Last year, I found this one of the most multi-layered and
deep comedies of the year (it was my #4 overall). Maria Bamford is unhinged in
a way that is both beautifully raw and leads to the possibility that anything
can happen. She is not just a great stand-up comic but one whose stage persona
(she does voices, she establishes personality very quickly) translates very
easily into a TV show. This season’s lost a little edge from last year on the humor
front.
Last year, a lot of the fun and bizarre came from the great premises and trickled down in all sorts of great ways down to the dialogue level. Some of the last year's premises includ Maria Bamford dating an
extremely ambiguously bisexual person who thought he had license to cheat on a
monogamous boyfriend while a talking dog (who sounds like Warner Herzog and is
still a running gag here) tries to talk her into not giving up her body
so easily; trying on a classy-sounding voice for an entire episode because a
new love interest is only attracted to her that way (a plot that is sold by
Bamford’s god-like voice over agility) and becoming a spokeswoman for a
multinational corp and “doing good” by cheerily educating Mexican people on avoiding the evils of unionizing.
For comparison, there’s another friend plot involving
assistant (Lennon Parham) who Maria's new boyfriend (a very un-Hollywoodish Olafur Darri Olaffson) alienates during a night of
karaoke bowling. The karaoke bowling is just as bad as it sounds as Parham
sings Bob Marley while bowling and gets so caught up in the signing that she
throws the ball across several lanes. It’s a wonderful sight gag. It’s followed
up in the next episode by a wonderfully awkward scene in which Paul Scheer
plays Gayle, a possibly transgender shaman/lawyer who makes Maria and her
boyfriend do absurd things in a coffee shop as a sign of redemption. Both these
moments are hilarious, but those might be the only two things I’ll remember a
week from now and last season was wall-to-wall funny.
Other episodes include an “am I ready for commitment”
episode at the start and an overbearing mother episode that are both just too
typical to have flown in the first season. The best stand-alone episode stars Judy Greer as
an accountant who reveals a financial discrepancy that results in a bounced check to Burt
Ben Bacharach (Fred Melamed) who reacts with the sort of quiet panic that makes his character
priceless. It’s a nice little mini-mystery but it’s not wall-to-wall funny which is what defines most of this season's shortcomings.
Maybe I was just setting myself up for high expectations?
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