Capsule Reviews: Braindead, Night Manager, and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

Braindead (CBS)-"Braindead" has a strong enough premise has enough thunder out of the gate to get you past the slow expositional burn of the first few episodes that typically sees viewers drop out when their attention spans are tested the most. After that, the show fails to maintain a sense of escalating tension. Still it's watchable enough that I made it to the end with a sense of relative satisfaction.

The premise is that aliens, in the form of ants, have invaded the brains of several power players on Capitol Hill with an as-yet-to-be-determined agenda that is up for the protagonist. Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays Laurel, the sister of a senator who is forced to resign to a Capitol Hill job after failing to make it as a documentarian. As such, she brings a jaded sense of been-there-done-that to her jobs that turns out to be one of the series' best features: As opposed to the usual intensity of policy wonks we see on TV, Laurel brings a sense of irony and detachment.

Laurel is given a love interest in the form of a senatorial aide from across the aisle (Les Miserables' Aaron Tveit) that does a decent job of padding the running time along (markedly better than Laurel's daddy issues). Her chemistry with brother Danny Pino also works pretty well.

I started this review by saying the show isn't lovable but would have trouble pinpointing specifically where the show fails. The political commentary is decent but not particularly engaging. The pace at which Laurel discovers the truth is a bit slow to hold our attention. Characters such as Gustav add a lot to the plot but others (like the woman Gustav is hitting on) are somewhat and forgettable and Tony Shaloub's villainous senator is amicable but not worth the hype.

The Night Manager (AMC)- A continental spy thriller that has the advantage of not being particularly convoluted in plot and having a sleak look. The exterior shots remind me visually of of Michel Hazanvicius's "OSS 117," "The Brothers Bloom" or "On Her Majesty's Secret Service." It's a spy thriller that feels much more like real espionage than even the more realistic James Bond films. The six-episode series contains its fair share of heart-pumping action but is also filled with a lot of bureaucracy and characters who sit and wait until the right moment. 
 

Tom Hiddleston (not to be confused with Tom Holland, Tom Hollander, or Tom Hardy) plays a concierge who is seduced by a mysterious woman one night who then gets maimed. She turns out to be a flash in a pan en route to a much larger story involving his recruitment to full-on spyhood with Olivia Coleman as his handler and David "I'm in literally every procedural on TV" Harewood as Coleman's American counterpart. Reminiscent of "Argo," there's a lot of split-screen action between Hiddleston's actions on the ground and the political and bureaucratic hoops the handlers have to jump through to give him any means of support when he gets there.

As far as I can remember, there's little detail as to why this hotel manager is so insanely good at every facet of espionage other than that he used to be in the army. He's just really good and that's pretty much all you need to know.

Hugh Laurie plays a Bond-like villain named Richard Roper who was on TV for nearly a decade as Roger Ebert's TV partner. Lines like "Richard Roeper is the worst, most ruthless, soulless man in the world. He will stop at nothing to get what he wants" sounds like the screenwriter has a vendetta against the guy for giving his last project a thumbs down (ed. note: I have recently learned that the book was written in 1993). 

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt Season 2 (Netflix)-The first season of this unusually quirky (in relation to Tina Fey and Robert Carlock's past work) show was defined by Kimmy's arc from impulsively freeing herself from her past to formally resolved. In contrast, the second season went out of its way to avoid any such grand movements in Kimmy's development. The Dong storyline -- a wonderfully racially unbiased romance -- zigged enough for one episode's filler (Dong can't see Kimmy), zagged back (Dong now can and will stop at nothing to see Kimmy) enough to fill another episode and resolved with a nice little bow. Consumation? check. Dong's put on a bus to his come country? 

Kimmy's main development this season was dealing with her inner demons through therapy. When a PTSD-related story arc is resolved through the victim resolving to ride the roller coasters, it's hard to take it as a serious treatment of the issue. 

At the same time, we have false expectations as viewers in TV's Golden Age (trademark) that all good TV must up the stakes every season and there's nothing inherently wrong with lateral development which is what can best be described here. The problem with "30 Rock" employing of such a strategy was that it kept going to the same well: Tracy's crazy, Jack's genuinely in love, Liz has one last chance for happiness before her ladyparts wither and it's with Matt Damon/James Marsden/Michael Sheen/whoever played the beeper guy. 

Fortunately, I have confidence that "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt" can find new angles because it's about so much more than the typical workplace sitcom and gives room for the writers to find new beats and definitions of happiness for their characters.  

Elsewhere this season, there were a number of developments with the side characters. In particular, Titus found a boyfriend and it was a very refreshing portrayal of a homosexual relationship between two opposites. It was two guys awkwardly making their way through something they had never experienced before and had no road map for). 

If there's one beef to be had with the show, it's on the humor level which had a lot fewer home runs. Tina Fey and Co. are generally go-big-or-go-home with their jokes so that you might remember something funny from "30 Rock" years from now. The first season of "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt" had the court trial, the dinner party and the GED quest which were brilliantly escalating comic plots that enveloped entire episodes. This season, we had a mentos gag which didn't dig as deep and Kimmy working as an elf which didn't lead to a single funny moment. 

Don't hail Brooklyn Nine Nine as the future of comedy yet: Straight-Man-Funny Man Dichotomy

Brooklyn Nine Nine is starting to get a little bit of critical steam now that it won the Golden Globe for best comedy.

Erik Adams at the AV Club just posted an article: Brooklyn Nine-Nine isn't TV's best comedy---But It's Getting there. In an effort to stop the  critical Brooklyn Nine Nine train from turning into a massive bandwagon, I'm going to put my foot in the ring and caution other critics to praise it as the next big thing just yet. I previously included Brooklyn Nine Nine on my 2013 list of shows that didn't measure up and I'll expand upon it here.

First, let's talk about the Golden Globes:
Anyone who uses the Golden Globes as a barometer for critical temperature should note that the Hollywood Foreign Press is composed of some 90-odd part-time journalists who only have the illusion of importance. The only reason anyone pays attention to them is because they finangled their way to a TV deal with NBC in the early 1960's (a contract that was dropped from 1968-1972 when the FCC questioned their voting procedures). If they line up with other awards, it's largely coincidence if you look at it statistically and in the case that the Golden Globes does something idiosyncratic, it should be taken as a fluke.

The Golden Globe nominees in the comedy film category have included Patch Adams, There's Something About Mary, The Tourist, Alice in Wonderland (the Tim Burton version), Analyze This and Sydney Pollack's highly forgettable remake of Sabrina. No one else has followed suit in honoring any of those films and I suspect no one has even rented these films from Blockbuster..errr, I mean Netflix

Adams also points out that it's rare for a show to dominate critical buzz early, but it's worth pointing out that 30 Rock (which really was a juggernaut in its first season), Arrested Development, Modern Family all won in their first year of Emmys eligibility, and the Office won in its second season after a first season that was just six episodes.

Now, let's talk about Brooklyn Nine Nine:


The show makes sense from a dollars-and-sense perspective. Andy Samberg is pretty hot coming off a highly visible 7-year SNL run and Mike Schur (Brooklyn Nine Nine's co-creator) was able to custom-cater a hit smash to ex-SNL cast member Amy Poehler's comic persona with "Parks and Recreation."

The problem with trying to do the same for Andy Samberg is that Samberg was never a particularly capable live performer (a decent impressionist at times, I admit) and that capturing lightning in a bottle for Samberg would involve taking over a great deal of Samberg's highly off-beat wackiness with him. To try to  put Samberg into any sort of straight sitcom is problematic from the start.

On top of that, Schur chose to make Samberg a cop, and not just a cop, but a homicide detective. Why they picked the most clichéd setting in TV show history as a vehicle for a comic actor who no one would ever picture as a police detective is beyond me.

Samberg is wacky beyond compare here and lacks a straight man to balance him out.

A straight-funny man dichotomy requires someone grounded in reality which is ironic because Greg Daniels and Mike Schur's first two series (The Office and Parks and Recreation) were known for their hyper-reality.

Take the example of 30 Rock:
Liz Lemmon is the straight man to everyone except in episodes where Tina is going a little bit off the rails and then Pete Hornberger acts as her straight man. As evidence of this, in episodes that don't feature Liz's neuroses, Pete has noticeably less screen time.

30 Rock tends to isolate their demented characters (the ubervain Tracy/Jenna duo, the ubermoral country bumpkin Kenneth, and the ubersnob Jack) and play them off the straight man. That doesn't necessarily mean that there aren't plenty of Tracy/Kenneth interactions but it means that the form of bizarreness is happening in isolation. When Tracy and Jenna are being self-centered showbiz type, it's usually countered with a strong balance by Liz or Pete reacting to Tracy and Jenna as if they're behavior is bizarre. Similarly, Liz (especially in Season 1) is highly stressed out by Jack because he's a bizarre boss making bizarre requests (like that episode where he misleads her into thinking he needs a great joke that night because he's wearing a tuxedo) is another example of bizarreness in isolation played against a straight man. In short, the straight-man-funny-man dichotomy on 30 Rock is one of very sharp contrasts (from 3 different sources) which is used to good effect.

Back to Brooklyn Nine Nine:
In Brooklyn Nine Nine, we have one character acting really bizarrely for a police detective rather than having a sharp contrast between him and the rest of the world, various characters like Boyle cheering him on and adding one liners on top of the mix, and characters like Diaz and Santiago who  join in sometimes and are sometimes dismissive of him for being an immature man-child. Boyle, in particular, is troubled, because he occupies an odd middle ground between class clown wannabe, shy guy, and straight man.

In short, there isn't a good distinction between the clowns and the straight men in this cast. Andre Braughter's character, Ray Holt, is a very grave and stern man. He almost works but a straight man isn't about being gravely serious to the point that where your grave seriousness is a comic trait.
A straight man, rather, is about bouncing off the funny in a way that establishes a comic baseline. Even if Holt were a perfect foil, so many of the characters are wacky, that it doesn't work. If we were to take Holt seriously, he'd have fired well over half the staff by the third episode which runs into the problem that we'd no longer have a show. 

On top of that, we'd have Chelsea Peretti who's a brilliant cloud cuckoolander in that she's so bizarre but she doesn't mesh well with the rest of the cast. The upside is that Peretti would kill on any other show with that character and I look forward to seeing that happen if this show gets cancelled.

What's the net effect of this? Som might point out that even if there's not a good straight man, characters are still saying funny things and since we're all still laughing, isn't that the point of a comedy? I'd argue it renders any attempt at pathos or sentimentality ineffective because I'm taken out of the realism completely which keeps it from being a show who's characters I want to follow week in and week out.

Top 10 of the Year in TV

My annual Top Ten of the Year in TV:
1. Homeland, Showtime 
The write-up for my #1 show typically has to be insightful and substantial so I'm going to wax a little poetic here and start with a quote from a forward to the book "The Manchurian Candidate" by Louis Menand:
"The secret to making a successful thriller, as Michael Crichton and Tom Clancy have demonstrated, is to slow down the action occasionally with disquisitions on Stuff It Is Interesting to Know- how airplanes are made, how nuclear submarines work, how to build an atomic bomb. Ideally, this information is also topical, food for the public's hunger of the hour."

Although Menand is not writing about "Homeland", he is saying that a great thriller should 1) tap into the zeitgeist and 2) include some howstuffworks.com-type content as a hook. But here's the catch: Topical films and television rarely capture the zeitgeist of the times without seeming like a rehashed newsreel. This is why so many war-related films (i.e. "Rendition", "The Kingdom", "Redacted", "Lions for Lambs") failed in 2007 when the war was in full swing. Homeland is a rare exception where I'm entirely hooked by a show about something I'm already sick to death of hearing on the news about. The acting by Lewis, Danes, and Patinkin is phenomenal, the characters are engaging, and the show keeps suspense going without seeming as though the cliffhangers are cheaply inserted. The show's "hook" is the insider look at CIA interrogations and terrorist watches but it branches into medicine, politics, and even throws in a Douglas Sirkian melodrama for good measure.

2. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, FX
I continue to find it astounding just how many layers this show can reveal around its five characters Clues are being dropped around us over time, but there's still room for our preconceptions to be challenged as we learn that Dennis wasn't as popular in high school as he thought or that Charlie's mom was a whore. At the same time, Sunny has such fun with dysfunction. Mac had daddy issues, Mac was fat, now Mac's a repressed gay, does it really matter? I don't know the answer to that but I'm having fun than ever trying to figure it out. The show is so comedically strong that many a scene can be lifted verbatim and, as a stand-alone sketch, it would be funnier than what you'd see on Saturday Night Live. "The Gang Dines Out", which had the makings of a stageplay, was one of the best episodes of TV I've seen all year. Ditto for "Charlie and Dee Find Love" which teased us with a rewrite of the character bible on Charlie (as someone who will never stray from the waitress) and the "Maureen Ponderosa Wedding Massacre" which added a horror component, more of the McPoyles and a cameo by Guillermo del Toro of all people. As of late, it's getting more apparent that the characters truly love each other which has led to a few more happy endings and that puts a smile on my face more than it compromises the show.

3. Boardwalk Empire, HBO (Note: I've watched Season 2 which goes up to half of 2012 but not the latest episodes)-Steve Buscemi's Nucky Thompson is anything but the burly man that you picture as the patriarch of a big crime organization, and that's what makes him so interesting. Starting out as more of a pencil pusher who cut corners and tried to keep the peace, Thompson has become a fascinating study in squirming your way to the top. Unlike other mob dramas, Boardwalk Empire has the added challenge of being a historic artifact. We know where Al Capone, Lucky Luciano and Nucky Thompson are going to end up, but that doesn't detract from the journey. Boardwalk Empire weaves together a number of interesting storylines and more often than not, the characters- Kelly McDonald as practical Irish immigrant who's moral purity slowly wilts in a marriage to a criminal, Gretchen Mol as a randy young grandmother who knows how to  play the angles, Michael Shannon as the Fed determined to stay within tracking distance of the bootlegging operation, Jack Huston as a gentle soul of a gangster with a disfigured face, and Michael Kenneth Williams as the criminal leader of the black community who can intimidate but knows his limits- do not disappoint. Season two succeeds in creating a more tightly coiled narrative arc with tension rising as Nucky and Jimmy head towards an inevitable showdown.

4. Suburgatory, ABC-Emily Kapnek's show isn't revolutionary by any means but it is the show watching and rewatching more than practically anything else. It has a unique voice and a sharp script. More importantly, the show has a vastly underrated cast with supporting actors (Cheryl Hines, Rex Lee, Chris Parnell, Alan Tudyk, Ana Gasteyer) who do exactly what supporting actors should do and more.  The show also gets a surprising amount of milage for its visual gags and is one of the few instances of voiceover that adds something. The show posits two urban transplants into a foreign suburban world and in that mismatch, sharp satire is added.

5. American Horror Story, FX-In both seasons, Brad Falchuk and Ryan Murphy have managed to create a compelling arc using the horror story homage. The show has a no-holds-barred sense of grandiosity. Nazi doctors and devious nuns not enough? How about aliens, demon possessions, and mutated monsters for you. In Season Two, things got a little excessive but they never got predictable. In Lana (Sarah Paulson), Kit (Evan Peters), and Shelley (Chloe Sevigny), the show's given us three characters to desperately want to see get out of this mess alive. Following a star performance in 2011,
Jessica Lange manages to patch together an otherwise shoddily written part and create a more nuanced character that could otherwise just be evil with a capital "E." Lily Rabe (whose career I am now going to make it a point to watch) and Joseph Fiennes were highly compelling, and while I was highly disappointed with the direction the show took Zach Quinto's character, he was one of the high points of the show before [SPOILERS AHEAD] it was revealed he was a psychopathe. With Quinto suddenly morphing into Skylar from Heroes (counterbalanced slightly be Sister Mary Eunice now being the only good guy in authority, the show needs at least one), I'm not thrilled with where the show stands now, but it's the unpredictable nature of AHS and the interesting directions the show has taken that gives me faith that the ship will either be righted or will at least leave me surprised.

6. The Guild, YouTube-An unabashed celebration of nerd culture and the banding together of six highly diverse misfits who initially never meant anything to each other except as anymous screennames to go on gaming quests with. Each season has succeeded in raising the stakes for the characters and developing them further. This season saw Codex get a job with the game and Vork head the protest movement. Felicia Day can play the violin, work a crowd at comic con, act, and is a talented writer as well. America's next great hyphenate in the making.


7. 30 Rock, NBC-How I will miss this show and wish I was kinder to it every year on my top 10 list. The show might have lost its novelty factor somewhere in the middle but it's never failed at being funny in ways both brilliant and gut-wrenching. This season, the show took on the election with "Mayor Dunston Checks In" and a satire of the presidential debates in which Jack and Liz debate for Jenna's tweeting power. Both were topical without overdoing it. Other reasons why 30 Rock had a great year: Kenneth finally got some forward movement and was hillarious as a member of the  Standards and Practices, Hazel (although this will be debated) was a great addition, the wonderfully vain Avery Jessup returned to turn the 30 Rock universe upside down for a few episodes before unfortunately departing again, and the 30 Rock staff scored two of their biggest successes of the year in improving on two of their past experiements: Queen of Jordan and The Live Show.

8. 30 for 30, ESPN-The series of documentaries launched by ESPN, currently in its second round, is a perfect compliment to the ESPN brand. More than that, the series of documentaries made by seasoned filmmakers is just what's needed to revive a genre of storytelling (sports reporting) that has become stale through heavy repitition. I caught 9.79, Broke, and Ghosts of Ole Miss, and think they could all work as stand-alone films in wide release.

9. Alphas, SyFy-Procedurals rarely hook me but in this show, each mystery of the week helps develop the show and the characters. The special effects are top-notch and the action scenes are both physical and intellectual: The intersection of the characters' powers often play out like a game of chess. The show also works well because of the chemistry. David Strathain's Dr. Lee Rosen works well as a father figure to the group, Rachel and Nina have an intriguing budding relationship as surrogate sisters, and with Ryan Cartwright's Gary Bell, the show deserves credit for not treating autism as though it has kid gloves.

10. Lilyhammer, Netflix-The show's one big flaw is allowing it's protagonist to have become inexplicably powerful too quickly and too easily. Other than that, Lilyhammer has an excitingly well-defined sense of place. Because it's filmed by a Norweigan production company (in collaboration with Steve van Zandt), it goes without saying that watching this show transports you to another world. The cast of characters is wonderfully sharp and I get the strong sense that there's potential of better things to come in Season 2.

10 Honorable Mentions:
Mindy Project, Fox-My review of it is written somewhere else. Don't necessarily think Mindy's a star, but the show is capable of hitting a few emotional chords, and the supporting cast and infrastructure of relationships are both solid.
Little Mosque on the Prairie, CBC-Just as how the Cosby Show eased racial tension by showing how a black family wasn't that different than white middle-class Americans, Little Mosque could do the same in America if people watch it on Hulu.
Go On, NBC-An interesting show with a daring mix of sediment and character-based quirkiness. Sedimental shows run a high risk of disappointing but that's not even half the battle here.
Vegas, CBS-Of the two episodes, I've seen so far, the show definitely has potential. Las Vegas is always an exciting locale to set a drama but historical Vegas has a little something extra to it and I'm excited to see where that goes 
Portlandia, IFC-The show, which made my Top 10 last year, sticks out pretty strongly for its innovation.
Key and Peele, Comedy Central-Mad TV had a few bright spots when these two were on screen so it's a good thing these two have carved out a more specific niche for themselves in the sketch comedy world
Breaking Bad, AMC-I've only watched two or three episodes. It's inclusion on the list is only so I don't get my license revoked as a TV blogger.
Unsupervised, FX-Most underrated cartoon of the year. It's got wonderful characters, it's feel good and disgusting.
Modern Family, ABC-A still solid half-hour comedy. I am certain that out of order, these episodes will kill in syndication.
Bunheads, ABC Family-I never was a Gilmore Girls fan, so when I came at this show at a fresh angle, I was delighted by what I saw.


For reference, here is what I watched: 2 Broke Girls, 4 to 9ers, 666 Park Avenue, Alcatraz (just one ep.), American Dad, Bent, Big Bang Theory, Bob's Burgers, Brickleberry, Chelsea Lately, Comedy Bang Bang, Daily Show, Don't Trust the Bitch in Apt. 23, Eastbound and Down (one ep.), Family Guy, Futurama, Glee, Good Chrisitan Bitches, House of Lies, Last Resort, Librarians, Louie (a couple eps.) Luck (one ep.), MAD,  Merlin (although episodes date to 2008), Misfits, New Girl, The Neighbors, The New Normal, Office, Parks and Recreation, Revenge (Again, not sure what year I watched this),  Saturday Night Live, Scandal, Shameless (two episodes), Smash, Up All Night (I think? Can't remember exactly if it was 11 or 12), Vampire Diaries,  Walking Dead

Playing GM of television: 2010-2011 Season

I saw this post by Andy Daglas the other day, in which he plays out a hypothetical scenario wherein he can trade TV characters from show to show as if he were a sports GM.
http://www.chicagonow.com/the-vast-wasteland/2011/12/hot-stove-tv/

1.    Sheila Shay (Ana Gasteyer) from Suburgatory to Revenge in exchange for Nolan Ross

Ana Gasteyer will fit right into the Hamptons and imbue the melodrama with a little bit of humor. Nolan Ross will move across the street in Sheila's place and give Tessa a more competent partner-in-crime than the overly affable Malick. Against the monotoned Dahlia and the Dahlia-like girls at her new school, Tessa needs all the help she can get.

2.      Tate (Evan Peters) from American Horror Story gets sent to In Treatment in exchange for Adele (Amy Ryan). Constance (Jessica Lange) gets loaned out.

Tate needs someone effective to help cure his problems. Ben (Dylan McDermott) clearly can’t do the trick and is secretly enabling Tate’s ghost-murdering ways. On Dr. Paul’s (Gabriel Bryne's) turf, Tate will finally get fixed and if you throw Constance in for a few guest spots, it’ll be a fun family session. 

In the meantime, Dr. Ben needs some help himself. The striking Adele will jump in and fix the damage and, yes, the two will probably either bang or have an emotional affair, but that's the best thing that can happen to him. His marriage to his wife is clearly in trouble. His first thought when his wife wanted to move because of possible ghost sightings was to throw her in an institutionalize her. 

 3.      Annie, Senor Chang, and Pierce get sent from Community to Glee in exchange for Sue Sylvester and Quinn Fabray (pre-wheelchair)

Abed and Troy need a more superficial and acerbic girl (possibly one who they might have more sexual tension with) to pal around with. With the temptation of Annie out of the way, Jeff doesn’t get the scarlett letter for bedding a barely legal coed, and Annie, as a peppy student assistant to Mr. Schu, gets better storylines to people closer her age. Plus, most of the guys will have crushes on her and the potential shipping combinations will be mind-boggling.

Meanwhile, Sue is getting tiring with her redundancy in trying to destroy the Glee club. As a pregnant P.E. teacher, she becomes the gang’s new nemesis, while Pierce boasts an attribute even deadlier than what Sue had: Crankiness. He won't even let Mr. Schu get through half a song without telling him to shut up, throwing some old-timey racist insult at one of his students, and boring them with stories. 

Lastly, Sr. Chang will be Michael’s crazy uncle who will have a Holly-Holliday-like 3-episode arc as Mr. Schu’s substitute upon a bad case of food poisoning. Chang gets fired once it’s discovered that he doesn’t have substitute teacher credentials but it will have been a fun ride.

4. 3-Way Trade: Jonothan Ames (Jason Schwartzman) of Bored to Death goes to Community, the rights to  John Goodman go to The Office, and Ryan Howard and Kevin Malone go to Bored to Death

Community needs a nerdy intellectual guy like Ames for a foil. A professor a few years younger then Jeff Winger who thinks he's six times smarter than him will irk Jeff. He'll also majorly crush on Britta and never ever get anywhere close to winning over her affections.

I don't want whatever character John Goodman plays to go over to The Office but just John Goodman and his comedic gifts and allow the Office writing staff the opportunity to mold a good character for him. I've never been in love with Goodman but I think with his bellowing, hefty frame, he could be a tough guy akin to Idris Elba's character and I could trust him to restrain the manic unpredictable energy that the writers have tried to infuse every manager with post-Michael Scott (Will Ferrell is an unusually bad example).

Lastly, maybe the only guy in the Scranton branch of Dunder-Mifflin with a master's degree needs to figure out what to do with himself since he can't be a temp forever and still is too fearful of going to Thailand. So he moves to this hipster enclave of Brooklyn where people get him and works on writing a tell-all novel about his rise and fall from temp to CEO to temp again of the world's zaniest paper company. And the show goes all meta- because he will meet Steve Carell and Greg Daniels and try to persuade them to star in a TV show based on his book. Kevin Malone will also, by some coincidence too crazy for me to even come up with a plausible explanation for (although the Office writer's room will know how to handle this perfectly, transitions of power that make no sense seem to be their specialty lately), end up in Brooklyn too where he will reunite with long-lost brother Zach Galifianakis.

5. Twofer from 30 Rock gets traded to New Girl in exchange for Winston, Frank from 30 Rock gets traded to Don't Trust the B--- in Apartment 23 in exchange for Eli

I'd hate to see Winston leave the gang, but realistically, the chemistry between the other three is strongest, and the fussy Twofer might bring in a little more of a clash with the other roommates. Can you imagine the hidden resentment a law school dropout like Nick would have for a guy with the command of the English language that Twofer has? Winston wouldn't be the complete antithesis of Tracy Jordan that Twofer was designed to be. He wouldn't be the polar opposite of Tracy, but he'd add a lot of life and personality to the 30 Rock writers room

Meanwhile, Frank was born to play the combination  tambourine-playing health-inspecting simultaneously-creepy-and-non-threatening guy next door that Eli currently inhabits and Eli is the perfect compliment to Jenna who needs a stalker on top of his game.

6. Free agent Josh (Lonny Ross) from 30 Rock gets picked up by Up All Night

I've only seen two episodes of Up All Night, but it's a show about a TV show and Josh and his sex addict of an agent need another crack at a television show, so Josh becomes faux-Oprah's sidekick

7. Howard and Raj get traded from Big Bang Theory to 2 Broke Girls in exchange for Oleg and Han Lee. Stuart will be signed to a full-season contract.

Two Broke Girls has two strong leads with two appalling secondary characters while Big Bang Theory has...er, well, basically the same thing, but what if we could take Howard and Raj and exchange them for walking stereotypes Oleg and Han-Lee. As Daglas pointed out when he made an almost idential trade, said, we need a Lenny and Squiggy for this Laverne and Shirley. I don't think Oleg, Han Lee, Howard or Raj combined could equal one Squiggy in terms of mating desirability, but Raj and Howard would be a massive improvement over Oleg and Han Lee. Raj would keep his mouth shut a lot more than Oleg, and Howard would come onto the girls plenty, but at least Max will know how to handle him. She'll probably punch his lights out, which is what Howard would need. The caveat, Howard has to break up with Bernadette (maybe temporarily).

In the meantime, Han Lee will put a face on the restaurant that the guys and Penny order their Chinese food every other night, while Oleg will serve as the pervy landlord super.

Because you'll need to round out the gang, comic book geek Stuart will return to school to get a higher degree and become a lab assistant and fill out the three's lunch table conversations.




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Brief reviews of Parks and Recreation, 30 Rock, and Outsourced tonight

Hey Guys, I'm going to drift off to sleep very soon, so this will be a somewhat loosely written and sloppy reflection on my thoughts of tonight's episodes.
Check out Top 10 Websites:
bit.ly/eDIrB1

Parks and Recreation:
Last week, Parks and Rec disappointed me by focusing so heavily on the dating lives of Ann and Leslie that I started to feel like the show was becoming a romantic comedy. Fortunately, things cooled down a little this week as we got classic Leslie buffoonery.

Leslie is starting to remind me pretty heavily of that other quintessential TV comedienne whose name starts with an "L": Lucille Ball. In fact, didn't Lucy Ricardo have at least one episode per season in which she tried to break into Ricky's show while sick? My colleague Cory Barker at TVsurveillance.com wrote that Parks and Recreation is already better than The Office (I don't know if I'd go that far) in part because Leslie is a lovable character that we root for, whereas Michael Scott is inconsistently written.

Moving on, Leslie's determination to give the speech was almost a red herring. It wasn't really about whether Leslie would succeed at the speech but what kind of working relationship Leslie would have with Ben and, to a lesser extent, Tom. Ben proved that he'd stand up for her and that he could be counted on and Tom proved otherwise which stayed consistent with what we already know about him. The plot device was entirely meaningless and treated as such: The money was raised despite the fact that she essentially screwed up big.

P&R is essentially about a strong group of friends at a workplace and that ensemble is rounding out nicely. I'm glad that the cast was tweaked to add some new blood. I only hope that Rob Lowe and Adam Scott weren't bought in just to provde romantic "solutions" to Leslie and Anne. Some notes:

-I have seen Rob Lowe in millions of things. He's a ubiquitous actor who finds his way into Aaron Sorkin dramas, Mike Myer comedies and everything in between. His character on Parks and Recration, however, is the first time I've ever seen him act. I'm very impressed

-It's to P&R's great credit that they navigated through a lose-lose situation by giving him some sort of girlfriend figure at the moment but still not taking away what amounts to an inferiority complex. Tom still is jealous of Ron for dating his significantly hotter ex-wife and he also has that same ineffective desire to please with the guys at the spa. It's both a step foward for Tom but it's not enough of a step foward that he isn't essentially a sad figure.

-I still have no idea why everyone's so crazy about Ron Swanson. It seems, based on reviews I'm reading, that he's already become an iconic character who's transcended the popularity of the show itself. Hell, I don't even know why Tom's ex-wife is even interested in her. I have no problem with adoration for Ron Swanson and Nick Offerman. I do, however, feel that Audrey Plaza is the ensemble darkhorse of the show and just hope those on Team Ron are throwing a little love for Team April too.

-Still undecided about the Andy and April relationship. I don't think it has long-term potential and I suspect most viewers don't. Thus, the question is: Are we rooting for a mistake to be made?

30 Rock:
The Tracy-Liz relationship has been one that existed in an uneasy state of equilibrium but it's generally been a constant. Tracy is annoying as Hell and he would drive most people insane. But Liz puts up with it and that's a big key to the show.

Let me explain: It's part of the framework of the show that this star-studded universe is askew and that chracters like Tracy, Jack, and Jenna exhibit alarmingly unacceptable behavior and Liz gets only a little annoyed as if dealing with mildly irritating colleagues like these is just part of a normal workday and she's supposed to grin and bear it.

If one were to call Liz a straight man, they'd be misidentifying her. A real straight man would be a character like Queen Latifah's congresswoman who walks in there and immediately notices that this workplace is full of extremely abnormal people. The fact that Liz reacts with just a little irritation rather than a genuine fear that someone like Tracy is diabolically insane and the business decisions of the entire NBC programming department is in the hands of someone who makes such irrational decisions (seriously, listen closely to Jack's lines) is what makes this universe work.

With that in mind:
Liz blowing up at Tracy is not consistent with the tone to date. It might be a very realistic course of action if the show were a realistic one but I found it a little jarring.

That being said, 30 Rock's strengths were in plain view tonight. When it comes to satirizing the norms of show business, 30 Rock pushes the envelope better than anyone and you know that the writers have a particularly sharp set of surgical tools with which to pick at their target. Liz and Tracy arguing through the song "Uptown Girls" so the reality show producer couldn't film it was one of the most clever scenes I've seen in a sitcom in ages. (Side note: How meta that Billy Joel probably will get money off of it)

I also had the observation tonight about 30 Rock that I can't think of any other show on television that's better line-for-line. When 30 Rock goes for a joke, it's a multi-layered piece of art. Lines of dialogue are beautifully inverted and subtly placed between seemingly ordinary sentences so when you catch it, it's a hidden treasure. There are a million examples of this but Jack said as the credits closed, "We haven't had ratings this good since that episode of SVU where the detectives watched American Idol." Is that not one of the most brilliant lines of dialogue you've ever heard? I will admit that 30 Rock had a drop in quality in Seasons 3 and 4, but that attention to crafting brilliant jewels and subtly inserting them into every line of dialogue they could is something that never waned. This convinces me very strongly that the writer's room is not full of lazy people.

Last but not least:
Outsourced: The episode was typical Outsourced which was pretty good for a show in its first season. With the strength of Parks and 30 Rock tonight, it was easy to not appreciate it as much (in fact, most other critics have already written the show off entirely) but there was some nice things to appreciate.

There were two pretty good twists I didn't see coming. The introduction of the other lover and the backfiring of Rajiv's plan. I thought the plan would backfire but I didn't see it backfiring that way. Falling into predictable sitcom formulas in the first season is the biggest indication (to me, at least) that a show is going nowhere, so I take this as a good sign.

The episode introduced different pairings too which is the kind of thing Community would do in the first season a lot en route to becoming a cult favorite.

But, let's talk about the big development: Charlie finally found out about Todd and Tanya. It's about time. Also, Tanya is looser than I thought. It was a nice moment of resolution and I think the joke was dragged out long enough.

Guest Stars Part II: Sunny and 30 Rock

This is the second edition of me taking an extensive look at notable guest stars that have appeared on TV shows I watch. I define notable as someone who I recognize when looking at the critics or watching the show so it's a subjective thing. As usual, any corrections or additions to the list are greatly appreciated. More importantly don't hesitate to weigh in.

Legend:
* means appeared as Self
^ means that they appeared in more than one role
Bold means Recurring Character


30 Rock:
Adam Levine*, Al Gore*, Alan Alda, Andy Richter, Ben Bailey*, Betty White*, Bill Hader, Brian Williams*, Brian Stack (Conan O'Brien), Brian McCann (Conan O'Brien), Buzz Aldrin*, Carrie Fisher, Conan O’Brien*, Cheyenne Jackson, Chris Parnell, David Schwimmer, Edie Falco, Elaine Stritch, Elizabeth Banks, Elvis Costello*, Emily Mortimer, Horatio Sanz, Isabella Rosselini, James Rebhorn, Jennifer Anniston, Jerry Seinfeld*, Jimmy Fallon*, John Bon Jovi*, John McEnroe*, John Slattery, Julia Louis-Dreyffus, Julianne Moore, Lonny Ross, Matt Damon, Megan Mullally, Meredith Viera*, Michael Sheen, The entire cast of "Night Court", Oprah Winfrey, Padma Lakshi* (Top Chef), Paul Giamatti, Paul Scheer, Paul Reubens, Rachel Dratch^, Rob Huebel, Rob Reiner*, Rip Torn, Sean Hayes, Selma Hayek, Sherri Shepherd, Steve Buscemi, Wayne Brady, Will Arnett, Will Forte^, Whoopi Goldberg

Summary: 30 Rock can affectionately be called a "Stunt Casting Whore." When the show's on, no one seems to mind but it was a different story when the show started slumping in Season three. The show's detractors must at least be jealous that 30 Rock's casting department is able to pull practically anyone out of a hat: Oprah Winfrey, Julianne Moore, Matt Damon and Paul Giamatti are likely very busy people with very little need to guest star on a TV show.

Whether you love or hate 30 Rock for the stunt casting. It's hard to argue that guest stars aren't used well on 30 Rock. Random celebrities like personalities like Buzz Aldrin, Jon Bon Jovi, Rob Reiner, Elvis Costello John McEnroe, Padma Lakshi, and Betty White (this was about a year before she became an Internet meme) seem to come out of nowhere in relatively inconsequential roles. Al Gore, Brian Williams, and Carrie Fisher have never satirized their own personalities so effectively as on this show.

Highlight: So hard to choose from this list, but here's a top 5 (in no particular order):
1. Elizabeth Banks-In Banks's Avery Jessup, Jack has found a counterpart that's equally nutty which means that Jack's vitriolic nature isn't going to be softened by the mushy romantic comedy plots that (in my opinion) sank much of the show's 3rd and 4th seasons.
2. David Schwimmer-Absolutely hilarious as an egotistical-actor-turned-rogue-environmentalist.
3. Paul Reubens-Played the last surviving heir to the Hapsburg Dynasty and a genetic monstrosity due prolonged in-breeding. His performance alone made
4. Wayne Brady-A bad date that Liz couldn't break up with due to accusations of racism. His hobbies included "Vietnam War reenactments, blogging about Star Wars (not the movie but the Reagan-era initiative) and taking pictures of doors."
5. Chris Parnell-Dr. Leo Spaceman has become a fan favorite for his unique brand of medical incompetence.

Check out this article on how 30 Rock's Characters Represent the Epic Struggle of Art vs Commerce


It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia:
Notable Guest Stars:
Anne Archer, Autumn Reeser, Catherine Reitman, Chad Coleman, Dave Foley, David Huddleston, Dennis Haskins, Jason Sudeikis, Judy Greer, Lynn Marie Stewart, Mary Lynn Rujskab, Melanie Lynskey, Nora Dunn, Patricia Belcher, Rene Auberjonois, Rob Thomas*, Sinbad*, Stephen Collins, Suzy Nakamura.

Summary: Over the course of 67 episodes, "Sunny" doesn't have a particularly notable roster of people to come through the show. This is somewhat curious because Danny DeVito is so well-connected. In fact, the show's two biggest hit characters are people with personal connections to the show: Mary Elizabeth Ellis (The Waitress) is Charlie Day's wife and Bruce Hornsby (Rickety Cricket) is a long-time friend of the gang and a story consultant for the show. Additionally, the target of Dennis in the "DENNIS System" episode, Jill Latiano, was Glenn Howerton's real-life fiancee. There is a relatively steady stream of guest stars week in and week out but a lot of them are under the radar.

It's also interesting to note that the guest star is never at the center of the episode on "Sunny." In his recent appearance, Jason Sudeikis probably had the most screentime for a guest star so far and that's because he was temporarily part of the gang themselves. Guest stars usually have the thankless task of responding with bafflement to the gang's unique style of conversation.

Highlights: Due to the way he defined the role on "Newsradio," Dave Foley is considered the archetypal straight man but he was a little underused in his role as a school principal who made a massive error in judgement by hiring Charlie and Dee. For my personal favorite one-time guest star, however, I'll go with Saturday Night Live alum Nora Dunn. She plays Frank's sister-in-law who responds disapprovingly as Mac and Frank both try to pick her up at her husband's funeral.

The Waitress and Rickety Cricket are fan favorites but I would probably choose Brian Unger's performance as the lawyer as my favorite long-term character. It's already enough of an accomplishment alone that he's able to play a foil to the gang (particularly Charlie) without seeming vindictive or overly dislikable in the process. Half the time, the lawyer is overly stressed and wants them to go away and half the time, he relishes going toe-to-toe with the gang and besting them. I didn't particularly care for how he was used in "The Gang Gets Divorced" (he seemed a little vindicitive to want to financially destroy Dennis when Mac was the one that drunk-dialed), but on the basis of the first two episodes alone, I'm pretty impressed.

I didn't list Unger as a notable guest star because I didn't recognize his name. His background is quite interesting: He's produced segments for the Daily Show, served as a commentator on NPR and written for The Washington Post and Minneapolis star Tribune; and he's served as a host for series on The Discovery Channel and PBS.




Coming up on the next edition: Boston Public, Mad About You, Newsradio, Community, or possibly Heroes. Whatever strikes my fancy

Review of this past Thursday in TV

Originally, this was gonna be the whole past week in television but time constraints prevented that. The five grades are all very high but last week they would have been significantly lower (The Office and Community last week both dissapointed me, for example). Also, every other show I saw this week (Running Wilde, Castle, No Ordinary Family and Modern Family) was a lower grade and I just didn't have time to get to those shows.


30 Rock “Reaganism” A
A-Plot: Jack is having a perfect day and comes up with some ninth-inning challenges he needs to fix (mainly in the form of Liz’s love life) to be able to keep his hot streak rolling
B-Plot: Jenna convinces Kenneth to assist in scamming a Caravel Ice Cream shop and creates a monster in the process (Kelsey Grammar guests here in a wonderful role)
C-Plot: Tracy can’t do a commercial to save his life

The difference between a great 30 Rock episode and the kind of episode that makes you mourn the old days of 30 Rock isn’t much at all. This wasn’t a big gimmicky week like last week’s live show, but they had a pair of solid storylines to start out with and infused them with great anarchic fun. The C-plot of Tracy Jordan messing up a TV commercial was Tracy being unleashed in a way that we haven’t seen him in a while.
Fun fact: Tracy is what tvtropes.org calls a Cloud Cuckoolander

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia “Mac’s Mom Burns the House Down” A-
A-Plot: Charlie and Mac (along with Dennis) try to get their mothers to live together
B-Plot: Dee gets sick. Fearing she won’t take care of him when he gets older, Frank tries to be a good dad and tend to her
Best episode I’ve seen in a while and that was solely on the strength of an exceptionally well-executed A-plot (the B-plot was pretty forgettable). The episode really had some great misdirection. The opening title and the fact that 98% of the show’s episodes don’t end happily led me away from believing that Mrs. Mac and Mrs. Kelly would be able to coexist and that’s where the storyline would end up. You know what? An occasional happy ending not only doesn’t hurt, it was actually very sweet. And as an added bonus, the dog miraculously survived. Just when I thought the show couldn't bring me any more joy. The best part was that they didn’t have to sacrifice the show’s trademark nastiness to accomplish this. I also loved how Charlie and Mac were trying to fit their moms into an episode of Golden Girls.


Community: A-
Plot: Shirley decides to make a Christian film for anthropology class. Abed, the always-entrancing film student decides to one-up her by making an extravagant meta-film on Jesus’ life that’s ridiculously complex, sacreligious on many levels and self-serving (the film’s name is “Abed”). Shirley is infurated

If you’re one of those reviewers that likes using the word “meta” (as in meta-textual or self-referencing) then you are going to have a field day with this episode. It is probably the most “meta” thing ever put on film. It references Charlie Kaufman’s “Synecdoche, New York” so that automatically makes it one meta-level above that. This episode was definitely a thinking man’s episode but in reality it probably didn’t make any sense. It was just complete anarchy. The show ended up just getting profoundly silly in the best of ways because that silliness was built out of this façade of grandeur that was the Abed film. Abed is usually relegated to the sidelines as a sort of zany wild card character who delivers golden little nuggets. When an episode is centered around Abed, it’s always been a more typical sitcomy episode (i.e. Abed’s dad is displeased with his career choice, girl has crush on Abed but maybe he’s too weird to approach her) and the plot tones Abed’s quirkiness down considerably and fortunately, that wasn’t the case here. It was also a good episode for Shirley who I think is the most limited character of the gang. The minus on the A is because the ending seemed like a cop-out.

The Office: “The Sting” B+
Plot: Dunder-Mufflin sets up a surveillance operation to try to learn the secrets of a suave salesman who’s stolen a lot of their clients
B-Plot: Andy decides to form a band. Creative disagreements ensue with Andy and bandmates Kevin and Darryl.
Overarching Plot/Long-Term implications: Dunder-Mifflin hires a new traveling salesman

It was nice to see Jim and Dwight working together like they did in “Traveling Salesman” although they didn’t show much of it. I think, on a larger note, my main problem with the episode came down to timing. They should have ended the episode with the introduction of the new salesman and left the quarrels between Danny and his coworkers for another episode to keep the suspense. It would have also given more time for the hijinks that this episode really thrived on. This episode had a set piece that turned into one of the most memorable scenes “The Office” has done in years: Meredith poses as a manger and as Oscar and Ryan try to intercept her she thwarts each of their plans brilliantly. The show works so well (or at least used to work so well) on awkward tension and that segment of the episode had you glued to your seat. The band subplot was a little cliché and the payoffs weren’t that great but I did like the Andy-Darryl chemistry. In the past, Darryl has been somewhat aggressive (he was downright intimidating and villainous to Michael in the first season’s basketball episode) so I'm glad to see an improvement there.

Outsourced: B+
Plot: Todd is accused of sexual harassment but he doesn’t know by whom

The sexual harassment episode is a staple (and if it isn’t, it should be one) because we’ve all seen that sexual harassment video and giggled at the lame acting. In India, as would be expected, the results were far different. It was pretty admirable to take that shared awkwardness we get when we watch the sexual harassment video and make a pretty solid episode out of it. The episode reminded me of how “Outsourced” isn’t getting the credit it deserves. Todd’s efforts to single out his accuser made for hilarious results that reminded me of actors improvising in an Adam McKay movie. The show’s good characters got better: Rajiv’s passive-aggressiveness was sprinkled in at the right places to punch up the tension with humor and Asha and Todd had some good moments. It’s becoming easy to see why Todd would mistakenly fall for Asha: She’s smart and relatable and to this guy who’s lost in this foreign land, she feels less foreign than anyone else. The lesser characters also had their moments: Gupta was used as a punch line as usual (the joke Manmeet made towards Gupta about him bringing shame to his family was awkward, but I might accept at as a cultural difference) but it ended with Manmeet making a nice gesture which shows that there’s hope for Gupta (at least for the other characters) and the shy girl (Madhuri) was used very well.

How 30 Rock Lost my Dad and the Implications Therein

First off, I finally got around to posting a new column at the examiner where I write about the film industry: Jackass 3-D: A Deserving Box Office Champ or the Decline of Civillization. Do please check it out, because that's my professional outlet and my job is to get readers on that site (not this one, even if I'm spending more time here).

Second, thank you to a number of friends who supported me and expressed interest in me when I told the news that I was being considered for an A.V. Club position.

I recently had the experience of watching 30 Rock a couple weeks ago with a somewhat culturally outdated man (my dad-a guy I love and apologize to in advance for ragging on) who was unaware until then that any good TV has come on the air since "Frasier" and "Seinfeld." His sensibilities were trained for laugh-track TV and I could tell that he was disoriented by the lack of a laugh-track and unprepared to give the show’s funny moments the benefit of the doubt unless something hit him in a familiar way as laugh-out loud funny. The end result was that he laughed less than I thought he would.

It was also a little bit of an off-week. When 30 Rock reverts to the same “Liz’s love life is awry” or “Tracy goes crazy” plots, the humor can get tired and stale. Last night was a better episode. Laughwise, it would have worked on my dad but it also would have worked on me (wait, it didn’t theoretically work on me, it did work on me because I was there. Sorry, getting my tenses confused) and rewarded me more on second-viewing. Last night’s 30 Rock worked in so many ways that it reminded me of that feeling I had in the first two seasons of watching a masterpiece unfold.

In the larger sense, I thought the “Reaganism” analogy was lame but the idea of Jack having a perfect day (without the term “Reaganing it” that they coined for this episode) lent itself to hilarity and two things about the episode felt inspired to me: 1) The way Jack fixed Liz’s psychosexual problem was so bizarre that it was more a satire on psychology than something to be taken at face value. It came off to me as a parody of the Hitchkock movie “Spellbound” but I have a feeling that the writers weren’t even thinking of "Spellbound" and were just going for general zaniness and 2) I loved the idea of rich movie stars jumping on board a scheme to rob Caravel ice cream of hundreds of dollars. It slowly pushed the boundaries of believability until it slid right out from under our feet.

But I want to focus more on the things I got when I viewed the show a second time. Some of those things were:
-“Let’s take a quick 500” which came off another zinger “Scripts get in the way of my process, Shawn. Let’s just shoot 100 of these and see what we get”: There is so much to admire things in these combined three lines. It demonstrates two of Tracy’s character traits extremely well: 1) He’s selfish and is a pain to everyone around him (his director is already bitter at him for messing up his last movie) but he’s oblivious to this trait which makes him likeable and 2) Even though he’s clearly insane, he has a consistency to it (if he needs 100 takes to nail one line, he’s going to also need 500 minutes of rest). I also love the way “quick” proceeds “500” as if there’s any way to “quickly” proceed about a stoppage of work that runs eight hours and fifteen minutes longer than the industry standard.
-“Could you put a human on the phone?” It took me until a second viewing to realize Kenneth was, in fact, talking to an animal. Humor really makes me laugh sometimes by getting me to ask hypotheticals. I’m right now thinking: Exactly how is an animal going to put a human on the phone and will that break Kenneth’s illusion that an animal can listen to him when the animal fails to abide by his request?
-Also on the hypothetical note….this one’s more obvious “You did it sir…a day of perfect problem solving….gifts have been coming in all over” This is funny because your mind goes to so many hypotheticals such as how people can be sending him gifts so quickly, how people can possibly know about his perfect day, etc…..
-“A couple hundred dollars [Is all you need]? I can help you out but first I’m gonna need $50 to get started” –Kelsey Grammar in a wonderful guest role
“Yes, you are the sexual equivalent of a million Hindenburgs, but….”-Jack, on a good day, comforting Liz
-“Forget it, I didn’t have a perfect day” –This wasn’t so much the line itself but the way Alec Baldwin said it with the gravity of Jack Bauer on “24”
-“Slip and falls”: The vernacular for the con-game Jenna and her mom used to play at grocery stores.
-“I don’t understand what you’re saying, but I like that it has the word ‘we’ in it” Evidently, this is all it takes to ask Kenneth to betray a moral code so strong that he was willing to shoot himself rather than adhere to lifeboat ethics.
-“I’ll do stuff with the dog, but I get to pick the dog.”–A soliciting prostitute who has her list of demands.

And most importantly this one because it leads to my next point:
-“I’m a real woman, not some oversexed nympho like those sluts from ‘Everybody Loves Raymond.’” 30 Rock often does this. They take a random sentence in the dialogue, play it entirely straight in delivery and put it in the context of an entire conversation or scene that isn’t particularly humorous except for one single substitution of one thing for another.

It’s almost as if they’re misleading you away from the laugh by stacking that one joke on either side with so much non-funny material. In the episode I saw with my dad, the A-plot was tied together with a dramatic confrontation scene between Jack Donaghy and a Queen Latifah’s congresswoman character. The final third of this line was the only humorous bit in the entire scene: “The first generation works their fingers to the bone making things, the next generation goes to college and innovates new ideas, the third generation snowboards and takes improv classes.” This was one of those things too subtle for my dad to get but I caught it.

This got me thinking: In order for someone like my dad (and he is a very smart guy, I don’t mean to be ragging on him so much) to be on board “30 Rock,” it would help if he got a lot more jokes on first viewing. Why would "30 Rock" want to lead its viewers away from the jokes? A laugh track would guide him towards the funny like a highlighted used-textbook might help a college student study.

Chuck Klosterman’s book “Eating the Dinasour” has an expose in it answering the question about why shows don’t use laugh tracks: It’s condescending to tell the audience when to laugh. It’s considered smarter and more sophisticated and that’s a good convention to follow. Shows that have laugh tracks tend to be “ghettoized” although there is room for a few of them on the schedule because occasionally older viewers (like my dad) like the nostalgic old-timey shows too.

Maybe it's important to consider that it's not pure nostalgia. In the interest of attracting a broad audience, laugh tracks have merit because they ensure that the better jokes hit their targets (AKA my dad). Remember that "30 Rock" is on a network that was so desperate to climb out of 3rd or 4th in the ratings that they displaced a third of their programming last year for a comic who by all accounts is mediocre simply because he attracts a broad audience. Having a comedy line-up entirely devoid of laugh track shows makes the lesser established shows ("Parks and Recreation," "Community," and "Outsourced") hard to distinguish from each other and sometimes invites unnecessary critical comparisons. I am actively rooting for every comedy NBC currently has to stay on the schedule so I'm not advocating going back to the drawing board. I am suggesting, however, that the newer comedies that might not be performing well in a critical or ratings sense, "Parks" and "Outsourced," do face unique challenges which we need to consider. I am also saying in the future: Don't rule out a show with a laugh track.

30 Rock back episodes: Audition Day and Stone Mountain

Audition Day A

This show was just cooky anarchy as Tracy and Jenna were recuriting gay and black people off the street, Brian Williams got in on the act, and more hijinks ensued. It was one single premise pushed to extremes: Open the auditions to one new person and the flodgates will come breaking open and they pushed it to extremes. It showed some of the brilliance the show was known for to keep holding our laughter and slowly remove us from reality as the show got more insane. The show also ended on the right twist.

Stone Mountain A-
Tracy was just the kind of off-the-wall bizarre plot that showed the ever-so-slight semblance to something in reality so that it plays on our perceptions of how celebrities might act. It's classic 30 Rock. It shows one character being a complete nut job but slowly reveals to him existing in a universe where other people in his world are equally as nutty. Betty White and Fallon are just as crazy as he is. That was great.

I thought the Liz and Jack plot was kind of the territory where some sort of moral argument or theme is presented through the disagreement between the two. The theme this week is whether such a thing as the real America exists in small towns: Usually it's the opposite where Jack is the cynic which I thought was a good change. Not as funny, and some of the gimmicks fell-flat, but it was a well-developed plot. Usually, the plots aren't that well-developed anyways.

The Jenna plot was the weakest of the three but not that bad. Reminded me too much of Parks and Recreations in that it was just a Halloween episode. It did give Lutz, Twofer, and Frank something to do. By the way: Why is Frank a full-on cast member and his partners-in-crime are just guest stars?

30 Rock review: Problem Solvers

30 Rock: The Problem Solvers C+

I would call this the weakest episode of the season on the basis that two of the subplots didn’t work and the main plot was devoid of funniness. I’ve written on a few occasions that the show’s writers posses godlike levels of talent in terms of dialogue and carefully constructed jokes but when the jokes fall a little short, we’re reminded that the show uses the same five or six plots over again:
1. Kenneth being naïve
2. Jenna and Tracy either turning the world upside down with their selfishness
3. The inverse of #2: Jenna and Tracy trying to compensate for being selfish by being selfless and still managing to make cause an equal amount of disaster than if they’d just been selfish to begin with
4. Either Liz or Jack finding love but realizing it can’t mix with their professional lives
5. Liz, the most grounded character on the show, feeling power-hungry
6. The inverse of #5: Jack, the most aloof character on the show through his inseperable wealth, feeling like one of the little people and being humbled

I previously liked Stone Mountain so much because it mixed up plots 5 and 6 so much and brought Jack from feeling grounded to a state of condescending aloofness (which was really his natural state) and did the reverse to Liz so that they both cathartically shared the same worldview at episode’s end.

This episode just had a complete recycling of plot points in the A-plot. Liz feels she’s too god for Jack and takes bad advice from Tracy and Jenna. Not one change from the Rosemary’s Baby episode or anything along those lines. What was worse was that it wasn’t funny. The two guest stars who played rival agents weren’t memorable and when few jokes are falling you’re reminded of unoriginality. The romantic ending cliché also didn’t work that well in my opinion.

The B-plot was even more painfully unoriginal. I won’t even spell it out for you because it was pretty much plot three and its only gag was that Jenna and Tracy got so enthusiastic about what they were doing that they created t-shirts.

The best plot was the C-plot which introduced a new cast member and played off Kenneth’s naivette. This was Kenneth at his best. They took his naïve helpfulness and turned it upside down. The new cast member was very eager to please and was Kenneth-like in nature in that sense. The twist was that Kenneth viewed the new cast member’s willingness to do things for himself rather than asking an assistant to do it for him, as stepping on his territory. The hilarious result: Things get ugly with Kenneth and the new cast member who are the two most likeable guys on the show. It is a blessing that we now have a new cast member who can potentially solve things.

In addition, please click on my column (which i get paid for by the click)

Thursday Night TV Review Part III: Office/30 Rock

Don't forget to check out my article on how relevant SNL alumni still are these days.


The Office:

While Jim and Pam are on their honeymoon, Michael gets entangled with the mafia (I think?) while the B-plot can best be described as a bunch of people want to bother Jim and Pam on their honeymoon in Puerto Rico.

I honestly was writing too much about Community while The Office was going on to be able to entirely absorb the plot but in the A-plot but here’s what I got: Michael gets the idea to write his own book and starts narrating (this would have been a better plot than what we were presented with); a large Italian man tries to sell Michael something, there’s some ambiguity over whether he’s in the mafia; Andy and Dwight attend a meeting in a restaurant with a large Italian guy; Andy is wearing a mechanic’s uniform and volunteers to repair the car of a woman and her son who mistakenly treat him as such; and the staff launches into a discussion over whether this guy is mafia or not based on his last name. At the end of the episode, Michael “stands up to the mob” although we don’t know if he’s in the mob or not.

The B-plot might have centered around Pam and Jim but it was made all the better by the fact that they were physically absent from the episode. For someone who thinks JAM is overused, it’s nice to get a much-needed break from Jim’s smirk for a week. On the downside, we have an overdose of Kevin who has often been criticized in going from adorably dense to full-on retarded in recent seasons. In a show that’s going for realism, Kevin sticks out like a sore thumb. In any case, Kevin commandeers Jim’s office while he’s on his honeymoon for reasons that definitely seem retarded to me. Things take a twist when Kevin accidentally causes Jim’s credit card to be voided (best scene in the episode). In the meantime, Jim is bothered by Michael because he needs bailing out when the whole mafia thing blows up and Oscar calls up Jim because he feels like the office is going to Hell without Jim’s presence. This all leads up to a fairly rewarding punch line. One major concern was that Jim has only been in charge for one week? Wasn’t he the office slacker a week ago? This characterization is getting a little rushed here.

My review of this week’s The Office doesn’t hold much water because of my distraction, but it seemed like this episode took rather unpromising ideas to run with.


B-







30 Rock started and ended off with a cute meta-awareness and in between a definite sense of improvement over a lackluster 3rd season. I agree with the AV Club’s review that the show got caught up in too many “Liz finds love” plots and too heavy of a reliance on guest stars. The Office had a comeback year last season by taking the relatively safe premise (of a regional manager who would always keep his job no matter how eccentric his ideas are) and turning it upside down.

Maybe what was wrong was that 30 Rock was getting too safe. We knew every one of Liz and Jack’s celebrity love interests wouldn’t last because we read in the Hollywood Reporter that Jon Hamm and Selma Hayek had limited episode contracts. Similarly, we know that Kenneth the Page will continue to be dumb but loyal. Jack teased us a couple times into thinking that someday Kenneth was going to amount to more than the sum of his parts and eventually take over Jack’s job. In this episode, Kenneth finally lives up to that billing as a capable foil to Jack Donaughy and that made him interesting for the first time since the poker game in Season 1.

Jack cuts overtime pay for his pages and gives himself a bonus instead. When Kenneth accidentally takes a peek at Jack’s paycheck, he becomes furious and stages a strike with the demand that Jack put down in writing that he lied. It’s a battle of wits between Jack’s hard line business savvy and Kenneth’s naïveté affability. The exact opposite ends of the human spectrum that these two characters inhabit has been capitalized upon a little (the episode where Jack puts Kenneth in an elevator with a literal reenactment of lifeboat ethics comes to mind) but the show has never literally pit the two characters against each other. It felt like this episode seemed like something that the show’s been leading up to forever. Things even get topical with a pseudo-debate between the two about the extremes of capitalism.

In the B-plot, Josh is leaving the cast and Jack orders Pete and Tina to find a replacement that reflects middle American values more. This raises the question of where the hell Josh has been for the past two seasons. He sort of disappeared and I don’t know if it does the show any good to call attention to how thin the show’s cast is anyway (it seems like there are only three characters on the show). This prompts Tracy and Jenna to get in touch with the common man more. The show gets plenty meta but it’s almost as if Tracy and Jenna are used almost entirely as a single meta-joke and it feels a little bit cheap. Still, there’s an inspired bit of lunacy that feels almost improvised as Tracy goes out into the middle of the striking crowd and tries not to act plebian.

There’s also a C-plot in which Liz and Pete have to keep the show’s new hire a secret so they do a really lame job of keeping their scouting trips to the comedy clubs a secret and the staff starts to suspect that they’ve had an affair. It all basically leads to a punchline that’s moderately worthwhile.

On the strength of the A-plot, I’m hoping that 30 Rock is en route to a better season.

A-

SNL has been mismanaging comedic talent for a while now

As usual, here's an article from helium to click on about the Roman Polanski scandal:

http://www.helium.com/items/1606694-samantha-geiner-should-roman-polanski-be-extradited-sex-crimes-roman-polanski-victims-rights


Except Will Ferrell, Lorne Michaels hasn't actually been doing that well with SNL talent post-1996 except for 3 women: Maya Rudolph, Amy Poehler and Tina Fey. Amy would never have gotten off the ground as a comedic star if she didn't have the chance to get her name out there for 8 seasons.



It seems like the big movie stars of comedy are coming up through being friends with Ben Stiller/being in frat pack movies, comedy central (daily show, stand-up specials, comedy central original shows), arrested development and The Office. SNL alum since the bad boys age of SNL have been largely unsuccessful in films (i.e. Colin Quinn, Norm McDonald, Chris Kattan, Tim Meadows, Molly Shannon, Cheri Oteri, Ana Gastayer, Jim Bruer, Horatio Sanz, Chris Parnell, even Jimmy Fallon is bombing in Conan's old slot).

Look at who's populating comedies these days:
-Zach Galinfakas (was in a Comedy Central show: Dog Bites Man)
-Rob Riggle was in Kicking and Screaming, Step Brothers, etc. (went from being fired on SNL to the Daily Show)
-From the Office: Mindy Kailing (License to Wed, Night at the Museum), Craig Robinson (Knocked Up, Zach and Miri, Pineapple Express), BJ Novak (Knocked Up), Jim Krasinski (Leatherheads, License to Wed, that Sam Mendes film), Jenna Fischer (Blades of Glory), Rainn Wilson (Juno, My Super Ex Girlfriend, Last Mimsy)
-From Freaks and Geeks: Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, James Franco
-From Arrested Development: Portsia de Rossi (Better off Ted), Jason Bateman (The Break-Up, Mr Magoo, Smoking Aces, Hancock, Juno, etc etc etc), Will Arnett (Blades of Glory, Brothers Solomon, 30 Rock), Tony Hale (Andy Richter's sitcom, Control, Stranger than Fiction)
-Demitri Martin-Comedy Central stand-up mainstray to Daily Show to own show to Ang Lee film
-Jack McBrayer from 30 Rock (Talladega Nights, Walking Hard)

I think they talk about SNL is a show of strong women but it's really only a show of women. The men on the show are second rate, perhaps. Also, with regard to the Casey Wilson/Michaela firing, Lorne does realize that Amy is only popular today because she shined on SNL for like a million years. There's no way that Michaela is gonna acheive any fame like that in half a season. It's harder for women to get noticed anyways in comedy.

Review of the TV year:Part 1

It's mid-summer and it's now time to review the year that was in TV. The two greatest tragedies were the cancellation of My Name is Earl and Pushing Daisies. I am greatly disturbed by the state of TV when I think of how powerless I am to change these things. Here is a list of some of the shows I followed this past year (more will be covered soon):

Sit Down, Shut Up- An animated comedy about incompetent teachers at a flailing school that really has very little to do about teaching at all. It’s made by the Arrested Development guy and stars such big names as Will Arnett, Jason Bateman, Kristen Chenowith, Keenan Thompson, Will Forte, Cheri Oteri, Henry Winkler and Nick Kroll. The expectations were high to live up to and that brought a lot of disappointment and I can see both sides of it. The show got a little bit too meta too early in its run. In the 4th episode and last before leaving the remaining 9 episodes of the season (and most likely the series) in limbo, there were no less than three or four self-referential gags going on: characters kept trying to consciously match themselves to 80’s archetypes, characters alluded to how they had few adventures before episode one, and Miracle was self-conscious about being nothing more than a plot device fueling the rivalry between Ennis and Larry.

On the other hand, I really like most of the characters (the sexually confused Andrew is definitely an exception) and there is a sense that the writing is witty and sharp and will be even better once a coherent tone is found. Most of the running gags the show has works: I think there is a good amount of running gags they have: The assistant principal is really really incompetent and was a prison clown before he was a principal, Happy's ethnic mumblings superimposed with proper-soundng British, Willard always having a different way to get to school, the fact that no one cares the least bit about actually teaching and we know very little of the students, etc..

Burn Notice, USA: In the world of TV, it is generally not a bad thing to have a gimmick that hooks you in. The show is about an exiled spy in Miami who is Bond-like in his ability to outwit his foes. The gimmick? Imagine if James Bond was letting you pick his brain while he was kicking ass. In Burn Notice, Michael Weston is an exiled CIA operative who takes freelance jobs (usually involving dealing with dangerous people) in his hometown of Miami while he attempts to figure out who ratted him out and compromised his identity to the CIA. As he’s slipping into and out of trouble, Weston provides voiceovers about how a spy should handle this or that situation that really makes things interesting. Also in the show are Weston’s mother (the only person who will take him in), an old male associate, and an ex-girlfriend (played by the dainty-looking Gabriel Anwar)

Important Things with Demitri Martin, Comedy Central-Demitri Martin is, by far, one of the best comics out there. He can be creative on so many mediums and he has such an uncanny ability to pull hilarious observational humor where no one ever looked before. He’s the ideal star for his own show, because it doesn’t just include 30 minutes of stand-up and he can mix it up, through different mediums and interlace some great sketches: For example, he has one in which a high school student gets his wish granted of meeting three great minds for dinner- Ben Franklin, Galileo, and William Shakespeare- and all they want to do is hit on the waitress.


30 Rock, NBC: I am not one who demands excellence from a TV show or demands it be cancelled. 30 Rock is good and provides humor better than a high percentage of shows still out there and by no means do I want that to go away. That being said, 30 Rock didn’t really raise the bar this season. In fact, the comedy that was previously limitless in the ways it could surprise the viewer with a limit, became somewhat formulaic as of late. Every plot would include three plots:
1) Liz looking for love or trying to convince herself that she hasn’t lost her plebian roots because she’s now part of Jack’s inner circle.
2) Jack dealing with his love life or family problems
3) A C plot with either Jenna trying to come to terms with her snobbishness or someone doing damage control for Tracy’s latest escapade

The Root of All Evil, Comedy Central: A novel idea that might not have legs to last several seasons, but good enough to allow those talented under-the-radar humorists like Andrew Daly, Patton Oswalt, Greg Giraldo, Andy Kindler and Paul F Tompkins to riff on various topics in what sort of plays as a comedic sport. Lewis Black could stand to play a larger role in the show. Every comic has their own unique style and everyone has their own preferences. I get a kick out of Tomkins and Daly who take themselves as seriously as lawyers because they’re suddenly dressed in suits. You can also never get enough of the debate over which is worse: Beer or Weed, American Idol or High School, Donald Trump vs Tila Tequila, etc.

More to come....