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Archive for the ‘TV COMEDY SERIES’ Category

Shitt’s Creek

19 Oct

Shitt’s Creek — TV Situation Comedy 2014-2020, On Netflix and elsewhere.
★★★★★
The Story: A wealthy family loses every penny, save a hick town, which when rich they bought as a lark and in whose seedy motel they must now reside.
~
Shitt’s Creek offers us a situation we humans have loved from Twelfth Night through the comedies of the ‘30s to Gilligan’s Island to this. The rich brought low.

Nothing needs to be said about it except that I watched — at least I think I watched — all 60 episodes with delight and surprise. I deem it to be deservedly popular and its handsome awards just. Beautifully directed and produced, perfectly written — by many — and performed with extravagant imagination by all.

Moira Rose, the mother, in the Natalie Schafer role, is played not as a mother but, as a soap opera actress between engagements. Catharine O’Hara, dolled up in The Wardrobe Without End, manages to be overdressed in every outfit, although each be but black and white. Her performance gains in magnificence as her diction gains in elaboration. One’s tongue hangs out eager to translate her next utterance into the vernacular of common sense. I think O’Hara wrote her own lines. They’re very funny. She’s very funny. Her Moira Rose is as selfish as cats, and we root for her every bugle-bead of the way.

The two children are carousels of gargoyle gesticulation. The son constantly shakes his head No as though it held dice it prayed would, when shot, produce a Yes. The daughter‘s body thrashes about like a Mixmaster itching to whip itself into a meringue of charm. The kids never stop twitching. They seem to have no center, for they cannot stand still to experience one. Cartoons but valiant ones, if they once spoiled themselves to experience the all-and-nothing of The Great World, they now bring the daring of those spoiled spoils into their futures where they transsex them into large social benefit. They contributed nothing but cuff-lace until they ended in this rube burg.

Eugene Levy, as the paterfamilias, never loses the vocalization of the born entrepreneur. He is the anchor of the wrecked vessel. He is down-to-earth — always hopeful, always creating hope in others. His Johnny Rose is to me a mystery performance. He plays the character not as a fool or dullard. All his family bring the folly of their grandeur to the small-town. What he brings is a bent to live out his talent for business and thus realize his own life and by contagion the life of everyone in contact with him. He is the occasion for comedy rather than the enactor of it. A wonder of a performance.

Each actor who plays townsfolk is tip-top, perfectly cast, endearing as all get out. Their characters live out a story whose foundation is that acceptance is natural as breathing.

Indeed, the Rose family presents acceptance as prenatal.

For Shitt’s Creek is a story which The Politically Correct never sullies but from which it is never missing. Before, after, and instead of, we are presented with a world made real and funny by the absence of what never should have existed to begin with. How true. If untried. No finger wags here. For what is advice but the starvation of a salesman’s sample? And why a sample? — when the example of a whole body, a whole town may live it out for us — as here?

Instead, the foundation of its comedy lies, as comedy must, in that everyone accepts everyone and is irritated by everyone.

I recommend the series with no reservation save to start at the start, go to the end, then, as Moira Rose would put it, desist.

 

Red Skelton: America’s Clown Prince

17 Feb

Red Skelton: American’s Clown Prince. TV Shows. Low Comedy. 5 hours Black and White 1961.
★★★★★
I would see that cheese-eating smile, surrounded by the destructive exclamation marks of his sycophantic dimples, I would see his sappy visage of a deranged choirboy, his body swaying constantly as though he needed to go to the bathroom, I would see that fidgeting left hand of his extended at the wrist like a male ballet dancer making a running exit – and I would make a running exit.

He repelled me.

He revolted me.

For I was never taken by the sort of comedian so popular in America of which he was a type: the schlemiel. Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope, Lou Costello, Danny Kaye – I was drawn to them only insofar as they evinced quick wit. But as dummies, they bored me. I was pitiless.

So I never saw Red Skelton. He made a movie with Fred Astaire, but I didn’t pay any attention to him. I found him profoundly unfunny, grating even, a suck-up.

Since I am sometimes interested in challenging my biases, I took this out of the library, and immediately rolled on the floor laughing. For me, now, he is a very funny man. I was mistaken. No, not mistaken about his cheese-eating persona, but about walking away so soon all those years ago. Once he goes into his act, he is titanic.

I never saw him on Television, and these are 10 shows from his TV shows. I don’t know which volume I have here, for there are many and they are not properly numbered, but it is the one with the show in which he, as Freddie The Freeloader and Ed Wynn, adopt a squalling baby. Even funnier is a skit with Jane Russell as a dance-hall hostess-cum-Belle Starr. And funnier still is the one with Marilyn Maxwell where he simply sits on a soldering iron, and we watch his face screw into madnesses of agony.

For as a performer he has a genius with props. And he has a genius with witty sets, grace á the imaginations of his designers. He is a good mime. And his characters work well because they are greedy, mean, overbearing, dumb, and in all ways drolly human.

Red Skelton is a tonic. I love low humor. Sometimes. And sometimes I have to question those “sometimes” and go back and check them out. As here. Thanks, Red Skelton. Sorry. And welcome.

 
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Posted in Ed Wynn, Jane Russell, Low Comedy, Marilyn Maxwell, Red Skelton, Slapstick Comedy, TV COMEDY SERIES

 

The Starter Wife

01 Mar

The Starter Wife — TV Series Comedy. A discarded wife decides to make her mark in Hollywood. 2 discs Color 2007

**

The great Judy Davis supplies that soft quick downplaying humor to all her scenes and it is a treat to see her bring them off. What a tonic she is!  Debra Messing is also expert at what she is doing here which is to play a person who is up to her nostrils in a swamp. This tends to monotonize the role, but it’s not her fault. Here, she either has a pretty man and feels secure or does not and does not. So this is not a particularly telling script, this being the story of a woman who is trying to rise above the males that surround her to make a career as a writer in Hollywood. But in fact, what she is actually striving for is the freedom to write a piece of her very own schlock, very much like the series we are watching. To have an ambition to be free is one thing, but to be free to produce a crumby woman’s movie is scarcely a charming goal. David Alan Basche gives a lovely Jack-Lemony performance as her husband; Hart Bochner, to play the handsome lug, takes care not to separate his lips very far when speaking; Joe Mantegna alone brings a touch of aristocracy to the proceedings. Yet, who cares about these spoiled Hollywood phonies? The difficulty with the material is that it is about Hollywood, a crass place as we all knew before we started, Also, its relatability is limited to jilted females of forty all of whom are worth more than Debra Messing’s character as they sit before their screens watching her. And so all they get to sort through is very expensive rubbish. The trouble is, you can’t write a satire of Hollywood, for Hollywood is in itself a satire. As for the humor, some snappy repartee, yup, but not a single character with any strength of character.

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