I was just thinking about the fact that there are two shows I can think of that use foreign-speaking characters with subtitles, and they’re on one right after another. On Freddie, the foreign speaker gets the funniest lines. On Lost, the foreign speakers get the most touching stories. And the shows are on one after another.
And then my thought was interrupted because one of the captions on Lost was messed up; they said “You’re” where they meant “Your”. Grrr.
Yes, I’m playing catchup tonight.
I’ve only caught the second episode of the three Free Ride installments that have run on Fox. As best as I could follow it, this is about a young man who moves back in with his parents, only to find that they, and his friends, and all folks around, are nuttier than he is. Is this an attempt to build a disfunctional family one-camera sitcom to fill the Arrested Development whole but with a hook for younger viewers? Oddly, it feels like it is, but if so, well, it doesn’t fill the hole for me. Played broadly, but not funny.
Yeah, yeah, I’m doing shallow capsule reviews. Sorry.
I stumbled across the premiere of The WB’s Modern Men without being aware it existed… which is a good way to go into a review. I’ve not seen others opinions, I’ve not seen the promo material designed to explain the series to me.
What it proves to be is about a group of male friends who talk in exactly the way male friends don’t, who rely on each other in exactly the way men don’t. When one gets a life coach, they all sign up for joint sessions in exactly the way modern men wouldn’t.
If you’re getting the sense that I don’t respect this series, you’re right. But I could conquer that lack of respect if I was entertained by it. Despite the presence of TV veterans Jane Seymour as the life coach and George Wendt as the dad of the central figure, there’s nothing here for me. And I doubt this will graduate to The CW.
The concept of Black. White. is a good one. They take a white family and a black family, and by use of often impressive make-up, switches their racial appearance. All six folks (each family has one teenage kid) gets to walk a mile in another’s shoes. It really gives folks a chance to walk a mile in the other man’s (or woman’s) shoes.
But as of the first episode (yes, the second one has aired, I’m still catching up), there’s a problem. Some of the folks they cast don’t seem like they’ll be prepared to understand what they see. It’s hard to believe that we’ll get insight from the white-guy-turned-black, for example, because rather than going in with an open mind, he’s going in with an assumption about race relations that he’ll make his observations fit. He believes that black folks don’t get casually snubbed by white folk.
They have the participants living together, so issues like that get talked through, and the really-black family comes off sounding correct in conversation simply because they don’t sound crazy. When the black guy says that living as a black man, you learn to recognize when you’re being snubbed, it carries a lot more weight than the “never happens” claims of the white guy… but from all I’ve seen of human interaction, the reality likely falls somewhere in the middle. There’s a lot of real racial snubbing… but once one gets into that mindset (whether for racial reasons or any reasons), one can assume that every snub is racially based. That’s the kind of thing it would be great to realize, but alas, I don’t think it’s a point that this show will be able to illustrate.
And some things are being identified as race differences that are class differences, or location differences, or just minor specific location differences. When a shoe salesman helps the black-guy-playing-white try on some shoes… well, yes, there may be some places where a white shoe salesman would feel uncomfortable touching a black man’s feet, having bought shoes a number of time (always in the guise of a white man) I’d say that the real difference is that in some stores, they help you try on the shoe, and in some they don’t, and it would not be hard to go through life experiencing one rather than the other.
In the end, it came off more as a reality show about people forced to live together while doing something odd than it does something that was going to generate real insight into the general case of race relations. Disappointing, but I will give the second episode a view to see if it can surprise me.
I Netflixified disk 1 of season 1 of Mr. Peepers recently. This was an early TV sitcom that I always wanted to check out, as it starred Wally Cox. I’d seen Cox pop up quite effectively in the role of a mild-mannered but intelligent soul a number of places (he’s the guy who Robert Petrie is running against in a two-part Dick Van Dyke Show, for example; he’s also the voice of Tennesee Tuxedo.) I’d also read Cox’s book My Life as a Young Boy at some point, a used bookstore find in Alaska, although I found it a disappointing read.
Cox is truly funny in this show about a new schoolteacher, but I found the show hard to watch simply because it’s old kinescopes. Most vitally, Cox’s light, high-pitched voice seem to disappear in the audio mix. I’d probably watch more of it if I could pay closer attention to it, but much of my TV time these days is multitasking – either paying attention to young Allison or getting work done. Yes, that makes me a poor reviewer.
Some of the early TVishness of it was funny. On the first episode, as Peepers approaches the school for the first time, the “town” in the background is clearly painted on the backdrop. It’s not that the painting is bad (you’d be surprised at how much painted backdrop you see and don’t notice in TV), it’s that the backdrop is being blown about a bit by something backstage, and to make matters worse it’s not just on one sheet, but on several, so that cracks appear in the town.
The disk does include the original, presumably unaired pilot for the series on the special features. There’s always some interest in seeing how they changed the first attempt into what you see (if you’ve ever seen the original Dick Van Dyke Show pilot with Carl Reiner in the lead role, for example, you see that they took a show of good ideas that didn’t work on the screen and reworked it into one that worked). In this case, the most eye-catching change is who they got to play the gym teacher – in the original pilot, it was an uncredited Walter Matthau.
Tony Randall eventually shows up in the series, although to be frank I didn’t watch enough episodes to catch him. (I operate under a loose rule with my Netflix disks – they go back after a while even if I’ve not finished watching them. It does me little good to have a bunch of disks around that I mean to get around to watching; I can always rent ‘em again later.)
Mr. Peepers is worth checking out if you’re a TV history buff, or if the name Wally Cox has some positive association for you. (He was Tennesee Tuxedo, folks!) Netflixable, or purchasable.
Fox has ordered two more seasons of The Simpsons, which will complete its 19th season.
I remember when the show broke out with its first full-length episode, the Christmas special. I mentioned it to folks after the first time it had aired (Fox had already planned a second airing), and my boss watched it and demanded I tell him why I hadn’t alerted him to this before its first airing. Fox added more showings of this special to the schedule… I think they showed it four times that first year, and then they showed all the episode of the first season, and then there was a lag – animation has a long lead time, and they weren’t counting on this spin-off of The Tracy Ullman Show being a hit.
It was seen as a rebel comedy then. Now? The kids graduating college these days have seen this as a staple for as long as they’ve really been aware of prime time TV. It’s hard to be more establishment than that. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes less so, but it no longer has the advantage of being a surprise the way it once was. It’s no longer the surprise bucket-of-water in our face, it’s the stream that runs through our lives. It’s the central cultural reference of our times – the show has gone after so many aspects of life with such precision that it’s a rare event where some Simpsons quote is not applicable (and there is a legion of folks out there with such a quote ready whenever the opportunity presents.) It’s earned its accolades (“First Annual Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence”) and its success, and will likely be visible in our cutlure for a long time to come.
Just a follow-up note to an earlier posting: apparently, the “Hockey Monkey” song is actually cartoonist James Kochalka working with the Zambonis. (Unsurprising, as has some thematic comfort with his earlier comic-boook-and-song hit “Monkey Vs. Robot”
A friend of mine has a daughter who for years had trouble reading some signs. She was just diagnosed with some color sensing disability. The mother noted that after a couple of eye doctors found nothing years ago, she assumed that “it was all in her head”. Did I respond by:
Score 1 point if you get the right answer, or 2 points if you think so nicely of me that you choose an answer that makes me look more compassionate than reality does.
The kids, you see, they like the drinking, and the knocking of the boots. And since the advertisers love the kids, we gotta take what they like and put it in a TV show. Not quality. Drinking and girls willing to knock boots. So if we put that in a TV show, rather than bothering with that quality stuff, the kids’ll eat it up like Shasta McNasty!
Okay, maybe that’s not fair. I missed the pilot of The Loop, caught the second episode, and it was clearly not a -cheap- production. It was a one camera show with good visual texture, with Phillip Baker Hall adding the illusion of class to it. But you don’t have to be a cheap show to be a mix of cheap attempts at humor and other thigns that seem merely masquerading as humor.
The series is about a young man who finds himself suddenly moved to the upper executive echelons of a failing airline. He lives with a group of attractive like-aged folks – his brother, a serious-minded redheaded lady, and a more bleach-brained blonde (who actually goes beyond the material in delivery in some ways).
Beyond her, there is one good thing about the show, one thing I found worth revisiting and researching: the theme song. It’s “Hockey Monkey” by The Zambonis – and it’s worth checking out the free MP3 of it and a video for it at their website.
