A weblog by Hao Lian.
A journey into the soft of night.
A terrible secret guarded by golems.
John Hodgman, everybody, lecturing the Radio and TV Correspondents’ Dinner on nerds and jocks. I like how CSPAN has nearly completed its transformation into a comedy showcase of my favorite people. (via Daniel Jalkut)
Glee opens on a scene of cheerleaders with abrasive coach Sue Sylvester; it’s Jane Lynch playing the same role she played in Role Models. Cut to title scene “Glee”.
Do the cheerleaders or Jane Lynch play an important role in the narrative of Glee? No. In an impressive directing decision, the cold open completely fails to illuminate neither the show’s story or characters.
Cut to scene of our protagonist Will Schuester (Matthew Morrison) pulling into the parking lot, where jocks throw a nerd into the dumpster.
“OK,” says you. “One of the show’s central themes is that high school is hard.” Accurate guess, were it not terribly wrong. Yet more impressively, Strangers with Candy does a better job of conveying that than Glee ever does. A better theme for the show would be the word mish-mash. “High school is tough” is mish-mashed with “Teacher Will Schuester struggles with making performing cool” is mish-mashed with “Rocky marriage turns into family and romantic drama” is mish-mashed with “Bully struggles with peer pressure” is mish-mashed with “Unpopular kids finding their place in the world” is mish-mashed with “Woman finds unrequited love in married man”. Glee spends all of 12 minutes (act one) packing these plots and subplots in before cutting sporadically in and out in the longer act two.
(In the interest of fairness and disclosure of my own laziness, I stopped watching after the second act.)
“OK, the plot has problems, mainly that I’ve seen both Strangers with Candy and Hamlet 2 and High School Musicals 1 Through 9. What about the characters?” You can’t see me, but I’m patronizingly ruffling your hair right now. Will Schuester is a teacher going against both his administration and the de facto social structure. Someone we can root for, until he frames athelete Finn Hudson (Cory Monteith) for marijuana possession. “A complicated character,” you say. Great until you take two steps back and realize that he did it to force Hudson into joining glee club at which point the Disproportionate Action-Motivation Train rolls into town and everybody gets on board for a magical journey far far away from Suspended Belief Land. Schuester is a Good Guy; the story hammers that enough into the viewer like any good “teacher against odds” plot (subplot? sub-subplot? main plot? impossible to tell?). If the writers wanted Schuester to be a Good Guy with Flaws, they took the certainly took the most heavy-handed approach possible.
But at least Schuester is not a flat character. Rachel Berry (Lea Michele) is the over-ambitious student learning to tone it down a notch; done to death. Finn Hudson is the school quarterback who’s more thoughtful than he lets on: no drug use, cares about his academic record, and wants to be successful in life; done to death. Sue Sylvester is Gayle Sweeney from Role Models with better lines. Mercedes Jones (Amber Riley) is the stereotypical sassy black woman; even 30 Rock can’t pull that off without seeming pretentious or over-trodden despite that show’s self-referential nature, Sherri Shepard’s role as Tracy Jordan’s wife, Johnnie Mae’s wonderful conversation as an airport screener with Liz Lemon (“Sandwich Day”), and the show’s generally gorgeous writing. The one-off flamboyantly gay ex-glee club teacher sexually harassing a teenager at the beginning … in the pilot … of a musical comedy series—well, it’s hard to tell if that’s a stereotype or offensive mistake or who knows how you’re supposed to feel about that in all of the three seconds the show devotes to it. The school’s jocks are jocks; the school’s cheerleaders are cheerleaders; never mind that these cliché cliques rarely form along such clean lines in high school or with such sheep-like meanness. And now you know the inhabitants of the overpopulated Glee universe.
Yet it’s clear despite the suffocating writing and haphazard plotting and epileptic directing that the acting is decent if not wonderful. Jayma Mays is fantastic as Emma Pillsbury (pictured in the Hulu thumbnail), a character we can actually sympathize—possibly the only one—with saddled by the writers with a germaphobic quirk that’s neither realistic (as in Monk) or funny (as in Monk). Cue a five-second scene where Pillsbury cleans a table that neither drives the story or character forward nor provides laughter. Principal Figgins (Igbal Theba) deftly strikes the balance between hard-ass and fatherly as the slightly cynical principal. And perhaps with more time and breathing space these characters can become people with depth and humor and drama and backstory, with whom we can empathize and I certainly have no reason to doubt that. But by throwing them into an overflowing cauldron of a pilot episode aboard the Disproportionate Action-Motivation Train chugging at light-speed away from Suspended Belief Town into Weird, Mish-Mash Plot Land, Glee does a great disservice by handicapping the story and the characters for what appears to be no gain.
Perhaps the greatest roast beef I have with Glee is that it’s billed as a “musical comedy”. For the first part, it should be noted that no original music is being written for the show; that is, the music itself is not actually comedic. Nor is it staged particularly comedically. It’s telling that the funniest music scene is the regional glee club competition, and even those laughs are pulled off by contrast not actual music (for reference, see Little Miss Sunshine). As for the second part, Glee treats comedy as a filler in between scenes of drama leading to a particularly flawed form of comedy-drama—which is a much more accurate, if more nebulous, genre if we’re going to be assigning those as the cavemen did—where comedy and drama are in separate rooms and try to take peeks at each other through a single small muddy window; meanwhile, the writers take turns throwing mud at the window. In pointing out the places where comedy drives the story or the character development, I could give you the scene with Hudson by the dumpster or Berry on the receiving end of a berry smoothie, but I’d be hard-pressed to offer anything more substantial. In a strange way, Glee takes the same approach to comedy that Family Guy or Punk’d or Sit Down, Shut Up or a large chunk of Adult Swim’s programming does: a vehicle for jokes, one-liners, quirky characters, and pie/smoothie-to-the-face jokes mostly devoid of basic human compassion for the characters involved, something that propels Arrested Development or 30 Rock or even Everybody Loves Raymond to a level far above Glee.
But this is just a pilot. Glee is a decent show at heart that certainly deserves to become the success everybody else already thinks it is provided, every now and then, it lets itself breathe and expand. I’ll be rooting for it.
Ze Frank’s Hard Times: Optical illusions.
The Daily Show: John Oliver reports on the Parliament corruption scandal.
The Peter Serafinowicz Show: Ringo Starr writes the Goldfinger theme song.
Chris Milk: Last Day Dream: a man watches his life pass before him.
Peter Serafinowicz: Fifty impressions in two minutes.
The Peter Serafinowicz Show: The Brian Butterfield Diet Plan
Look Around You: Water.
The Peter Serafinowicz Show: The Brian Butterfield Karaoke Bar.
Episode 1x05 of Police Squad! In Color
- Dance teacher: Look out, he’s got a knife! [fight scene]
- Dance teacher: Look out, he’s got a club! [fight scene]
- Dance teacher: Look out, he’s got herpes!
- Me: “Late in his life, Serling taught at Ithaca College in Ithaca, New York”
- Me: That would be weird to have him as your professor
- Ethane: WELCOME TO
- Ethane: SCREEN WRITING 101
- Ethane: GOTCHA, BITCHES
- Me: “Are we going to die? / NO! STOP ASKING ME THAT!”
Everybody Loves Raymond is a gem among sitcoms. It’s not about
bratty adults, usually post-collegiate, with messy relationships
(Scrubs, Friends, Graey’s Anatomy [which might as
well be a huge medicine joke], How I Met Your Mother, House, The
Office). It’s about a family, but not about kids (Fresh Prince,
Two and a Half Men, George Lopez, The Simpsons, and the list
goes on). It’s about adults in a family, which isn’t dysfunctional,
which is as apparent as the difference between its finale shot—in
which the family sits down for dinner—and the Arrested Development
finale, pre-teaser shot—in which Michael and George-Michael sail away
from their soon-to-be convicted family. It’s one of the last sitcoms
that’s not afraid of love. So many shows treat love as a ten-foot high
dragon with a bad breath and a crippling social awkwardness. It’s “he
might love me, he might not” or “should I commit” or “doesn’t
everybody deserve second chances” when you flip past prime-time
sitcoms about relationships. And it’s annoying that writers can’t
approach love with any kind of sentimentality or tenderness or even
realism because it has to be frigging dragon with a frigging
flamethrower on top of a frigging castle. In fact, the show that
anywhere approaches this level of frankness in dealing with love is
Pushing Daisies on ABC, and it’s being canceled after this season.
(Editor’s note: Fuck you, ABC.) ELR is refreshingly, retrospectively
different. Debra loves Ray, despite their flaws; Marie loves Frank,
despite their flaws. The family loves each other. It’s one of the few
TV shows where I’ve watched all the entire series more than four
times. Because it’s radically different comedy, where you can turn on
the TV and not think, “Ha ha, what horrifyingly emotionally disfigured
people these are” but “What a lovely place to be.”
With two jokes added.
For the purpose of conserving already-endangered Bytes, please slap yo-self in the butt and absolutely do not bring up any of the following in a conversation about The Daily Show and The Colbert Report:
With your help, we can save the Byte and prevent it from going the way of the now-extinct bit. Talking about anything else would be extremely appreciated, repetitious bastards.
The two best Monk episodes are these: (1) “Mr. Monk is Up All Night” for the beautiful cinematography and surrealism; (2) “Mr. Monk vs. the Cobra” for the symbolism and the ending.
Now, I know Law and Order has extremely tight writing and, as a consequence, they fit everything into one hour on the tradeoff that all their characters have extremely fast reaction times. But sometimes you just get a magically absurd moment.
Female accountant for a prostitution service (on the verge of tears): Chanel. It’s Chanel. She’s an exotic British model. She lives with her boyfriend. (sobs) He’s with organized crime.
Boy, it sure is lucky that her information saved us two days worth of investigation.
To recreate a murder, the detective avaunts. She leaves the scene, she scurries, she is no more, et cetera. You would think she’s going to the crime scene and have an epiphany about the nature of mankind and/or the murder in question. No. She journeys into some forensics department room of the police station. It’s completely dark. There’s an illuminated table in the center with a technician standing opposite our detective. Sand is falling on the table, or so you think. Until they begin talking.
Then, you realize with mounting horror and fascination (horcination), the falling sand and table contraption is actually a hologram machine. The sand acts as pixels, right? Wrong! When possible hypotheses for the mechanics of the murder gently float on the table, the sand just flows around it. Does the sand create the hologram? No. In real life, that’d be awful. Imagine projecting a movie onto a screen as we do now. Imagine that screen was infinitely long with tiny holes. Now accelerate the screen downward at 9.8 meters per second squared for the entire duration of the movie. Now make that movie three dimensional. That’s how awful that idea would have been.
Not the type of people to take this setback without fighting, the writers merely ignored the sand. It’s there to look pretty. It’s decoration sand. There’s decoration sand in my hologram. The horcination continues. With every hypothesis, the technician pulls up a new visualization. How? The viewer has no idea; I have no idea; the writers probably don’t have any ideas. They’re just standing there, talking, and new holograms pop up. The detective has a degree in kinesthesiology, which is the basis for the conversation that’s ongoing I suppose. Now, you might ask yourself, “Is the conversation scientifically accurate? Would that redeem the show?” First of all, I tried to focus on the dialogue and the completely improbable futurism of the room, and I passed out. The doctors said I had an aneurysm and hernia and heart attack at the same time induced by stress, but I think it’s because shutting down the body is its way of defending against hyper-bullshit.
Nothing can redeem the show. During the last spring season, Jesus tried and his liver exploded. Jesus doesn’t even have a liver. (They were invented in 1821, long after he died, came back to life, and defeated gravity—the final boss.) If you can project your thoughts onto a 3-D hologram, I refuse to suspend my disbelief. My disbelief is so great that there’s not enough hard drive space in the world to which I could suspend it. There’s no limitation to the plot devices you can construct if you let yourself write an imagination machine into your TV show. Let there be police robots! Let there be computers that stop crime before it happens! Wait, this completely abandonment of reality already happened, and it was called Minority Report, and I already saw it, damn it.
30 Rock, 2008.04.17
- Former NBC executive: I wandered around all night. I didn’t bump into a single soul.
- Kenneth looks relieved
- Executive: Except for this great big lesbian.
- Kenneth, agog
- Executive: Who is Conan O’Brien, and why is she so sad?
John Oliver’s Terrifying Times stand-up set premieres on April 20th on Comedy Central, which is remarkable. It’s the first time a Daily Show correspondent has done a comedy special while still on the show as far as I can call, a reversal of what they did with Demetri Martin. Oliver is also one of the most versatile comedians: In addition to all this, he along with the wonderful Andy Zaltzmann does the radio with The Bugle, a consistently funny podcast and truly a pleasure to hear. I’m working through the archives and “Hotties from History” along with the reaction from their audience is just comedy gold. I wish I had caught their Political Animal radio show. Kudos to whoever casted Oliver onto The Daily Show. He along with John Hodgman brought the show back after Colbert and Carrell became less frequent and finally left. They really brought back the tradition where correspondent sketches could literally go anywhere, Hodgman with his quiet, insane madness (“John, is that really true? / Yes. I said it, didn’t I?”) and Oliver with his zany eye for satire (the 3-minute list of silly names for British military figures, “The Meter is Running”).