TV Diary
1. Entourage
Aside from times when I stayed at my dad's house, the past year has really been the first time I've had HBO at home, and aside from finally catching up with The Wire, I pretty into Entourage reruns. It kind of pains me to like a couple HBO shows this much, considering I've always hated on The Sopranos/Sex In The City/Six Feet Under/etc. and kind of considered the whole "it's not TV, it's HBO" thing a bunch of elitist bullshit to rationalize paying extra for the channel. I don't think I'll even bother giving Deadwood or Big Love a chance. Anyway, I like Entourage even though it's not really that funny sometimes (outside of Johnny Drama, maybe the single funniest character on television right now, the washed up brother of a big Hollywood star played by Matt Dillon's washed up brother in an insanely effective bit of stunt casting). So far this season is looking pretty good, although the Ari-centric press coverage surrounding the new season is kind of weird to me. I like Jeremy Piven and Ari is a great use of his crazy asshole energy, but he doesn't really outshine the rest of the cast or anything.
2. Lucky Louie
I always liked Louis C.K. as a standup, although I never saw Pootie Tang or anything. So I was looking forward to this, especially after reading the advance press about how he was just doing a basic, old-fashioned 3-camera sitcom, but on HBO with swear words and no commercials. And it definitely has the feel of early Roseanne (complete with the bloozy background music), or even Roc, just depicting regular blue collar people really bluntly and realistically, with a set that looks convincingly like a shitty, run down apartment. At the beginning of every episode, a cast member actually says "Lucky Louie was filmed before a studio audience," which totally feels like a throwback to the Cheers era. It totally looks like it was made 15 years ago, and the first time I watched it J.G. asked me if it was a rerun of an old show. That stuff, I liked, but the show itself is pretty underwhelming. They supposedly are shooting alternate takes of every scene with the swears taken out in case they even make it to syndication, and while I'd be seriously surprised if that ever happened, I think I'd like to see those takes. They might figure out how to balance the freedom of HBO with not overusing swears and transgressive humor for its own sake later, but in the first 2 episodes it felt really forced and unfunny. And then, there were times when the dialogue resembled the way people really talk in a way that you never see on network TV. But there still weren't that many laughs. I mean, Byron Crawford thinks it was hilarious, which is a pretty good indication of how unfunny Lucky Louie is. The first episode actually began with a looong long scene of a young girl asking her father "why?" over and over. His answers eventually got kind of funny but it took a while, and overall just felt like really stale humor. It's basically a FOX show if Married With Children actually got to say all the stuff they wanted to. But even then, there was already a FOX show about a red-headed guy with a white trash family, Grounded For Life, which I always assumed was crap, but started watching reruns of recently and it's actually pretty good.
3. Dane Cook's Tourgasm
Like the Comedians Of Comedy series, this is a tour diary that focuses as much on the life of comedians on the road as what they actually do when onstage. Which makes sense, because most stand-ups do a lot of the same material night after night, so they can't really show you those jokes over and over and instead intersperse little excerpts of stand-up amongst all the travelogue stuff. Again, it's understandable, but doesn't make for very good television, considering that most comics are miserable assholes that aren't very funny offstage, or at least that's the stereotype that this show bears out. I think Dane Cook is pretty funny, and although I'd assume he's probably be annoying to hang out with in real life, he comes off fairly normal and low-key in this, it's the other guys that are nuts. None of them are particularly well known, except in the oh-I-saw-them-do-10-minutes-on-Comedy-Central-once sense, although Gary Gulman was on Last Comic Standing. He's pretty funny, although again it's frustrating because I'd like to see more than 90 seconds of his act at a time. Robert Kelly is one of those short, stocky, angry, aging comics who has a lot of generic meanspirited 'edgy' material and is probably just as much of a dick offstage, and the whole first episode was about him bumping heads with the other guy, Jay Davis, who I can scarcely believe is a working comic based on the footage they've shown of his act. There was some interesting stuff about the comic's craft where Dane encouraged him to go out and wing it on a new joke one night, and he just went out there and bombed. Maybe he'll make progress by the end of the season, but I don't know if I'll bother tuning in.
Aside from times when I stayed at my dad's house, the past year has really been the first time I've had HBO at home, and aside from finally catching up with The Wire, I pretty into Entourage reruns. It kind of pains me to like a couple HBO shows this much, considering I've always hated on The Sopranos/Sex In The City/Six Feet Under/etc. and kind of considered the whole "it's not TV, it's HBO" thing a bunch of elitist bullshit to rationalize paying extra for the channel. I don't think I'll even bother giving Deadwood or Big Love a chance. Anyway, I like Entourage even though it's not really that funny sometimes (outside of Johnny Drama, maybe the single funniest character on television right now, the washed up brother of a big Hollywood star played by Matt Dillon's washed up brother in an insanely effective bit of stunt casting). So far this season is looking pretty good, although the Ari-centric press coverage surrounding the new season is kind of weird to me. I like Jeremy Piven and Ari is a great use of his crazy asshole energy, but he doesn't really outshine the rest of the cast or anything.
2. Lucky Louie
I always liked Louis C.K. as a standup, although I never saw Pootie Tang or anything. So I was looking forward to this, especially after reading the advance press about how he was just doing a basic, old-fashioned 3-camera sitcom, but on HBO with swear words and no commercials. And it definitely has the feel of early Roseanne (complete with the bloozy background music), or even Roc, just depicting regular blue collar people really bluntly and realistically, with a set that looks convincingly like a shitty, run down apartment. At the beginning of every episode, a cast member actually says "Lucky Louie was filmed before a studio audience," which totally feels like a throwback to the Cheers era. It totally looks like it was made 15 years ago, and the first time I watched it J.G. asked me if it was a rerun of an old show. That stuff, I liked, but the show itself is pretty underwhelming. They supposedly are shooting alternate takes of every scene with the swears taken out in case they even make it to syndication, and while I'd be seriously surprised if that ever happened, I think I'd like to see those takes. They might figure out how to balance the freedom of HBO with not overusing swears and transgressive humor for its own sake later, but in the first 2 episodes it felt really forced and unfunny. And then, there were times when the dialogue resembled the way people really talk in a way that you never see on network TV. But there still weren't that many laughs. I mean, Byron Crawford thinks it was hilarious, which is a pretty good indication of how unfunny Lucky Louie is. The first episode actually began with a looong long scene of a young girl asking her father "why?" over and over. His answers eventually got kind of funny but it took a while, and overall just felt like really stale humor. It's basically a FOX show if Married With Children actually got to say all the stuff they wanted to. But even then, there was already a FOX show about a red-headed guy with a white trash family, Grounded For Life, which I always assumed was crap, but started watching reruns of recently and it's actually pretty good.
3. Dane Cook's Tourgasm
Like the Comedians Of Comedy series, this is a tour diary that focuses as much on the life of comedians on the road as what they actually do when onstage. Which makes sense, because most stand-ups do a lot of the same material night after night, so they can't really show you those jokes over and over and instead intersperse little excerpts of stand-up amongst all the travelogue stuff. Again, it's understandable, but doesn't make for very good television, considering that most comics are miserable assholes that aren't very funny offstage, or at least that's the stereotype that this show bears out. I think Dane Cook is pretty funny, and although I'd assume he's probably be annoying to hang out with in real life, he comes off fairly normal and low-key in this, it's the other guys that are nuts. None of them are particularly well known, except in the oh-I-saw-them-do-10-minutes-on-Comedy-Central-once sense, although Gary Gulman was on Last Comic Standing. He's pretty funny, although again it's frustrating because I'd like to see more than 90 seconds of his act at a time. Robert Kelly is one of those short, stocky, angry, aging comics who has a lot of generic meanspirited 'edgy' material and is probably just as much of a dick offstage, and the whole first episode was about him bumping heads with the other guy, Jay Davis, who I can scarcely believe is a working comic based on the footage they've shown of his act. There was some interesting stuff about the comic's craft where Dane encouraged him to go out and wing it on a new joke one night, and he just went out there and bombed. Maybe he'll make progress by the end of the season, but I don't know if I'll bother tuning in.
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on Tuesday, June 20, 2006 at 10:52 PM.
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