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Spring 2015 Review: CSI: Cyber

30 Mar

CSI: Cyber

Police must love cop shows. Nothing glamorizes the institution more than detectives and officers fighting the good fight, always cracking the case, and locking the bad guys up for good. While this applies to almost every cop show on TV (there are of course exceptions, like The Shield), no show makes cops look better than editions of CSI. There are none of the classic cop struggles here. No alcoholics or cops who struggle balancing the family and work lives or copious amounts of red tape or cops negatively affected by prior cases. There are just ultra, ultra-competent cops who can do everything, from computers, to hand-to-hand combat, to interrogations, and do it impressively, staying well within the law all the time (no questionable go-too-far tactics here) and always in time to save the day.

CSIs are also a little silly by cop show standards, played completely straight within the shows, but in a way that makes me think the creators don’t take them all too seriously. Partly because of this, as much as they’ve been the butts of jokes over the years, I have a hard time actually hating them. They’re just so ludicrous. CSI: Cyber stars the FBI’s Cyber division, responsible for investigating any cyber crimes (which seem to be anything which involves programming or electronics, or, well, it’s hard to tell). The team is made up of Avery (Patricia Arquette), the leader, a behavioral psychologist, Elijah (James Van Der Beek), her second in command, a military type, Daniel, a super elite hacker, Raven, a woman who doesn’t do anything in the first episode so I don’t really know what her deal is, and Brody, a new one-time criminal hacker on a Mod Squad type program to either help the FBI and become one of them, or rot in prison. 

The case in the pilot is a series of baby abductions, which leads to the discovery that an organized crime ring has been orchestrating these kidnappings and auctioning off babies. The Cyber connection is that the criminals chose and cased the babies through a software weakness in baby security cameras owned by the victims’ parents.

Arquette and Van Der Beek are everywhere during the episode, and doing everywhere. They take over from local cops, work the home, convince a reluctant kid to give evidence, find the first lead in a warehouse, arrest a couple of lackeys who were then assassinated, shoot their assassin who was getting away on a motorcycle, and raid the warehouse where the real bad guys were at. Van Der Beek even literally saves a drowning baby towards the end of the episode, and Arquette performs CPR to bring the baby back to life.

There’s lots of silly cyber stuff, though to be honest less than I’d hoped. The Cyber division office contains a ludicrous amount of screens, kind of like one of those CNN Electoral War rooms. The show presents us with a few two-color black-and-green cyber-reconstructions of very computer-related events and the hackers talk a little bit of code (uberhacker Daniel berates a baby cam company IT guy for problems with their programming), but there’s far less technobabble than I was hoping for.

Calling CSI: Cyber a bad show is not so much right or wrong as it is beyond the point. It’s a very silly show. It’s professionally done, as CSI’s are. You get a case, it gets cracked little by little, until it’s all wrapped up at the end of the episode, and everyone goes to get a beer except for our fearless leader, Arquette, who goes off to think. And yes, before I forget, it turns out that Arquette got into this business because her professional records as a psychologist were hacked, leading to a patient’s murder, and yes, she still hasn’t yet found the hacker, but rest assured, should the show continue she will. CSI’s full of crime procedural cliché catnip like that.

Anyone familiar with CSI, and that should be, at this point, just about anyone familiar with television, knows exactly what this is. There are no surprises. If you’re the type of person who likes CSIs, you might like it, and you might not, and if you’re not, then there’s really no point watching, and there’s really no way you’re considering watching it anyway. There’s nothing to see here.

Will I watch it again? No. There’s no need to. I don’t mind watching these pilots so much, and they’re over-the-top which in doses is entertaining rather than bothersome, exceptionally compared to some of the worst pilots which can really be a slog to get through. Still, there’s no reason I ever need to see another episode.

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Ranking the Shows That I Watch – 2014 Edition: 11-8

27 Mar

We move into the top ten. Three comedies and an HBO miniseries. Moving on along…

Intro here and 43-40 here and 39-36 here and 35-32 here and 31-28 here and 27-24 here and 23-20 here and 19-16 here and one-offs/shows ineligible for the list here and 15-12 here.

11. New Girl

New Girl

No show has had more ups and downs than New Girl. New Girl has for periods of times, in the 2nd season particularly, hovered among my favorites shows on TV, only to, after a stretch of great episodes, like a cartoon character, look down, realize there was nothing below it, and come back down to its frequent inconsistency. New Girl four seasons in still hasn’t quite figured out how to be at its best for any length of time and part of the reason is because the cast is so damn good that it keeps the quality of the show always one level above the writing, helping to downplay shoddily written episodes and not forcing the writers to dig deep and focus on what works. New Girl does get on these streaks of brilliance though, and one of these streaks was the first half of the fourth season, which made me temporarily forget about my frustration with the extremely up and down third season, as the show banged out classic episodes one after another, with two of the biggest winners being Landline and Background Check New Girl may never put together a whole season this great, but the fact that this streak has the show ranked this well tells you how high New Girl flies when all is well.

10. Community

Community

I’ll make a comparison I’ve made many times before but still continues to stand. Community will never and has never enjoyed the startling consistency of former NBC-mate Parks and Recreation, but the show has moments where every aspect comes together and makes an entire season worthwhile in one episode. The fifth season was not the show’s strongest, though upon looking back at the episode list, it was much better than I remembered offhand. More episodes were hits than misses, and some of the hits were very good. Best, unquestionably, was Cooperative Polygraphy, where the group receives their bequeathments from Pierce’s will, and was the kind of episode that explains why people are fanaticall about Community. The writing and acting are both on fire and in sync; the show deals with Pierce, the lack thereof, the characters, their relationship, and the world, all while being very funny. Community has its problems, but it also explores areas few comedies do, which buys it some purchase on its shortcomings. It will never be a perfect show and its best days are likely behind, but it is singular and that characteristic in and of itself can be underrated.

9. Olive Kitteridge

Olive Kitteridge

I put off HBO miniseries Olive Kitteridge for months, knowing little about its premise other than it was based on a book. Based on the name, I assumed the source material was from the late 1800s rather than 2008, and that it would be, even if eventually proven worthwhile, a slog to get through. And on paper, it seems like it should be. It’s depressing as hell and Kitteridge, played by the brilliant Frances McDormand, is frequently a miserable person, tearing down her less intelligent happy-go-lucky husband and son as she lashes out from her own serious depression. The miniseries follows her over a nearly 30-year period, as she and her family grow old. It accomplishes the impressively saddening double as you squirm in your seat at her behavior while feeling awful for her at the same time. Against all odds though, it’s actually incredibly riveting stuff. Watching is compelling, even without any obvious narrative hook (there’s no natural beginning, middle, or ending). Kitteridge is simply a deeply complex character, endlessly frustrating, and endlessly heartbreaking as well, from a place and a time where she didn’t have the proper outlets to help herself. Watch, and while during the first 20 minutes, you may feel like it’ll be hard to get through the whole thing, a short couple of hours later you’ll be wondering how you thought that before.

8. Broad City

Broad City

I knew Broad City existed, and I knew it was going to be good, but for some reason I can’t explain in hindsight it took me a few months to catch on with and one drunken evening to dive in and watch the first six in a row on demand. By year two, I was heavily anticipating each episode, watching it live, and sometimes watching it again soon after. Broad City for a time this year became the buzziest television half hour since Girls, and although the plaudits for best comedy on TV may have initially seemed to come too soon, they may just as well have been on the money. Broad City, more than any other show, takes place in my New York City, neighborhoods and places I know and recognize and speaks to my generation. Broad City doesn’t simply buck TV conventions by consciously doing the opposite. Rather it ignores those conventions completely, making the show as creators Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer see fit, entirely peripheral to when and where it fits in with conventions or avoids them. The show succeeds both in more sitcom-y episodes and in wacky gimmick episodes, such as Destination: Wedding, when Abbi and Ilana are rushing to get to a wedding on time by whatever mode of transportation gets them there. The side characters (Lincoln, Jaimé, Tre, etc.) are great and not to be underestimated, but the core friendship of Abbi and Ilana is even through just a single season one of the strongest on TV, and the center of everything the show builds around.

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Spring 2015 Review: Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

25 Mar

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is a new sitcom from 30 Rock creators Tina Fey and Robert Carlock. 30 Rock is one of the best comedies of the 21st century, and while second efforts from well-respected creators don’t always turn out so well, in this case, if you like or love 30 Rock, you’ll like or love Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. That’s not to say the shows are exactly the same, but they are tonally similar enough that I would just about guarantee any fan of the former would like the latter.

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt shares 30 Rock’s rapid fire delivery method, its love of wordplay jokes, its over-the-top silliness, and for kicks, one of the four main characters in portrayed by Jane Krakowski, whose Jacqueline Voorhees is pretty much the same as her Jenna Maroney on 30 Rock – rich, entitled, vain, and egocentric.

The show begins with a high concept premise that could be misleading but is worth knowing. Kimmy Schmidt was kidnapped as a teen and spent 15 years underground in a bunker, held captive by a wannabe cult leader/preacher (the amazingly-named Reverend Richard Wayne Gary Wayne) who told her and three other women that the apocalypse had occurred and all life on earth was destroyed beyond the bunker. She and the other captives were eventually found and released, and while the others move back to their small midwestern town, Kimmy decides she wants to use her newfound freedom to take on big New York City. She’s a classic fish-out-of-water, both having never been to a big city, and also being unaware of 15 years of culture and technology, which results in many hilarious miscues.

She moves in with a wannabe theater actor named Titus Andremedon who warms up with to her after displaying initial hostility and gets a job as an assistant for wealthy housewife Voorhees. The three of them, along with Kimmy and Titus’s landlord Lillian, make up the main cast.

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt is not just good; it’s laugh-out-loud funny, a quality that even many of the sitcoms I watch and enjoy don’t feature on an episode-to-episode basis. Kimmy Schmidt does not shoot for perfect, squeaky-clean writing and plotting. Rather, Kimmy takes a Pete Rose approach – it goes up for 650 at-bats, swinging away over and over again, never passing up an opportunity to insert a joke, and yet its joke-joke-joke approach works because it connects an inordinate number of times. We forgive the inevitable misses because the hits are frequent enough and funny enough to make the trade clearly worthwhile. This scattershot approach leads to plenty of jokes which some people will find funnier than others, but more than enough for everyone to find some they like.

The show was written with Ellie Kemper in mind as Schmidt, and it shows. She’s a perfect choice for the part, and the part is a perfect showcase for her talents. Kimmy Schmidt showcases her sense of comic timing, her physical humor, her ability to be charmingly confused without looking dumb (something The Office unfortunately pushed too far to simply making her stupid), her ability to be bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, endlessly enthusiastic in the face of countless obstacles, yet not drive a constant cynic like myself off the wall with her good cheer.

Will I watch it again? Yes. Actually, I’ll be honest. It’s a Netflix show with ten half hour episodes. I already finished it, and you probably should too.

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Spring 2015 TV Review: One Big Happy

23 Mar

One Big Happy

I recently talked about the remake of The Odd Couple, which was the latest attempt to make what I call a Sitcom (note the capital S), a comedy designed to consciously double down on and exemplify the fashion of old-style sitcoms which were popular for decades but have diminished in popularity over the last decade or so. These sitcoms share several characteristics, outsized protagonists, a laugh track, big jokes followed by significant pauses and an emphasis on broad comedy. One Big Happy is a newer invention; a show that tries to fuse a more modern ethos about the new ways young-ish people live, the relationships they have, and this diverse world we live in with this very old style of comedy.  One similar analogue that comes to mind offhand is 2 Broke Girls, which is not a coincidence since One Big Happy creator Liz Feldman worked as a writer and producer for that show.

Like with 2 Broke Girls, there’s a shiny facelift of the new plastered on the exterior, but the parts underneath are creaky and old, with the same broken humor (or really lack thereof) that has been pumping up mediocre or worse sitcoms for decades.

One Big Happy wears its premise on its sleeve, laying it out very clearly over the course of the first episode. A single commitment-phobic straight guy and his single lesbian best friend decide that if they are both single after a certain point, which they are, they’ll have a baby together, impregnating her with his sperm. After a couple of failed attempts, the baby takes, but at the same time, the guy out of nowhere falls head over heels for a  British woman who he marries to prevent her from being deported. Thus, this wacky trifecta has to make things work without killing each other and there’s no other choice, because there’s a baby involved.

There’s nothing subtle or clever about the humor in One Big Happy; it’s as broad as it gets. Broad comedy can be funny of course in the right hands but this certainly isn’t that. I took a note while watching that the lesbian character said at one point “I peed on it” to her bestie regarding a pregnancy test and it for some reason got a hysterical laugh; that’s pretty emblematic about everything in this show.

One Big Happy tries to sneak up on people who only know or hear its premise as original, but don’t be fooled. The admittedly novel premise cloaks a pretty bad comedy.

Will I watch it again? No. It was bad, and there’s no reason for anyone to watch it in the unlikely event it survives. Sorry, Elisha Cuthbert and guy who played Pete in Happy Endings. Long live Happy Endings.

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Spring 2015 Review: iZombie

20 Mar

iZombiePilot1

Imagine there was a party game for TV junkies, where players would watch an episode of a show by a well-known TV writer and would have to identify the show was written by. After watching ten minutes of iZombie, any self-respecting television zealot would be able to pick it out as the work of Rob Thomas without a doubt. Aside from the high concept sci-fi premise (and, yes, it’s ludicrous to talk about a show called iZombie and toss that aside, but work with me), iZombie has an incredible amount in common with Veronica Mars that should have it appealing to Veronica Mars fans of all stripes.

Let’s walk through the comparison, with some longer explanations for the iZombie analogues. In both, at the beginning, a young girl (Veronica is in high school, iZombie’s Liv is in her 20s) is doing great – she’s successful and popular. Veronica is a high school cheerleader with tons of popular cool friends, and Liv is a doctor kicking ass in her residency and engaged to a cool, attractive dude. Something happens. In Vernoica Mars, it’s the death of her best friend, followed by a messy, botched investigation by her sheriff dad that makes her a pariah and an outcast at school. For Liv, it’s well, becoming a zombie. Liv’s zombie form, to be clear, is no AMC’s The Walking Dead-style brainless cretin (it would be a pretty boring and/or nonsensical show that way). Instead, she still maintains the same personality as before, but medically she’s cold, nearly bloodless, and needs to eat brains to maintain her intelligence (she’s actually much closer to a convention vampire than zombie).

Both Veronica and Liv, after this life-changing event, struggle, face a period of despair, and then regain their footing somewhat, seeking a new way forward – realizing their lives will never quite be back to the way they were, but that maybe they can carve a different path.

Veronica and Liv both use their particular newfound skill sets to solve crimes. Veronica has been groomed partly intentionally and partly unintentionally by her now private eye father, while Liv gains visions from the people whose brains she eats. As those brains tend to be acquired from murder victims, she sees flashes of how they die and who killed them. Although solving these crimes isn’t initially part of the plan, it soon becomes a calling for each, a way to follow the new paths forward both are building.

Oh, and both Veronica and Liv narrate the action with a world-wary, self-aware, and pop culture-dotted voice over which takes you through their point of view.

So, yeah. Not talking right out of the gate about the fact that Liv is an undead zombie who needs to eat brains and has psychic visions is kind of burying the lead, while Veronica is merely a teenage girl with a really expensive camera and some mad private eye skills. But down in its guts, iZombie has a whole lot of what Veronica Mars had, which, since Veronica Mars is a great show and a personal favorite is definitely a good thing.

The similarities, particularly in the voice overs, were so uncanny that it made me think Rob Thomas was desperate to bring Veronica Mars back, but in a way more palatable with current trends, which, given the outsized success of AMC’s The Walking Dead, meant zombies.

Does Rose McIver have the chops to pull off the Kristin Bell role? Does the wacky premise have enough heft behind it to last a full season and then some? It’s too early to say. iZombie featured the sharp dialogue that is the hallmark of any Rob Thomas show, and the sweet spot tonal midpoint between drama and comedy, that Thomas and Joss Whedon have mastered.

Will I watch it again? Yes. This was one of those shows, that due to the Rob Thomas connection (he’s behind not only Veronica Mars but my beloved Party Down), I would have had to have hated not to watch another episode. That said, it’s Veronica Mars similarities only enhanced those chances.

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Spring 2015 Review: Secrets and Lies

16 Mar

Secrets and Lies

It’s impossible not watch new TV shows and movies without viewing them through the prism of existing works we’re already familiar with. It’s impossible, for example, to watch an episode of Allegiance or The Assets and not think that either of those shows is a cheap rip-off of The Americans, regardless of whether they are cheap rip-offs or merely inferior similar programs which were conceived entirely independently coincidently. Likewise, whether or not it was conceived entirely independently, it’s hard to watch the pilot of Secrets and Lies and not immediately think of Gone Girl. Both focus on a media feeding frenzy that accompanies an attractive man accused of being a cold-blooded killer in a high profile murder case, and both hold out initially the information regarding whether the did he or didn’t he actually do it. Unfortunately, Secrets and Lies has these elements of Gone Girl but none of the quality which makes Gone Girl work.

Ryan Phillippe plays a hot father who, while out on a run, finds his neighbor’s young son dead somewhere on his path. Phillippe and his family live in Charlotte, a city in which, on his block at least, every neighbor knows the other, and gossip spreads fast. When no other suspect is quickly uncovered, Phillippe becomes the primary suspect, and the media, despite the lack of any evidence, pounce. In response, the nation and the locals turn against him. At the same time, he’s struggling with his marriage, with the implication that he participated in an affair which has his marriage on the rocks.

A persistent detective played by Juliette Lewis pesters and pesters him, suspecting him the whole time, but trying to subtly have him incriminate himself, rather than attack him straight out. Most of the first episode consists of her trying to trip him up, while he never quite gives in, and this happens about four different times, as he vacillates between trying to lawyer up to be smart, and trying to convince the world he has nothing to hide. Slowly, however, some incriminating evidence slowly builds even while he proclaims his innocence to suggest at least the possibility of his guilt.

The show promises both secrets and lies, but the first episode under delivers on both, not making the most of its first forty minutes to reel viewers in. The only lies, at least that we know about, are Philippe’s about his whereabouts, which he doesn’t remember (very drunk) and the only secret, revealed at the end of the episode, could not be more obvious to anyone who has ever watched a television show.

More than lacking substance, Secrets and Lies commits the more fatal sin of being boring. For a show whose goal appears to be edge-of-the-seat entertaining with a little bit of soapy intrigue, the first episode sure doesn’t make you want to know what happened or care at all about any of the characters.

Will I watch it again no? No. Secrets and Lies tries to be a sexy, mysterious potboiler, where you don’t know whose lying, and who isn’t, and what secret, or so the title implies, is right around the corner, but it is not one of these things except surprisingly boring and unsurprisingly unsurprising.

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Spring 2015 Review: American Crime

13 Mar

American Crime

American Crime is a deadly serious drama which uses a tragic murder as a window through which it attempts to show a broad picture of America how it really is, unvarnished and unfiltered. Through a diverse cast of characters affected by and associated with this event, American Crime tries to cut through a broad spectrum of race and class, a tall task indeed. In doing so American Crime, takes part in a long tradition of cultural investigation of race and class issues through crime. The upside to this attempt is Traffic, the downside is Crash, and American Crime ends up somewhere between those two pillars.

American Crime begins right after a young man, a vet, was murdered and his wife raped and left for dead (she’s in critical condition). His father, Russ, is called in by the police, identifies the body, and then reaches out to his ex-wife, Barb. Barb, we learn, apparently raised their kids while Russ gambled the family’s money away and then left, although he forged a better relationship with his sons later in life. We see a lot of the parents grieving together and feeling with one another. When they feel like the policemen aren’t doing their job, they talk to a reporter to try to get the word out and keep the case in the news. Barb takes the opportunity to be casually racist when the killer is suspected to possibly be Hispanic.

Nearby, there’s a single Latino father, trying to raise his two children the right way in a neighborhood bereft with gangs, which has become that much more difficult after the death of his beloved wife. His son, who seems to be the apple of his eye, borrowed a car from their garage (the dad is a mechanic), and without permission loaned it out to a shady gang-related dude for what seemed like some easy cash. This comes back to bite the son when that dude is suspected of having murdered the aforementioned dead vet.

There’s also a third plot strand based around a couple of drug-addled lovers. I frankly have absolutely no idea how this is related to the rest of the show and I’m not sure if I’m missing something or it simply won’t be explained until a later episode.

Considering the on-the-nose potential of taking on race and class in this manner, the content itself is generally not as heavy handed as it could be, though it definitely could a defter touch at times.  The filming style as well is occasionally too much; there are strange and awkward cuts which feel unnecessarily arty; as if the director is really trying to let us know that this is serious stuff. And it is.

For the most part, American Crime isn’t a particularly fun show.  This is the fine line shows like American Crime walk. Like all deadly serious prestige dramas, it can feel like a slog if everything isn’t running on all cylinders. There’s certainly room for extremely serious television, but the less fun it is to watch, the more meritorious it best be in other ways to compensate. There could be some real merit here but I’m also not sure there was enough going on to compensate for how much I looked at my watch as the show was passing. As difficult as attempting to talk about race and class is, it’s certainly a worthy goal, and it’s possible American Crime may have the ability to add something productive to the conversation, but maybe at the expense of being an hour of television anyone wants to watch. The one source of drive for the show could be following the mystery, but it almost feels peripheral in the first episode to all the issues happening.

Will I watch it again? I don’t know. It certainly wasn’t bad, but it also didn’t leave me wanting to immediately watch another episode. Maybe if I don’t forget about it, I’ll come back when my TV week gets less crowded, and that lack of enthusiasm but minor interest is about accurate to how I feel about the show.

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Spring 2015 Review: Battle Creek

6 Mar

Battle Creek

Battle Creek is a cop drama which is the joint product of two heavyweight television creators – David Shore, who was behind House, and Vince Gilligan who created Breaking Bad and co-created its spin-off Better Call Saul. And for all that talent, what Battle Creek amounts to is, well, nothing.

Here’s the set up. Dean Winters plays a big detective fish in a small pond, the king of the chronically underfunded Battle Creek police department. Battle Creek, a mid-sized town, seems to have a disproportionate amount of crime, and its cops are strapped by their lack of resources – in the a bust in the opening scene of the show, both their recording equipment and tasers don’t work. The FBI swoops in for the rescue in the form of the preternaturally perfect Josh Duhamel. The golden child, he’s good-looking, great at just about everything, and brings a winning attitude along with access to forensics and proper equipment that the department desperately needs. Everyone else at the department is overwhelmed and excited by Duhamel personally and the resources he brings but Winters is struck by jealousy and a nagging obsession that there has to be something wrong with Duhamel for him to be sent to Battle Creek. Who is this outsider, he wants to know, why is he so friendly and consistently unfazed, and why is he getting all the credit for what they could have been doing with proper resources.

Of course, they’re partnered up and banter back and forth, Duhamel relentless upbeat, Winters the constant cynic, with their contrasting approaches making them a formidable team.

Battle Creek is not a particularly serious police procedural. It’s light, and makes active attempts at humor. It’s really not far off from an USA procedural, and much closer to USA or Fox than to the rest of the CBS procedural family. Nothing is all that serious. It’s purposefully silly and humor is mined from just how strapped the Battle Creek department is versus how flush Duhamel and the FBI are.

There’s really not even a lot to say about it. There’s just nothing to it. It was watchable, but eminently forgettable. Everything is competent enough but no more. There’s simply no hook to keep a viewer interested in coming back week-to-week. Battle Creek doesn’t appear to have been crafted with the kind of care one would expect of Shore or Gilligan. There’s no ambition. It’s the same problem that often haunts USA shows, but it doesn’t have the sense of fun or style that propels the better USA shows, though it’s certainly going for it.

Will I watch it again? No. There’s really no need to. Battle Creek came in and out with a whimper.

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Spring 2015 Review: The Last Man on Earth

2 Mar

The Last Man on Earth

Hey, The Last Man on Earth was kind of funny. There were more laughs than most network comedies, or really any comedies produce in a pilot, Many a somewhat promising pilot has had other aspects of their show more or less coalescence over the course of 21 minutes, such as the basic premise, the relationships between the characters, the vague personalities without being, well, funny. That can be okay; humor is the hardest part to get right, and often takes some time as the stars develop chemistry and writers learn to write to their actors. But if you can be funny in the first episode, well, that’s a big one up over everyone else.

The Last Man on Earth takes place in a world in which, to his and our knowledge, Will Forte’s Phil Miller is the only man remaining in, if not the world, at least the United States. He, in an opening montage, drives around the country trying to find any other living humans. Everyone was wiped out by a virus, and any information beyond that, and really that in and of itself, is really beyond the point; the apocalypse exists to get us to this end of the world scenario. The distinctive part of the idea is that seeing a post-apocalyptic world, usually played for drama (see currently the phenomenally successful AMC’s The Walking Dead), actually played for laughs.

The Last Man on Earth made a smart decision to air back-to-back episodes as its premiere because the show, which is very up and down humor-wise in the first half hour with Forte as a solo act, really starts to pick up when person #2, a game Kristen Schaal, shows up. The hit and miss early scenes feature Miller having fun blowing stuff up and knocking stuff and down and were far and away funniest when Miller talked to his cadre of friends he assembled from different balls. Schaal and Forte in their back and forths play a version of the very classic men-are-from-mars schtick, but the absurdity of the surroundings and the fact that they are two very funny people really made it work in a way that it didn’t have to and could have easily not. Schaal is purposefully ridiculously annoying and grating, insisting on following ridiculous rules that don’t make any sense. Schaal’s insistence on correct, or really incorrect grammar, and parking in parking spots in the face of the apocalypse were funny, again as much due to Schaal’s delivery as much as the material

Not a lot actually happens in the hour, which shouldn’t be surprising consider the nature. Phil fucks around, does a bunch of stupid shit, talks to balls, meets Schaal, shoves her aside after she’s so irritating, and then gets slightly inspired to try to actually improve his circumstances rather than just defecate into a giant pool, blow stuff up, masturbate. Some of the jokes were one-note, and while funny the first time could easily grow old – namely jokes that work around the humor of seeing someone try to comply with typical rules in the face of the apocalypse where those rules make no sense.

Still, it’s one episode; there’s only so much you can ask. My expectations were reasonably high coming out of the gate for a network show, because of the personnel involved, and while the show wasn’t a masterpiece right out of the gate, it was different, interesting, had its share of laughs, and did more than enough to warrant watching another episode.

Will I watch another episode? Yes, I’ll give it a shot.

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The Ups and Downs of the Parks and Recreation Finale

27 Feb

Parks and Recreation

Parks and Recreation is a first-ballot hall of fame TV show, and while its final season wasn’t its peak, it was overall a very solid season, better than the one that preceded it, and did everything that the final season needed to do for the show to feel complete. Yet the series finale, while very true to the show itself, rubbed me somewhat the wrong way.

Composed of a series of flash-forwards where we see every major character’s future, it was just too much; everyone getting exactly what they’ve always dreamed, unadulterated happiness, emotional crack. At first, I was concerned if this was a problem with me and not with the show. I wondered if I was just too cynical or too pessimistic too handle this unrelenting optimism, and that I needed to just sit back and enjoy. And while those may still be personal problems, and I probably should simply enjoy more, after some thought I was able to reckon with my issues with the finale in more impersonal terms.

The emotional highs in the series finale were manipulative in a way that the many emotional highs throughout the series were not because they were unearned. Parks and Recreation was a very, very, funny series, but some of its best remembered and most canonical moments are notable because of the way they made you feel rather than laugh. Parks and Recreation handled emotional arcs better than any other contemporary sitcom. The show built investment over a long period of time in likeable and well-constructed characters, so when payoffs happened over the course of the series, they felt like the deserved fruits of years of labor and hard work.

There are many such moments, both personal and professional over the series’ run, but the pinnacle may be Leslie’s election to the Pawnee City Council. The goal was long-held and the process was excruciating and obstacle filled. We saw her work towards this goal over episodes and seasons, through ups and downs, though the agony of defeat before the ecstasy of victory. We were there with her every step of the way, and when she won, there was a wonderful euphoria.

This is the case for big personal moments as well. Ben’s proposal to Leslie was both tontally perfect and felt earned, as did Andy and April’s marriage, which was an inevitable triumph after they had struggled to get together for a long time.

This was the exactly opposite of Tom and Lucy’s proposal, which felt completely and totally out of nowhere. Didn’t Lucy just break up with her boyfriend and episode or two before Tom and her got engaged? It felt like there were episodes missing, as if Parks and Recreation forced the events just to make sure Tom was married by the end of the series.

In the finale, each character got to virtually live out their ideal fantasies with no sense of the road that took them there. Sure, Leslie gets to be governor, just like that, in five minutes. Tom is rich, and then broke, and then rich again.

The most clear example of the problems of these flash forwards may reside in April and Andy’s segments Andy and April are discussing having a child. Andy is super excited to have kids, but April is wary. Leslie wisely advises April that having kids is a tough decision, and one they need to make together and after much though. Then, 30 seconds later, without any of the discussion that was supposed to accompany this we see April, nine months later, giving birth. This is a major decision! This should be thought over and talked about, and then if and when they both agreed and eventually had the child, all the warm fuzzies would be well deserved. Here that’s fast-forwarded, an unfair cheat.

Parks and Recreation is a great series and the finale was certainly true to the show itself; relentlessly optimistic, both for its characters, and for the general idea of people of all stripes working together rather than against one another, maintaining friendships in the face of ideological differences. Still, the decision to branch forward into future outcomes without supporting the personal wins with carefully laid groundwork prevented the finale from being an all-time classic.

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