Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency Review: First Two Episodes of Season 2

Source: Salon

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency might have gotten unfavorable "the book was better" comparisons, it might have gotten lost in the shuffle, or critics pain didn't like it, but this was one of my favorite shows last year. It was wonderfully bizarre, the characters were outlandish and well-cast (they strike me as inhabiting a universe where everyone’s just a little out of tune, like the types who pop up in TerryGilliam films) and the serialized plot built towards something. But this series is more anthology-like, so it’s really a more a question of whether lightning can strike twice than a continued interest.

Slogging into a serial drama like this can be a reminder that (at least for me), the early episodes can be like homework. You need to absorb the information of seeing and characters before you can properly enjoy those elements intermingling. With this show, we're not at the proverbial drop point in the roller coaster, but it’s getting close.

Dirk Gently desperately needs some forward progress. Like Dwight of The Office successfully demonstrated and Dina on Superstore is failing to do, there’s nothing particularly pleasant about watching an annoying character continue their irritating ways without gradually becoming aware of how annoying they are. We see Todd bending towards Dirk, but that doesn’t fully break the illusion that Dirk is getting any less useless. At the same time, Douglas Adams’ work is rooted in exposing the ridiculousness in our world (or, rather, a slightly off-center fantasical version of it) and Dirk solving crimes while doing godawful detective work is one of those oxymorons this kind of material thrives on. 

Elijah Wood’s screen persona is that of a blank slate a la Tobey MaGuire: His go-to acting move is reacting with wide-eyed wonder with a little more frustration laced in. Elijah Wood has two things characters in his situation ordinarily aren't saddled with: A hint of a stable relationship (with Farrah) and a definitive goal (searching for his sister). Both of these are positive developments. 

There's also Dustin Mulligan (Schitt's Creek) who was an airhead last season is now apparently running some top-secret prison torture operation to extract information out of Dirk Gentley. The other leftover is the holistic assassin Bart (Fiona Dourif) who sounds a lot like Jerry Lewis. There was a certain novelty to her in the first season but it's going to wear thin soon.

So far, it’s hard to tell what’s going on but this is a series that takes relishes in taking a while to connect the dots. I can barely remember anything plot-wise except the character work. The two stand-out characters that keep things interesting so far are an oddball police officer who somehow see things on the same bizarre spectrum of causality as Dirk; and Suzy, who is a submissive housewife and secretary to a white trash husband and corrupt boss that is suddenly on the grips of getting some superpowers.

Baroness von Sketch Show Review: Dont Make Me Send a Lawyer Up There

Baroness von Sketch Show-Don't Make Me Send a Lawyer Up There-This IFC show isn’t just sketch comedy from a woman’s perspective but from a middle-aged woman’s perspective. It’s also worth noting that some of the big name sketch stars like Amy Schumer and Sara Silverman make it a point to go blue to try to show they can be dirty in a man’s realm, whereas these women are just organically comedic.

What makes the show stick out as that this quartet-Meredith McNeil, Aurora Browne, Carolyn Taylor, and Jennifer Whalen- establish their voice and chemistry very quickly out of the gate. It also helps that because they pack in short sketches between the longer ones, they generally get in a dozen or more sketches in an episode which familiarizes you with the actresses fast. McNeil seems to be into physical comedy, Taylor enjoys exaggerated facial expressions, Whalen's a bit of a befuddled straight woman, and Browne is more of a jack of all trades.



The first sketch out of the gate establishes its punchline cinematically. A woman is indulging in her new hobby of adult coloring and talking about how much she loves it, and the camera zooms out to reveal she’s trespassing in a kindergarten classroom and the teacher deadpans “yeah, I’m going to call the police.” The sketch goes on for a couple more lines (the teacher corrects the trespasser over whether she’s better at coloring than when she was a child) that continues to maintain humor and establish how oblivious the trespasser and the whole thing clocks in at a pretty solid 41 seconds.

Then there are the sketches that the show puts more of its effort into developing. This week the big opener is a sketch about to become the first woman to attempt a free fall from space only to regret it (“what’s more important is little girls are counting on you, Janet” “Don’t those little girls have Beyonce?”) even though the only other option is death. As the sketch moves forward, the lack of qualifications of the austronaut are revealed and it plays out smartly.. A lot of the sketches are tinged with feminist commentary, some of which is quite good, and and some of it seems thematically muddled.


The woman who reports a stalker to have it ignored so thoroughly might sound good on paper, but it plays out in a way that seems too ridiculous to buy (though it’s saved by a good twist at the end). There’s another sketch this week where four ladies are so consumed with talking about privilege that they don’t notice a guy in a wheelchair who can’t go through, but while it’s believable, the joke is over 1/3 of the way through the sketch, so it's not as funny.

There’s generally one sketch I see every week that has me barreling over with laughter and this week it’s a relatively simple concept: Guy with no social skills hits on girl at bar, but it’s just extremely funny in this context.

Haters Back Off Check-In Season 2

Based on the YouTube sensation Miranda Sings – musical theater alum Colleen Ballinger's parody of a talentless YouTube singer who is too coddled to know her faults- the show is one you might find yourself rooting for if you follow someone on YouTube and feel some pride as one their adopters (AKA YouTube groupies) when they hit it big.

But a simple caricature (and one that's mean spirited in origin at that) isn't much to base a show on without some massive expansion. The tv world of Miranda Sings populates her delusion with enablers in the form of a weak willed mom, an uncle who's all kinds of simple minded, and a long suffering crush. The control is the level headed sister, Emily, and when you (pretty instantly) become aware of
the pain Mirandas delusions inflict on Emily and others in her path, Miranda stops becoming likeable or remotely rootable. In this sense, the show was able to redeem itself by making Miranda's story a tragic one: she gets what she wants but at the loss of everyone around her.

The whole thing is augmented by a Tim Burton vibe the color scheme seems borrowed from Edward Scissorhands and the protagonist seems defined by a beautiful sense of weirdness (though her actions aren't beautiful, the hope is that she'll eventually get there).

Season two risks detracting from the ending if it resets everything back to normal, yet the cast had to get back together, and it walks that fine line relatively well. Miranda s ex boyfriend and her mom Bethany re-enter get life but with terms and conditions. mom has just gone to some bible-themed adventure land, and the suffering Christian imagery isn't lost (unless you want to ignore it, I’m fine with it if you are). Bethany might be the hero of the story, but as soon as the screentime reverts to sister Emily we’ll see that it’s really a story about a blossoming Cinderella with an evil step sister.

It's a delicate balancing act for the show to gain our sympathies once again just as it is for Miranda and her mother to reform a relationship. We also get a glimpse of daddy here (UCB's Matt Besser) and he's also a man child of sorts. The second and third episodes have Miranda raising red flags to society at large. She terrorizes an airport in the former, sneaks into an elementary school and kidnaps a child in the latter. Lord our father up in Heaven, let there be consequences.

My Liberal Centrist Principles as an Arts Writer and Blogger

This is a loose list of principles I've come to strongly believe that the liberal critical community is missing and want to devote written effort into countering through every avenue available. A failure to the binary thought of temper identity politics is disastrous for the Republican Party:

Race, Gender ,and Sexual Orientation  matter but they neither explain anything and everything nor is readjusting inequality along these lines the solution to anything and everything. 

In other words, these issues are capable of being exaggerated and no one should be considered an enemy to progress for being more exact with these degrees. To exaggerate is a loss in credibility. 

Examples: Geena Davis institute and like-minded institutions publishing numbers on women and film, the Cannes film festival insisting that the grand prize go to a woman director despite the quality of Sophia Copolla's film, the black lives matter reaction to the Oscars So White campaign, the black politce brutality

Being on the right side of history doesn't give you liberty to be a jerk.

Yes we know racism and other said evils are wrong, but there is nothing justified about harassing or demeaning other individuals you suspect of these behaviors in the manner you accuse them of doing

Examples: Attacks on liberal college professors, death threats to electors who were planning on voting for Trump,

The move for inclusivity of gender, race and sexual orientation must not be compromised with intellectual exclusivity

Examples: Many of the message board encounters I have, university atmospheres, ?, disinviting speakers

You must acknowledge things that people do well if you complain about them doing things wrong, you also don't get to dictate what your ally

If a conservative lawmaker or advocate actually makes progress on something you didn't think they'd do, you must give them credit or you have no credibility. Similarly, no one owes you anything. If someone wants to advance your cause, you can critique how they go about it but not before appreciating their help, that reeks of entitlement.

Examples: So so many: Various conservative lawmakers like John McCain or Jeff Flake who have done things against the party.... The NCAA for relocating their championships outside of North Carolina for the bathroom bill...People being hard on the academy awards in 2015/2016 when they bent over backwards with a black president, black host, and black honorary Oscar recipient just to appease a liberal base.... Even if the Trump administration occasionally does something right, like a decent response to Hurricane Harvey and Irma, or having the foresight not to push for the nomination of the corrupt drug czar or promoting a woman to homeland security, it has to be acknowledged... All the missives like "Dear White People: You don't get it"...Comments on message boards from women who hate guys who list "feminist" in their dating profile as if that's better than not being a feminist.... Countless instances of people saying that organizations are only half-modifying their efforts... Tom Hiddlestone gave a speech at the Golden Globes calling attention to doctors without borders in the Congo and people complained he was a "white savior"

We should listen and research other people's perspectives and if you are a policy maker or a cultural icon, you should get feedback from colored purple or women in making your decision, but your skin color shouldn't detract from an intellectual argument

In debate tournaments, judges don't deduct points based on skin color. Everyone is a stakeholder on policy, everyone gets a seat at the table. Besides, people are capable of researching what other people go through, it's not an industrial secret.

Don't be afraid of free speech and encourage fear of it. The solution to bad speech is simply counter speech. Don't shut it out, don't live in a bubble

Examples: Berkeley Campus, movements to make twitter be more stringent, reactions to try to categorize UVA as a hate crime, wanting to push for the TV show Confederate not to be made...

There are bad people who should be stopped, but stop labelling everyone as bad by association. I personally don't like most of the republican party platforms, but being Republican isn't a crime nor is having ever associated with a Republican a crime

Examples: Mozilla Firefox CEO ousted for donating to gay marriage, believing that all Trump voters are xenophobic and misogynistic, wanting to boycott Matthew McConaughey's movie because he said "Give Trump a Chance', holding it against anyone who once held views against gay people, (similarly Obama having had contact with Ayres isn't a cause for concern), not understanding that there's a dichotomy more complex than pro-gay vs anti-gay that shapes how people vote. Also, there's the idea that neutral technology somehow has to be pro-woman. Twitter is just an algorithm it's not pro or against anything. What is that??

Not all sex crimes are equal, people accused of sex crimes deserve to be heard, historical figures need to be taken in context

Examples: Realizing Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson were products of their time. Treating sexual harassment or erring a bit on set in terms of creating a safe workspace as equivalent to rape as is the case with Casey Affleck, treating Woody Allen like he's guilty when there was never evidence outside of one person's testimony. Calling Joss Wheedon a sexual predator for having affairs. Labelling Travis Kalanick (Uber) and Kenneth Starr (Baylor U) with sexual deviants when they were merely the heads of companies that didn't have proper atmospheres. 

  

Realizing that "intersectionality" works both ways. If you expect people to have compassion as both a black person AND a woman, then be open to the possibility that someone can be both white AND poor or poor AND disabled, or born into a cycle of poverty AND have invested generationally in a dying industry

Examples: The lack of empathy for blue lives matter or people persecuted in red states

The Path TV Review Season 2

The Path centers around a cult in upstate New York known as the Meyerist movement. The most impressive thing about the show is the way Jessica Goldberg (who wrote about her creative process in an article entitled How I Lost My Religion and Created a New One) builds an impressively intricate religious world view for her characters from the ground up through weaving together a number of existing mythologies and religious practices. In Meyerism, there's a ladder and rungs and "the light" and a lot that seems hokey from an outside perspective. Then again, most religions seem pretty hokey to outsiders (part of the point here).

Those who might admire the complexity of the show's religious infrastructure might be disappointed by the fact that it's not really a show about religion and inner spiritualism. For that, you might want to get Frank Capra's "Lost Horizon" or "Razor's Edge" or Martin Scorsese's "Silence" or even the Robert Zemeckis sci-fi film "Contact".

The show might have started in that vein and does feature characters who are trying to find spiritualism, but it's primarily about the follies of the "kingdom of man" than the "kingdom of god" as some medieval saint I learned about in history class (and since have forgotten) put it. It's more interested about the politics of a religious organization that is already positioned as the antagonistic force. As a result, it's hard for the show to really enter into unbiased discourse about how to be spiritual when the characters that are evolving towards Meyerism are painted as either rubes or enablers of corruption from the start.

The show is also heavily about scandal with a capital "s" and three exclamation marks. There's a practice called unburdening where people confess everything to each other and are supposed to feel good about it. This is supposed to be ironic because nearly everyone on screen is having a lot of clandestine sex with people they're not supposed to be having sex with. There are more sex scenes here than nearly any other show I've seen in recent memory (even "Masters of Sex" didn't master having sex as frequently as these people). The camera is particularly interested in Michelle Monaghan getting hot and heavy, either to make some grand thematic statement or because some writer or producer just finds Monaghan hot and wants to see a lot of her. In short, it's a show that places A LOT of its eggs in the "Scandal!!!" basket.

At the center of the Meyerist movement is a family torn by various levels of devotion and a leader (Cal, played by Hugh Dancy) who ranks somewhere in the middle echelon of corrupt characters on TV. Part of the the theme is that corruption and shortcuts are hard to avoid when trying to build a big movement under the veneer of behaving with good morals. In this fashion, the show isn't just a political snipe at Scientology (that would be kind of easy) but a richer more universal commentary about all religious organizations and how they can blind people to abuse of power: If you stand for good, is it that wrong to throw a little bad into the mix in service of the end goal?

The family consists of Eddie (Aaron Paul, who throws himself into the role admirably) who's beginning to actively rebel against Meyerism, wife Sarah (Michelle Monaghan) who's veering closer to the center of the religious power structure, and son Hawk (Kyle Miller) who's oscillating between the two ends. They also have a daughter but as of yet (halfway through season 2) she serves no discernible function (maybe Ray Romano served as a producer here?). Again, it is a situation that can be topically applied to a great many religions where intermarriage is a problem.

The use of side characters is also pretty well-placed: Emma Greenwell plays a former drug addict who's going in a journey of the opposite direction of Eddie and trying to rediscover herself in cult life. Similarly, Ali Ahn stands out as Sarah's sister-in-law who slowly pushes for power for her husband in the second season because, supposedly, he's less scandalous.

I didn't find it in the upper echelon of the most engaging things on TV but, for me, it was certainly watchable enough to stick with (it gets significantly more exciting in the second season). Enough ingredients are in place that it could really be someone's cup of tea.