Step aside, all other shows about stand-up. You think a stand-up comedian playing themselves as a sad sack is novel? You think going all the way back to the 1970s is novel, you schlemiel Ari Gaynor show (http://www.imdb.com/title/t... Try an Ashkenazi Jewish 1950s housewife who kvetches her way to stardom, with Lenny Bruce as a side character, and dialogue stylized courtesy of Amy Sherman-Pallanido (Gilmore Girls, Bunheads) and then come back to me. Raise your hand if you didn’t even knew stand-up comedy existed in 1958…my point exactly!
This show is all that and a bag of matzah brie. Yes, it’s a little heavy on the Ashkenazi Jewish stereotypes (and by, the way, mazels to Tony Shalhoub on your recent conversion to Hollywood Judaism, was Alfred Molina taken?) but it also has an endearing cultural specificity and a strong cast. While the show is about comedians, it’s very comfortable with its dramatic beats. The stakes are high – the protagonist goes from being excited about landing the rabbi for Yom Kippur to losing her husband, her home, and getting arrested in the span of a few days—and the episodes so far end on icy cliff-hangers.
The show is feminist but not in a way that hits you over the head but it has more leeway to do so without being cloying as a period piece. There’s less debate that gender norms were pretty crappy in this era, so it’s more easily read as an examination of this decade in all its facets. More so, it’s a testament to the pluck of a woman trying to do something extraordinary when pressed in from all sides. Midge Maisel (Rachel Bronsahan)
The show also works as an interesting examination of the end of Jewish self-isolation in the United States. As someone whose father was within spitting distance of these communities on Long Island and whose own generation marked the bridge between the old guard and a current state of Judaism that's desperately trying to hold off the next generation's apathy (exhibit A: Birthright), a lot of the tension between the titular Midge Maisel (Rachel Bronsahan) and her parents (Shalouhb and Hingle) is not just laced with the typical radicalized-60s-generation-rebelling-against-their-parents overtures, but tells a much more specific story about these people.
The electric Alex Bornstein (Mad TV, Family Guy) also does great work here.
The Mick (Fox)-The Teacher
Sabrina has a crush on her teacher. Because this is Sabrina, we know she’s going to go after him like she owns him. Because it’s The Mick, we know something disastrous in a boundary-pushing way is going to happen from Point A to Point B. Because a great comedy is about subverting expectations, I can admit to being thrown for a couple big curves.
In this case, Mickey tries to stop Sabrina by wagging her finger at the teacher but he seduces her. That this happens before the episode’s first commercial break is the cleverness of the episode. It’s no longer a sexless comedy of errors (although I’ve often read that ALL screwball comedies are primarily based on romantic attraction without sex) but rather a game of Mickey trying to rub it in Sabrina’s face that she had sex with her teacher and using everything at her disposal to get the teacher to admit it. That and it’s a comedy about a crazy ex-girlfriend from the POV of the confused teacher. The episode also demonstrates the growing rapport between Mick and Sabrina: We’re past the phase where Sabrina thinks she can simply roll her eyes past her aunt’s existence.
The B-plot involves Chip paying Jimmy $200 to enhance his reputation after he gets listed #42 out of 50 among the hottest guys in his grade. The idea of Jimmy charging $200 to a child when he’s living rent-free in his great-grandmother’s mansion for no discernable reason (being an occasional sex partner of Mickey doesn’t seem to qualify) is a perfect summation for what makes the guy a comic stand0out.
Mom (CBS)-Fancy Crackers and Giant WomenIf a show like “Superstore” can attain semi-respectability by portraying working class people, that audience needs to check out “Mom.” Detailing the comings and goings of an AA group and a mother-daughter pair (Allison Janney as Bonnie and Anna Faris as Christy) within that group, it’s truly about people who have a long way to go before they can achieve relative normalcy.
Case in point: Christy has to apply for law school but the application fees are so high, Bonnie has to cut the internet bill. Sizeable plot holes abound: If the price of an application is going to bankrupt Christy, how big of a hit will the cost of law school be? Do law schools have financial need applications?
I’m personally most curious what most of us would do in the neighbor’s (character actress Amy Hill) shoes if my landlord explained to me that they had to forgo internet for such a noble cause. Would we expend a free resource and fork it over? It's underlooked how often the show asks us to critically examine the lack of breaks that befall people in this echelon of society
The other plot is all about Jill (Emmy winner Jaime Pressly) and her new weight gain, which has now segued from an excuse for a bunch of fat jokes into an actual emotional moment. Jill is now aware that she’s put on weight. I’m not sure the show handled it particularly delicately, but what’s more pressing to me is the whether the actual line jokes of this show are up there with the rest of golden age TV standards for humor. This show has very sophisticated character work for a multicamera sitcom and the format allows the show to aim for zingy one-liners in a way that single camera comedies would be more reluctant to pull off, but I wonder if those zingy one-liners don’t have room for improvements.
American Dad (Fox)-The Long Bomb, The Bitching Race, A Nice Night for a Drive, Casino Normale
Since purchasing an episode on a whim last week, I started rediscovering this show and realizing it’s a pretty dependable source of sophisticated humor although it still tends to live or die by the episode.
The “Nice Night for a Driver” sounded like a knight rider parody but was more a retread of the Klauss-Stan relationship. Stan started out as a flanderized aloof unemotional dad who openly disliked certain members of his family (Hailey, Klauss, Roger) but has gradually come around on Hailey (“Long Bomb” is a wonderful example of this) while considering Roger a worthy foil. Klauss is still an outliar for the family but it’s nice they occasionally have a bonding episode.
“The Bitching Race” was a surprisingly enjoyable half-hour despite the curious fact that I’ve never seen the source of the parody “The Amazing Race.” It follows classic sitcom tropes of an aloof dad learning to be more intuitive to his family. It’s ironic that Sean O’Neal, in an essay on the mothership, called Home Improvement (the godfather of the aloof dad sitcom trope) casually misogynistic when shows like American Dad generally have character arcs that spin the other way.
“The Long Bomb” mixes action and humor adeptly enough that I think it’s fair to say Seth MacFarlane doesn’t get enough credit for. The characters introduced solely for this episode – the singing guy on the trapeze, Johnny Concussion, etc—reminds me of one weakness of this show: By being overly dependent on Roger (in an interview, the show runners mentioned they realized the potential of the show when they figured Roger could be the guest star of the week), the show doesn’t have as many recurring characters as some of its cartoon cohorts which requires too much comic buildup for many of the characters we see each week.
Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (BBC)-Little Guy Black Hair
Watching season two is kind of like when my dad attempts a humorous anecdote at a party or other family gathering. Because he’s my dad and I have a good relationship with him, I want his story to succeed but I also am cringing with embarrassment when he tries to be funny.
DGHDA is undeniably ambitious but when it falls flat—when the female deputy who wears her hat backwards (honest to God, I made a solid effort to look up her name) overemotes, or when someone in the realm of normality has to react to the weirdness of Bart or Dirk-- there’s a cringe to bear. The show can feel tonally jarring, especially now that Dirk and Todd are being thrown into a fantasy novel this season (or as Todd aptly puts it “a murder acid-trip ren-fair nightmare”). There’s also a far-off blackwing plot which provides little of interest unless guys in military outfits speaking in conceptual techno-babble (to borrow a Star Trek term) is your thing.
But lo and behold! Dirk ties everything together in this episode with a rousing speech that pieces together all the disparate parts of the season thus far. About 90% of our “huh?” questions have been solved at this point and the explanation (that Windemoor was dreamed up by telekinetic traumatized kid a few decades back) is actually quite groovy. If only they peppered in the hints a bit more heavily, I might have been more invested at this point, but this hasn’t been the worst investment of a season I’ve had this year. The core commitment of the show to abstractist absurdity is still there. Plus, the growth of Todd as a friend to Dirk and a sibling/caretaker of Amanda has been quite sweet.
The Orville (Fox)-New Dimensions
This show pretty much falls under “What were they thinking!?” and rather than engage with it years later on a podcast like “How Did This Get Made” or Nathan Rabin’s “Year of Flops” it’s hard to deny how interesting it is to watch a train wreck as It’s happening. The show’s main crime is not putting enough jokes in what is supposed to be a comedy and mirroring Star Trek way too closely but I’ll call BS on that: Galaxy Quest, the occasional Saturday Night Live skit, Thank God You’re Here and 10 Items or Less (off the top of my head) all had pretty exact Star Trek parodies, and no one cared whether it mirrored the source material too closely.
But yes: The show is mostly boring and oddly focused on a bickering domestic couple at the center without being unaware that they are getting tired. At the same time, it’s kind of nice to re-imagine a version of Starfleet where people will get drunk and pull pranks on each other. The distant cordiality between the seven principals on TNG, and the exponentially greater emotional distance between the senior staff and everyone else on the ship, made for an extremely stuffy adventure. And hey, Penny Johnson (who was great on Deep Space Nine) is here and she seems to have joined the cast voluntarily rather than, say, being kidnapped.
The last time I reviewed this show was an episode in which John LaMarr (aka the token black guy) got into trouble with the local populance of a social media obsessed planet for humping a statue (honestly, it wasn’t as crude as it sounded). I thought it was the high point of the troubled series to date and went over to the AV Club and one other site’s review of the episode and people couldn’t get over how dumb it was that Lamarr would go out and hump a statue, and my main reaction is: What show did you think you were watching?!
This show has mostly been muddled in its execution, but when it does work, it shows that Star Trek: The Next Generation, with its air of stuffiness, is pretty ripe for mockery. MacFarlane is not particularly well-liked among the critical community but he clearly has an intelligent voice and I can see this as a platform that tells solid science fiction stories with a nice comic distance from the TNG format. At the same time, if it were cancelled tomorrow, I wouldn’t lose any sleep.
This week’s episode is another John LaMarr episode and I know I’d be the laughing stock of the critical community if I were writing this for a Rotten Tomato-accredited site, but the episode actually had some salient dramatic moments: LaMarr’s speech about how it’s his responsibility that the group screwed up and that makes him not a leader was actually a powerful and insightful. I’m still not saying this is a good show, but credit where credit is due.
It’s also worth mentioning that they somehow managed to snag Norm McDonald to play the part of a (I’m not making this up) ball of slime who’s up for the position of chief engineer. I can’t ever say McDonald is miscast in anything, so it’s a plus.
This is also a good episode if you’ve gotten tired of Adrianne Palicki’s character being walked all over by the Captain for cheating on her once. Why are these two in a toxic relationship with each other?
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