To make up for posting so infrequently, instead of a general catch-up post, a list post. This isn't a list of shows currently airing, but rather, shows that are "current" in that new episodes are either currently airing or forthcoming; shows that are not "done." I'm going to leave Twin Peaks out, partly because it's so obvious, and partly because what the fuck is there to say about Twin Peaks right now? Likewise for The Handmaid's Tale.
You're the Worst and Love. Network TV has played around with romantic comedies, but other than How I Met Your Mother -- which was really a hang-out comedy with the Ross-and-Rachel of it all turned up -- hasn't had many post-Mad About You successes. A to Z was better than you would think from the high concept, but was one and done. Other experiments like Mixology or just about any David Walton show quickly came and went, while an American remake of Gavin and Stacey was canceled before air. The Mindy Project is sort of a borderline case.
But leave the broadcast networks and it's another story. Aziz Ansari's Master of None -- not on this list because at the moment he's not planning to make more seasons -- works in a lot of the same territory as his surprisingly good book Modern Romance. FXX's Man Seeking Woman is not my cup of tea, but has successfully gone for a few seasons.
And two of my favorite series are FXX's You're the Worst and Netflix's Love. I'm grouping them together here, and it's not like they don't have plenty in common -- both are about deeply dysfunctional young couples who meet in the first episode of the series, and for that matter, in both shows, at least one member of the couple works in the entertainment business. (On You're the Worst, Gretchen is a publicist while Jimmy is a novelist gradually depleting the advance from his first book; on Love, Mickey works in radio and Gus is an aspiring screenwriter who works as an on-set tutor for one of the young stars of a Charmed-like TV show.)
Despite this, they're not that similar, largely because each has its own distinctive voice. You're the Worst goes to some dark places -- even before a multi-episode arc in which one character is so deep in clinical depression that they barely engage with the rest of the cast -- and Gretchen and Jimmy start out pretty close to broken. They meet at the wedding of Jimmy's ex, who is the sister of Gretchen's best friend. They hook up. They don't hate being around each other but take forever to admit that there is anything between them but sex. They are both regularly horrible to each other and to people around them, though primarily verbally. Somehow, though, they ground a cast that includes characters who are, in the main, drawn more broadly than they are: the mean, cartoonishly dumb, but delightful Lindsey, Gretchen's best friend, in a not-quite-loveless-but-close marriage to uberdork Paul; Becca, Lindsey's older sister, and her douchey husband Vernon whose friendship with Paul is at the center of one of the show's best episodes. The most grounded, most human character is Edgar, Jimmy's roommate -- an Iraq War veteran whose PTSD has left him unemployed and who basically cooks for Jimmy in exchange for rent. Edgar is fantastic, and the writing of his arc is inspired, and Desmin Borges is one of several actors on this show who should have been nominated for an Emmy.
Love is an Apatow-produced show, but generally doesn't seem like it except at the fringes: Andy Dick recurs a couple times as himself, Freaks and Geeks alumni Dave Gruber Allen and Steve Bannos have recurring roles, and Iris Apatow plays the kid Gus tutors. The series opens with Gus and Mickey going through breakups before meeting by chance encounter at a convenience store. Gus is, on the surface, the classic nice guy, but given to passive aggression, judgment, and controlling behavior; you could easily believe he's a few bad breakups or job losses away from becoming the initial-capitals Nice Guy who spends all his time on the internet bitching about women. Mickey is, on the surface, a mess -- a drug addict, an alcoholic, a love and sex addict, cynical and manipulative -- but more self-aware than Gus, and certainly much more aware of what she needs to work on. Gus hangs out with a large group of friends (and I think probably doesn't have many close friends) who watch movies and make up new theme songs to them -- which is a fantastic recurring bit. Mickey has a new roommate, Bertie (the all-star Claudia O'Doherty), who is damn near the soul of goodness.
Gus and Mickey don't hook up right away -- in fact, Mickey tries setting up Gus and Bertie in one of the first season's best and most awkward episodes -- but the sparks are obvious. By the time they do, you know them both well enough to kind of wish they would cool it and work on themselves for a while, which is a neat trick to pull in a show like this. They spend all of season two either fighting or giving you the sense that a fight is right around the corner.
There is a lot to love about Love if it's for you, but Gillian Jacobs, as Mickey, is the anchor. Co-creator Paul Rust is no slouch as Gus, but Mickey is so self-destructive, sometimes so awful, that making us love her is just more uphill work than showing the cracks in Gus's nice guy facade. You root for both of them -- they have just enough on the ball that it seems like, okay, you guys are being terrible people right now, but we can see the potential for you to not be terrible, so please get it together. (I wouldn't characterize You're the Worst this way, which is one of the key differences: you root instead for Gretchen and Jimmy to stop being terrible to each other, so that they can join forces and be terrible to the world. If the distinction seems trivial, probably neither of these shows is for you.)
Either of these shows can make you squirm -- Love moreso perhaps since You're the Worst is a little less real, a little broader. Depending on where you draw lines in terms of the likeability of characters, they may or may not be your thing.
Closely related here is Catastrophe, on Amazon Prime. Co-created by and starring Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney, Catastrophe follows Sharon and Rob after they conceive a child in a one-night stand (well, one-weekend stand, if I remember right). I'm discussing it separately from the above two shows in part because their relationship advances more quickly, in part because the characters are slightly older and the show doesn't have that "kids figuring their shit out" vibe (I don't know exactly how old any of these characters are supposed to be, but Horgan and Delaney are in their 40s, while the stars of Love and You're the Worst are in their 30s). The relationship issues that are dealt with are different, there's a kid involved, their friends are married with kids -- it's a different vibe from the other two.
Horgan is a genius, incidentally, and this is the show that's easiest for Americans to watch -- Pulling is one of my all-time favorite shows, but I don't know if it's still streaming anywhere in the US; she also created Divorce for HBO.
Better Call Saul. The reason this Breaking Bad prequel is so good is that it isn't a Breaking Bad prequel: the show has little to do with setting the table for Walter White's arc from Mr Chips to Scarface, and likely won't even add many surprises to the backstories of his main nemeses. By instead tracing the early stories of Saul Goodman/Jimmy McGill and Mike Ehrmantraut, who are both significant to Breaking Bad, it makes its own fun. Most of the time it's really two shows happening simultaneously: Jimmy's life as a lawyer, Mike's life as an ex-cop, both of them struggling for different reasons to stay on the straight and narrow and also having different reasons for the times they bend the rules. Sure, there are Breaking Bad cameos, and some of them are exciting, but this show could arguably go on for five or six more seasons before the name Heisenberg is mentioned.
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is my favorite show on network television in years. It's a hard sell, which is part of why it's also the lowest-rated scripted show that hasn't been canceled (another part is that it's on The CW). It's a musical romantic comedy in which the lead, Rebecca Bunch (played by co-creator Rachel Bloom), is ultimately also the villain -- she is nearly always either pursuing the wrong course, doing terribly unhealthy things to try to Get The Guy, or being self-destructive. The show knows this, mind you, and sometimes so does Rebecca, who devotes one song to self-loathing and another to the realization that "I'm the Villain in My Own Story."
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is intended to be five seasons, with a specific structure that was pitched when the show was first developed. The first season begins when Rebecca moves from New York to West Covina, California, taking a huge pay cut to take a job in a two-bit local law firm, all in the name of pursuing her ex-boyfriend Josh Chan, who she hasn't seen since summer camp ... and who turns out to be engaged. In classic romantic comedy fashion, she immediately meets Greg, a guy who is probably a better match for her (Rebecca is a genius; Josh could understudy for Joey Tribbiani). Her new co-worker Paula, played to perfection by Donna Lynne Champlin, acts as an audience surrogate, egging Rebecca on and rooting for the hypothetical Rebecca/Josh relationship as a way to live vicariously through her.
It's hard to get across how many things make this show work so well. It's a show that understands people better than television comedies usually do. It's a show that invests real writing energy and screen time into showing how one-on-one friendships work, not just relationships, and not just group dynamics, which are the usual fodder of hang-out comedies. It's a show that cast a Filipino man as the romantic lead and spends time showing his family life. It's a show that's absolutely frequently cartoonish -- it has to be -- but still makes room for a subplot about a middle-aged man realizing he's bisexual. It's a show that is ostensibly built around Rebecca's stalker-ish behavior towards Josh, and equally unhealthy behaviors later, but constantly challenges and interrogates not only the correctness of her decisions, but her motivations and the deeper issues surrounding them -- usually while being funny. There's a dream sequence on a plane with angels and a therapist. There's Rebecca's own Crazy Ex-Boyfriend in a later subplot with real potential. There's Patti Lupone as Rebecca's rabbi!
It's a magical show. There is nothing else quite like it on television.
In brief:
Superstore, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and The Good Place are my favorite network comedies. The first two have terrific ensemble casts, the kinds of casts where there really are no weak characters or weak performances (which is not to say there's no way to pick favorites -- Mark McKinney and Nichole Bloom on Superstore, for instance, and Stephanie Beatriz and Andre Braugher on Nine-Nine). The Good Place is its own thing, and it's hard to say much about what's great about it without getting deep into spoiler territory (which is particularly tough since the season ended on a cliffhanger) -- the characters are not quite as well-developed as any of these other shows (though given creator Mike Schur's history, that will probably change over time, as it did on Parks), and it is maybe a comedy of ideas more than characters, but they are very good ideas.
Top Chef and Chef's Table are the only "reality" shows I really watch or enjoy (I'm not sure whether to count The Great British Baking Show as a current show). The most recent season of Masterchef Junior soured me on it -- it was as though they had focus-grouped it and decided they needed to amplify the worst things about the show. Top Chef, on the other hand, just came off one of its best seasons.
Friday, June 9, 2017
streets ahead: the best community episodes
We recently finished a rewatch of Community, which was the first time I'd rewatched the final two seasons. We wound up skipping most of season four -- we didn't intend to originally, but binging it really drove home how off it was in tone, and after a few episodes we were just eager to move on.
There are so few comedies that hold up to multiple viewings while still being funny. Among 21st century shows, Community is up there with Curb, Arrested Development, and Happy Endings in this respect (maybe Wet Hot American Summer too), as well as in how strong and distinct its voice is -- which is exactly why season four stands out. If season four was all that existed, it would be a solid show, well-written, great actors. But you can't do Arrested Development without Mitch Hurwitz; you can't do Community without Dan Harmon. Losing half the cast by season six, when Pierce, Shirley, and Troy had all left for one reason or another, affects the basic core Community-ness of the show less than losing Harmon for a year did. (Of course, you could argue that the three characters most vital to that Community-ness were among the four who remained, but I don't think that dilutes my point.)
We owe Community's existence in large part to an era of diminished expectations and desperation at NBC, which also gave us Parks, Friday Night Lights (once DirecTV chipped in), and Chuck, all shows that performed pretty poorly in the ratings but not poorly enough to trump the value of their established audience vs. the risks of putting new shows on in their place, because hardly anything was prospering on NBC, so there was no real standard of performance other series had to measure up to.
I think I said when the sixth season was on that Britta was my favorite character, which remains true in rewatching. She may be my favorite sitcom character of all time -- she's certainly up there with Taxi's Reverend Jim, WKRP's Dr Johnny Fever, and Soap's Burt Campbell. The development of Britta parallels the course of the show, in a lot of ways: she is least distinct in the early days of the show, when it's a funny, well-written sitcom in which many of the characters are not fully in focus yet (Troy and Annie are fairly insubstantial sketches, Britta is primarily the hot girl Jeff wants to impress and/or fool, and is overall more serious). Jeff is Jeff from day one. He grows, sure, but in the way that all sitcom characters in his situation grow: he becomes less of an asshole to people he has come to know better. Abed, similarly, is pretty much Abed right away, becoming more nuanced over time, but not in a way that makes his early episodes seem out of character. Britta is the one who doesn't just become more flawed over time, but flawed in ways that become the main way other people characterize her ("Britta is the worst," "The AT&T of people"), with her "I lived in New York," her empty and performative activism, her ambitions to become a therapist. But she also becomes goofier, with more physical comedy and weird tics that are perfectly consistent -- it somehow makes more sense for Britta to be the one who says "baggle" than anyone else, for Britta to have a carnie ex-boyfriend and parents played by Martin Mull and Lesley Ann Warren.
Dean Pelton is the only one who goes through quite the same level of development -- at least successfully, since Chang is used for different purposes in different seasons. In Chang's case it turns him into an unwieldy, unwriteable cartoon, but the Dean becomes both broader and more human.
Anyway, I couldn't resist making a quick list of my favorite episodes. They are in chronological, not ranked, order.
Spanish 101 (season 1, episode 2)
This was one of the great things about rewatching Community: one of the best episodes is the second episode. No, the series hasn't come fully into focus yet, especially when it comes to Troy, Britta, and Annie. But early Chang is probably still the best incarnation of Chang, who becomes not just cartoonish but an active nuisance later in the series and goes through multiple periods in which he is weirdly infantilized. While Dean Pelton -- my second favorite character after Britta -- becomes more interesting and more funny as time goes on, Chang was best as a minor supporting character. What makes this episode is the Jeff/Pierce relationship -- which would always be at its best when played like this, with Pierce's hero-worship of Jeff (and later, Jeff's realization that he will some day be as uncool as Pierce).
Contemporary American Poultry (season 1, episode 21)
After toying with tropes and the characters' awareness of tropes in subplots, this is Community's first full-on homage episode, riffing on Goodfellas in a story about the corruption that comes with power over the cafeteria's chicken fingers.
Modern Warfare (season 1, episode 23)
The first paintball episode probably remains the best, but this episode gets bonus points for the fact that even its sequels were pretty fantastic -- there were absolutely diminishing returns in the paintball episodes over the course of the series, but when you start with such a high point, it takes a while before those diminishing returns bring you low.
Epidemiology (season 2, episode 6)
The zombie episode! Brilliant all the way through, but especially in its use of the cat scare, and of Jeff's ridiculous vanity.
Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (season 2, episode 14)
The fact that Community has two D&D episodes, both of which are good, when the show isn't a show about nerds or geeks like The Big Bang Theory or something ... is ridiculous. The first one is the best of them, both for the way it fits with the season's ongoing character arcs and for Alison Brie's miming, but if the first one didn't exist the second one would be on this list.
Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking (season 2, episode 16)
Out of all the main characters, Pierce-focused and Shirley-focused episodes are the rarest (depending on how you count "Troy and Abed" episodes). Most of them are not among the show's best -- Harmon doesn't seem to have had much of a handle on Shirley (her best scenes are rarely those in which she is the main character of the story, unfortunately), whereas with Pierce, the problem was the opposite. He seems to have understood the character perfectly well -- and made him so petty and unlikeable that, like Chang later, it's often difficult to understand his presence in the show or among these people. This episode is one of two that revolve around Pierce giving everyone a gift with ulterior motives -- and while he is no less petty here than usual, the format is a good occasion to explore his relationship to and impressions of each of the other characters. This leads to some great stuff -- Troy's panic is the most obvious, but Britta's ethical dilemma over Pierce's check is classic too.
Critical Film Studies (season 2, episode 19)
The Pulp Fiction/My Dinner With Andre episode. I mean, what more can you say? It's pitch-perfect, from the choice of those two particular movies (can you think of two indie movies that are less alike, while at the same time both being renowned for their talkiness?) to the continuation of Abed's Cougartown fandom.
Paradigms of Human Memory (season 2, episode 21)
The back half of second season really demonstrates Community's brilliance, and of course the stuff that would make it so divisive. This is a clip show in which all the clips are from study group adventures we haven't seen. It's such a brilliant concept that it's amazing it hasn't been used frequently enough for us to have been sick of it by the time this episode aired, but I can't think of a live-action show that had done it before.
Remedial Chaos Theory (season 3, episode 3)
The episode that introduces the darkest timeline, but there are so many other great moments apart from that, the best of which might be the realization that the happiest timeline is the one where Jeff leaves the room and his absence leads to everyone else feeling happier and more relaxed.
Digital Estate Planning (season 3, episode 20)
The eight-bit episode, which would be on this list even if only for Annie and Shirley's murder spree, but which also features Abed's eight-bit girlfriend.
App Development and Condiments (season 5, episode 8)
Because Harmon never developed Shirley as deeply as some of the others, her religious self-righteousness that was established early on -- and somehow never goes away even as she's fleshed out more and humanized -- is good fodder for episodes like this one, which positions her as an antagonist. Plus, hey, Mitch Hurwitz as Koogler.
Basic Crisis Room Decorum (season 6, episode 3)
The best parts of season 6 are the Britta parts, as she reaches her final evolution as a ridiculous goof. Basic Crisis Room Decorum features Britta shitting her pants and running around in panic, and the first mention of 90s alternative band Natalie is Freezing. This episode is so much better than I make it sound.
Queer Studies and Advanced Waxing (season 6, episode 4)
Dean Pelton's sexuality is front and center, and actually thoughtfully handled in Community's own weird way, rising above making him the butt of a joke about it.
Honorable mentions:
Comparative Religion (season 1, episode 12). It's not quite in the upper echelon, but major bonus points for Anthony Michael Hall (who I wish had returned) and the holiday brawl.
Physical Education (season 1, episode 17). The billiards episode, which features some of first season's best moments of physical comedy.
Aerodynamics of Gender (season 2, episode 7). The mean girls subplot isn't good enough to make this one of the very best episodes, but the transcendent trampoline with its racist guardian is fantastic.
Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas (season 2, episode 11). The stop-motion is terrific, but the novelty wears off on re-watches, and the writing isn't as strong as the novelty.
Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps (season 3, episode 5). The Halloween anthology episode -- a little uneven by Community standards, but certainly great.
Studies in Modern Movement (season 3, episode 7). I don't know what episode better shows how much Troy's character was developed from the beginning of season 1, when he was the ex-jock Annie had a crush on; here he's Abed's childlike playmate, the two of them a couple of Oscars to Annie's Felix. The Dean/Jeff subplot is pretty great.
Introduction to Teaching (season 5, episode 2). Invaluable for Abed's Nic Cage, if nothing else.
Emotional Consequences of Broadcast Television (season 6, episode 13). The Community finale is also one of its most meta episodes, but suffers from the lack of half of its original cast.
There are so few comedies that hold up to multiple viewings while still being funny. Among 21st century shows, Community is up there with Curb, Arrested Development, and Happy Endings in this respect (maybe Wet Hot American Summer too), as well as in how strong and distinct its voice is -- which is exactly why season four stands out. If season four was all that existed, it would be a solid show, well-written, great actors. But you can't do Arrested Development without Mitch Hurwitz; you can't do Community without Dan Harmon. Losing half the cast by season six, when Pierce, Shirley, and Troy had all left for one reason or another, affects the basic core Community-ness of the show less than losing Harmon for a year did. (Of course, you could argue that the three characters most vital to that Community-ness were among the four who remained, but I don't think that dilutes my point.)
We owe Community's existence in large part to an era of diminished expectations and desperation at NBC, which also gave us Parks, Friday Night Lights (once DirecTV chipped in), and Chuck, all shows that performed pretty poorly in the ratings but not poorly enough to trump the value of their established audience vs. the risks of putting new shows on in their place, because hardly anything was prospering on NBC, so there was no real standard of performance other series had to measure up to.
I think I said when the sixth season was on that Britta was my favorite character, which remains true in rewatching. She may be my favorite sitcom character of all time -- she's certainly up there with Taxi's Reverend Jim, WKRP's Dr Johnny Fever, and Soap's Burt Campbell. The development of Britta parallels the course of the show, in a lot of ways: she is least distinct in the early days of the show, when it's a funny, well-written sitcom in which many of the characters are not fully in focus yet (Troy and Annie are fairly insubstantial sketches, Britta is primarily the hot girl Jeff wants to impress and/or fool, and is overall more serious). Jeff is Jeff from day one. He grows, sure, but in the way that all sitcom characters in his situation grow: he becomes less of an asshole to people he has come to know better. Abed, similarly, is pretty much Abed right away, becoming more nuanced over time, but not in a way that makes his early episodes seem out of character. Britta is the one who doesn't just become more flawed over time, but flawed in ways that become the main way other people characterize her ("Britta is the worst," "The AT&T of people"), with her "I lived in New York," her empty and performative activism, her ambitions to become a therapist. But she also becomes goofier, with more physical comedy and weird tics that are perfectly consistent -- it somehow makes more sense for Britta to be the one who says "baggle" than anyone else, for Britta to have a carnie ex-boyfriend and parents played by Martin Mull and Lesley Ann Warren.
Dean Pelton is the only one who goes through quite the same level of development -- at least successfully, since Chang is used for different purposes in different seasons. In Chang's case it turns him into an unwieldy, unwriteable cartoon, but the Dean becomes both broader and more human.
Anyway, I couldn't resist making a quick list of my favorite episodes. They are in chronological, not ranked, order.
Spanish 101 (season 1, episode 2)
This was one of the great things about rewatching Community: one of the best episodes is the second episode. No, the series hasn't come fully into focus yet, especially when it comes to Troy, Britta, and Annie. But early Chang is probably still the best incarnation of Chang, who becomes not just cartoonish but an active nuisance later in the series and goes through multiple periods in which he is weirdly infantilized. While Dean Pelton -- my second favorite character after Britta -- becomes more interesting and more funny as time goes on, Chang was best as a minor supporting character. What makes this episode is the Jeff/Pierce relationship -- which would always be at its best when played like this, with Pierce's hero-worship of Jeff (and later, Jeff's realization that he will some day be as uncool as Pierce).
Contemporary American Poultry (season 1, episode 21)
After toying with tropes and the characters' awareness of tropes in subplots, this is Community's first full-on homage episode, riffing on Goodfellas in a story about the corruption that comes with power over the cafeteria's chicken fingers.
Modern Warfare (season 1, episode 23)
The first paintball episode probably remains the best, but this episode gets bonus points for the fact that even its sequels were pretty fantastic -- there were absolutely diminishing returns in the paintball episodes over the course of the series, but when you start with such a high point, it takes a while before those diminishing returns bring you low.
Epidemiology (season 2, episode 6)
The zombie episode! Brilliant all the way through, but especially in its use of the cat scare, and of Jeff's ridiculous vanity.
Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (season 2, episode 14)
The fact that Community has two D&D episodes, both of which are good, when the show isn't a show about nerds or geeks like The Big Bang Theory or something ... is ridiculous. The first one is the best of them, both for the way it fits with the season's ongoing character arcs and for Alison Brie's miming, but if the first one didn't exist the second one would be on this list.
Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking (season 2, episode 16)
Out of all the main characters, Pierce-focused and Shirley-focused episodes are the rarest (depending on how you count "Troy and Abed" episodes). Most of them are not among the show's best -- Harmon doesn't seem to have had much of a handle on Shirley (her best scenes are rarely those in which she is the main character of the story, unfortunately), whereas with Pierce, the problem was the opposite. He seems to have understood the character perfectly well -- and made him so petty and unlikeable that, like Chang later, it's often difficult to understand his presence in the show or among these people. This episode is one of two that revolve around Pierce giving everyone a gift with ulterior motives -- and while he is no less petty here than usual, the format is a good occasion to explore his relationship to and impressions of each of the other characters. This leads to some great stuff -- Troy's panic is the most obvious, but Britta's ethical dilemma over Pierce's check is classic too.
Critical Film Studies (season 2, episode 19)
The Pulp Fiction/My Dinner With Andre episode. I mean, what more can you say? It's pitch-perfect, from the choice of those two particular movies (can you think of two indie movies that are less alike, while at the same time both being renowned for their talkiness?) to the continuation of Abed's Cougartown fandom.
Paradigms of Human Memory (season 2, episode 21)
The back half of second season really demonstrates Community's brilliance, and of course the stuff that would make it so divisive. This is a clip show in which all the clips are from study group adventures we haven't seen. It's such a brilliant concept that it's amazing it hasn't been used frequently enough for us to have been sick of it by the time this episode aired, but I can't think of a live-action show that had done it before.
Remedial Chaos Theory (season 3, episode 3)
The episode that introduces the darkest timeline, but there are so many other great moments apart from that, the best of which might be the realization that the happiest timeline is the one where Jeff leaves the room and his absence leads to everyone else feeling happier and more relaxed.
Digital Estate Planning (season 3, episode 20)
The eight-bit episode, which would be on this list even if only for Annie and Shirley's murder spree, but which also features Abed's eight-bit girlfriend.
App Development and Condiments (season 5, episode 8)
Because Harmon never developed Shirley as deeply as some of the others, her religious self-righteousness that was established early on -- and somehow never goes away even as she's fleshed out more and humanized -- is good fodder for episodes like this one, which positions her as an antagonist. Plus, hey, Mitch Hurwitz as Koogler.
Basic Crisis Room Decorum (season 6, episode 3)
The best parts of season 6 are the Britta parts, as she reaches her final evolution as a ridiculous goof. Basic Crisis Room Decorum features Britta shitting her pants and running around in panic, and the first mention of 90s alternative band Natalie is Freezing. This episode is so much better than I make it sound.
Queer Studies and Advanced Waxing (season 6, episode 4)
Dean Pelton's sexuality is front and center, and actually thoughtfully handled in Community's own weird way, rising above making him the butt of a joke about it.
Honorable mentions:
Comparative Religion (season 1, episode 12). It's not quite in the upper echelon, but major bonus points for Anthony Michael Hall (who I wish had returned) and the holiday brawl.
Physical Education (season 1, episode 17). The billiards episode, which features some of first season's best moments of physical comedy.
Aerodynamics of Gender (season 2, episode 7). The mean girls subplot isn't good enough to make this one of the very best episodes, but the transcendent trampoline with its racist guardian is fantastic.
Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas (season 2, episode 11). The stop-motion is terrific, but the novelty wears off on re-watches, and the writing isn't as strong as the novelty.
Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps (season 3, episode 5). The Halloween anthology episode -- a little uneven by Community standards, but certainly great.
Studies in Modern Movement (season 3, episode 7). I don't know what episode better shows how much Troy's character was developed from the beginning of season 1, when he was the ex-jock Annie had a crush on; here he's Abed's childlike playmate, the two of them a couple of Oscars to Annie's Felix. The Dean/Jeff subplot is pretty great.
Introduction to Teaching (season 5, episode 2). Invaluable for Abed's Nic Cage, if nothing else.
Emotional Consequences of Broadcast Television (season 6, episode 13). The Community finale is also one of its most meta episodes, but suffers from the lack of half of its original cast.
Sunday, May 21, 2017
guardians of the galaxy 2 (spoilers!)
Guardians of the Galaxy 2
There are spoilers in this post, so stop reading if you haven't seen Guardians of the Galaxy 2!
Like I've talked about here and there, I got into comics as a kid in 1980 because of television -- especially the original 1960s Spider-Man cartoon (Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends hadn't started yet), and to a lesser extent the Hanna-Barbera Fantastic Four cartoon, the Adam West Batman, and cartoons like Superfriends, Shazam, etc -- and a set of Marvel trading cards that had a bunch of characters in it that I didn't know from the cartoons, like Dr Strange, the Silver Surfer, and Ghost Rider. The trading cards intrigued me because you could tell just by looking at them that those three characters in particular weren't just variations on Superman or Spider-Man -- they didn't look like superheroes, but they didn't look like anything else in my pop culture line of sight either.
Unsurprisingly, those early exposures guided the comics I got into. In the DC comics, my favorite comics by far were the Superman comics that emphasized the weirdest tropes of that character: Mzyztplk, "imaginary stories," the bottle city of Kandor, the Phantom Zone, red kryptonite transformations, Bizarro World. At Marvel -- my default comics publisher until the Vertigo years of late adolescence -- I loved the weirdos, misfits, and the magical or cosmic stuff. The Defenders, Adam Warlock, Son of Satan, Howard the Duck, Dr Strange, the Thor and Fantastic Four comics that dealt with stuff like the Celestials or Galactus, Bill Mantlo's Hulk and ROM comics. I was also a big Spider-Man fan and obsessed with the Avengers, mind you, but I loved the weird little edges of the Marvel universe, the crispy fried-out bits.
The thing about those weird little edges is that they're not exactly superhero comics, but they have all the benefits and features of the larger superhero-centric setting, a setting that is well-trod and intricately detailed, heavy with history and traditions. That's what I loved about Marvel comics: this sense of a story too big for any one person to read in full.
So! That's the frame of reference I bring to the Marvel movies.
If you're not familiar with the comics, the funny thing is that this incarnation of the Guardians of the Galaxy is not the one I grew up with: the original Guardians was an Avengers-like team native to a thousand years in the future. This new Star-Lord-led team (with a Star Lord very different from the way that character was originally written) was introduced in the 21st century, composed of characters who had been introduced independently and kicking around the Marvel universe in various forms. I was more or less familiar with the new team, but they weren't the characters who came to mind when I first thought of the Guardians.
Turns out I loved the first movie, though, for the same reasons everyone else did -- it was funny, it was a good adventure story, it was a little bit Raiders and a little bit Star Wars (or at least the Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, etc., bits in Star Wars' DNA).
I wasn't expecting to like the first movie nearly as much as I did -- I was just tickled that it even existed. But the second movie I was anticipating pretty heavily.
So how did it stack up?
There was a lot of good, some bad, some just hrm-worthy.
The best things about the movie were probably the visuals -- it's the most visually interesting movie out of any of the Marvel movies by far -- and the sense of humor. Those jokes are undoubtedly divisive for some people -- I don't know that the second movie is necessarily funnier than the first, but it definitely feels like Gunn responded to what people liked in the first movie and cranked the knobs a notch, so we get way more Funny Drax than Serious Drax, and how much the movie in general works for you may depend on how charming you find Pratt. It works for me (though I would've been happy with the same amount of Funny Drax but also a little more Serious Drax, i.e. just more Drax in general) but I get that it wouldn't work for everyone.
What's been most interesting about these movies is the changes they make to the characters. Pretty much none of them are the same as in the comics. The comics version of Drax is a human from Earth, not an alien -- because the comics universe is older and better established than the movie setting, he's still a guy who lost his family to Thanos, but this whole "Drax is from a culture that doesn't have sarcasm and so he's totally literal-minded" thing doesn't work with an Earthling Drax. The comics Rocket isn't a one-of-a-kind misfit, he's from a planet of animal-people like himself. Star-Lord is the son of an alien king, not an alien god planet. Etc.
So this trend continues in the new movie, for good and ill.
Ego is pretty different -- he's not a god, even small-g, in the comics, though I'm not sure this is a change that makes a huge difference, beyond his use of the word "Celestial" maybe being a signal that the MCU Celestials differ significantly from their comics counterparts.
But Mantis ...
Like Drax, Mantis in the comics isn't an alien, she's from Earth. She's half-Vietnamese and raised to be the Celestial Madonna. She's also a kickass martial artist. Sure, she's an empath, but these are not separate abilities exactly: her mystical powers also inform her combat skills, by letting her see her opponents' weak spots. Mantis has successfully beaten up Thor.
Making Mantis an alien instead of human is not too big a deal. But between Mantis in the second movie and Gamora's introduction in the first movie, this is the second time that a female character has been tweaked to take away or reduce her combat-related powers. Movie Gamora is no slouch, but she is noticeably less powerful than in the comics, and in particular less strong and more physically vulnerable. Comic-book Gamora would not need Peter Quill to rescue her. Comic-book Gamora is not just a Space Girlfriend. Comic-book Gamora could kick Drax's ass.
This is not great. It was already not great in the first movie, in which the Quill/Gamora subplot is one of the weakest elements. As a trend, it's hard to miss. (It's not super-great that Gamora's Quill-free scenes consist largely of fighting with her sister over who deserves Daddy's love, either.)
It also underscores that Mantis's main purpose in the movie is pretty easy to see as an example of the Submissive Asian Woman stereotype: she serves Ego, she pacifies him, she turns against him not so much of her own agency or for her own interests but because a rival man is nice to her.
I'm not going to downplay those problems. I really want to see an improved, less cringey Mantis in the third movie, or Avengers 7, or whatever her next movie is. I'd like to see an improved Gamora, but it may be too late for that.
All of that said, all in all it's a fun movie. It's an adventure movie, a spectacle movie, without most of the problems that have plagued the Avengers movies. The villain isn't nearly as boring as in the first movie, although villains are still the weak link in most of the Marvel movies -- and Ego as villain is more interesting than Ronan or what little we saw of Thanos in Guardians mainly because it's not immediately apparent he's the villain, which is a different accomplishment from actually portraying interesting villainy. (It does sort of make sense that an Earth kid who grows up to call himself Star-Lord after being space-kidnapped turns out to be the son of a god who calls himself Ego.) It feels like a comic book more than most comic book movies do, and is one of the only movies to capture all that What Is This Crazy Shit vibe I was talking about above -- in that sense, it's up there with Deadpool and the first Spider-Man movie as far as Getting The Tone Right. (Getting That Stuff Wrong is part of what made the various Fantastic Four movies so leaden -- there is no sense in those movies that the filmmakers have any understanding of what makes someone enjoy reading a Fantastic Four comic, and while those are the worst example of the problem, I have similar issues with the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man and most of the Avengers movies.)
Little things:
I love Baby Groot, and Adolescent Groot cracked me the fuck up.
I love Yondu in the sequel, even if I'm not totally convinced that the new parts of his backstory are what Gunn had in mind while making the first movie.
Drax and Mantis's mini-romance is both more believable and more interesting than Quill and Gamora's in either movie, which mainly underscores how boring the Gamora-Quill stuff is.
Kurt Russell's head looks ENORMOUS in his digitally de-aged flashback; maybe they should've got Wyatt to play Young Ego instead.
There are spoilers in this post, so stop reading if you haven't seen Guardians of the Galaxy 2!
Like I've talked about here and there, I got into comics as a kid in 1980 because of television -- especially the original 1960s Spider-Man cartoon (Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends hadn't started yet), and to a lesser extent the Hanna-Barbera Fantastic Four cartoon, the Adam West Batman, and cartoons like Superfriends, Shazam, etc -- and a set of Marvel trading cards that had a bunch of characters in it that I didn't know from the cartoons, like Dr Strange, the Silver Surfer, and Ghost Rider. The trading cards intrigued me because you could tell just by looking at them that those three characters in particular weren't just variations on Superman or Spider-Man -- they didn't look like superheroes, but they didn't look like anything else in my pop culture line of sight either.
Unsurprisingly, those early exposures guided the comics I got into. In the DC comics, my favorite comics by far were the Superman comics that emphasized the weirdest tropes of that character: Mzyztplk, "imaginary stories," the bottle city of Kandor, the Phantom Zone, red kryptonite transformations, Bizarro World. At Marvel -- my default comics publisher until the Vertigo years of late adolescence -- I loved the weirdos, misfits, and the magical or cosmic stuff. The Defenders, Adam Warlock, Son of Satan, Howard the Duck, Dr Strange, the Thor and Fantastic Four comics that dealt with stuff like the Celestials or Galactus, Bill Mantlo's Hulk and ROM comics. I was also a big Spider-Man fan and obsessed with the Avengers, mind you, but I loved the weird little edges of the Marvel universe, the crispy fried-out bits.
The thing about those weird little edges is that they're not exactly superhero comics, but they have all the benefits and features of the larger superhero-centric setting, a setting that is well-trod and intricately detailed, heavy with history and traditions. That's what I loved about Marvel comics: this sense of a story too big for any one person to read in full.
So! That's the frame of reference I bring to the Marvel movies.
If you're not familiar with the comics, the funny thing is that this incarnation of the Guardians of the Galaxy is not the one I grew up with: the original Guardians was an Avengers-like team native to a thousand years in the future. This new Star-Lord-led team (with a Star Lord very different from the way that character was originally written) was introduced in the 21st century, composed of characters who had been introduced independently and kicking around the Marvel universe in various forms. I was more or less familiar with the new team, but they weren't the characters who came to mind when I first thought of the Guardians.
Turns out I loved the first movie, though, for the same reasons everyone else did -- it was funny, it was a good adventure story, it was a little bit Raiders and a little bit Star Wars (or at least the Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, etc., bits in Star Wars' DNA).
I wasn't expecting to like the first movie nearly as much as I did -- I was just tickled that it even existed. But the second movie I was anticipating pretty heavily.
So how did it stack up?
There was a lot of good, some bad, some just hrm-worthy.
The best things about the movie were probably the visuals -- it's the most visually interesting movie out of any of the Marvel movies by far -- and the sense of humor. Those jokes are undoubtedly divisive for some people -- I don't know that the second movie is necessarily funnier than the first, but it definitely feels like Gunn responded to what people liked in the first movie and cranked the knobs a notch, so we get way more Funny Drax than Serious Drax, and how much the movie in general works for you may depend on how charming you find Pratt. It works for me (though I would've been happy with the same amount of Funny Drax but also a little more Serious Drax, i.e. just more Drax in general) but I get that it wouldn't work for everyone.
What's been most interesting about these movies is the changes they make to the characters. Pretty much none of them are the same as in the comics. The comics version of Drax is a human from Earth, not an alien -- because the comics universe is older and better established than the movie setting, he's still a guy who lost his family to Thanos, but this whole "Drax is from a culture that doesn't have sarcasm and so he's totally literal-minded" thing doesn't work with an Earthling Drax. The comics Rocket isn't a one-of-a-kind misfit, he's from a planet of animal-people like himself. Star-Lord is the son of an alien king, not an alien god planet. Etc.
So this trend continues in the new movie, for good and ill.
Ego is pretty different -- he's not a god, even small-g, in the comics, though I'm not sure this is a change that makes a huge difference, beyond his use of the word "Celestial" maybe being a signal that the MCU Celestials differ significantly from their comics counterparts.
But Mantis ...
Like Drax, Mantis in the comics isn't an alien, she's from Earth. She's half-Vietnamese and raised to be the Celestial Madonna. She's also a kickass martial artist. Sure, she's an empath, but these are not separate abilities exactly: her mystical powers also inform her combat skills, by letting her see her opponents' weak spots. Mantis has successfully beaten up Thor.
Making Mantis an alien instead of human is not too big a deal. But between Mantis in the second movie and Gamora's introduction in the first movie, this is the second time that a female character has been tweaked to take away or reduce her combat-related powers. Movie Gamora is no slouch, but she is noticeably less powerful than in the comics, and in particular less strong and more physically vulnerable. Comic-book Gamora would not need Peter Quill to rescue her. Comic-book Gamora is not just a Space Girlfriend. Comic-book Gamora could kick Drax's ass.
This is not great. It was already not great in the first movie, in which the Quill/Gamora subplot is one of the weakest elements. As a trend, it's hard to miss. (It's not super-great that Gamora's Quill-free scenes consist largely of fighting with her sister over who deserves Daddy's love, either.)
It also underscores that Mantis's main purpose in the movie is pretty easy to see as an example of the Submissive Asian Woman stereotype: she serves Ego, she pacifies him, she turns against him not so much of her own agency or for her own interests but because a rival man is nice to her.
I'm not going to downplay those problems. I really want to see an improved, less cringey Mantis in the third movie, or Avengers 7, or whatever her next movie is. I'd like to see an improved Gamora, but it may be too late for that.
All of that said, all in all it's a fun movie. It's an adventure movie, a spectacle movie, without most of the problems that have plagued the Avengers movies. The villain isn't nearly as boring as in the first movie, although villains are still the weak link in most of the Marvel movies -- and Ego as villain is more interesting than Ronan or what little we saw of Thanos in Guardians mainly because it's not immediately apparent he's the villain, which is a different accomplishment from actually portraying interesting villainy. (It does sort of make sense that an Earth kid who grows up to call himself Star-Lord after being space-kidnapped turns out to be the son of a god who calls himself Ego.) It feels like a comic book more than most comic book movies do, and is one of the only movies to capture all that What Is This Crazy Shit vibe I was talking about above -- in that sense, it's up there with Deadpool and the first Spider-Man movie as far as Getting The Tone Right. (Getting That Stuff Wrong is part of what made the various Fantastic Four movies so leaden -- there is no sense in those movies that the filmmakers have any understanding of what makes someone enjoy reading a Fantastic Four comic, and while those are the worst example of the problem, I have similar issues with the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man and most of the Avengers movies.)
Little things:
I love Baby Groot, and Adolescent Groot cracked me the fuck up.
I love Yondu in the sequel, even if I'm not totally convinced that the new parts of his backstory are what Gunn had in mind while making the first movie.
Drax and Mantis's mini-romance is both more believable and more interesting than Quill and Gamora's in either movie, which mainly underscores how boring the Gamora-Quill stuff is.
Kurt Russell's head looks ENORMOUS in his digitally de-aged flashback; maybe they should've got Wyatt to play Young Ego instead.
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