Mike's Adventures in Sitcomland: Day Four

When people speculate about the downfall of America, it's usually our failing financial markets, our military over-extensions, maybe some sort of Apocalyptic religious war. But no one ever seems concerned about the state of American pop culture.

I bring this up because NBC's Kath & Kim is, apparently, a remake of a popular Australian sitcom, another in what's becoming a fairly long line of American shows adapted from foreign shows. There was a day, my friends, not so very long ago, when America ruled the sitcom! Do you think ALF was adapted from a Japanese show called Alien Furry Sock-Puppet Our Friend? Do you think Cheers was adapted from an Indian show about the neighborhood hookah bar? No! 

Don't get me wrong, sometimes these translations work: the only people still arguing that the American version of The Office is a cheap ripoff are being curmudgeonly for the sake of being curmudgeonly, like those people who refuse to listen to any REM album past Murmur. But more often, it seems, these remakes fail to capture some hard-to-define charm of the original, like the American version of Coupling, which I'm sorry to bring up, since as a nation I think we decided to never speak of again.*

This remaking business just strikes me as fundamentally lazy. It's not like it's all that much work to come up with one of these things; in fact, they seem to be put together in a kind of Sitcom Mad Libs game: [Lead character name] works at [business] with [secondary character name] who's quirky because of his/her [race/appearance/unmarried status/mild developmental disability], hijinks ensue! 

Or: [Lead character name] has just seen his/her life change due to [new career/marriage/divorce] and is trying to [make it work!/meet Mr. Right!], hijinks ensue!

K&K is, in fact, sort of a mixture of the two: Kath (Molly Shannon**) runs an in-home hair-styling business, and lives with her daughter Kim (Selma Blair***), who's quirky due to being incredibly stupid. Also, Kath has a new boyfriend (John Michael Higgins), who runs a mall sandwich shop called Phil's Sandwich Island and is quirky because he's basically like every other comically over-earnest John Michael Higgins character ever****.

It's not hard to imagine K&K as a translated foreign show, because it seems like it should be funny, and is often very close to being funny, but some hard-to-define thing just isn't quite right. The humor (attempted) mostly stems from the same kind of dramatic irony that propels a show like Absolutely Fabulous: two characters who clearly think their lives are glamorous and enviable, but which are in fact kind of sad. The show's best moments play on this kind of tension, like when Kath says "No, Kim, not the Pecan Sandies, those are for company!" Or when Higgins' character takes Kath out for a special engagement dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Or when Kim storms into the living room and complains about their being out of Doritos for the third time that week, then pouts "What else am I supposed to eat with my Hot Pocket?"*****

Of course the balance one has to strike in this kind of deal is making the characters funny without making fun of them. This is the particular genius of the Best in Show-style mockumentary, in that the characters are all patently ridiculous, but they're so over-the-top ridiculous (and so earnest) as to actually be fairly sympathetic. They're ridiculous caricatures but they're also, somehow, totally real humans. Kath, at times, seems to fit this mold (i.e., the Pecan Sandies joke, or her attempts to turn her living room into a "real salon" by adding one of those little Zen rock fountains), but Kim is just too much of a joke, her stupidity manifesting itself mostly in mispronouncing words or failing to see why her somewhat-estranged husband would value a job at the electronics store over a job at Cinnabon, since working at Cinnabon means free Cinnabons******.

For the show to work, I think the writers need to spend more time studying that Best in Show mold, and figure out how to strike that balance (it might involve actually making the characters more ridiculous, the show's premises more absurd). They've got a cast that could pull it off: Shannon is funny, Higgins is really funny, Selma Blair is perfectly capable of giving one-dimensional characters a depth of humanity.

Verdict: As has been noted by pretty much every television critic, the outlook for this show isn't exactly promising, based on the first two episodes (yes, I actually watched two episodes this time). But I don't think it's a lost cause ... yet.

*Actually, I know at least one person, a person generally smart about other things, who really loathes the British version of Coupling, to the point where it almost made me reconsider, but then I saw the episode where the curly-haired guy pretended to have a wooden leg to date a woman he met on the train, and I was back to being a fan. 

**playing a character that's sort of a variant on her SNL "Forty and Fabulous!" character.

***who is, at least, not playing her usual film role of Repressed/Dowdy Girlfriend Sure To Eventually Be Left For Someone More Fun.

****like his character in Best in Show, or his small part in The Break-Up, a movie I find to be vastly underrated, probably because too many people expected it to be a typical romantic comedy and so were confused when Vince Vaughn and Jennifer Anniston fail to get back together in the end.

*****Actually, it's beginning to dawn on me how many of K&K's jokes revolve around food, which is kind of odd. I would be surprised if there isn't, at some point, a joke revolving around either tuna noodle casserole or Hamburger Helper.

******The show uses a stand-in for Cinnabon, of course, but it's clearly meant to be Cinnabon.

Mike's Adventures in Sitcomland: Day Three

I came to Gary Unmarried with, yes, a fair amount of skepticism, but also with a small shimmering globule of hope. Like Gary, I'm unmarried (though, unlike Gary, I'm not unmarried due to divorce), and I'm also still grasping onto the possibly unjustified belief that Jay Mohr -- frequently criticized for his work in ... well, pretty much everything he's ever done -- actually has within him the possibility for comic greatness, or at least reasonable comic goodness. 

Now that I find myself wanting to defend that belief, though, I can't say with any real certainty where it comes from, except maybe a few funny Christopher Walken impressions on Saturday Night Live, a sort-of-funny bit part in the movie Go, and the fact that I often enjoy Snarky Asshole characters,* which Mohr seems fairly adept at portraying**.

The premise of Gary Unmarried is that Gary (Mohr) has recently divorced his wife of 15 years and is now trying to live on his own. He runs a painting business that seems to not be particularly successful (he has only one employee, and when that employee paints the interior of Gary's new bachelor pad, he manages to paint the windows shut). Despite this non-success, he's somehow able to live in a prototypical sitcom house,*** by himself, while also paying child support and a portion of his wife's living expenses.

Though there is at least a brief nod to Gary's probable financial woes, since in the episode I watched -- "Gary Marries Off His Ex" -- part of the plot revolves around Gary trying to convince his old marriage counselor (played by Ed Begley, Jr.), who's now dating Gary's ex-wife, to hurry up and marry her already, so he can stop paying her so much money. The other part of the plot revolves around Gary's improbably hot girlfriend**** wanting him to move on with his life, i.e. paint his new house, buy dishes not made of paper, etc., and presumably in turn get more serious with her.

If this all sounds like fairly standard sitcomish stuff, it is, though I have to admit there were a couple moments of actual humor, like when Gary stole his wife's expensive Kitchen-Aid stand mixer, then admitted he didn't even know what it was for and took it out of spite (later in the episode, he also steals its replacement from her kitchen). It's not even that the stealing itself is particularly funny, just that the Kitchen-Aid mixer is pretty much the perfect representation of a Married Product, in that people tend to own them only because they registered for them and someone actually forked over $400 to buy them one. It's also a product I can completely believe his wife would be pissed over losing, because I in fact registered for one, before I decided not to get married, and if I'd gotten it I would have guarded it fiercely, partly for its utility but mainly because it's like a beautiful art object for one's kitchen*****.

The success or failure of this show, I think, will ultimately turn on Mohr's ability to be a reliably funny and improbably likable Snarky Asshole. If Vince Vaughn were in this show, for instance, it would probably be hilarious. But Mohr is, sadly, no Vince Vaughn; his humor operates at about 1/3 of Vaughn's frenetic pacing, and because he hasn't fully embraced his Everyman Schlubbishness in the way Vaughn (mostly) has, his brand of asshole-ishness has the off-putting scent of the guy who still thinks he could get by on his looks******.

Verdict: I may actually watch this show again, against all rationality, because I still think there's hope for Mohr to save himself, and this show seems to be the proper vehicle for him to do it. Because the very things Mohr would need to do to be successful in this show -- embrace his Everyman Schlubbishness, be a more likable variety of asshole -- are also the things Mohr needs to do to be successful in general.

*I also used to be a sometime-defender of David Spade, though I've long since given that up.

**At this point we probably have to concede that Mohr, like Spade, is in fact a real-life snarky asshole, though while this makes me like Spade less, for some reason it only makes me like Mohr more. I have no idea why this is, except I think having a few beers with Mohr might be fun, whereas having a few beers with Spade would be interminable. Maybe because Mohr seems to at least partially embrace his schlubbishness, whereas David Spade continues to think he's the cool guy in a circa 1992 high school cafeteria. I mean, come the fuck on.

***Almost every sitcom house is a 1950's-era bungalow or craftsman in a vaguely suburban (but not exurban) neighborhood, where the homes are close together but all feature fenced yards and driveways. It's funny that in sitcoms these homes tend to represent something like "working class family" despite the fact these kinds of homes, in old, nicely tree-lined neighborhoods usually within easy commuting distance of a city's downtown business district, haven't really been "working class" since maybe the late 1970s (the recent fallout in home prices notwithstanding).

****Of course every male character on pretty much every sitcom is paired up with an improbably hot girlfriend, even if that male character looks like, for instance, Kevin James. In Gary Unmarried's case, though, I suppose this might be slightly less ridiculous, since in real life Mohr's first wife was a model and his current wife is an actress. On the other hand, if Mohr were in fact a house painter, rather than an actor, I'm not sure how likely these pairings would be, in so far as Mohr isn't unattractive, but he's not exactly Brad Pitt, either. In Gary Unmarried he's starting to show his age, with a haircut that's about three years away from becoming a full-on combover, and a paunch not unlike Vince Vaughn's in The Break-Up. 

*****Yes, I'm kind of a woman.

******Mohr's blonde hair doesn't help. For some reason -- and I'm not saying this is fair -- men who are still blonde beyond the age of, say, 22, tend to come across as narcissistic assholes.

Mike's Adventures in Sitcomland: Day Two

Here's a pretty good indication of the sitcom's current status in the universe of American television: there are no prime-time sitcoms on Tuesday nights. None. This isn't a baseball/debate abnormality, either, since the Phils had the day off and the two presidential candidates don't square off until tonight (Wednesday). Even when I expanded the search to include basic cable, the only sitcom I could find last night was a circa-2005 episode of Reba.*

But no fear, loyal readers: once again Tivo has come to the rescue**. I happened to tape The New Adventures of Old Christine last week, before I even thought of this project, so now I'll just pretend it came on last night.

TNAoOC isn't exactly new, of course -- it's been on since '06 -- but I've never seen it. And it seems like it might be a good watermark for sitcoms in general, since it's been nominated for a number of awards, and Julia Louis-Dreyfus actually won an Emmy.

Let me note, first of all, that I fucking love Wanda Sykes. I have never, ever seen Wanda Sykes in a television show or movie and not laughed at least once -- and this is saying something, because Wanda Sykes has been involved in some really shitty projects***. True to form, I laughed at most of her jokes in TNAoOC, even when I knew, intellectually, that those jokes weren't all that funny. I don't know what it is; something about Wanda Sykes just does it for me, humor-wise.

The premise of TNAoOC is that Christine (Dreyfus) is divorced and owns a gym. Also, at some point she apparently sham-gay-married Sykes' character for reasons never made entirely clear in the episode I watched, though I can only assume the reasons were predictably zany.

Dreyfus is fine, and the other actors are all fine, in rather predictable sitcomish fashion -- a series of laugh-track one liners, mostly, which in this episode centered around race (after Sykes is profiled in a magazine article, the gym gets a bunch of new black members, which makes Dreyfus vaguely uncomfortable, though this tension is resolved so quickly it's like it's never really there). Just to give you a sense of the sorts of jokes we're talking about here:

--A woman is twice mistaken for pregnant, after which she says "I'm getting rid of this stupid blouse."

--Dreyfus is trying to say she'll "be right back" but instead says "be right black," then gets flustered and says "be white black."

--The two men in the episode (whose relation to the other characters I'm not entirely clear on) are shown to be rather inept at child care and general responsibility.

In other words TNAoOC isn't exactly breaking new ground, but is perhaps serviceable as a kind of sitcom comfort food. And the power of sitcom-as-comfort-food shouldn't be discounted. I for one find myself, in times of mild depressiveness, turning to old episodes of Cheers or Cosby not so much for the jokes but for the familiarity -- just seeing the Cheers bar or the Huxtables' living room is enough to make me sink a little deeper into the couch, exhale and go comfortably numb. One could perhaps imagine TNAoOC's gym some day having a similar effect, since it has that familiar sitcom look, a look I'm not sure how to describe except as oddly warm -- everything is very evenly lighted, the furniture and props never seem to move, the show's universe is pretty much a closed world****.

So I guess my verdict on TNAoOC isn't really positive or negative -- there's enough potential that I don't feel comfortable dismissing it without first watching more than one episode, though I'm not sure I'll watch it again. Perhaps one problem with sitcoms is actually their comfort-food appeal, which makes old reruns of syndicated shows somewhat more appealing than new shows, unless of course those new shows transcend the comfort-food thing and manage to be different or interesting, like (reportedly) Arrested Development*****.

*Which I refused to watch, since a) this project is about "new," or at least "kinda new" sitcoms, and b) come on, Reba? Fuck me.

**Actually I'm Tivoing all these programs, which is why I reviewed a Monday show on Tuesday, etc. And it strikes me that this whole project would never be possible without Tivo; or, it would be possible, but would require me to be an even bigger slave to my television than I already am. Which, in a way, might be more interesting, since it would be an actual challenge then -- sitting through a different sitcom each night, commercials and all, instead of just recording them and watching them whenever I feel like it. Tivo, I've found, is a sort of double-edged sword: on the one hand, obviously, you can watch things when you want. On the other hand, I watch all sorts of dumb crap I'd probably never watch -- and would maybe be better off for never watching -- if I were forced to do my watching on the networks' timetable.

***Like Evan Almighty, for instance, which admittedly I didn't see, but I laughed at Wanda Sykes' parts in the trailer.

****It's worth noting here that, as an actual gym, the gym in TNAoOC is patently ridiculous: one carpeted room measuring maybe 12' by 14' featuring about six pieces of exercise equipment. Though, in fairness, the gym seems to be modeled more on Curves for Women than Bally's or Gold's, and since as a man I'm not allowed inside Curves for Women I can't say for certain that the portrayal on TNAoOC isn't architecturally and anthropologically accurate.

*****Which I never really got into, partly out of some weird curmudgeonly resistance to everyone else's unabashed praise, and partly because I was afraid of watching AD and not liking it, then having to reconsider my friends' aesthetic tastes.

Mike's Adventures in Sitcomland: Day One

What can I say: I'm a sucker for idiotic projects. So this week, in part to retain some semblance of sanity while fighting off both a flu and a giant stack of student papers, I've decided to, each evening, tune into one new (to me) sitcom, and report back to all those loyal readers in Barrelhouseland about what I find.

Up front, let me just say I'm not optimistic. It's not a great time for the sitcom, by nearly all reports. For Christ's sake, Two and a Half Men* is supposedly the best the genre has to offer. The only sitcom I watch with any regularity is How I Met Your Mother, but even that regular watching has less to do with great comedic moments** than with my own laziness and aversion to change (at this point, I pretty much have to find out how he finally meets my mother, right?). I suppose Entourage is sort of a sitcom, in that it's half an hour and meant to be (mostly) funny, though I just don't think HBO shows count, since they inherently play by different rules (cursing, nudity, no commercials, etc.). Honestly, the only reason I can name more than one or two currently running sitcoms is their prominent advertising during college football games and the MLB playoffs.

Anyway, on with Day One's show, which is something called The Big Bang Theory. The title alludes to the actual Big Bang, since the main characters of the show are geeky scientists (physicists, specifically, according to IMDB.com, though I'm not sure their specialty matters all that much) who live next door to a "hot"*** girl. That's pretty much the whole premise, so far as I can tell.

I'm not sure it's fair to criticize the cliche-factor of a sitcom's premise, since pretty much every sitcom is positioned in relation to cliche (either as a cliche itself, like 'fat, losery dude inexplicably paired with smart, funny, beautiful wife,' or as cliche-breaking in a rather obvious way, like 'black family living the kind of mid-80s upper-middle-class existence previously represented televisually only by white families'). 

But the cliche of TBBT -- geeky scientists juxtaposed with "hot" neighbor -- doesn't leave the show with many options, story-arc-wise. Either the guys will prove themselves to be more winning with the neighbor than one would expect, which might be interesting but not particularly funny, or they'll be a collection of geeky-science-guy stereotypes, which will be funny only in the lamest, most predictable ways.

It seems the writers of TBBT have gone with that second option, as the episode I watched involved a lot of geeky science-speak, a lot of social awkwardness (one character is literally unable to speak in the presence of the "hot" girl) plus an Indian guy who speaks in an exaggerated, Apu-style accent.

All of this would be perhaps be okay except for two things I just couldn't get past, having to do with two of the science-guy characters. One, Leonard, is played by Johnny Galecki, better known as David, from Roseanne, Darlene's losery boyfriend for several seasons. I always liked David's character: he was sort of subtly funny, and mopey, always being abused in one way or another by either Darlene or the other Conners. He was a sad sack, but a lovable sad sack. So I just can't buy him as a brainy scientist. At first I thought this was my own fault, but Galecki seems to be playing the geeky science-guy character with pretty much the same mannerisms, voice inflection, slouchiness, etc., that he brought to the character of David. Sure they've put dark-frame glasses on him, but frankly that just makes him look like an older David, who's maybe semi-realized his dream of penning his own comic book, rather than a guy who's exploring the outer reaches of our universe with a giant telescope. 

My other problem with the show is Jim Parsons, who you may remember for his brief appearance in the movie Garden State: he was the guy who worked at Medieval Times, and was sleeping with another character's mom. On TBBT, Parsons' character is supposed to be unemotional and rational in a Spock-like way, but this is played up to the point where he resembles nothing so much as a deranged serial killer. It's fucking creepy, which could be interesting, but it's obvious the creepiness is mostly unintentional; I didn't get the impression there'd be a future episode in which he reveals a closet full of body parts.

As for the episode's actual plot, it wasn't really interesting enough to dwell on. 

Verdict: This show's been on the air a full season already, so presumably certain people are watching it. But I don't think I will be.

*I refuse to watch Two and a Half Men. Sorry. I just will not.

**Actually, HIMYM is sometimes funny, but mostly because of Neil Patrick Harris, Jason Segal and, to a lesser extent, Alyson Hannigan (I can never decide if I think she's funny or just hot. I know that shouldn't be a hard distinction to make, but for some reason it is, probably having more to do with me than with any sort of universal law re: funniness and hotness). Point is, the actual plot of HIMYM is pretty stupid, and not very entertaining, and the main character and pretty much all of his girlfriends are completely insufferable. It's sort of like late-period Friends, in that the whole thing is patently ridiculous and overly sitom-ish, but every now and then either Joey or Chandler would say something funny.

***Kaley Cuoco, who you may or may not remember as the daughter on Eight Simple Rules for Dating My Daughter, a show memorable mostly because it featured John Ritter, and then John Ritter died, and it tried but failed to awkwardly sputter on without him. I don't find Cuoco particularly hot, though I suppose she is in a kind of bland, sitcomish way: if you squint a little, she looks sort of like a mid-breakdown Britney Spears.

Your New Fall Season

These probably won't be the new shows you'll see this fall, but they damn well should be.

Popularity Contest: Several strangers live in a house, like The Real World, or Paradise Hotel, only there are no challenges, or jobs, or, for that matter, anything else. They can do whatever the hell they want, but each week, one of them gets the boot, based only on viewer voting. Unlike American Idol, there are no judges telling America how to vote, there are no guidelines for voting, people just vote for whoever they want sent home. The winner gets to be Obama's vice president. 

Wife Swap, Extreme Edition: Basically, the same premise as the original, only with more fucking.

If I Did It: A miniseries based on the popular and purely fictional bestseller, starring O.J. Simpson as himself, Alyssa Milano as Nicole Brown Simpson, Rob Schneider as Ron Goldman, and Fred Goldman as Guy Who Comes From Offstage Every Now and Again and Punches O.J. Simpson In The Face.

Big Fat Idiot Wife: A sitcom in which a thin, well-groomed, successful man is married to an overweight, slovenly, underemployed woman who likes to scratch herself and smell her own farts. Hilarious! 

Race War: Finally, we answer the age-old question -- which race truly is the best? Watch as blacks go up against whites in spelling and marksmanship, as Jews compete with Arabs in relay races, as Asians battle-dance against other kinds of Asians.

Man vs. Beast, Extreme Edition: Basically, the same premise as the original, only with more fucking.