Is Ramy a Bad Guy? (Thoughts on Season 3)

Ramy (Hulu)-Fun fact: This is one of the three shows I’m listed as a RottenTomatoes critic for. Anywho, to catch you up, Ramy Yousef is the writer and creator of this pseudo-autobiographical show about a highly introspective American Muslin trapped in a phase of Arrested Development and living with his parents. I’m reading insightful reviews from Vulture by a Muslim woman (Deena El Ganaidi) that mention Ramy is about a man who does a lot of wrong. I’m not sure if the show is about a man beating himself up so much as it’s about a man living in a complicated world. Is it really automatic that you should ditch your racist uncle because he says racist things? Is temptation from marriage universal? I’d make the case that Ramy appears to exemplify the type of bad luck that befalls sitcom characters like The Life and Times of Tim or Seinfeld. Not everyone has a past fling show up on the night before their wedding to seduce them, after all.In fact, as much as I loved the second season, Pastor Malek’s pronouncement “F — k you, Ramy, you hurt people” rang a little false to me. Ramy’s friends also use him, his uncle doesn’t really respect him, and his parents often don’t make a sufficient effort to understand the context of Ramy’s world. It’s not as if he’s in the best of circumstances. In a recent episode where Ramy’s parapalegic friend, Steve, is using him for a ride. Over the course of the evening, Steve reveals to Ramy that he wants to propose to his girlfriend whereas Ramy reveals.Comedy often invites us to revel in the misfortune of our protagonists (Everybody Loves Raymond, Frasier, Three’s Company) but if Ramy does anything differently, it blurs the lines between comedy and drama enough that we’re invited to witness the tragic undertones of a modern Muslim life for a young single mam.To give credit to Ramy, it’s not just male-centered angst. His sister Deena is also navigating the BS that goes on in corporate culture as an aspiring lawyer. Or maybe it’s standard drudgery that you have to do to work your way up. Or parents who don’t understand her. Or a man who blames her for taking his virginity. If Deena is a female counterpart to Ramy who feels like modern life can’t give her a win, at least she and Ramy are self-aware of their imperfections (if perhaps a little hard on themselves).Both their parents and, especially their uncle, are ill at ease to handle life’s complicated moral quandaries. My mother is an Israeli-born woman of Iranian heritage and you couldn’t drag her to a therapist even if it was free. That’s why I think the thesis of the show is towards the value of self-awareness and the moral costs (something the young generation has due to their unique cultural assimilation) that the older generation is unable to do.

Catching up on Derry Girls (Netflix) Season 3, and Ghosts (CBS) Season 2

Derry Girls (Netflix)- Books and media taking place in the pseudo-war zone of Ireland are an odd phenomenon to reflect on today. With this greater awareness for “people of color” and images of genocides in Haiti, Cambodia, and Ethiopia sprawled on the covers of National Geographic, it’s hard to picture Ireland---one of the world’s biggest tourist hubs—as some sort of war zone: Between civilized people of the same pale color.

My sister briefly taught abroad in Ireland and it was exciting to see this normally apolitical get all passionate about the conflict there. But I must confess—five years later, I don’t remember who did what to whom. Still, the interesting thing is that Ireland is much closer than actual war zones—Ethiopia, Haiti, Nigeria, Indonesia—to the creative centers of power so if creative figures like Kenneth Branagh, Neil Jordan, and Derry Girls creator Lisa McGee have stories to tell about it, there’s a much higher chance that that story will be told.

Derry Girls, now entering its third season, tells the story of five childhood friends bound together by familial bonds (among the five are two sets of cousins and they all grew up in the same side of the neighborhoods) who are getting into enough trouble in their Catholic girls’ school to make Lucy Ricardo look tame by comparison. One of the running jokes is that one of the five “Derry Girls” is an ordinary straight guy, James, who tags along with them to the girls’ school because, well, who knows. It's not important. The show uses a lot of 

It’s not exclusively about war zones and class conflict but class (the protagonist Erin’s parents and grandfather all live under the same roof) and religious conflict (the fear that James might be picked on if he went to a protestant school) insert themselves in organic ways to create a very strong sense of place which is this show’s biggest appeal.

 

Ghosts (CBS)-Continuing to work my way up the list of best shows of the year, the show is about a mansion run by a couple of yuppies that is inhabited by ghosts of eight different time periods—a Viking, a Native American pre-Columbus, a Revolutionary War soldier, a widow from the guilded age, a jazz age singer, a hippie, a dweeby travel agent from the 80s, and a Wall Street boy-with lots of unresolved issues and a great sense of camaraderie. Due to a near death experience, the wife (Rose McIver) can interact with ghosts (who use most of their interactions with her, using her as a TV remote control among other things) but her husband can’t, which creates a pretty ripe dynamic for comedy. The first season was pretty exposition heavy with each character getting a day in the limelight so the writers can milk entire episodes on exposition.

In the second season, Ghosts seems to find their groove even more as the characters change enough to keep things interesting but not hard enough to disrupt the status quo. After all, these characters have been in existence for centuries in some cases. The mood whiplash for them in changing overnight is a real thing, so it's been wise to take the changes slow.

It's also interesting to note how even though Utkarsh Ambudkar is the epitome of coolness (he raps with Lin-Manuel Miranda and Daveed Diggs), he successfully pulls off a dork here (his hobbies aren't too far off from Phil Dumphy on Modern Family

Review of Reboot (Hulu)

 

I generally dismiss shows about show business as a tired trope from unimaginative writers, but occasionally something pops through that’s worth fighting against that bias. Created by Steve Levitan (Just Shoot Me, and more recently Modern Family), this show contains some of the more wholesome relics of old-school sitcoms while still maintaining a sharp subversiveness.

The doozy of a plot is as follows: Three has-been actors (Johnny Knoxville, Judy Greer, and Worthy) and one classically-trained has-been in denial (Keegan Michael-Key) are recruited to revive a multi-camera (AKA old-school, laugh-track) sitcom in a comedic landscape of more advanced comedy. This wouldn’t be unusual as tons of 90s schlock is being rebooted, but in this case it’s a little of an in-universe head scratcher as the proposed TV executive, Hannah (Rachel Bloom from Crazy Ex-Girlfriend), has pretentious high-art tastes. Secretly, however, Hannah is doing the show because her estranged dad, Gordon (Paul Riser), is the creator and she wants to ruin his legacy. Her daddy issues reemerge when Gordon appears back on set and has decided not to surrender the intellectual property so these two knuckleheads have to now work together.

They also have competing writing rooms: Old Borscht Belt comedians verses the kinds of LGBT and POC headliners who often populate hotlists merely because they are gay or a person of color (this is demonstrated by two women of color pitching a joke about two women discussing the Bechtel test but having nothing funny in the punch line). The show is an equal opportunity skewer (or is the word skewerer?) and the comedic tension of these eight secondary characters has the potential to give me about as much hope for intergenerational friendship as this polarized age can provide.

Like Levitan’s previous hit, Just Shoot Me, this is a sharp comedy with very shallow back-stabbing characters with the emotional heft of a (forgive me for using such a gooey word) beautiful father-daughter relationship.

Ten Notes on the Back Half of Resident Alien

The show this half-season has shifted focus to Olivia Baker’s alien sightings, D’Arcy’s attempt at romance and attempt to regain her ski career, Ben’s attempts to boost the town’s profiles with a resort (precipitating one of TVdom’s most avoidable marital spats). Some thoughts:

1. Whether Terry O’Quinn’s character was going to be killed or not was as good of a cliffhanger as ever. I found myself preparing to disown my allegiances to Harry if he went through with that murder, which is an indication that the show still has me frantically guessing well into its second season. A good sign.

2. Because we’re introduced much earlier to Ben as an audience and he’s constantly being belittled by the town he tries to do good for, he’s pretty rootable. Therefore, his wife Kate has an uphill battle at trying to win the audience’s affections and her arc has been based on adapting to the town. Kate’s love story is with Patience (as evidenced by the bonding with the ladies of Patience) and it’s even tied with her reconnection to Ben (the two are often a couple in distress) because she has to understand what he loves. Therefore, it’s been jarring to see the thing that binds them become such a source of division in a melodramatic story plot that seems like it’s halfway to becoming Kramer vs Kramer.

3. The D’Arcy/Asta relationship is becoming the key to the show. The only hitch was that, we (I’m presuming the audience was with me) couldn’t bear to see the inevitable breaking point when Asta’s secret was going to jeopardize her friendship. How often does the show rely on the catharsis of Asta and D’Arcy making up from a fight? About the right amount, I’d say.

4. If D’Arcy Bloom was an Olympian in 2016 and the show is set in the present, that means that her big comeback is happening 15 years later after she was at the top of the world. The number of people who have qualified for the Olympics in a competitive sport at the age of 40 or older is probably extremely tiny (I’m sure archery or golf might be exceptions). No wonder she needs painkillers! Even then, that’s not going to give her the leg strength of a mogul skier in their 20s. Still, despite some real gaps in realism, the subplot with D’Arcy as an Olympic skier provides some rare TV insight into post-Olympic depression I’m thankful for.

5. It’s time to see Judy be more than the punch line of a joke. Some shows like Parks and Recreation or Cheers have the running gang of the celebration of the found family being contradicted by someone who’s the butt of every joke. The incongruity provides humor, sure, but this is a show that’s more about tugging at the heart strings than easy jokes, and too many of us in the audience find Judy endearing.-

6. Deputy Baker is pretty far removed from the central action to be getting such thick side plots but it can work based on the strength of the material. Her fight to stand up to her boss was plenty juicy, but the “Close Encounters of a Third Kind” subplot this half-season feels thin in certain situations. When it’s about putting the pieces together better than her boss, but her wonder that aliens exist feels like a jarring genre shift. We’re kind of past the point of caring that aliens exist so she’s not necessarily much of an audience surrogate.

7. I’ve always felt the show had a kid-oriented vibe taking cues from 90s shows like “Who’s Afraid of the Dark”, “Goose Bumps”, or “The Outer Limits” and a lot of that is in the score, which alternates between sci-fi eeriness and semi-comedic bounciness.

8. As the show moves along, it’s smart that any resolution on the Asta/Jay relationship seems to be slow. This is a good way to keep the show from burning through plot.

9. Ah, that short-lived Judy/Harry relationship that lasted about 37 seconds. Priceless!

10. I’ve always theorized that the monotone voice of Harry is only what we hear as the audience, and not what’s happening in-universe.  Otherwise, wouldn’t the denizens of Patience be far more suspicious of Harry? After all, there is no accent that matches his voice other than alien or mentally disabled and they trust him to be a doctor. Unfortunately, my theory became disproven when D’Arcy who made fun of his voice. On the other hand, it’s a good sign of that D’Arcy’s development as a less clingy person, that she’s willing to so readily make fun of someone she was previously smitten with.