"Loser” is one of those epithets I don’t feel terribly comfortable with. What is a loser? I find very unsettling the idea that a person might not have any potential for success, which is what the term connotes. (I feel equally uncomfortable with “winner,” by the way, which not only connotes a sort of artificial perfection, but also implies a zero-sum game.) But as much as I might resist the epithet, “loser” is definitely a valuable species of character—the character who lacks ambition, skills, or both, who tries but fails, who doesn’t understand what the rest of the world wants to see, or who’s just plumb unlucky. TVTropes lists something like 25 different categories of loser for a reason.
It’s not surprising that losers
often make good television. It’s
encouraging, and even heartwarming, to watch an underdog succeed, and it’s usually
more comfortable to watch characters who are flawed than characters who are perfect. Perfect is boring and/or angering. Flawed leaves room for hope. Losers’ problems often mirror our own and make
us feel a little better about our lives.
And some loser characters are downright classics: Homer Simpson, Al Bundy, Chris from Get a
Life, Louie… These shows are about losers we kind of like, even if we often don’t
admire or identify with them. We’re
rooting for them to learn, to change, to get luckier, to succeed against the
odds—whatever it might be, we want them to have a positive outcome, for once,
once in a while.
What I wonder is what makes the
difference between those classics and the others—the losers who evoke
schadenfreude, or depression, or frustration, or anger. I think there are even more of those than the
lovable ones. I expect the line is
different for different viewers—which is why there are so many shows that walk
that line, and so many losers who fall on the “other” side of the line for
me. I appreciated the artistry of
Napoleon Dynamite, and its dialogue is timeless, but it didn’t make me happy. The film didn’t ask us to laugh with them, it asked us to laugh at them, and although I found it funny,
I was ashamed of myself for feeling that way. What
puts them on one side of the line, and Homer on the other?
With loser-dom in mind, and my general distaste for shows that disrespect the legal profession, I'm giving five SimonBakers (the maximum number) to Rake (Fox, new, dramedy), a show that seems custom-made to make me want to throw things. As far as I can tell, the main character, played by Greg Kinnear, is a sexist, gambling, attorney with poor impulse control who should be disbarred for any number of reasons, who manages to hold on to his law job by his fingernails, and we're somehow supposed to root for him. I didn't think it was possible to make a law show I'd want to watch even less than Franklin & Bash. Guess I was wrong.
Enlisted
(Fox, new. Sitcom.)
Watched: pilot
Premise: Bad News Bears meets the military.
Promise: A military hero returns to base to train a
group of misfits, each with a different problem—unathleticism, lack of
intelligence, bad temper, overenthusiasm, etc.—and finds that they’re more
promising than he originally took them for.
There’s a good bit of comic potential here, but there’s also a lot of
potential for tired stereotyping, and the pilot indulges at least as much in
the latter as the former. The episode
culminates in a wargame exercise at which the group finds its own way to
succeed, which is encouraging, but I don’t have the energy for a bunch of
episodes about these characters fumbling around. I’m sure it’s aiming for M*A*S*H, but it has a
long way to go to get there.
Verdict: Ultimately heartwarming and occasionally
amusing, but it fumbles enough that I’m unlikely to tune in again.
Chozen
(FX, new. Animated sitcom.)
Watched: pilot
Premise: Gay white rapper tries to recapture his
career after being released from prison.
Promise: The main character is a well-meaning but
generally unintelligent stoner, who was falsely imprisoned when he was very
young and now wants to return to the rap career he was just beginning when he
went to prison. He rounds up some of his
friends from his youth, but has difficulty adjusting to life on the
outside. If it sounds more sad than
funny to you, you’re right. It’s
produced by the same team as Archer, which I adore, but it has more in common
with its other producers’ show, Eastbound & Down. Like Archer, Chozen is actually quite
competent (at rapping, as Archer is at espionage) – but Archer’s unlikeability
is smoother, more upbeat, and more surreal than Chozen’s rougher, more depressive
variety. I’m also a bit confused by the
show’s decision to make Chozen a stoner rather than simply unlucky. It seems inconsistent not only with the
character’s backstory (where was he getting marijuana in prison?) but also with
his naiive, generally innocent personality.
Verdict: Doesn’t really work for me.
The
Spoils of Babylon (IFC, new. Comedy/melodrama miniseries)
Watched: First two episodes
Premise: High-concept television half-hour miniseries
purporting to dramatize a melodrama, ‘70s-style.
Promise: This show is all over the place. It’s got at least two framing devices: it opens with the novel’s down-and-out author
telling us what we’re going to see, and then we see the main character
narrating the story in flashback in what we presume is an audio suicide note,
and then at last we get to the story underneath. It’s got an amazing cast, but a very odd
premise—it focuses, as far as I can tell, on a lifelong forbidden love between
step-siblings starting in the 1930s and continuing until the 1970s. Its humor is absurdist and surreal, which
could be hilarious, but it often misses the mark—the gag, for example, of
having the male lead’s wife played by a mannequin (voiced by Carey Mulligan) is
a cute gag, but it can’t carry an episode of television. In fact, that’s true of most of the
jokes: they can’t carry the weight
assigned to them. It’s very
inside-baseball, mocking the tropes of ‘70s melodramas, which is probably
funnier if one is familiar with those tropes.
Overall, it misses the mark about as often as it hits—it’s always
melodrama, but not quite funny enough to be funny and not quite serious enough
to be serious. It also reflects its idiosyncratic
casting—a bunch of very serious actors plus Kristen Wiig. Most of the time, she’s emoting, while the
other actors are just acting as if they’re in a serious drama. The result feels off-kilter—which I presume
was the objective. But just because the
show does what it wants to do doesn’t mean I find it terribly entertaining.
Verdict: If you thrive on absurdity and/or have a deep
knowledge of ‘70s melodrama, give it a try. Otherwise it’s safe to miss.
Broad
City (Comedy Central, new. Sitcom.)
Watched: pilot
Premise: Two broke young women navigate the vagaries
of life in New York. Or, Slack in the City.
Promise: The show has the low-fi feel of a web series
ported to TV, which is exactly what it is.
Two Upright Citizens Brigade alumnae lead the show, and fill the remaining roles with recognizeable comedians. The
show airs directly after Workaholics, which is a good match tonally—the women
of this show have the same sort of intensity in their underachieving as the
guys on Workaholics, or It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, or Wilfred…and I
suppose it’s progress to see a slacker show about women join the many about men.
There’s a “Girls” vibe, too—these young
women have the same sort of misdirected, youthful energy as the Girls—but this
is more straight-ahead comedy. The pilot
centers around the women’s attempt to make money to support buying pot and playing
hooky from work by, among other things, returning a bundle of pilfered office
supplies to a store and using a Craigslist-esque service to find a job cleaning
a guy’s house in their underwear. I find
it extremely difficult to identify with the choices they make, so it’s a bit
hard to watch—but the gags are sometimes funny, and as baffling as their choices
are, the main characters generally mean well.
The humor is at once wacky and low key, and the show recognizes and
capitalizes on its characters’ flaws without apologizing for them. It doesn’t make me want to watch the show
regularly, but it does make me understand why others would—and why Comedy Central
pulled it up into the big leagues.
Verdict: I’m not the target
audience, but I respect the show’s appeal for others.
On the DVR/Unreviewed: The Assets, Chicago PD, Helix, True Detective, Bitten, Under the Gunn, Looking.
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