Capsule Reviews: Lola (1961), Safety Last!, Parks and Recreation—Season 1

Lola (Jacques Demy, 1961)

If character dramas unfold in arcs, the lines of the people in Jacques Demy's debut form asymptotes. Demy's New Wave-cum-classical style creates a self-contained world that gives a softly lift haze to reality as characters constantly aim for each other and miss, sometimes passing within mere inches of each other before carrying on or being redirected. The linking of characters—the ennui-ridden Roland and the American sailor looking to stay outside his homeland, the titular dancer and the sweet but equally restless teenager Cécile—only serves to compound and make mutually perpetuating cycles of the sense of missed chances and empty dreams that cool the film's fits of aspirational jauntiness. Roland is the Ghost of Christmas Future of Frankie's desire to stay in France, whose quixotic quest to win Lola's spoken-for heart suggests the endpoint of Roland's own courtship. A spoken-word film has never wanted so badly to be a musical, but everyone's too confused and sad to dance around and sing. Raoul Coutard's cinematography is deftly composed but as antsy and fidgety as the characters, creating a balance between formalism and rawness worthy of the title card's dedication to another master of technical, grim melodrama, Max Ophüls. The camera certainly moves enough to betray aspirations to Ophüls, but Demy accomplishes similar acts of formal rigor on real port city streets, replacing Max's almost clinical touch with more deeply felt longing and obliviousness. Grade: A

Safety Last (Fred C. Newmeyer & Sam Taylor, 1923)

From the opening misdirect—threatening bars and a hanging noose revealed to be a harmless train station—Safety Last! advertises a keen sense of cheek that makes use of Harold Lloyd's perpetual look of having been forced into a situation that, despite his undiluted confidence, exists wholly outside his understanding and, unless you pay attention, his physical capacity. Yet Lloyd, with his anti-Keaton arsenal of beguiling smiles, also demonstrates the hucksterism implanted by his father, and his perpetually unassuming nature masks a capacity to play at levels no less minutely planned and vast as his contemporaries. Lloyd knew how to cater to an audience without letting it come off as condescension, and his eager young worker makes for a more identifiable and empathetic character than Chaplin's pitiable, idealistic Tramp. He'll find a way to push through any moment, turning a pratfall into a desperate rep of push-ups in a flash as if to convince an onlooking crowd that he meant to do that, demonstrating the indefatigable nature of the American spirit, even if he made it look ridiculous.

Lloyd also knew how to set up a gag as well as anyone: that wry open is merely the first of many jokes that call for physical dexterity but work best for their staging and the mad logic of their comic crescendos and expectation-shattering fakeouts. The best of these, of course, is the legendary sequence in which Lloyd, an amateur forced to double for an expert climber, scales a building façade as everything goes wrong to impede him, most famously him falling on a clock hand that then pulls the whole face of it out of the building. And even when he recovers, he gets caught in a damn spring. It's always something. But even the scenes of working life in a department store, with its two-pronged assault of employee-dehumanizing surveillance and rampaging customers engaged into open war for the best deals, show off Lloyd's body language and his ability to frame big scenes with coherent economy. Lloyd may not mine the same thematic depth as Chaplin, nor the technical brilliance of Keaton's setpieces and innovative camera techniques, but he had the purest laughs, and this is one of the few silents where intertitles are almost as funny as the sight gags. Not a hair out of place. Grade: A+

Parks and Recreation—Season 1 (2009)

Granted, the American version of The Office started off weakly too, but it's amazing the Parks and Rec we know and love emerged from this six-episode mid-season replacement. If the first six episodes of The Office's own truncated season felt too tethered to the original, Parks and Recreation feels downright chained to the American Office, an exhibition of Plato's argument against art as being thrice removed from reality, only this is thrice removed from yet more art. The show does manage to ground itself in the intriguing setting of small-town government, and some characters—chiefly Tom and Ron Swanson—are winners from the start. But the rest of its considerably talented cast is largely wasted, and Leslie Knope's laminated Michael Scott copy is too clueless even as Poehler uncomfortably draws on Hillary Clinton-esque ambition that should (and eventually would) come across as bucking gender norms but here plays into the most aggravating types of career-driven women. The last episode represents a notable uptick in quality, but not until the writers came back that fall, armed with feedback they wisely did not ignore, the show soon found its feet and became one of the best shows on TV. Say what you will about NBC (I have), but you've got to admire their confidence in letting not one but three major creative investments pay off despite initially poor results (see also The Office and 30 Rock). Grade: C

Community — Season 2

Community's second season improves so dramatically on the first that it's hard to believe the show was already, pound for pound, the funniest series currently on air. While it lacks the depth and ingenuity of Louie, Community achieves such a rapid-fire rate of jokes that it rises over the current crop of excellent television to be one of the finest shows around. Balancing old-school sitcom narrative style (self-contained episodes of ludicrous adventures) with modern TV storytelling (long arcs of both character and narrative), Community often gets away with having its cake and eating it too. It offers episodes so outlandish that the show often breaks even the loosest connection to reality, yet somehow the show manages to consolidate even something as possibility-shattering as a zombie outbreak into the core story of the study group septet of varying ages and backgrounds that resembles more and more the most touching family on-screen as time goes by.

The previous season ended on an emotional cliffhanger not unlike the second season finale of the American version of The Office.  A confession of love, a physical expression of another kind and various subplots resolved and opened new paths to be explored upon the show's return. From the moment Dan Harmon and his crew get back, they not only follow up on these stories but give unexpected spins on plots headed seemingly in the opposite direction. Where the series got off to a slow start with its first few episodes, the second season wastes no time assessing where it stands, where it needs to go and how it can get there in the strangest, most unorthodox way possible.

The West Wing — Season 6

After the mediocre (at best) fifth season expanded on the worst aspects of Sorkin's time on the show -- overblown storylines, optimism that verged on reality blindness -- and combined them with a sudden lack of clearly defined direction and an inability to maintain a dramatic arc. The new showrunner, John Wells, fumbled the admittedly ludicrous but dramatically tense finale of the fourth season and he spent the rest of the season trying to recover. Eventually, they found themselves in the same position as the last year, with a finale that sacrificed logic for a desperate grab for suspense.

If the central issue of the fifth season was the sudden upswing in major political problems being wrapped up with stupefying expediency, the sixth season of The West Wing hardly inspires much confidence for a return to the unrealistic but at least vaguely plausible political dealing of the show's early years. Setting a new high for Jed Bartlet's capacity as a groundbreaking leader and a new low for understanding of the complexities of international tensions, the writers use the first two episodes to -- I am not kidding -- solve the bitter struggle between Palestine and Israel. There is some small measure taken to acknowledge how absurd this is and how difficult a peace would be to ensure, but after only a few episodes, even the matter of U.S. peacekeepers sent to monitor the situation cease to rate a mention. It is yet another embarrassing development for a show that seems at this point capable only of making plainly clear the thin line between sharply written off-reality and stilted, cockeyed idealism.

But diffusing one of the world's most dangerous time bombs thankfully does not set a precedent for superhuman achievements on Bartlet's part. Instead, it captures, or at least attempts to capture, the uncertainty of a lame-duck session. After winning reelection despite the massive controversy of lying about his multiple sclerosis and then resigning his post for a brief time to hunt for his daughter without emotionally compromising the position of the most powerful man in the world, Bartlet suddenly finds himself staring down his biggest challenge: retirement.

Unfortunately, the ennui and mounting sense of regret for policies left undone spreads to the pacing of the season. The first half of the season drags so badly I feel as if I could have watched two seasons of the show's early years in the same time span. Compounding Bartlet's feelings of being trapped in the office is the blatant metaphor of a sudden onset of advanced MS symptoms, leaving Bartlet paralyzed for a time and wearied for the rest of the episodes. Had this occurred sooner, the paralysis would have carried weight, impeding his bold plans for bettering America. Instead, it only exacerbates the feelings of aimlessness, miring the series in a loop that works like so: Bartlet discusses fatigue, Abigail begins edging into decision-making in full-on Edith Wilson mode, the staff gently grumbles about not doing anything, and everyone misses Leo, who had a hear attack, because why not?

Whatever shrewdness might have motivated the writers to suddenly scale back the sense of accomplishment and fire to the Bartlet administration, this exaggerated nonsense makes the already struggling series unbearable. One episode, involving Bartlet accidentally accepting the flag of the Taiwanese independence movement mere hours before he must deal with the Chinese on economic and diplomatic issues, manages to rival the badness of the fifth season's gimmick episode "Access" by simply being bad within canon. In some ways, that's even worse than "Access." (And what the hell was with that officious, and nonsensically British, guy down in archives?). Another story of note includes Josh lightly hitting a Prius while test-driving a gas-guzzling SUV, setting off the dumbest media frenzy in the history of Beltway echo-chamber frenzies. This laziness can be seen all over the place, even in minor details such as dragging Lily Tomlin out on location for the Camp David episode and giving her no lines.

Then, something miraculous happens: The West Wing rights itself, and in a wholly unexpected way. Rather than attempt to find that old spark, the writers finally understand that, after five seasons of dramatic arcs and single-episode issues, the show simply has nothing left to say about the Bartlet administration. Instead, Wells and co. turn their attention to the next generation of politics, splitting focus between drudging White House-centric episodes and vibrant, intriguing and rewarding looks at the campaign trail for the Democrats seeking not only to secure the presidential nomination.

Previously, presidential elections on The West Wing were covered primarily through flashbacks of the staffers coming to Bartlet's original campaign. But those episodes concerned what it was about Bartlet that made the characters decide to throw their time and effort behind the then-governor. Here, the writers focus on the nitty-gritty of the campaign trail, treating the mad house that is the election cycle with the same meticulous, if exaggerated, detail with which Aaron Sorkin plotted the inner workings of the White House through the staff, back before most of these decisions were filtered through the broader prism of the president's involvement.

The desire for the staffers to continue working leads to an ideological split: some stay with Bartlet to try and ensure that his last year is as productive and meaningful as his first seven, while others head out to find the next major player. John Hoynes, the disgraced ex-vice president, feels enough time has lapsed from his public scandal to consider a run, especially since his only real competition is Bob Russell, current VP and target for every joke about dumb politicians that people have saved up since Dan Quayle disappeared from the public eye. Will Bailey, who already aligned himself with Russell when he spotted the shrewd politician underneath the bumbling facade, becomes the vice president's primary campaign adviser in addition to being chief of staff. Donna, as fed up with the drawn-out sexual tension with Josh as the show's audience, also jumps onto Russell's campaign.

But the most interesting development is Josh's decision to hunt down a Texan congressman who had been considering retiring from public service while still young to effect more direct change at home. Matt Santos (Jimmy Smits) has no aspirations to run, but Josh's dealings with the representative nag at him until he heads to Texas to convince Santos to run. For the remainder of the season, Josh toils to make his candidate look like more than a joke as more and more come to believe he's running Santos just to split votes from Russell to benefit Hoynes, his boss before Josh jumped onto Bartlet's ship.

The writers based Santos on then-Senator Barack Obama, and it's remarkable how prescient his campaign is: an also-ran against presumptive front-runners, Santos slowly gains ground when he sticks to pushing issues instead of getting bogged down in the usual attacks (remember when Obama's unwillingness to stay on the offensive was a sign of integrity and not a routinely disappointing display of his reluctance to stand by his beliefs?). His unexpected rise throws the Democratic caucus into pandemonium, preventing a clear choice for nomination when the Republicans immediately fall behind Sen. Arnold Vinick of California (Alan Alda).

At last, The West Wing returns to gripping television. Both the confusing nature of the Democratic situation and the plans of the Vinick campaign make for fascinating stories. Part of this, of course, can be attributed to the actors. Jimmy Smits has always struck me as an actor I shouldn't like until he unloads a heap of talent while you're not paying attention. He looks as if acting excites him more than anything, like a boy wondering onto a set in the middle of classic Hollywood and managing to get on-screen. I almost expect him to stop in whatever performance he's giving and wave "hello" to his mother at the camera, and that eternal, endearing boyishness makes him magnetic. When he combines that with the conviction of belief he brings to Santos, I couldn't take my eyes off him, and I noticed more about this actor I adore than I ever had previously. His physicality matches his acting style: slight pockmarks lay off the side of his still-youthful face, adding a hint of wisdom and calm to his enthusiasm. When Santos walks around New Hampshire before the primaries, insisting on discussing policy instead of simply hunting photo-ops with average citizens, he still comes off as the most likable of the candidates.

At the other end is Alda, whose casting as the Republican senator only compounds the unlikelihood of Vinick's complexity. Not only do the writers at last come up with a conservative character who does not serve as a punching bag for our pent-up frustrations with Bush et al., they picked one of Hollywood's most committed liberals to play him. While Santos struggles to stand by his idealism as Josh attempts to soften him, Vinick has the voice of authority of a longtime politician, sticking to his guns even when it could cost him among the conservative base. His commitment to hands-off policy causes him to butt heads with social conservatives on issues like abortion, and his religious doubts lead him to denounce his castigation among the press for not attending church regularly. Perhaps it is a byproduct of The West Wing's tangential relationship to reality, but Vinick's more libertarian policies actually sound as if they could work. Modeled loosely after Barry Goldwater, Vinick lacks his inspiration's hawkish qualities but shares a commitment to fiscal conservatism over the Religious Right and an unwillingness to simplify or soften his message for the sake of easily digestible rhetoric. If Santos comes off as a man of the people, a young gun who can connect seemingly with anyone even if his beliefs clash with his or hers, Vinick emits an authoritative tone, fatherly without being patriarchal.

The caliber of these two candidates makes for riveting television, taking Bartlet's magnetism and splitting between two completely opposed but respectful men. Though the sixth season deals with the tension among Democrats as the race for nomination is too close to call even heading into the Democratic National Conference, one instantly hopes that the final race will pit Vinick against Santos, for the two of them continue to display such honesty that I would set aside any hopes for truly realistic politics just to see what it might be like if two candidates would conduct themselves honorably and truthfully. So enraptured was I by the pair of them that I never stopped to consider that, in real life, we finally got one such candidate in the last presidential cycle, only for him to sorely disappoint on many of the core issues that defined the courage of his beliefs.

If Santos brought up the Barack Obama connection openly, the end days of Bartlet's administration blurred the line of who might best embody our current president. Though Bartlet is entering his final year of a second term having accomplished much, the single year we see in this season mirrors the two Obama has presided over since taking office: Bartlet is besieged by compromise and regret, unable to get anything past a partisan Congress (though at least Bartlet has the decency to be gridlocked by a Republican majority and not a small but militant minority), and idealism takes a back seat to politicking. If the writers called Obama's meteoric rise three years ahead of time, they also anticipated the cynicism that would take foot when certain things beyond the leader's control spiraled out of control and some of the policies he enacted to right them only made matters worse. After suffering through a season I originally pegged as mediocre but not entirely terrible before revising my opinion to something even less positive, I needed to see this shift from dragging plots to ahead-of-the-curve projection. Though it appears as if The West Wing will never return to its original format before its finale in the next season, I no longer mind. By changing course, it saved itself, and I can at last look forward to completing a series that instantly leaped into the high reaches of my favorite programs when I dove into its mesmerizing early seasons so long ago.

Shut It Down: On the Rise and Neverending Fall of 30 Rock

When it first premiered, 30 Rock promised to at least partially fill the gaping hole left by the cancellation of Arrested Development, the most brilliant sitcom that ever existed. Arrested Development marked the zenith of the "no hugging, no learning" style of situation comedy promoted by Seinfeld, its cast a hodgepodge of vain, arrogant and thoroughly unlikable people who were so uproarious together you couldn't help but watch. 30 Rock thus softened the approach, giving us a cast of characters who didn't really deserve love but were so goofy you gave it to them anyway.


For two seasons, it was the funniest show on TV, picking up the occasional slack in the American Office with a show revolving around meta-humor and a constant critique of the network that kept them on the air despite low ratings -- in the 30 Rock world, even allowing them to exist was proof of the infamous negligence and mismanagement that sent NBC into a tailspin these last few years even as some of its best programming ever has hit the airwaves. Yet as the show moves into its fifth season, there's a sad truth that must be acknowledged: 30 Rock is so far past its prime that the only humane thing to do is put it down.

Like Arrested Development and any other show that ignores emotion for laughs, 30 Rock excelled when the writing clicked. When a single joke failed, however, the dead air created was deadlier than a missed mark in a more lighthearted comedy.

In the third season, the cracks started forming. For every magnificent episode -- "The Funcooker," "Apollo, Apollo" -- there was a corresponding dud -- "The One With the Cast of Night Court," "Goodbye, My Friend." When an episode failed, it generally did so for one of two reasons: one, it reached too far within the meta framework of the show's humor, delving too far into esoterica while still remaining facile enough for the show's younger audience, almost none of whom would be familiar with something like Night Court. Two, it made the fatal error of assuming that anyone cared about the characters beyond their silly adorableness.

So when the show threw episode after episode at us about Liz Lemon struggling to adopt, or wanted us to empathize, even jokingly, with Jack Donaghy's stalled career ambitions. That these two stories represent 40 percent of the only narratives 30 Rock uses -- the others being Tracy's insanity, Kenneth's naïveté and Jenna's insecurity -- only compound the frustration felt when we must watch these stories over and over again.

30 Rock began to act like a character-driven show to stave off the burnout that comes with relentlessly writing jokes, an understandable fear. (Look at the writing staff across a few seasons of The Simpsons in its prime, or even now; the rate changeover is horrifying.) But you can't make two seasons of Seinfeld and then start making The Cosby Show; one is the direct and intended antithesis of the other, and to suddenly be expected to empathize with these two-dimensional punchline setups was absurd.

The writers understood this, but rather than go for broke in the Arrested Development fashion, they made the same lazy choice that so many do these days: pad their shortcomings with broad irony. "We really want you to care about the latest fight between Jenna and Liz, which is no different from earlier ones only we're supposed to feel good about ourselves at the end of this one, but since no reasonable person could expect that with these characters, we'll add in a wink at the end like a passive-aggressive emoticon at the end of a clearly insulting post."

Yet still, I watched, and I even bought the third season on DVD because enough episodes were gems. The fourth season, though, took a turn for the worse. The very first moments of the fourth season announced how tired its self-reflexivity had become, how the cheekiness of earlier broad references had given way to bored, limp looks to the camera. Even as Tina Fey was growing as an actress, her and her staff's writing abilities had hit the walls, and everyone started to suffer. No longer did Alec Baldwin come off as the offensive but affable version of the cardboard devil Republicans Aaron Sorkin used to prop up in The West Wing. Tracy Morgan lost his edge when his act just got old, while Jack McBrayer finally succeeded in making us feel the annoyance Kenneth's do-gooder nonsense engenders in other characters.

I could not even make it past the mid-season break, though the episode that preceded the Christmas special, "Dealbreakers," was easily one of the series' best, returning to the pure ridiculousness that made the show great. Watching Liz having to receive guidance on how to "wave your arms like a human being" made me cry with laughter in a way I hadn't with any comedy since 30 Rock's own "Rosemary's Baby." But that was the only episode of the entire first half that completely connected, and the Christmas episode was so uneventful that when the show finally came back, I'd just lost interest.

Still, I tried to give it another go when the new season started, and if they got back on track, I'd gladly fall in line once more. Sadly, the damage has been done. Though none of the episodes so far have been outright "bad" -- and there weren't more than a handful in the third or fourth seasons -- not one has the feel of what made 30 Rock so irresistible initially. That the show has devolved not into true badness but banality, it still has people hoping for the best. Even a critic as insightful and on top of things as Alan Sepinwall continues to let mediocre episodes pass because they're an improvement over some of the fourth season.

But I can no longer justify following around a show that has been on tenuous ground for half of its run, and not even the immense joy I take from the first two seasons can keep me coming back for another 22 minutes of faint chuckles and watch-checking. Even the live episode, the ultimate display of ratings-chasing desperation for any show, didn't pass muster, and 30 Rock had the advantage of being populated with a writing staff cherry-picked from live comedy television. Ultimately, I was only mildly impressed by the staging of the episode and the way the crew handled the show's typical cutaway format in a live setting. But I didn't laugh, and the tame sense of admiration I had for the gang not crashing and burning couldn't conquer the sense of ennui of watching them continue to peter out with a whimper.

I was struck recently by catching up on Community how a show can really deserve the reaction Sepinwall gives to lackluster episodes of the latest 30 Rock. When part of a Community episode misses the mark, at least one other aspect picks up the slack. The latest episode, for example, couldn't keep track of both Annie and Abed's stories and should have just focused on one without regressing both to their initial, more stereotypical personalities. Yet the episode itself was so damn funny that it genuinely excused what is hopefully nothing more than a momentary lapse in reason. On the other hand, the episode that preceded that one focused more on the heart than the laughs (though they were certainly there), and the results were moving without segueing too harshly from the irreverent tone of much of the series' comedy. Even when it doesn't measure up, some part of Community is so entertaining that it invites all those lazy add-ons of "but it's still better than 99% of what's out there."

When 30 Rock attempts to move out of the narrow box it built for itself, everything completely falls apart. And it's fallen apart so many times that I no longer care about the few occasions in which the writers get their act together. I love what Fey and the rest accomplished with the series' best moments, and it will be sad to see such a great cast go their separate ways, but I wish they'd go ahead and do it so they don't continue down this path until no one will shed a tear when they get canceled. Fey will rebound, Morgan will continue to capitalize on his remarkable mania and Baldwin can do whatever he pleases, secure in the knowledge that he reversed a decade-long slide into irrelevance with the most entertaining role of his career. That should be enough to lift the spirits of those involved. If only it could make me get over the crushing disappointment of 30 Rock's decline.

Community — Season 1

Community is the American version of Spaced. The magnificent pop culture explosion from Edgar Wright and co. was recently slated for unauthorized theft artistically viable re-imagining at the hands of McG, but vicious testing killed the pilot before it could infect the airwaves. Community doesn't recycle any characters from the Britcom, nor is the situation that forms the foundation of the situation comedy the same, yet it captures the spirit of Spaced like no other series.


The pilot focuses on Jeff Winger (Joel McHale, who turns the potentially deadly video round-up series The Soup into comedy gold), a star lawyer who is finally caught working without a degree and heads to Greendale Community College to quietly get a degree and get back to winning massive sums by routinely playing on the memory of 9/11 for such cases as DUI arrests. On the first day, he meets Britta (Gillian Jacobs), a late-twentysomething trying to get her life together. In an attempt to seduce her, he passes himself off as a Spanish expert and sets up a study group, only for her to guess his motive and invite several other students. They are: pop culture guru and potential Asperger's sufferer Abed (Danny Pudi), middle-aged divorcée and mom Shirley (Yvette Nicole Brown), bright but insecure Annie (Alison Brie), former high school football star Troy Barnes (Donald Glover) and Pierce (Chevy Chase), a half-crazed moist-towelette tycoon who seems to be here to live out a midlife crisis 20 years past due.

For the first part of the season, Community stays true to its concept, tackling the various stereotypes of a community college. The teachers seem to know barely more than the students, and they're about as imbalanced. Take Señor Chang (Ken Jeong), who routinely berates his students like a drill instructor despite a questionable proficiency with Spanish. Another professor ostensibly teaches accounting, only to throw out textbooks and impress upon students their need to seize the day.

About halfway through, however, the show, which boasts strong, fast writing throughout, evolves. Instead of a well-above-average take on the usual sitcom with usual tropes -- sexual tension between several pairs, goofy two-dimensionality -- it morphs into an absurdist mash-up of deconstructionist comedy and elaborate pop culture references. The Christmas episode plays as an anti-P.C. holiday rant that morphs into an embrace of various cultures that avoids sappiness by bonding characters over a huge fight that plays on the entire career of Anthony Michael Hall (who guests as a nerd-cum-bully who picks fights to outpace a sexuality apparent to everyone but him). Another episode finds the study group seeking easy-A classes, with some landing in a pottery course run by a teacher haunted by Ghost (the film, not the incorporeal beings with business left on this Earth), while others learn to sail...on a boat in the parking lot. They even act as if they're drowning when they fall off onto the pavement.

By the end of the season, episodes serve as full-on homages to other films and shows. The popularity of the cafeteria's chicken fingers launches a scheme that plays out as a farce of GoodFellas, complete with tracking shots and a pitch-perfect narration from Abed. Best of all is "Modern Warfare," easily the single best episode of comic TV since 30 Rock's "Rosemary's Baby." When the hapless dean sets up a campus-wide paintball fight to win priority registration, Greendale devolves into a collision of every action movie under the sun, from Die Hard to Battle Royale to John Woo movies. There's even a fantastic recreation of 28 Days Later's opening. The crash of Community's typical level of dialogue writing and incredible physical comedy is the best condensation of everything that's great about the show, even down to its unlikely sweetness.

With its postmodern metafiction, Community could very well have been smug and overly reliant upon other shows to make up for its own lack of writing (watch Glee and see how it continues to push the songs at the expense of character and even the human logic of sitcom characters). Yet the show, like Spaced, is so literate with pop culture that it knows just the right mixture of references to enhance its own characters, not set them aside. Also, the writers have an ace up their sleeve in Danny Pudi, who generally sets off each reference through Abed. He has such impeccable timing and such a remarkable ability to impersonate the various pop culture items Abed can flawlessly recall that he always gets a laugh. His take on Christian Bale's Batman brought me to tears.

Pudi's not the only terrific cast member. Ultimately, Community succeeds because its cast has the goofy singularity of an old-school sitcom and the effortless chemistry of Office-style comedies that rely on a believably level of interaction. The friendship between Troy and Abed is endlessly rewarding, never playing on the "Isn't it weird that a jock and a nerd could be friends?" angle but simply milking their shared silliness for endless laughs -- Community has easily the best, context-less closes of any show running, most of them playing on some game Abed and Troy play. Meanwhile, Shirley comes off as a close-minded Christian who projects her divorce onto her new "family," and both Brown and the writers know exactly where the line exists to prevent from mocking her beliefs and her issues or from playing on them for hollow sympathy. McHale proves a great straight man for the Abed/Troy variety hour and Annie's peppy inanity, and the openly acknowledged Sam and Diane relationship between him and Britta eventually finds a balance between sexual tension and a sort of bromance between the only two sane people in the group. It takes a united front, after all, just to deal with Pierce, who serves as the best outlet for Chevy Chase's straight-faced non-sequitur as anything he's done in about 20 years.

Occasionally, Community rests on old sitcom clichés without subverting them, but even at its most conventional, it's one of the funniest shows in years. When it goes a step beyond, however, it emerges at the top of the heap, ranking with Modern Family and Parks and Recreation as the next wave of great sitcom programming as The Office and 30 Rock overstay their welcome and shows like Arrested Development rest in the ground. It only gets better as the season continues, growing ever bolder with its pop culture mash-ups and more secure with its characters and pacing. What started as a way to poke fun at community college turned by the end into the perfect mix of old- and new-school comedy, one that follows NBC's strategy of packing a cast with supremely talented up-and-comers (many with writing experience) and inserting an established star in a dry spell (Chase is this show's Baldwin) to rehabilitate his reputation by essentially making a fool of himself every week. There's still room to grow, but that's good; peaking early has been a danger that's plagued NBC's other shows, and a refinement of both the movie parodies and the straight focus on community college could make a great show a classic. Either way, it's still streets ahead of the competition.

My Thoughts on the Leno/Conan Fiasco

Oh good Lord, I'm writing about late night television again? Hey, consider yourselves lucky: I've written three pieces on late night over the last year, only one of which made it here. I reviewed the first week of the new Tonight Show and The Jay Leno Show; for the former article I gushed about my giddiness of Conan's ascension. In the latter, I marveled at the trainwreck I saw coming from a mile away and detailed what it felt like to actually watch him from start to finish.

But I do not come here to tell you that Leno isn't funny or that Conan is superior. I shouldn't even be writing about this at all, not simply because the parties involved have not reached final decisions, not simply because the Internet has already suffered floods of discussion on the subject but because, frankly, this is the Internet, and thus it already sides with Conan. Do not let the inundation of #saveconan tweets and outraged Facebook statuses lull you into a sense that the world shares your pain: that way lies the box office failure of such guaranteed hits as Snakes on a Plane and the hysterical Presidential campaign of Ron Paul.

For the Tonight Show's audience, as it stands now, relies on older crowds than the ones who typically spend their days on social networking sites. Or at least, that's what the Tonight Show's audience was, before they gave Conan, not exactly a spring chicken but someone who undoubtedly plays to a younger crowd, the gig. It was a gamble by NBC (more on that in a moment), but after only seven months, mass fallout from the results of their late night lineup changes, the network decided to make a bad situation much, much, immeasurably much worse.

NBC's decision to cancel The Jay Leno Show due to its adverse effect on the 11 pm news programs of NBC's affiliates has created a snowball that turned into a shitstorm, spiraling out of NBC's hands just as rapidly and catastrophically as I just lost control of that metaphor. In an attempt to keep all of their hosts, NBC has proposed that Leno return to his original time slot at 11:35 for a half-hour program, while Conan would retain the Tonight Show but shift the program forward a half hour to 12:05, affecting Jimmy Fallon's Late Night and Carson Daly's Last Call similarly.

What does this mean for the parties involved? Well, first let's discount Carson Daly (everyone else has) and Jimmy Fallon; moving Daly from 1:35 to 2:05 will have no effect, and Fallon might actually benefit from a shift, relaxing pressure on him to give him the time to find his footing (and might I say that he's not been half as bad as some myopic, implacable naysayers would have you believe?). The parties most clearly affected are, obviously, Jay and Conan.

Conan assumed the role of the host of the Tonight Show in June of 2009, but he technically won the position in 2004, when NBC gently strong-armed Leno into giving up the program in five years' time in order to secure Conan, who didn't lobby for the job over Jay's convenience but was receiving enough lucrative offers from other networks with the approaching end of his Late Night contract that Jeff Zucker ensured Conan's loyalty (though he turned down the other networks) by promising him the biggest prize in late night. Leno never enjoyed the idea of having to let go of the Tonight Show, leading NBC to give him his 10 pm program to prevent him from jumping to another network.

For those who know anything about the last major upheaval in late night TV -- and, thanks to this mess, those of us who didn't snag a copy of The Late Shift before it went out of print have had all the relevant details given to us by various articles (see my review of the hysterically bad TV movie adaptation here) -- Leno's situation in '04 contains a certain cosmic irony: where Conan did not court NBC into giving him the promotion, Leno and his camp lobbied hard for the Tonight Show back in '92, with such ferocity that Johnny Carson grew tired of the infighting and announced an early retirement. Instead of turning the program over to Dave Letterman, who'd started Late Night and turned into a program that, in some circles, was just as legendary as Carson's show, NBC offered it to Jay, who tested higher with older audiences and wasn't as abrasive as the acerbic Dave.

Yet Jay has always displayed a tendency in his comedy to be just as nasty with Dave, albeit with the sanctimonious image of the everyman; salvaging some issues from my article on Jay's first week with his new program, the one that sticks out the most is my surprise at Leno's twisted bite. I love acidic, black humor, but I don't know how to explain Leno's brand of humor while still avoiding the non-issue of whether it's funny (because let's be clear: ratings trump talent when it comes to programming). Watching him present the image of an avuncular buddy-type host while engaging in bits like "Jaywalking," where a staffer or celebrity guest (not Jay himself) takes to the streets to find airheads who cannot answer simple trivia questions for the snickering delight of Jay and his audience.

I bring this up because it displays the deep hypocrisy that Jay and what few vocal supporters he has are building around him in this situation: most people who know Jay have bent over backwards to let us know what a "nice" guy he is. His entire persona is based upon that perception. But one of the first things they teach you in journalism school -- the first, if my first class is any indicator -- is that, at the end of the day, you review actions, not personalities and private lives. I do not dispute that Jay Leno is a nice man to his guests, to his family and friends and anyone else with whom he might converse. But he's been at the epicenter of the two biggest fuckups in late night history, one brought on directly by his intense lobbying and the other the result of his refusal to go quietly into that good night, a justifiable position to take albeit one underscored by the general pettiness of his decisions regarding the late night shift.

Comedian Patton Oswalt placed the Leno/Conan debate -- for this debacle has become largely an excuse for people (almost all of them Conan fans) to compare the two -- in intelligent and reasoned terms and managed to criticize Leno without taking the easy route of "he ain't funny" that has dominated the Internet firestorm. Oswalt charged Leno, once one of the most beloved stand-ups among both the mainstream and other comics (Bill Hicks, who later eviscerated the big-chinned one for selling out, cited him as an early influence), with giving up his talent to create a vanilla program; Oswalt also mentioned that both Conan and Dave were such big fans of Carson (Dave, Conan) and Letterman himself (Conan) that they used their programs as tributes to their heroes while exploring all the areas they, as superfans, wished their predecessors would have gone.

That's the overriding issue with Jay's relentless pursuit of the Tonight Show gig: he doesn't seem to want to make the program his. He wants to make it not someone's else's: not Johnny's, not Dave's and now, possibly, not Conan's. Why, as Oswalt asked, does he want the job so desperately? On the Tonight Show, Leno had no POV for his jokes; where Dave cast a mood of crusty misanthropy that made him ironically unsuited to the role of late night product-seller and guest-schmoozer and Conan played up his Harvard nerd image that served him more as a writer than a stand-up comedian playing one venue every night, Jay was just...Jay. That's what makes his comedy, funny or not, deeply insidious and, ultimately, tragic: he's trying so hard to please everyone that he's even sold his comedy's soul.

Conan released a statement amidst frenzied speculation that revealed his deep and abiding love for the program he inherited, refusing to move the Tonight Show into a slot where it would actually be tomorrow and citing the memory of the program's legacy as something bigger than himself (compare this to Leno's original assumption of the Tonight Show, wherein he didn't mention Johnny in the hopes that no one else would either). When he inherited the gig back in June, perhaps the most satisfying aspect of the transition was that, in a way, Letterman finally won. Even for someone like me, too young to remember Dave's Late Night and turning to YouTube for enlightenment, the idea that Conan, who so clearly modeled his version of Late Night after Dave's while taking it to fantastic new places both metaphorical and literal (who can forget his sojourns to Finland, Chicago, Toronto and elsewhere?), could get the job felt like a validation of off-beat and unique humor. In fact, Conan's statement itself proves his talent as a writer. The Harvard grad crafted the perfect weapon in a situation as volatile as this: a classy letter. By placing the Tonight Show above himself, by also displaying deference the proposed change's effect on his old show Late Night and what it would mean to the memory of Letterman's tenure there and to Fallon's current work on it, Conan establishes himself as the enemy of The Man, a humble and grateful employee who reached his breaking point and did not explode but calmly announced his inability to go along with a disastrous plan. It's a statement that practically forces NBC to release him from his contract (thus giving him a colossal payout and freeing him to go elsewhere), all without ever playing the victim à la Jay or attacking the people who treated him so well for 16 of his 17 years with them.

Numerous commentators have reacted positively to the news that Conan might head to Fox if NBC presses ahead with returning Leno to 11:35, but it still feels like a loss to me: Conan tried so hard to make the Tonight Show his own while respecting the memory of Steve Allen, Johnny Carson and, yes, even Jay; Leno spent two years floundering before Hugh Grant threw him a lucky break and inexplicably ensured his success for the next decade, but Conan, who worked in his early Late Night days under weekly threat of cancellation until he molded that program into a classic, now faces the prospect of losing the show after seven months. However, I want him to be on a show (and network) that treats him fairly, and Conan's right to believe that moving around the Tonight Show and tarnishing its legacy is a greater travesty than the effects of these changes on his ego. If he can find creative and ratings support at FOX (Jesus, wouldn't that be the irony of ironies), then I hope Coco flies the coop and, in my humble optimism, that Leno tanks and takes NBC with him. Ah, to hell with what I said earlier: #teamconan.

Chuck — Season 1

Back when Chuck premiered in 2007, I repeatedly confused it for the CW series Reaper, even though I watched neither. Having now watched several episodes of that series as well as the first season of this one, I can understand my confusion: both are about shiftless 20-somethings in dead-end jobs – they even both work in generic department stores – who suddenly have incredible abilities thrust upon them and find themselves forced into extraordinary lives filled with heroic deeds.

Also like Reaper (based on my limited experience with each series) is its formulaic structure: Chuck is a spy comedy, so every episode entails an assignment that invariably goes wrong, providing a fun mix of laughs and action. Yet the quality of its writing and a superb cast make the show an engaging, if occasionally rote, series that gives us what seems nearly impossible these days: light-hearted comedy that’s genuinely funny.


The titular Chuck Bartowski (Zachary Levi) works at an electronics store as an expert in the Nerd Herd (a clear rip-off of the Geek Squad) and lives with his sister Ellie (Sarah Lancaster) and her boyfriend Devon (Ryan McPartlin), whom he dubs “Captain Awesome.” Both are doctors, which only adds to Chuck’s insecurity. When he’s not at work, he plays video games with buddy Morgan Grimes (Joshua Gomez). Chuck is so socially awkward that the very first thing we see him do is attempt to sneak out of his own birthday party.

We discover that Chuck used to attend Stanford until his roommate, Bryce Larkin, stole his girlfriend and ended up getting him kicked out. Chuck mentions to a disinterested guest – a friend of Ellie’s –that Bryce is an accountant now. We then see Bryce downloading something called the Intersect before being chased by NSA agents. Major John Casey (Adam Baldwin), traps him on a roof, but Bryce emails the information to his old roommate before he dies. When Chuck opens it, images flash rapidly on-screen for hours, and Chuck passes out when they finally cease. Chuck assumes it was all a bad dream, until certain visual cues spark visions of government secrets.

Soon, the CIA and NSA, who shared information via the Intersect come looking for their classified documents. The NSA sends Casey, while the CIA dispatches Sarah Walker (Yvonne Strahovski), only for both to discover that Chuck's computer crashed, which means the only surviving "copy" of the Intersect is located in the put-upon nerd's head. The intelligence agencies need Chuck alive until they can set up another Intersect. Casey gets a job at the Buy More and an apartment across from Chuck's, while Sarah poses as Chuck's girlfriend (much to his alternating chagrin and delight).

The pilot was directed by McG, who also serves as executive producer, and the show actually looks like he made it even when other directors take over. Wait, where are you going?! Don't let that frighten you; show creators Josh Schwartz and Chris Fedak use the middle-aged man-child's style for intentional comedy. Nearly every episode features Sarah, who fleshes out her cover by working at a local hot dog joint, in melee combat that highlights the faux-Germanic lederhosen/short skirts her undercover job forces her to wear. When Buy More manager "Big Mike" flies out of his office in a rage to find and berate Morgan, the film momentarily cuts to slo-motion for absolutely no reason, and the result is gloriously absurd.

The dialogue not only plays into this elaborate action parody but reveals the writers to be just as nerdy as the lead; each episode features spoken and visual nods to Bond films, Lost, Big Trouble in Little China, Star Wars. There's even an entire episode devoted to ripping off Casablanca (with an espionage twist, of course). Much of the dialogue in the action scenes, particularly in the early episodes, is intentionally over-expository, spitting out chunks of plot all at once while maintaining its fast-paced wit.

The scripts are taut, but they require just the right voices to pull them off convincingly; fortunately, Chuck has a cast of mostly unknowns so well-suited to their roles you'd swear Joss Whedon helped them sort out the auditions. Baldwin is certainly playing to type, but he gets to have some fun with the image; where Firefly took Animal Mother and The Bodyguard and let him be funny, Chuck allows him be funny while warping the molding pan a bit. Strahovski balances professionalism and sentiment nicely, while Lancaster, Gomez and McPartlin are fantastic supporting players. But the biggest revelation is Levi himself: firmly channeling a young Tom Hanks, Levi has a a childlike innocence and unassailable comic timing. In a show that points out the stiffness and absurdity of the spy genre, Levi brings the nuance necessary to make it an engaging series and not simply a mildly interesting parody (the other actors bring extra dimensions to their characters as well).

The season hits a bit of a rut in the middle of the season when the standalone plots start running together, but the formation of a concrete arc -- which introduces the evil espionage ring Fulcrum as a long-term foe -- in the final stretch finishes the season with a bang. We also learn a bit of backstory for some of these characters, including Bryce's ties to Sarah and why he got his buddy kicked out of Stanford in the first place. They're not massively rewarding character moments, but they make the show more interesting and let us explore these people a bit more.

While far from perfect, Chuck's blend of physical comedy, sharp wit, funny-but-well-made action and a heaping slab of winking self-deprecation makes it one of the most instantly entertaining programs on T.V., and (along with How I Met Your Mother) proof that, in the age of the narrative, arc-based series, a good old fashioned sitcom can still work magnificently.