There isn’t a lot new on the weekly calendar right now, so among other things, I decided to use some time to catch up on a show I’d been wanting to check out.
Rick and Morty kicked off the week Sunday night with “Valkyrick,” And, hey, we finally get a full credits sequence this season, which includes a couple of fun new sequences. Anyway, this week is a Rick and Space Beth adventure. Space Beth is working for some… organization whose name I’ve already forgotten and is sick of all the bureaucracy and meetings about meetings, so she goes rogue to conduct an assassination of a space bug queen they’ve been planning for months… only to find out it’s already been done. She calls Rick to bail her out, and the two of them work together to uncover what ends up being a conspiracy by a crazed doctor to create a mutant race of superbugs, and with the help of Stephen Root’s, uh, good-guy temporary-ally bug general, are able to find a cure and ultimately put a stop to the (very annoying) crazed bug doctor (who constantly uses “rent-free” even though it’s long been stale and stupid).
There are some good jokes and bits here too (“Turn on the cash!”), but mostly it reflects two things at this point. One is that the show has established so many characters and worlds that there are many, many places they can go for stories that use already-existing characters (Birdperson even reappears here!). And two, the main plot of the episode is really about Rick and Space Beth bonding through this adventure, without any nihilism or cynicism or Rick-is-an-asshole-ness to undercut everything at the end. I guess, like all the rest of us, even wild sci-fi adventure-comedies mature and mellow with age. Solid episode; it doesn’t really break any new ground, but it fits well with the show’s current groove.
Moving on to Thursday, I don’t know if it was intentional or not, but Fox’s animated block had a theme of organized crime…
Bob’s Burgers leads us off with “Snackface,” where Louise is running an illegal snack-selling operation at school, and Gene devises a new snack chip with an unripe-persimmon coating that becomes a hot seller because of its tongue-numbing abilities. The kids’ operation grows and starts to look a lot like organized crime (I would say GoodFellas, but really it’s more like “Contemporary American Poultry”) and, of course, dealing with that. Unfortunately it features Millie, who I still find too much of an actual danger to the other kids for her to be just another quirky person who needs to be accepted. Meanwhile, Bob and Linda have to try to rescue their hard drive on their extremely old laptop, which fails while they’re trying to do their taxes (I think Sam Richardson plays the tech support guy).
The Great North gives us “Reservoir Dad Adventure,” where Beef finds he’s lost his love of fishing and links up with a group of extreme stunt fishers to try to recover his passion… and then discovers they’re really a criminal ring that steals rare exotic fish and sells them on the black market. And then he has to go undercover to help catch them, which he is… poorly suited to. While he’s gone, Aunt Dirt runs a competition between the others to determine who would be the best captain in Beef’s absence.
Grimsburg gives us “The Undies,” which is the name for the Undercover Awards, not underwear. Marvin is still adjusting to roommate life with Summers (which mostly means continuing to be rude and demanding his way all the time), but then the opportunity comes to go undercover in a mob family, and he he has a pre-made character ready: “Roberto Stanleytucci.”
Then on the job, Marvin gets caught in an explosion and suffers amnesia, thinking he actually is Roberto Stanleytucci. And because this leads him to actually treat Summers like a friend and is willing to go along with everything Summers wants to do, Summers indulges it as long as he possibly can… although it eventually has to come to an end, it’s pretty funny along the way (with a funny shot at Sebastian Maniscalco and another good joke about John Mulaney).
The B-plot involves Wynona and Otis overhearing the mayor talking to Martinez about a budget surplus, and coming up with their own solutions for it. (Otis wants to buy an orphan at the orphan auction so he can have a sister to have more age-appropriate conversations with, and the “orphan auction” segment is quite funny.) Solid Thursday night all in all; I think Grimsburg made me laugh the most.
I decided Sunday night, with not much else going on, to get back into The Four Seasons, and I ended up blasting through the whole thing, which should be a pretty good indicator of its quality. I mean, it wasn’t my favorite show of the year, but it engaged me enough to make me want to keep going. It’s got a lot of good character comedy, although it definitely falls more in the “dramedy” category.
One thing I do like is that it inverts some of the traditional expectations of the story being told here, which we see most clearly in Steve Carell’s Nick and Tina Fey’s Kate. I’ll leave you to discover what I mean by that, exactly, but given the kind of characters Tina Fey usually plays, you might have an inkling already. Anyway, I enjoyed this pretty well, possibly more than I thought I would. Maybe being in my 40s and long married helped me understand what everyone was going through better, and which married couples’ various discords could be resolved and which couldn’t. Anyway, it’s funnier than you all told me the movie was, at least. To get into more detail would, I feel, be just spoiling it for you.
As slow as this week was, we still didn’t get to Friday’s Murderbot. A week being slow doesn’t matter much when the show comes out this close to deadline and the Mrs. doesn’t feel like watching it.
We had to put on a few King of the Hill episodes after hearing the horrific Jonathan Joss news. (Fortunately, we had a couple of terrific obituaries on here that I didn’t have to write one too.) “Nancy Boys” is a great John Redcorn showcase, as Dale’s recommitment to Nancy leaves her having second thoughts about her long-running affair… and Dale’s willingness to help John Redcorn with FOIA cements for him that Dale’s too good a friend to keep screwing his wife, too. Also, “Transnational Amusements Presents: Peggy’s Magic Sex Feet” is funny, and, you know, exactly what it seems to be about. (As well as being a great reminder that Bobby Hill is the wisest and most self-assured of the Hill family, if not of the entire show.)
I also got a hankering for some Futurama a couple of nights ago, and started with one of my favorites, “A Clone of My Own”– mostly because I was thinking about the “universal translator” that only speaks the long-dead obscure language of French– before moving to a few I enjoy but don’t watch as often as my very favorites. First, “The Deep South.” I forgot “The Deep South” had a couple of my favorite Farnsworth jokes, between his fixation on the giant suppository and “He may have ocean madness, but that’s no excuse for ocean rudeness.” Next, “I Dated a Robot,” because that “educational” propaganda film kills me. Finally, “Amazonian Women in the Mood,” which does lean a bit toward the guys being more overtly sexist than usual so they can get their asses kicked for it, but also gives us some great classic Zapp material.
And, due to a possibly-fabricated Truth Social post by Donald Trump about Elon Musk, I watched an episode of Chappelle’s Show just so I could watch “Player Hater’s Ball” again. “Why don’t you click your heels three times and go back to Africa?” Just one of the hilarious offensive-in-any-other-context lines in this sketch! (The rest of the episode is not that good; like nearly every sketch comedy show ever, Chappelle’s Show is uneven and people remember the hits a lot more than the misses. It’s just that the hits were all-time great sketches and good enough to make the show a cultural phenomenon.)
Oh, and I’ve been watching Andor again. Yeah, it’s that good.
Nothing this week, as so many shows wrapped up their seasons in May.
Nothing immediately on my slate this month, at least. Sunny in July and the King of the Hill in August are all I have firm release dates on so far this summer. There are other shows coming out, of course, or that have come out recently; I just don’t have any that I’m committed to watching at the moment.
Stay tuned as well for the possibility that this column moves to a new day in the coming weeks.
Your turn in the comments!
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Captain Nath
Born on the bayou, thriving in the mountains. Writer, gambler, comedian, singer-songwriter, bon vivant, globetrotter, and all-around Renaissance Man with perfect opinions about TV and music. Pronounced with a long A and with the H.
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I’ll have to check out The Four Seasons. While bleakness billed as comedy can be massively irritating (and indeed is rarely anything else, though there are some good depression-related comedies), I’m actually always here for well-executed dramedy.
And now for my own TV round-up, excluding anything already posted about during the week:
Andor, “Kassa,” “That Would Be Me,” and “Reckoning”
Enjoying this so far! I’ll try not to repeat myself too much from Discord, but I won’t try that hard:
* I’ve said before that I love crime story devices in nontraditional crime narratives, and Andor is bringing that so far: Brasso embroidering the alibi Cassian asks him for is a great touch, for example. But another part of that is how human-scale some of the motivations (like Timm’s jealousy) are, and how that creates a fictional universe that isn’t made up entirely of heroes and villains all acting for the sake of the bigger picture; that backrop enhances the “bigger” actions.
* I love that Cassian gets to commit (relatively) cold-blooded murder with the second guard’s death: he doesn’t get much time to think about it, but it’s a deliberate act of long-term self-preservation rather than an accident or reflexive, heat-of-the-moment self-defense.
* Another thing that makes the universe feel lived-in and believably complex is Syril’s boss immediately recognizing that he wants nothing to do with the guards’ deaths: “They’re in a brothel, which we’re not supposed to have. The expensive one, which they shouldn’t be able to afford. Drinking Revnog, which we’re not supposed to allow. Both of them supposedly on the job, which is a dismissible offense.” The prequel movies tried to do large-scale politics, but this the small-scale kind that I’m more excited about, where you get jaded-by-experience people playing the odds to try to keep their lives as trouble-free as they can. Of course this guy mostly just wants to keep away from the Empire’s attention, and of course that strategy is undone by ….
* Syril, who is probably the most interesting character to me so far. He’s the kind of character who generates drama because there’s something he’s pursuing beyond the status quo; it’s not necessarily smart, and in this case it’s obviously not good, but it Makes Things Happen. And I’m always fascinated by characters in fictional dystopias who are True Believers, even capable of succeeding for a while in whatever system they’ve devoted themselves to … but, almost inevitably, only for a while. (These systems tend to eat the loyal in the end. Syril’s boss has a better chance of making it out alive than Syril does.) He’s really an idealist with toxic ideals, shaken to the core by the idea being the Bestest Fascist Boy availed him nothing and that his crew was taken down by two rebels and the hatred of a whole area. How could this be, when he’s such a clean-cut, enterprising young man?! “Am I so out of touch? No, it’s the galaxy that’s wrong.”
* Luthen and Cassian’s meet-up in Reckoning” is fantastic, especially with Stellan Skarsgård’s world-weary Luthen instantly sizing up Cassian himself as a much bigger asset than the stolen equipment Cassian is trying to sell him. If he can recruit him, he can get a lot more than one Starpath unit out of the deal. It’s both a completely pragmatic stance and a subtle contrast to the inherently dehumanizing way of looking at things in the fascism that’s surrounding them: I suspect that the Empire never bets on or invests people in the same way. This show promises a grimmer, practical look at the business of resistance, so I’m sure there are plenty of circumstances where the Alliance higher-ups would let Cassian die for the overall cause–I mean, Rogue One is all about necessary deaths, after all–but not for trivialities.
Primal, “The Red Mist” and “The Primal Theory”
“The Red Mist” fucking owns, with some of a very action-packed show’s most brutal and savage action thus far. One thing I really appreciate about how this show constructs its fight scenes is how it’s constantly finding new and dramatically charged angles on them. Some of that comes down to the choreography and literal battle arrangements–this, for example, is the first scene we’ve had where our protagonists can be assailed by a barrage of long-distance weapons fired by a huge group of enemies in this exact way, and seeing Fang at the center of a vortex of incoming arrows feels legitimately harrowing–but the bigger and more interesting part comes from the moral and social dimensions. This episode pits our characters against an actual community, and while it’s a warrior community that’s armed to the teeth and well-trained, it still, by its nature, features opponents Spear, in particular, would rather not be fighting. As legitimate as the grievance against the Vikings is, and as desperate and necessary as their violent escape is … fighting this particular fight still means fighting, harming, and even killing children. And the losses create an antagonistic counterpart to Spear and Fang, another grief-stricken parent and spouse now on the warpath with his remaining son. It has a Kill Bill feeling to it, where the revenge is fair but also begets the potential for more revenge.
“The Primal Theory,” on the other hand, is an intriguing, fun series outlier, hopping into the Victorian era to vindicate Charles Darwin’s assertion that humanity is fully capable of reverting back to “primal” violence to save itself. I’m amused by how this borrows a classic urban legend setup. (It leans into the horror, as a consequence of that, and the drop of blood falling from the ceiling into the glass of whiskey is a great image.) Having never read a biography of Darwin, I’m going to blithely assume this is all Strict Realism and Darwin and his friends really did fight an escaped convict to death on a dark and stormy night. No one correct me on this.
Poker Face, “One Last Job”
Superficially entertaining, with another strong guest star line-up–you give me Sam Richardson and James Ransone, and I’m going to be at least a little bit happy–but the more I thought about any of it, the more annoyed I got. It’s like this episode was created to perfectly embody the criticisms of the show Miller posted about on Discord: the moodboard shallowness of the vibes (the crime movie references felt more like obnoxious, obvious pandering than lived-in love), the minimal thought put into Charlie’s detective work (the episode seems to set up key details for later deduction and then blows past them by just having an extra clarify that part of the crime seems to be a Mission: Impossible III reference, solving it all for her), the sympathetic victim praising fake-Wal-Mart as a modern town square (S1 had a guy doing his best to genuinely invest making Subway sandwiches with some creativity, but it felt like that his determined optimism to make the best of things, not a grand statement about the Value of Subway, and also he didn’t run the Subway, and I feel like that makes a bit of a difference). And so on. I’ll probably finish out this season, but if it doesn’t dramatically improve by the end, I’m giving the probable season three a pass.
I’ll just end with two bits of in-house conversation my wife and I had during this: “Okay, if more bars were showing Heat, maybe we’d go out more” and “Objection: nobody likes Baby Driver this much.”
I won’t get more specific, because there are some wrinkles to even the points I’m thinking of, and what fun are spoilers anyway?, but I’m really enjoying how your understanding of character, and systems, and, um, fascism, has already let you make a couple of reasonably or at least broadly accurate predictions.
“They’re in a brothel, which we’re not supposed to have. The expensive one, which they shouldn’t be able to afford. Drinking Revnog, which we’re not supposed to allow. Both of them supposedly on the job, which is a dismissible offense.”
That’s the exact moment I knew this show was on to something great.
***
One major trend in Season 2 of *Primal* is a sort of transition between the lawless natural world of Season 1 and a world of burgeoning, but still largely bargaric, civilizations that Spear and Fang suddenly find themselves in. That is in full force in their clash with the vikings, where their fight takes on a mythical, demonic dimension, and unlike the monsters and creatures they faced in Season 1, the people who survive them will remember them in one form or another, be it for vengeance, worship or something more. This will continue to play on in the final stretch of the season, so I look forward to your thoughts on that.
Hacks, Season Four, Episode Ten
Finally got around to finishing this, and I’m with everyone else on last week’s post at finding it slightly disappointing by this show’s standards, though it has one really good scene in Deb observing that Ava really shouldn’t have only her as a friend and should be trying to accomplish more. I’m with Ava in thinking Deb is mostly just trying to hurt her, but also, Ava was head writer of a TV show at 29! She’s accomplished an incredible amount so far. But Deb does have something of a point in that Ava’s kind of drifting at this point. And the final scene is an incredible setup for the next season.
“They used the R word!” / “What?!” / “Retired!”
I love how Ava’s “What?!” is equal parts offended and confused that they even managed to fit that in. Like, “Hey, that’s not okay! But also, how, even?”
Not much other than Ghosts. My wife and I love laughing about a classic Clickhole article which chronicles a handful of BBC shows with increasingly absurd seasons and Christmas specials. We thought of it because the original British Ghosts is such a show, two seasons, something like eight episodes and four Christmas specials. This is a long way of saying the Christmas episodes of the show are the best (finally some physicality for the actors) and I can see why the Brits would dispense with the regular ones and just skip to Christmas.
Citation: https://clickhole.com/6-american-television-shows-that-started-in-england-1825123039/
Haha, that Clickhole article killed me. I’m not sure which entry is my favorite, but it’s hard to go wrong with “the second season consisted of no episodes at all.”
Heh, thinking of Community’s Cougarton Abbey joke where Cougar Town was originally a British show, except it ended after only eight episodes when the characters all died.