilot was titled The Cage and involved Pike getting kidnapped by some androgynous aliens with gigantic veiny heads called The Talosians. Apparently the networked bitched about the pilot being “too cerebral,” but they liked the idea enough to order a second pilot. This pilot, called Where No Man Has Gone Before, took care of many of the issues the network had with The Cage. It had more action, Spock fixed that fucked-up hairstyle he used to have, and Pike was replaced with Kirk. In a delicious bit of recycling, The Cage was chopped up and turned into a two-parter called The Menagerie, which accomplished the impossible by turning this blatant example of penny-pinching into a classic sci fi story.
Because of the nerd stigma surrounding all things Trek, I didn’t know how to approach this show. I decided to watch them in order, wrongly assuming that there was a ton of information that would slowly be revealed over the course of the show that would make watching future episodes a more rewarding experience. As it turns out, you can randomly watch any episode of TOS and not worry about having missed some crucial bit of information. In fact, it almost seems like the show goes out of it’s way to tell you what you need to know in every episode. I mentioned how the crew frequently bitches Spock out for relying on logic over emotion. This is annoying, but it makes it easy for a first-time viewer to tune in and understand that this character operates differently from others. You don’t need to know about his half human status, the rituals of his home planet, or his previous relationships. Because TOS had no season-long story arcs, every episode starts from scratch. A forced cease-fire between the Federation and the Klingons (who at this point were just a bunch of angry black guys with goatees) is promptly ignored in future episodes when the Klingons start up their shit again. As someone who loves story arcs, this aspect of TOS makes it somewhat less great than its reputation suggests.
That’s not to say the show is bad. The first two seasons are full of great sci fi stories that still work. The slow, talky aspect of the show makes the decisions more important, and it goes a long way towards giving the show an environment that feels real to the viewer. When compared to the even slower and more cerebral The Next Generation, TOS sometimes feels like a Michael Bay production, but it is still a fantastic show with a lot of heavy-handed philosophy and social commentary, which I always enjoy in a show. And when they come, the action scenes are a lot of fun. There are fewer things more enjoyable that Kirk getting into a fight by diving at the enemy doing his ridiculous two-handed punch, and randomly doing a roll on the ground while trying to dodge an enemy’s phaser. Plus, even though the cast absolutely detested Shatner, there’s still a real sense of camaraderie and friendship among the crew. That makes all the technobabble about warp drives and matter/antimatter and whatnot go down a lot easier.
So we have a well-written original sci fi show with a great cast and interesting characters. The only thing it was missing was viewers. The ratings for the first season were average at best, even though it was the number one color program on TV. The financial concerns led to the threat of dropping one of the most popular characters from the show: Mr. Spock. He wanted an increase in pay due to the popularity of his character, and since the show was barely getting by as it was, this lead the producers to consider replacing the character, possibly with another Vulcan. However, the network demanded that Spock stayed on the show, since nearly half of the fan mail that they received was for that character. Women loved him, and nerds wanted to be him.
However, the ratings for the second season didn’t improve, and the network began doubting the commercial viability of letting nerds dictate their programing. In a fantastically effective move by Roddenberry, he got in touch with a couple of fans and secretly began a letter-writing campaign to save the show. The silent minority of geeks began flooding the network with mail, and it worked. Trek was renewed for a third season, and the world shown the surprising power of nerd outrage. That victory came at a cost, though. Three things happened with the third season that finally got Trek out of NBC’s hair for good:
First, the show was moved to the Friday night death slot, which is the TV equivalent to driving a pet dog you no longer want into a far away place and kicking it out of your car. The people who would want to watch this show, teens and college students, were out of the house actually doing things, leaving it up to the die-hards to tune in every night to keep the ratings up.
Second, the budget was slashed, causing a bunch of the episodes to look shitty. The “strange new worlds” explored by the enterprise were reduced to a bunch of styrofoam rocks that got more airtime than Sulu, and variously-colored backgrounds. The difference between each planet was even less significant than Clark Kent yanking off his glasses and adding some bass to his voice. Also, even basic things started looking “off.” The most egregious was Spock’s ears, which by season three started to look like something a kid would pay a dime for at the toy store.
Third, because of the show being moved to the death slot, Roddenberry pulled the ultimate douche move and decided to ditch the show, basically telling the dedicated fan base that busted it’s ass to save his show to go fuck themselves. Possibly as a result of this, the quality control of the new episodes seemed “lax,” to put it nicely. To put it less nicely, the show turned into a retarded fucking joke, pumping out a shocking amount of horrible bullshit that made the show even harder for the fans to defend. The opening to each episode became increasingly ridiculous, always ending with the same idiotic “dramatic” music before the title credits began. The plots focused more and more on planets that have environments “remarkably similar to our own!” Further, the writers didn’t even seem to be trying anymore. The biggest example of this is the embarrassing Spock’s Brain episode, where aliens steal Spock’s brain, which is then somehow able to talk to Captain Kirk and his crew, while a brainless Zombie Spock shuffles around looking like he’s about to say “time for go to bed!” at any minute. Mercifully, TOS was finally canceled after the third season, preventing it from getting even worse.
This is one of the times where getting canceled was a blessing for a show. Season three was the shark-jumping season, and the absolute best time for it to die. If it stayed on the air, the only thing that would have allowed it to rise to its previous heights would be pumping the budget back up for each episode and putting it back on a time slot where people would be home to see it. Roddenberry would then scoop the sand out of his vagina and get back to work, and we’d potentially have some more classic episodes. As it happened, viewers got to see classic episodes in syndication, and the injustice of it being canceled helped fuel the mystique behind the show. The fan base steadily began growing, conventions started popping up, and it all culminated in a film franchise, which was successful enough to spawn spin-offs which took the promise of TOS and made it even better than it ever was before. There has never been a more successful failure in the history of television.
Recommended for: Sci Fi fans, people who really like heavy-handed social commentary and philosophy, closet nerds, regular nerds, fans of bad stunt-doubles, women who masturbate to emotionally distant men.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Introduction
It's a bitch of a job to try to appeal to the tastes of tens of millions of people. You have to figure out what kind of show will grab the largest number of viewers in the shortest amount of time, and there are very few second chances for a show that doesn't pull in respectable ratings immediately. There is little room of subtly or nuance in those first few episodes, because basic information needs to be conveyed quickly to the audience so that they have some kind of stake in the fates of these characters. And unless the budget is low enough that the station isn't losing too much money gambling on a new show, very few will risk a slot to let an audience build. That's one of the reasons why there's so much dreadful bullshit on TV. The stakes are too high to experiment.
There have been many oddities to slip through, however. If you look through the graveyard of canceled TV shows, amidst the typical crap you'll find some strangeness that somehow got on the air. It's not that the concepts themselves were odd (though that certainly is the case with a show like Toxic Crusaders), it's how they were handled. And no matter how critically-acclaimed a show is, if it doesn't hit with Middle America and the average Joe, it's gone. Thus, shows like Arrested Development and Freaks and Geeks get the ax, while According to Jim gets eight seasons. This can't just be chalked up to the masses having shit taste and no willingness to try something different. A show like Lost can be a huge hit and have smoke monsters, a complex flash forward/flashback/present time structure, and moral ambiguity. Also, something like Twin Peaks was (briefly) a big hit, which showed that a large audience sometimes wants to see the bizarre.
I was inspired to do this after watching Twin Peaks, hence the name of this blog. It stood out to me as a show that was both brilliant and shitty, hitting amazing highs and depressing lows. I started thinking of other canceled shows, and decided to start going through them, since it wouldn't take that much time (for some shows, that is) and because it's also interesting to see what kind of shows viewers don't warm up to. I honestly have no clue why audiences across America rejected a show like Freaks and Geeks, but they did. Meanwhile, like I said, fucking According to Jim...
Here are some rules I set up in order to do this:
The show had to last three seasons or under.
The show had to be canceled, not voluntarily ended by the creators. Hence, The State doesn't count, because even though it was immediately canceled before it even began airing on CBS, the creators ended it's run on MTV. So a non-starter doesn't count.
Also, I'm trying to decide on how many episodes a show should have before deciding that it's too much. The 60s Batman show lasted three seasons, but because it aired twice a week it has over 100 episodes. It's no wonder viewer fatigue eventually set in.
An exception is made for shows where several episodes are created, but only a handful ever make the air. Some shows that never even debuted but still managed to get a DVD release will be featured, since that's even more interesting.
Boring bullshit like a 90's Friends knock-off that was quickly canned will be ignored. I have no desire to watch a shitty version of a show I never liked to begin with. This blog is just going to be my selections based on what I either find interesting or just want to watch. I might make exceptions for shows such as Margaret Cho's All American Girl, since she actually developed health problems because of this show, and also because I went to both elementary school and junior high with the kid who plays her younger brother. It's doubtful that anyone else aside from Cho fanatics would want to see this watered-down version of her stand up act, but there you go.
Sadly, because of the very nature of this blog, some shows won't get covered mainly because I have no way of obtaining copies of the show. Fox's embarrassing fat girl sitcom Babes will not get a post until the time when someone, somewhere decides to either upload the entire series online, or Fox decides that there's an audience that wants to buy it. Since people don't even remember this show anymore, that seems highly unlikely.
Here's a tentative list of what I plan on watching and reviewing at some point. I'm coming to these shows with no previous exposure to them, so I'm not one of the people who watched Firefly and then bitched loudly to everyone near me about it getting canned. Same with Arrested Development and other shows that the internet mourns. My idea is to come to these shows as a random viewer flipping through channels and stumbling across them.
Animation:
The Ripping Friends
The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse
The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat
Clerks
The Goode Family
The Critic
Toxic Crusaders
The Maxx
The Head
The Brothers Grunt
Liquid Television
Ren & Stimpy “Adult Party Cartoon”
Aeon Flux
Sci Fi and Horror:
War of the Worlds
Friday the 13th The Series
Freddy’s Nightmares
Star Trek
Firefly
The Outer Limits
Superhero:
The Flash
The Tick
The Adventures of Superpup
Batgirl
Misc:
The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.
Max Headroom
Twin Peaks
On the Air
Get a Life
Andy Richter Controls the Universe
Andy Barker PI
Ben Stiller Show
Undeclared
Freaks and Geeks
Arrested Development
My So-Called Life
Police Squad
That’s My Bush!
Heil Honey I’m Home!
Carnivale
Deadwood
Dark Angel
So there you go. Let's hope this doesn't prove to be too much of a waste of time.
There have been many oddities to slip through, however. If you look through the graveyard of canceled TV shows, amidst the typical crap you'll find some strangeness that somehow got on the air. It's not that the concepts themselves were odd (though that certainly is the case with a show like Toxic Crusaders), it's how they were handled. And no matter how critically-acclaimed a show is, if it doesn't hit with Middle America and the average Joe, it's gone. Thus, shows like Arrested Development and Freaks and Geeks get the ax, while According to Jim gets eight seasons. This can't just be chalked up to the masses having shit taste and no willingness to try something different. A show like Lost can be a huge hit and have smoke monsters, a complex flash forward/flashback/present time structure, and moral ambiguity. Also, something like Twin Peaks was (briefly) a big hit, which showed that a large audience sometimes wants to see the bizarre.
I was inspired to do this after watching Twin Peaks, hence the name of this blog. It stood out to me as a show that was both brilliant and shitty, hitting amazing highs and depressing lows. I started thinking of other canceled shows, and decided to start going through them, since it wouldn't take that much time (for some shows, that is) and because it's also interesting to see what kind of shows viewers don't warm up to. I honestly have no clue why audiences across America rejected a show like Freaks and Geeks, but they did. Meanwhile, like I said, fucking According to Jim...
Here are some rules I set up in order to do this:
The show had to last three seasons or under.
The show had to be canceled, not voluntarily ended by the creators. Hence, The State doesn't count, because even though it was immediately canceled before it even began airing on CBS, the creators ended it's run on MTV. So a non-starter doesn't count.
Also, I'm trying to decide on how many episodes a show should have before deciding that it's too much. The 60s Batman show lasted three seasons, but because it aired twice a week it has over 100 episodes. It's no wonder viewer fatigue eventually set in.
An exception is made for shows where several episodes are created, but only a handful ever make the air. Some shows that never even debuted but still managed to get a DVD release will be featured, since that's even more interesting.
Boring bullshit like a 90's Friends knock-off that was quickly canned will be ignored. I have no desire to watch a shitty version of a show I never liked to begin with. This blog is just going to be my selections based on what I either find interesting or just want to watch. I might make exceptions for shows such as Margaret Cho's All American Girl, since she actually developed health problems because of this show, and also because I went to both elementary school and junior high with the kid who plays her younger brother. It's doubtful that anyone else aside from Cho fanatics would want to see this watered-down version of her stand up act, but there you go.
Sadly, because of the very nature of this blog, some shows won't get covered mainly because I have no way of obtaining copies of the show. Fox's embarrassing fat girl sitcom Babes will not get a post until the time when someone, somewhere decides to either upload the entire series online, or Fox decides that there's an audience that wants to buy it. Since people don't even remember this show anymore, that seems highly unlikely.
Here's a tentative list of what I plan on watching and reviewing at some point. I'm coming to these shows with no previous exposure to them, so I'm not one of the people who watched Firefly and then bitched loudly to everyone near me about it getting canned. Same with Arrested Development and other shows that the internet mourns. My idea is to come to these shows as a random viewer flipping through channels and stumbling across them.
Animation:
The Ripping Friends
The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse
The Twisted Tales of Felix the Cat
Clerks
The Goode Family
The Critic
Toxic Crusaders
The Maxx
The Head
The Brothers Grunt
Liquid Television
Ren & Stimpy “Adult Party Cartoon”
Aeon Flux
Sci Fi and Horror:
War of the Worlds
Friday the 13th The Series
Freddy’s Nightmares
Star Trek
Firefly
The Outer Limits
Superhero:
The Flash
The Tick
The Adventures of Superpup
Batgirl
Misc:
The Adventures of Brisco County Jr.
Max Headroom
Twin Peaks
On the Air
Get a Life
Andy Richter Controls the Universe
Andy Barker PI
Ben Stiller Show
Undeclared
Freaks and Geeks
Arrested Development
My So-Called Life
Police Squad
That’s My Bush!
Heil Honey I’m Home!
Carnivale
Deadwood
Dark Angel
So there you go. Let's hope this doesn't prove to be too much of a waste of time.
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