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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
"Cracking Up" joins the deranged family circus, "The OC" sets its Seth trap, and UPN becomes a shrieking violet over a wailing Shandi. Plus: Got a triple-tough stain of cherry pie, tobacco and David Gest on your dentures?
Mar 15, 2004 | Eight isn't nearly enough
Remember when the word "dysfunctional" was still fun to use? I fancied myself a laugh riot when I overused it in my Filler column for Suck.com back in 1999. I know that was only five years ago, but somehow, back then, you could still feel daring and witty, just by using words like "bipolar" and "borderline." These days, bandying about terms from the DSM-IV is like plastering your hair with Aquanet and squeezing on a pair of acid-wash jeans two sizes too small. Everybody hurts, just like they always have, but nobody cares exactly how anybody else is hurting, or what clinical term best sums up your particular flavor of pain.
So, what once felt like cutting-edge wit has now trickled down to the world of sitcoms, and zany dysfunctional families are for the new millennium what zany functional families were for the late '70s. It's simple, really. Just replace hugging and learning with slugging and yearning. Skip the sweetness and the smiles and the moral of this story for manic, rapid-fire absurdity and severely deranged characters spouting farce.
OK, it's not really that easy to do this sort of thing well, as evidenced by "Cracking Up," the new Fox sitcom starring "Rushmore's" Jason Schwartzman and "SNL's" Molly Shannon. Written by Mike White, the guy behind "Chuck and Buck" (sad and funny), "Orange County" (fun) and "The Good Girl" (just OK), "Cracking Up" has a lot going for it: a great cast, a strong premise and a very timely tone (which in TV terms means that it feels 5 years old instead of 10).
But, strangely enough, sitcoms are incredibly difficult to pull off. Even though Schwartzman is pretty good (although not showing nearly as much charm or restraint as he did in "Rushmore") and Molly Shannon is, as always, extremely funny, and even though the stories are fine and the single-camera style works well for this show, the whole thing doesn't quite add up yet.
But, you know, sitcoms are like couples' therapy. Just as it takes at least six months, $2,400, and probably 10 to 12 boxes of Kleenex simply to learn how to say "good morning" to your husband without contempt in your voice, a sitcom requires about half a year, maybe $5 million and 25-30 takeout lunches from California Pizza Kitchen just to usher a few mildly amused chuckles from the back of your average viewer's throat.
Take "Arrested Development." I was half-amused and half-annoyed the first three or four times I watched it. Then I was about 30 percent annoyed and maybe 70 percent amused, but I still thought the characters were too weird and flat for me to care what happened to them. Finally, about a month ago, I watched four episodes in a row (TiVo Purging Day, a beloved holiday in my household) and, within the course of two hours, eliminated all annoyance and fell in love with the show.
I guess shows featuring quirky assholes take a while to warm up to. It took me a long time to dig "Seinfeld" and "Curb Your Enthusiasm," too, come to think of it. Or maybe I'm just slow. The point is, "Cracking Up" could go either way. Mostly I just wish being a narcissistic sociopath was still as fun and endearing as it used to be.
Arrested development executives
In the immortal words of that little redheaded girl on "The Waltons," "How come every time I love something it dies?" Just when I'm starting to love "Arrested Development" in earnest, creator Mitch Hurwitz claims that they're "fighting for [their] lives."
The cast and writers of the show were on hand at the Museum of Television and Radio's Paley Festival last Thursday night, gushing about how much they're enjoying the show and how much they're hoping it'll stick around for another season. Everyone seemed very concerned over the show's future. But when the talk of ratings and the show's impending renewal got to be too much, David Cross quipped, "My dream has always been to work on a show that holds 'Malcolm [in the Middle]'s' numbers. And if that doesn't happen, well, you move on."
Questions from the audience were pretty tame, particularly compared to the insanity at the "OC" event, which we'll get to later. The "Arrested Development" demographic appears to include a wide range of ages, from teenagers to the gray-haired, but all present seemed somewhat brainy and very, very shy. Unfortunately, shy people don't make very good activists -- witness the death of "Freaks and Geeks," "My So-Called Life" and most other programming targeting the shy. Maybe that grass-roots organization Television Without Pity will rally the shy troops a little more effectively and a few quality shows will survive to supplement the endless flow of loudmouth-thug favorites like "Forever Eden."
There's one cracked nut in every audience, of course. Thursday's nut stood up and asked Tony Hale, who plays Buster, what it was like to kiss Liza Minnelli.
Nut: Can you get the David Gest off your breath?
Hale: Um ...
Cross: (scolding) David Gest never kissed Liza Minnelli!
Cross is funny. It would be nice to have him around for social events, picnics, small cocktail parties. I wonder if I could rent him.
I'm pretty sure that half of the shy, shy people in the audience were also wondering if Cross would be their friend if they paid him well enough for his time, but instead they stared at their laps and rubbed their shy little eyes. But when my boyfriend insisted that we talk with a writer from the show that he used to work with, the shy people bum-rushed the stage seeking autographs and shoved their shy elbows into my ribcage on the way there. I think I like shy TV fanatics a little better on "Television Without Pity" than I do in person, but then, I'm an antisocial depressive.
