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| What We Do in the Shadows |
This pandemic is many things--horrifying, demoralizing, anxiety-provoking--but humorous is not one of them. Yet I've been finding solace as of late in TV comedies that find humor in unlikely situations. In fact, this is why I love comedy: in a universe hell-bent on killing us after heartbreak and suffering, sometimes laughing is the deepest, most appropriate response possible.
As I said in a post back in 2015,
In the face of the terrible things going on in the world that can easily drive us to depression and despair, humor is one of the few things that can keep us sane. It might also reveal something profound about the human condition.
So, here are my mini-reviews of unlikely TV comedies for pandemic relief: What We Do in the Shadows, Avenue 5, The Midnight Gospel, GLOW, Barry, Future Man, and Upload.
What We Do in the Shadows
FX/Hulu
Vampires have always been kind of silly. Vicious, blood-drinking killers who need your permission to enter your house? Gothy, fanged denizens of the night who turn into rats or bats? Sexy, brooding immortals that can't look at a crucifix or themselves in the mirror? I mean, it's all a bit silly if you think about it. I'm surprised there aren't more vampire comedies, but I'm glad we have this one.
FX's What We Do in the Shadows, based on the 2014 film by Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement, shows us that vampire comedy is just what we need when everything sucks.
The cast is hilarious: regular vampires Nandor (Kayvan Novak), Lazlo (Matt Berry), Nadja (Natasia Demitriou), and Nandor's human familiar (Harvey Guillén). I especially love the new idea of Colin Robinson (Mark Proksch), energy vampire (he sucks your energy by being boring and lame). There are some great guest stars (Danny Trejo, Evan Rachel Wood, Paul Ruebens, Wesley Snipes, Mark Hamill... as well as Waititi and Clement themselves).
My favorite part of the show is that the vampires are both vicious, immortal killers and hilarious, very human buffoons. And there's something oddly comforting about that juxtaposition right now.
Avenue 5
HBO
Science fiction comedy is nothing new (think of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy). Even existential science fiction comedy is nothing new (think of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy).
But HBO's Avenue 5 (created by Veep creator Armando Ianucci) is definitely a show for our times. Don't let it fool you that it takes place in the future on a space ship. Due to a navigation mishap, a luxury space liner will be in the outer solar system for an indeterminate amount of time. It turns out the captain (Hugh Laurie) isn't what he seems, and the people actually in charge are even more incompetent ("led" by Josh Gad as a too-familiar buffoonish billionaire with Suzy Nakamura as his slightly less incompetent assistant). As illusion after illusion is dispelled it turns out that people are trapped together hurtling through space with nothing but incompetent leaders, each other, and a poop ring (don't ask) to get through it. Nope, nothing politically or existentially relevant about that. Nope.
My favorite scene features the delightfully grumpy customer service rep Matt Spencer (Zach Woods) trying to placate an angry crowd.
Spencer: This is like jazz fate.
Person in crowd: I hate jazz.
Other person in crowd, faintly: I hate fate.
The Midnight Gospel
Netflix
It's almost impossible to really describe Netflix's The Midnight Gospel, but it's something like a podcast set to trippy animation. Sort of. Kinda.
A couple students recommended this show because a few episodes discuss Buddhism and the philosophical issue of personal identity (especially episode 5). It's super weird animation with drug culture pop philosophy and a heavy dose of New Agey spirituality, but I find it oddly compelling (emphasis on “oddly”) and occasionally funny (if anything the juxtaposition of the mostly serious discussion and the psychedelic animation is weirdly amusing).
The last episode in particular is a deeply moving discussion about death and grief. And overall it's a nice change of pace from the smug pop nihilism of recent animated shows like Rick and Morty and Bojack Horseman. (Not that I don't appreciate those shows, too. Don't @ me.)
GLOW
Netflix
I loved professional wrestling when I was a kid in the 80's. I haven't really kept up with it on TV, but I have gone to see the WWE a few times over the years (most recently just a couple months before everything was canceled). Wrestling itself is not often funny, at least not on purpose (those who enjoy it ironically may disagree). But there is something kind of humorous about the idea of combining a physically-demanding sport with over-the-top acting and something called "Kayfabe."
Netflix's GLOW is deliberately funny, but it becomes more of a "dramedy" as it goes on and we delve more into the characters. It's also fabulously 80's. It's a fictionalized account of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling from the 1980's. It gets surprisingly deep when it comes to issues of gender, race, and representation as well as what it takes to follow your dreams with a little help from your friends. And the wrestling is always fun to watch. Say what you want about professional wrestling, but you've got to admit it's entertaining.
Barry
HBO
Comedies about hit men aren't completely new (think Grosse Point Blank with John Cusack), but HBO's Barry has the brilliant twist of making the hit man's dream to become an actor. And to have Bill Hader in the starring role. My favorites are NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan), a happy-go-lucky Chechen gangster, and Henry Winkler as a scruffy acting teacher with a heart of gold (or at least gold-adjacent). The biggest question of the series is: Are we condemned to be what we are, or could we become something different?
Future Man
Hulu
I've reviewed Hulu's Future Man before and I recently mentioned how excited I was for this third season.
Here's what I said about the first two seasons.
These points are still there in the third season, but I have to admit that the third and final season wasn't my favorite. Maybe the premise wore a bit thin. Maybe it all spiraled into incoherence (as time travel stories often do). I still can't decide if the final scenes are brilliant or lame.
This isn't to say that there aren't some funny moments. The sequence when the main trio are trapped in 17th century Canada as fur trappers is amusing, if a bit drawn out (see photo above). And Seth Rogan's character is usually funny when he shows up.
I can say that fans of science fiction comedy will at least enjoy the first two seasons, and they'll probably stick around for the third for a few more laughs.
Upload
Amazon
Amazon's Upload was created by Greg Daniels, who previously co-created Parks and Recreation with Michael Schur, who himself went on to create The Good Place. (For the record, I loved the ending of The Good Place. Maybe I'll write something about that another time).
You might think Upload sounds a lot like The Good Place, but the similarities are superficial. The tone feels different, and this is an afterlife via digital upload (not an entirely original SF trope: my favorite example is Iain M. Banks's Surface Detail). Are you you in a digital upload? Are the uploaded people people? Could there be relationships, even romance, between living and uploaded people? Does upload cancel out more traditional, religious afterlives?
The twist here is that this is a near future world of untrammeled digital capitalism (I won't say "late-stage capitalism" because, A. nobody knows that means and B. it reflects a weirdly Hegelian view of history). But the dystopian element is that even the afterlife has a class system: the living characters are surveilled by their corporate employers and for the dead the more you pay, the better your afterlife, something the show explores especially in the last few episodes. Capitalism follows us even in death.
Ultimately I didn't feel like the show came together as well as it could. It spends a lot of time on seemingly irrelevant details while leaving major plot lines undeveloped (especially when it comes to the main intrigue that's supposed to be driving the show). But it's amusing enough, and finds humor in death. So that's something.
GLOW
Netflix
I loved professional wrestling when I was a kid in the 80's. I haven't really kept up with it on TV, but I have gone to see the WWE a few times over the years (most recently just a couple months before everything was canceled). Wrestling itself is not often funny, at least not on purpose (those who enjoy it ironically may disagree). But there is something kind of humorous about the idea of combining a physically-demanding sport with over-the-top acting and something called "Kayfabe."
Netflix's GLOW is deliberately funny, but it becomes more of a "dramedy" as it goes on and we delve more into the characters. It's also fabulously 80's. It's a fictionalized account of the Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling from the 1980's. It gets surprisingly deep when it comes to issues of gender, race, and representation as well as what it takes to follow your dreams with a little help from your friends. And the wrestling is always fun to watch. Say what you want about professional wrestling, but you've got to admit it's entertaining.
Barry
HBO
Comedies about hit men aren't completely new (think Grosse Point Blank with John Cusack), but HBO's Barry has the brilliant twist of making the hit man's dream to become an actor. And to have Bill Hader in the starring role. My favorites are NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan), a happy-go-lucky Chechen gangster, and Henry Winkler as a scruffy acting teacher with a heart of gold (or at least gold-adjacent). The biggest question of the series is: Are we condemned to be what we are, or could we become something different?
Future Man
Hulu
I've reviewed Hulu's Future Man before and I recently mentioned how excited I was for this third season.
Here's what I said about the first two seasons.
You can tell that the writers are real science fiction fans who revel in pointing out the paradoxes of time travel and the many absurdities of the time travel sub-genre, but always in a loving way. This is satire done by people who love what they're satirizing. I find this to be a deep point, actually: if you can't have a laugh at the absurdities of time and life once in awhile, what kind of life would that be? Is a humorless life worth living?
These points are still there in the third season, but I have to admit that the third and final season wasn't my favorite. Maybe the premise wore a bit thin. Maybe it all spiraled into incoherence (as time travel stories often do). I still can't decide if the final scenes are brilliant or lame.
This isn't to say that there aren't some funny moments. The sequence when the main trio are trapped in 17th century Canada as fur trappers is amusing, if a bit drawn out (see photo above). And Seth Rogan's character is usually funny when he shows up.
I can say that fans of science fiction comedy will at least enjoy the first two seasons, and they'll probably stick around for the third for a few more laughs.
Upload
Amazon
Amazon's Upload was created by Greg Daniels, who previously co-created Parks and Recreation with Michael Schur, who himself went on to create The Good Place. (For the record, I loved the ending of The Good Place. Maybe I'll write something about that another time).
You might think Upload sounds a lot like The Good Place, but the similarities are superficial. The tone feels different, and this is an afterlife via digital upload (not an entirely original SF trope: my favorite example is Iain M. Banks's Surface Detail). Are you you in a digital upload? Are the uploaded people people? Could there be relationships, even romance, between living and uploaded people? Does upload cancel out more traditional, religious afterlives?
The twist here is that this is a near future world of untrammeled digital capitalism (I won't say "late-stage capitalism" because, A. nobody knows that means and B. it reflects a weirdly Hegelian view of history). But the dystopian element is that even the afterlife has a class system: the living characters are surveilled by their corporate employers and for the dead the more you pay, the better your afterlife, something the show explores especially in the last few episodes. Capitalism follows us even in death.
Ultimately I didn't feel like the show came together as well as it could. It spends a lot of time on seemingly irrelevant details while leaving major plot lines undeveloped (especially when it comes to the main intrigue that's supposed to be driving the show). But it's amusing enough, and finds humor in death. So that's something.
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