Toast's latest hat-on-a-hat-on-a-hat entry pulling more of our subfeatures together than ever before (or ever recommended) made me laugh but exposed that many of our subfeatures have a tendency of overlapping. So I'm stripping out a lot of the other subtitles and just going with the What I Have Been Watching feature (which is a feature all about the admitted state of spending too much time in front of the TV. There are too many streamers, too much content, and it drives me bonkers just even thinking about it anymore. Here's some of what I saw in the comedy category in, let's say, the past year of television)
This is a grammatical nightmare.
In this edition:
The Kennedys (1 season, 2015) - amazon
Murderville (1 season, 2022) - Netflix
The After Party (Season 1, 2022)- AppleTV+
Grand Crew (Season 1, 2022) - Global/NBC
Reservation Dogs (Season 1, 2021) - d+/star
Our Flag Means Death (Season 1, 2022) - Crave
Mythic Quest (Season 1, 2020) - AppleTV+
Kids in the Hall: Death Comes To Town (1 season, 2010) - AmazonPrime (rewatch)
I Love That For You (Season 1, 2022) - Showtime
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The Kennedys seems to be a British take on, like, The Goldbergs or Fresh off the Boat or Everyone Hates Chris or Young Rock, a period-set sitcom that takes a look at a real person's amusing childhood experiences and family life, but, you know, turns them into sitcom fodder thus wearing away most of the autobiographical sensibilities that the show is premised upon. In this case, it's actress and comedian Emma Kennedy telling tales about growing up in the late 70's in the Jessop Square subdivision.
Young Emma is played by Lucy Hutchinson who at about 12 years old has some pretty impeccable comedic timing. As the series lead she's surprisingly capable and naturalistic. She doesn't feel like she's acting or putting on a performance and she convincingly feels of the era, talking about Star Wars and whatnot. Her mother, Brenda (played by the IT Crowd's Katherine Parkinson) is the show's powerhouse, though. A rampant feminist but still unaware of her own trappings in the patriarchy, she's defiant to a fault of her role as mother and homemaker. She's a boldly entertaining character, both for her lack of hubris, but also not lacking in love or kindness. Patriarch Tony Kennedy (played by Dan Skinner) is kind of an oblivious lunk, never quite sure what anyone is saying to him or why. Not stupid, just not always present in the moment. The family is best friends with the unwed couple Tim (Toast of London's Harry Peacock) and Jenny (Emma Pierson), the former a womanizing drunk, the latter a preening mess of a woman, unsure of what she wants out of life.
Most of the episodes take place within the neighbourhood and over its six episodes starts to build up familiarity with its surroundings for the audience. The comedy is multifaceted and quick, with a lot of wordplay, as well as utilizing the sort of late-70s naivety as a hindsight joke machine, and then a whole bunch of non-sequitur side-swipes, which seem to be the fashion of this nostalgiac subgenre of sitcom.
I was shocked to see that there were only 6 episodes in this series. It's quite funny, well-produced, and exceptionally well acted with recognizable faces. It's not innovating anything but it's rocksolid in what it's trying to do, and that's usually good for two or three seasons, at least in British terms.
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I don't want to talk about Netflix as an entity. It's too complicated for this space. But lets just say they've spent a lot of money trying stuff, most of which is forgettable and didn't work. The odd thing is transcendant. Murderville is somewhere in the middle.
It's a fully plotted, largely improvised comedy about a bumbling homicide detective who keeps getting a new partner each week and has a murder mystery to solve. The partner is a real world celebrity (in this case Conan O'Brien, Marshawn Lynch, Kumail Nanjiani, Annie Murphy, Sharon Stone and Ken Jeong fill the role), playing themself, coming in cold to the situation and having to act along. The episodes that pop are the ones in which the performers are actively playing along, versus the performers who are lost, sitting back, and just watching things happening around them.
Leading them along the way is Will Arnett as Terry Seattle, who is in the midst of a divorce with his precinct Chief (Haneefah Wood) and is, most apparently, living out of his office. Seattle drives a pristine looking El Camino (so awesome) which seems to be the only light in his life. He still mourns the loss of his partner (who is only ever seen in a photo hanging on the wall as Jennifer Aniston) 15 years ago, and puts his grief and anxiety upon the unsuspecting rookie.
Surprisingly the show, for all its improvisational set-up, has an arc. It's not necessarily a thoroughly satisfying arc but it's surprising that they even attempted it within the format. It's an enjoyable show, with even the lesser episodes still providing some good laughs within. It's certainly strange, and unlike anything I've seen done before, but I could see some refinement of the formula into something that's consistently great fun.
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The one series I was most looking forward to on AppleTV+ when I started the service this year was The After Party. It's the brainchild of Christopher Miller, one half of the great Lord and Miller comedy directing/producing team known for their ability to exploit genre tropes adeptly and shrewdly for maximum entertainment value (see Clone High, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, the Jump Street movies, The Lego Movie).
This series I was hoping would be the next great one, a murder mystery in which each episode takes a look at one of the accused but from a different genre standpoint. It sounded fantastic, and the cast, featuring some of the most underhyped comedic talent going (Sam Richardson, Ilana Glazer, Ben Schwartz, Ike Barinholtz, John Early) all held down by Tiffany Haddish's under-the-gun detective. The crux is superstar Xavier (Dave Franco) is murdered in his own home during the afterparty following a high school reunion.
Well, I mean, I liked the series, quite a bit. I enjoyed tremendously the performers, and I liked the characters, and I enjoyed the murder mystery angle certainly enough to eagerly come back from week-to-week, but my expectations of the genre-busting Miller were not quite lived up to. True, each episode did focus on a different suspect, and leaned towards a specific genre/subgenre/storytype (like a Fast & Furious Movie, highschool drama, musical, animated comedy, psychological thriller) but the realities of trying to uphold a single story through these different genres meant the genres couldn't be exploited to their full potential. So the show, while fully entertaining, doesn't hit that next level I had hoped for.
Season 2 is in the works. I'll be there.
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You can't really rely upon network television to deliver anything innovative or surprising. They are hanging on for dear life in this era of the streaming wars, and know that their key to survival is reality competition shows and programming that appeals almost exclusively to the Boomers, doling out of-the-week dramas in every possible high-stakes professional situation. At this stage network comedies are life support, and even the mighty Chuck Lorre's laugh track adherence is failing to save them.
So when something like Grand Crew sneaks out quietly, and just as quitely maintains a consistent tone of hilarity and fun, well, it's always a shock. Brooklyn Nine-Nine was the last great network comedy, and Grand Crew has the potential to be the next. It's a dead simple premise, a group of Black friends hang out at a wine bar when not living their lives. It's basically a modernisation of Cheers and Friends but a lot less dependent on that single situational environment. It's also thoroughly a Black-led and run show, from creator Phil Augusta Jackson, but it's also inherently accessible as any network comedy should be. It's a Black-centric show, thus many jokes are very specific references to of Black culture, and I'm a middle-aged white guy so I may not catch all these references, aptly so, but being hyper-specific in comedy is always the correct way to go. When I do get the references (which is more often than not), they are gold, so I can only imagine how good the deep cut ones I'm not getting are. But the general sensibility of the show's humour is straight-up character silliness, like Brooklyn Nine-Nine or Happy Endings. It really leans into the characters goofball traits, and their unique personas for the majority of the humour, and it's great.
The cast is tremendous. Echo Kellum (Arrow) is the lead of the ensemble, a flitty, hopeless romantic who just broke up with his girlfriend and is learning to live without love for a while, despite his impulses. His sister Nikki is played by Nicole Byer, a hypersexual alpha who's also a realtor. Carl Tart plays the perpetually unemployed, always calculating, boisterous Sherm while his roommate Aaron (Anthony Jennings) is the buttoned-down professional accountant who has to be the responsible yin to Sherm's yang. Then there's married friend Wyatt (Justin Cunningham) who is a stay-at-home husband (and still uncertain how he feels about it). They make a new friend who works at the wine bar in Fay (Gracie Mercedes), who is relatively new to L.A. but still uncertain about her place there.
This is very much an episodic show, with only a little bit of character and/or relationship development happening from episode to episode. They're a tremendously fun crew, some might say "grand". Even when the show tackles the impact of yet another tragic murder-by-police shooting of a black youth, they still manage to find some levity within the resonance without dipping into "very special episode" terrain. A second season is on its way, thankfully. The current 10 episodes just isn't enough. Grand needs a nice long life.
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Reservation Dogs is a comedy in the vein of vanity projects like Atlanta, Master of None, or [edited...let's not go with that suggestion, apt as it was]. Normally "vanity project" has a negative connotation, but for creative performers like Donald Glover, Aziz Ansari and [redacted] their vanity projects give them a chance to hone and showcase all of their skills, including writing and directing, as well as delve deeper into more thoughtful exploration of subjects that aren't explored elsewhere, and certainly not with their point of view. These projects take on their own rhythm, their own style, even though they're of a type together, they feel the impact of their creators' visions in letting creativity be the star. Episodes tend to feel more like mini-movies than serialized television.
With the support of producer Taika Waititi, Reservation Dogs was given life at FX from director and sketch comedian Sterlin Harjo, but unlike many a vanity project, Harjo remains off camera and uses the platform as an showcase for Native American performers, writers and more (both Ansari and Glover, though, it should be noted, use their platforms to elevate others too, but the talk of those shows is still centers so much around them).
The show is a comedy (but also has some weight behind it) about life on an Oklahoma reservation, following the "Reservation Dogs" crew, four teenage friends who steal shit to make money for a good cause, getting the fuck off the reservation and going to California. They recently lost one of their crew to suicide, and the loss haunts them each in different, sobering ways. Things get further complicated when the NDN Mafia, a rival quartet of teens arrives on the scene and start taking shots at them. What could have been a very straightforward series based off the setup quickly reveals itself within its first three episodes as something much more contemplative than that.
The episodes all vary in tone and subject matter and even who is starring in them, but they're all amazing, exploring so many different facets of res life, Native heritage and culture. While there are some amazing guest stars (Gary Farmer, Zahn McClarnon, Jon Proudstar, and Kaniehtiio Horn among may) throughout the season, the stars are the four young members of the Dogs. Devery Jacobs is Elora, the de facto leader of the crew, and the one who maybe feels the most outwardly motivated to leave the res. Her spotlight episode finds her attempting yet again to get her drivers license only to get embroiled in her instructor's whole side deal. Bear is played by D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, an awkward young man who needs the gang to bolster his sense of confidence and masculinity (but he also has a bold but equally awkward spirit guide, hilariously played by Dallas Goldtooth). Bear's spotlight episode finds his estranged father, a successful rapper, returning to the res for a charity event, and Bear's mom tries to brace him for disappointment, but he starts spending the California money to try and look a big shot for his dad which raises tensions with Elora. Willie Jack, played by Paulina Alexis, is tough-talking and hard-as-nails but is very connected with her family and was hit hard by her cousin's Daniel's suicide. Her spotlight episode finds her going hunting with her father, but flashing back to memories of hunting trips with Daniel, and it's a very emotional journey that explores the problems of depression on the res, and the lasting impacts they have. The final member of the crew is the youngest, Cheese (Lane Factor). Quiet and laid back, he gets on with everyone and just kinda of seems to tag along with the dogs with no personal agenda. Cheese's spotlight episode is actually more a spotlight for McClarnon's Officer Big and a showcase for the town as he has the young man as his ride-along partner for the episode.
As many shows have keyed into over the past decade, you get a lot of mileage out of building out the population of your environment. What used to only be seen as a thing in prime time animation (The Simpsons primarily) has now become a staple for all the great network comedies in recent years, and the same occurs here, with the res feeling full of interesting and fun people.
It's a fantastic series.
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While Waititi only served as producer (and co-writer on the pilot) for Reservation Dogs -- thus his influence is limited -- Our Flag Means Death is a Waititi production through and through, catering much more to the comedic writer/director/performer's goofier sensibilities. Here he has developed a semi-epic, 1700s-set, pirate comedy that kicks off with a soft, upper crust man abandoning his family for a life of skullduggery on the high seas. It is a life for which he is ill-equipped, using his money to buy his ship and hire a crew of largely inexperienced scalliwags.
Taking to the seas, Stede Bonnett (Rhys Darby) and his ensemble pretty much immediately are boarded by the Royal Navy, led by an acquaintance from Stede's aristocratic past. Stede kills him accidentally, but it's unknown to the crew, and he earns at least a little of the respect that was missing from his men. Stede's general management style and general world outlook could be considered progressive (adopting a lot of current managerial philosophies) but this all seems counterintuitive to a pirate crew, and the general amount of high seas piracy, kidnapping and murder is kept pretty much to a minimum. Things like forced vacation days, a flag-making competition and a talent pageant, not to mention bedtime storytime (in which Stede reads the crew a story) all seem kind of...soft...for the lifestyle. Stede gets nicknamed The Gentleman Pirate, which isn't meant as a compliment, despite how he takes it.
Things get more complicated when the Revenge encounters Blackbeard's ship. The crew is direly intimidated by the men of Blackbeard's crew, and of course, of Blackbeard himself (Waititi performs the role). A strange turnabout happens, however, when Blackbeard takes a shining to Stede's erudite lifestyle, moreover he wishes to escape the pirate's life and live a more humble existence in the world of high society. Stede offers to teach him about high society in exchange for lessons in piracy. A deep kinship is borne, much to the dismay of Blackbeard's grizzled right hand, Izzy Hands (Con O'Neill). Izzy conspires against the pairing only to his own detriment, as the rest of Blackbeard's crew start to glom onto Stede's way of leadership. Of course, the Royal Navy is pursuing Stede with ruthless abandon, and things come to a glorious head in the final three episodes after threatening an amusing status quo.
This is, on top of it all, a large ensemble piece, which includes Ewen Bremner (Trainspotting), Samson Kayo (Truth Seekers), Vico Oritz, Christian Nairn (Hodor from Game of Thrones), Nat Faxon, and many more, with guest appearances from Rory Kinnear, Leslie Jones, Fred Armisen, Claudia O'Doherty, Kristen Schaal, Nick Kroll, Kristen Johnson and Will Arnett among others.
The crux of the series, though, comes down tot he different ways people express love to each other, and particularly the relationships between men and how they show affection for one another, whether it's platonic, idolisation, as brothers-in-arms, or as lovers. It's not dissecting these with any great zeal, but it seems that love, and how people care for each other, is the great unifier of most of these episodes.
I don't have a great affinity for pirates, but Waititi's style, as upheld by his writing staff and his remarkably unique cast of performers, helps the adventure of it all go down smoothly. It's kind of telling that the bits that take place on land (like at Spanish Jackie's pub or Stede and Blackbeard imprisoned at the Royal Privateering Academy) were my favourite parts of the series, thought he finale where Stede returns home to his family was easily the best episode for its wildly unexpected twists.
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After basically writing it off after its initial announcement as another dumb workplace comedy on a topic I have little investment in (MMORPGs), it took all of one episode for AppleTV's Mythic Quest to hook me in. It's a damn funny show.
From Always Sunny in Philadelphia creatives Charlie Day and Rob McElhenney with Megan Ganz (writer on Community, Always Sunny, Modern Family), and starring McElhenney as the self-aggrandizing creative head of the Mythic Quest Massive Multi-player Online Role-Playing Game, I was expecting a tepid retread of The Office but with more nerd shit.
I'm not a devoted follower of Always Sunny but from what I've seen of the show (a couple dozen random episodes) I shouldn't have been surprised at how whip-smart Mythic Quest is, and how it knows how to present an egomaniac as a fool (Always Sunny is basically a show about watching a crew of sociopaths get their come-uppance episode after episode). What's also most immediately surprising is how tailored the show is as an ensemble piece and not a solo showcase for McElhenney. Even as the creative head of Mythic Quest, his Ian (pronouced, annoyingly, "eye-ann") is still not the top dog. He has (unseen) corporate overlords that he has to appease, an ineffective middleman to patronize in stammering beta David (David Hornsby), and he of course needs the support of his hyper awkward development lead Poppy (a transcendent Charlotte Nicdao). Then there's the borderline psychopathic head of monetization, Brad (always great to see Dany Pudi), David's full-on psychopathic assistant Jo (Jessie Ennis), the head writer, legendary 70's award-winning, over-the-hill sci-fi novelist C.W. Longbottom (F. Murray Abraham doing great work...at least on camera), and repping hard for the female gamers, game testers Rachel (Ashly Burch) and Dana (Imani Hakim).
The show quickly eases into its status quo. It finds its groove rapidly in its first two episodes, and it feels like it's going to have a nice long life of great nerdy jokes (with a full understanding of the world it's operating in), great character conflicts, and gentle world building (its game, the economy and society that surrounds it, and the meta world around Mythic Quest as a company and property). But by episode t it rapidly upends any expectation of what it should be.
Episode 5 is a full detour in the life of a female game developer and her relationship with her boyfriend-turned-business partner-turned-husband. The episode is a mini-movie spanning three decades, starring Cristin Milioti (Palm Springs) and Jake Johnson (Stumptown) as the lead couple in this romantic comdey-drama that really takes you through a tour of the highs and lows of video game celebrity and evolution. It has an impact on the world of Mythic Quest but in a way that is not immediately apparent, and takes some time to reveal its ultimate point within the show. It's a special thing, though.
Following that episode, Mythic Quest emboldens itself to actually embrace some dramatic storytelling within its otherwise riotous framework. There's a gutpunch of an episode that introduces Ian's son, and a COVID special that stands as one of the best snapshots of what the first wave lockdown really felt like.
There's something tremendously special about Mythic Quest, as such I haven't binged it like I normally would a series I enjoy this much... I savour its episodes, and they root down in me with the time that I give them to breathe.
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Amidst the new Kids in the Hall series appearing on Amazon and my ongoing rewatch of the original series (plus the recent acquisition of Brain Candy on blu-ray) I thought it time to revisit the Kids' 2010 serialized mini-series Death Comes to Town.
I caught a few episodes of the series as it aired originally but its scheduling on CBC was a mess as it was interrupted by the Winter Olympics, and I had to purchase the series on Apple in order to watch the rest. I don't recall loving the series and had little desire over the past dozen years to revisit it. But with time comes fading memory so I was going into the series with near-fresh eyes.
And a rapid 175-minutes later, I did not come out with triumphant adoration for the series. It does not feel unfamiliar to Kids in the Hall (more akin to the tone of Brain Candy than sketch comedy), but at the same time it lacks a specific drive. It's effectively a murder-mystery, but it's a murder-mystery that's kind of disinterested in the fact that it's a murder-mystery. It really wants to build characters and build a character out of the town of Shuckton, but with the death of its mayor (who everyone seems to idolize) in the first episode, Shuckton loses the one thing that really seems to define it. As much as the series wants to build characters, it has a much harder time with building relationships between the characters. Sure, it finds connective ties for the characters to share with each other, mostly as comedy, but few of the characters have any real, defining traits to their relationship with other characters beyond forgetful delivery lady Marnie (Kevin McDonald) and disgraced hockey wonderkid Ricky Jarvis (Bruce McCulloch), now obese and housebound.
Scott Thompson takes the ill-advised role of Crim Hollingsworth, adopting a Native Canadian patois, and adorning himself in style and symbology of, supposedly, Ojibwe culture, of which Crim puports to be 1/16th heritage. I'm not sure why Thompson, of all the kids, tends to be the one in brownface all the time, but there's a trend. It's an uncomfortable pattern. While it's not necessarily mocking any culture, and there is the sense of trying to develop a character, it never seems the right thing to do, particularly inexcusable for 2010. Likewise the amount of fat jokes and sight gags about Ricky Jarvis seem like they should have ended with Fat Bastard in Austin Powers. And then there's the weird references to trans people, in a way that seems to be meant to be inclusive, but is edited with comedic timing to be a punchline. This stuff has aged poorly and in much faster time than most KitH sketches.
There's plenty of silliness and a lot of conceptual comedy within Death Comes to Town but it does tend to be overshadowed by the sheer lack of laugh-out-loud comedy within. Besides their post-Brain Candy
disbanding, this is a real low point for the troupe. Not embarrassingly bad, but certainly not meeting up to expectations (even when they're low).
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And if this wasn't a long enough post already, we ploughed through I Love That For You with reckless abandon. I didn't want to. I put it off for some time. I mean, I liked Vanessa Bayer as an SNL cast member and have enjoyed her in her cameos in other things like Barb and Star Go To Vista Del Mar and Brooklyn Nine-Nine, but the setup for this series felt just...too...cringey for me to want to sit through.
Created by Bayer (and Jeremy Beiler), the story of I Love That For You finds Bayer as Joanna Gold, a lifelong fan of the SVC home shopping network. She would watch religiously as a child while going through chemotherapy for leukaemia, and as a remarkably awkward adult, she seems her most comfortable and confident selling people seemingly worthless things. She's always had a manipulative streak in her, but it's not malicious so much as a coping mechanism for her trauma. She finally gets her shot at an open casting call for SVC and absolutely nails the audition. She's elated to find she's gotten the job, only to blow it on her first on-air showcase. As she's getting fired she blurts out that she has cancer, and there are dollarsigns in network owner Patricia's eyes. Joanna is suddely the new "it-girl" at the network, to the delight of some, like her idol Jackie (Molly Shannon) and to the chagrin of others she's displacing, like the preening, self-obsessed Beth Ann (Ayden Mayeri).
The show then has to deal with Joanna going deeper and deeper into her lie, and what should be unbearably cringe is somehow, in Bayer's hands, nearly effortlessly watchable and just straight up amusing. Bayer has always been fantastic at being uncomfortably awkward in her performance without being cringe about it. She does this by way of acknowledging she's aware of her own awkwardness, and Bayers one of the few people who can do this with just a look, but she's also equally clever at delivering lines that highlight how aware she is of her own social ineptitude. Even within the show, this winds up endearing Joanna to her colleagues more than alienating her, but it never lets her off the hook for her lying, and she knows she's not capable of keeping it up forever. It's more of an "I'm in too deep, and I don't know how to get out" kind of situation.
I enjoyed the show, even though I found the whole cancer-ploy of Joanna really held the show back from being a proper workplace sitcom. It's a time bomb just waiting to go off, and so you can't ever rest or rely upon the dynamics as they're set up. When the bomb goes off in the penultimate episode you have to wonder how the show could possibly set up a second season given what the fallout *should* be. Yet, it does its thing, and finds a way, and things are perhaps more awkward for Joanna than ever as the season closes out.
The show struggles with it's shopping network within the show. It doesn't know whether it should be lampooning hope shopping channels and the products they sell, or if it should be earnestly presenting something possible, something real. It often wavers between the two in a gentle fashion, and it never feels comfortable. When the hosts start being goofy or unprofessional on camera (and they all do it), it really diminishes what Joanna initially got fired for and thus betrays the whole crux of this first season. At the same time, when the sales pitches are completely po-faced, it's not very engaging and I want them to move faster through those parts.
There's a solid supporting cast, topped by Jennifer Lewis as the no-nonsense Patricia is credibly intimidating but gets the best through-line in the show, and Punam Patel as show producer Beena develops into a complete scene stealer with both her micro- and macro-agressions (and her beautiful Bernese Mountain Dog who's always at her side).
It was a pleasant surprise of pleasantness, especially give to how easily it could have been full-bore cringe.
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