peep show

There seem to be three main groups of British TV broadcast in the US:

Sci-fi, which means almost entirely Dr Who, with occasional miniseries, Red Dwarf, Hitchhikers, and just enough of a dose of Sapphire and Steel that somebody out there other than me must be a fan

Masterpiece Theater stuff like Downton Abbey

The very mixed bag of sitcoms that run the gamut from Absolutely Fabulous to Are You Being Served to Black Adder to The Office. Maybe the common thread here is that until recent years, the well-known British comedies tended to be very very broad. Looking at you, Mr Bean.

(Why we wind up with the British shows we do, and what relationship this sampling has to the whole of British TV, is something I actually think about a lot and derive a lot of frustration from. It's insane to me that there is a fucking channel called BBC America that shows, like, one or two scripted British shows at a time, plus a couple of talk shows and a lot of cars. Think of how much old British content there is, never aired in the US, that surely could not command all that much money in North American broadcast rights. This is like if the Cartoon Network only showed cartoons on Saturday nights. For that matter, with all this goddamn real estate across the 500-channel programming grid, where are all the other English-language shows that should be relatively easy to acquire, or the foreign-language shows that have already been dubbed or subtitled for other English-speaking markets? Jesus Christ.)

I'm sure it can't be representative, but even apart from that it can be bewildering figuring out why -- beyond rights availability, I guess -- certain shows become unavoidable while others remain obscure. The fact that The Office is so much more well known than Peep Show, for instance, is just nuts. I'm not knocking The Office -- it's just that Peep Show is in some ways the perfect companion piece to it, in its early seasons.

Peep Show's one of those British sitcoms where every season is like six episodes long, so the fact that there are eight seasons shouldn't intimidate you - that's a total viewing time of, what, about the first season of Lost? 

The name refers to the heavy use of point of view shots, especially but not entirely of the two main characters, and if it were an American show, it would probably commit entirely to that gimmick, the way How I Met Your Mother spent ten years getting around to meeting the mother and then stopped. But it isn't, and doesn't. The use of voiceover for the inner thoughts of the two leads serves the same purpose as the interview cutaways in The Office and other faux documentaries, but to different effect, since you don't have to cut away from the scene. 

There's a long tradition of terrible people in comedy, obviously, whether as a single member in the cast (Ralph Kramden's a blowhard who abuses everyone around him, Larry David spends most of Curb trying to find the path that indulges his self-centeredness while mitigating its consequences) or, in the post-Seinfeld world, all of the main characters. Sometimes it's a source of a show's brilliance, like with Arrested Development, where Michael Bluth constantly congratulates himself for being better than the rest of his family but is a mediocre and self-serving negligent father who is only able to feel good about himself because of just how much worse the people surrounding him are; sometimes it makes a show just about unwatchable for me, like with Everybody Loves Raymond, King of Queens, or that spate of 2000s comedies about couples bonding over what terrible parents they were. 

There's a more subtle sort of everyone is awful, too, which both versions of The Office capture. It's a mediocre kind of awfulness -- one the US version didn't dwell on very long, but gave you enough glimpses of to realize (until the final lackluster seasons) that, you know what, Jim is kind of a dick who is so sure that he's better than his mediocre job that he constantly belittles Dwight (who the show makes sure we realize is a genuinely good salesman) in large part because Dwight has the gall to care about the job. 

One of the things that weakens the U.S. Office is that it doesn't really fully admit Jim's dickishness or the general mediocrity of the whole bunch -- in part because it can't, not when it has 100 or more episodes to fill and a once-great network to save, and it needs to be likable. So instead we get these increasingly rosy glasses forced on us as we watch these grey tones play out, and this has a lot to do with why the show started to grate even before Michael left.

Enter Peep Show.

Like Jim, Mark Corrigan (David Mitchell) is an office drone at some fucking business that does some fucking thing that we don't need to care about and has no inherent interest (Peep Show never lampoons the meaningless of the business the way The Office does, but that's a whole nother tangent). Like Jim, he has a thing for one of his co-workers, Sophie. Unlike Pam, Sophie isn't taken -- Mark is just timid, anxious, constantly self-questioning (with good reason, admittedly), and has a rival in the form of alpha workmate Jeff.

Everything plays out the way you think ...

... insofar as, you know, Mark and Sophie flirt, and almost get together but don't, and almost get together but don't, and then do get together ...

... and here's the thing. Sophie is fucking awful.

Mark is fucking awful.

They are not fucking awful in ways that are good for or enjoyable to each other. Neither actually likes each other at all by the time they're truly together, which makes for some of the funniest scenes in the series.

I don't mean they're awful like the Always Sunny people, like oh, they've found each other, they can be awful together, I mean they are just really unpleasant to be around, and self-serving and self-absorbed, and each is manipulative but not really all that good at being manipulative so it doesn't come off as being charming or anything, and neither really cares about very much except for Mark's obsession with history (and fascism) and with being respected, and whatever it is that drives Sophie.

And this is all fantastic!

Meanwhile Jeremy (Robert Webb) is Mark's roommate and best friend since college. He's a would-be musician who's been sponging off Mark, but it's clear how badly Mark needs him, and in how many different ways -- the friendship is handled better than in most sitcoms that revolve around A Couple Of Bros, but of course it helps that both of them are absolutely terrible people, that each knows how terrible the other is, that each is accustomed to the other's terribleness, and that they have basically come to terms with this. At one point Jeremy tells himself that he's Mark's "the one," and he's not wrong -- he's the only person Mark can be himself with without being rejected, and vice versa. It's the glue of the series, and what connects many otherwise unrelated plots (though Peep Show has a gift, as with Arrested Development or Seinfeld, for tying disparate elements together, often when one self-serving character sabotages another). 

I've barely scratched the surface of a series that features rampant drug use, each lead's occasional homosexual meanderings, elaborate lies that never work out, etc. It's on both Netflix and Hulu and it's one of the all-time great comedies.

returning tv fall 2015

The season's been going for a bit now and the big shows are back - good time to check in.

Sleepy Hollow and Homeland seem to be dealing with similar problems: redefining, to one degree or another, what the show is about in the wake of previous plots being resolved. In Homeland's case this is something they've been struggling with ever since Damian Lewis left, and in some people's view, ever since the first season ended. You're never going to recapture the magic of "is this guy a terrorist?" And arguably, you shouldn't have tried to.

I don't think there's anyone who would disagree that that first season was the best. At this point my concern is less whether they'll have a season as good as the first one again, and more whether there is a compelling reason for there to still be a Homeland TV show -- especially one with the recognizable elements of Carrie, Saul, and somebody not believing Carrie about something. I realize this show comes to us from the makers of 24, which reran the tape way too many times on a very narrow concept, but ... that's kind of my point. So far, this season hasn't done anything to persuade me that we needed to keep Homeland around.

Sleepy Hollow's situation is a little different, since there's a new showrunner and I have to assume that the change in showrunners was the result of network dissatisfaction with something. But some weird choices have been made. While Katrina's transition to villain last season was clumsy, it's even clumsier to so transparently replace her with one character for each niche she occupied: Betsy Ross as Ichabod-love-interest, Pandora as evil-witch-antagonist. It's just one of those show changes where the seams REALLY show.

On top of that, we've lost John Noble and Orlando Jones, both of whom were under-used in second season but still terrific. Jones was a large part of what made the show great.

So yeah, here too I'm skeptical that this is working. I'm very conscious of the fact that I'm watching because of the first couple seasons, and although season two was all over the place, the first season had hit a very compelling stride with a very specific mix of madness. I don't know if Kurtzman and Orci are still involved or if, like with Fringe, this is a show that is going to sway in very different directions depending on the showrunner at the helm.

Then there are shows that were able to make some minor changes without it throwing everything out of whack. Eddie Huang decided he didn't want to provide voiceovers any longer for Fresh Off the Boat, the sitcom very loosely based on his childhood. At times this makes young Eddie no longer seem like the protagonist in the show, and it would be a shame if they shifted to an ensemble piece. As much as Constance Wu is the best thing about the show -- Emmys, I keep telling you, Emmys -- the show occupies the intersection between two sitcom trends: the look-at-my-childhood sitcom and the look-at-this-family sitcom. Without the focus on Eddie, you lose the focus on 90s hip hop which is the only reason for this show to be a period piece.

The returning shows I was most anticipating this season have all turned out to be interesting:

iZombie may not be a premium-level drama like the other two, but it's one of my favorite network shows, and an interesting show in the Rob Thomas filmog. On the one hand, structurally it's most similar to Veronica Mars, which is maybe also his best show (hard to pick between it and Party Down since they're so different). The lead character solves crimes on an episodic basis, while also having a personal stake in a larger mystery that looms over things. On the other hand, while Veronica wrapped everything up at the end of season one, the supernatural nature of iZombie lets them do something more interesting. Season one ended with Liv coming to a better understanding of why she's a zombie and what's going on (along with other major developments, ho ho), but instead of resolving anything, that just opened things up for further exploration of the mythology in season two.

I don't know that that can be sustained forever -- even dealing with mythology at a greatly slowed rate, the X-Files tangled themselves up pretty famously -- but it makes for a more confident season two than you might otherwise suspect. There have been some inevitable tonal changes thanks to the other developments -- more characters know Liv's secrets now, bad guys are badding it up in different ways, etc. -- but the most noticeable difference has been that the brains Liv eats seem to be affecting her much more than in first season.

This is something I hope they don't give into. The frat boy episode was funny, but it felt like Liv was way more affected by frat boy brains than she had been by computer geek brains, adrenaline junkie brains, etc. I don't remember many episodes where the effects of the brains-of-the-week were so evident in every scene, especially with Liv being so unable to push them down. That could get old. We'll see.

The Leftovers made the unexpected but not at all implausible decision to uproot the main cast and relocate them to a Texas town where no Departures were experienced. So far, in two episodes -- the first told from the perspective of the new cast members native to Jarden, the second covering some of the same ground from that of our Mapleton expats -- there have been more questions raised than anything else, but that's not a complaint. Just when the show feels a little less bleak, we realize Kevin has attempted to kill himself while sleepwalking, and Jarden's secrets are probably going to turn out to be very dark indeed.

But it works. It's not for everyone -- short of Looking, it's probably the most "not for everyone" show on pay cable -- but it is an amazing thing, and the addition of Kevin Carroll and Regina King to this already excellent cast bodes well.

Fargo is in a different boat than any of these other shows. It's essentially an anthology series, although in this case, second season is telling a story involving one of the major supporting characters from first season. It's amazing how confident a single episode feels, even as it seems to throw the kitchen sink at us: a cast of characters already huge before anything has even really happened, a crime scene absolutely worthy of the Coens even before the possibility of aliens is introduced, and a pretty fucking great performance by Kirsten Dunst that somehow stands out despite everything else going on. (The other standout performance in the season premiere: Ann Cusack as the judge.)

You do not have to rewind the clock very far to find a point at which we would not believe this is the kind of show you could get starring Ted Danson, Jean Smart, Brad Garrett, and Kirsten Dunst -- nor, of course, is it starring them in the same sense it would have been at that particular midnight. I have a really good feeling about where things are going, even while I'm kind of thinking I'm not going to have any idea what's going on until the end.

red oaks

Red Oaks is the latest Amazon Prime series, and interesting not only in its own right but because Amazon still hasn't yet developed much of a brand identity. You have the indie movie feel of Transparent and Red Oaks, the serious alternate history drama of the forthcoming Man in the High Castle, and the awful grumpy-cable-man drama of Hand of God, for instance. Right now I guess they're probably just throwing things at the wall and seeing what people watch, without worrying about consistency across the brand.

When I say "indie movie" vis-a-vis Red Oaks, I don't mean to lump it in with Transparent, which is very different in tone. You could call both of them dramedies, but the drama in Red Oaks is very light, as is the comedy. I was expecting something broader -- either something more like Caddyshack or a send-up of 80s movie tropes. But there isn't a hint of satire in the show, even in the "body swap" episode which, true to its title, has two of the characters swap bodies for the day, Freaky Friday style.

Red Oaks is about a college kid, David -- the kid from Richard Ayoade's excellent Submarine -- who's working as a tennis pro at the local country club in the summer of 1985, while putting off registering for classes because he neither wants to continue with the accounting major his father expects him to pursue, nor confront his father and make this clear. Richard Kind (Mad About You/Spin City) and Jennifer Grey play his parents; Paul Reiser, the president of the club. That alone was enough to get me in the door, and they're all great - Reiser is especially convincing as an entitled prick (as is Josh Meyers as the douchey photographer constantly threatening to steal David's girlfriend away).

If I list plot points, or if you watch the pilot to get the lay of the land, it's going to sound flat and predictable and obvious. David and his girlfriend want different things from the next few years of their lives, and spending most of each day apart from each other due to their jobs gives them ample opportunity to be around other people who may be more compatible or more interesting. David's father has had a heart attack that has resulted in underscoring his insistence on making practical choices -- study accounting because if something happens to me you may have to take care of your mother, and accounting is a reliable field, the subtext seems to say. Meanwhile, David's parents are having problems, and his best friend at the club is obsessed with the lifeguard who's dating a jock whose band has a song called "Sex Flu."

But while it's not a masterpiece or anything, the whole is greater than the sum of those parts, perhaps mainly because of tone: because it isn't satire, it doesn't have the challenge of maintaining satire's edge over a sustained period of time, nor of serving the dual and usually conflicting needs of satire and story. Because it isn't a zany comedy, it doesn't get its characters into impossible to resolve situations every episode. It's funny, but with a light touch; it's drama, but not melodrama. It takes place 30 years ago, but it doesn't slam that home with constant shots of pink legwarmers or "Van Halen will never break up" jokes, and you'd be hard-pressed to call it nostalgic in the manner of The Wonder Years (or even The Goldbergs).

The lack of voiceover helps: we have no idea who David has become in 2015, or how he would look back on these events. Does his girlfriend Karen eventually seem like a minor footnote in his love life, or is this the story of how he and his future wife worked their shit out? A voiceover would probably give it away.

Honestly, the show I am most inclined to compare it to is The O.C., and I'm reluctant to make that comparison because a) if you haven't seen The O.C., your impression of what you think I mean is probably very different from what I mean; b) even if you have seen the show, what you and I mean by The O.C. may be two different things depending on how you feel about Marissa Cooper or the final season; c) the comedy of The O.C. was much broader than Red Oaks', and the drama was more melodramatic.

It's ten half-hour episodes that you can watch in a weekend afternoon; they're not urgent but they're pleasant, smarter than most sitcoms, with very little filler or wasted time.