TV Recap: “Seals: The Deal” S3 E1

Cut from the same weird-smelling cloth as Halibut Habitat and Gangland Raccoons, the cult hit  Seals: The Deal takes a bunch of wild animals, gives them cute names and fake Twitter accounts, and attempts to weave a soap-like story out of their various day-to-day bickering, foraging, and confusingly omni-sexual dry-humps. Last year’s finale culminated in a dramatic couples-therapy session between Monsignor Whiskers and Lady Miss Barks-a-lot, which was interrupted when Nurse Blubberton announced she had the results of Pup-paya’s paternity tests, and Lightbulb Jones finally succumbed to snail fever. Riveting stuff. But how do you top it?

The answer: Flood the dock. The season premiere introduced 75 new seals, so many that, in order to avoid viewer confusion, every critter must now wear a themed hat, most of which were inseminated and/or eaten before the first commercial break. And based on the sheer number of #sealwholookslikemanson tweets from last night, Swastika Wally is definitely the breakout star, followed by Ping-Pong Jr., Seal Who Looks Like Seal, and, of course, Shitshow, whose wounded stare, hoop earring, and bad-boy rep is clearly going to cause problems between Pickles and Poop-Deck, whose romance is still reeling from the mysterious torching of their restaurant, The Im-Mackeral-Eat Conception. Just one episode in, and, there’s already plenty to bark about.

Tags: TV recaps

TV Recap: “Gums” S2 E1

Gums is one of those quirky detective shows that’s advertised on drug-store circulars and played on airplanes, but that nobody seems to talk about. Which is fitting, considering the set-up: Derrick “Gums” Wallach is a mute private eye suffering from color-blindness, puppetry addiction, and a perpetual case of what’s called “the walking bends.” The only way he can communicate is by animating a pair of dentures that belonged to his grandfather, a famous P.I. who’s seen frequently in Claymation dream sequences, and who’s voiced—via a series of recently unearthed pizza-parlor answering-machine tirades—by the late Dom DeLuise.

Based on a hit British series, which in itself was based on a North Korean daytime talk show, Gums finds its titular hero scrambling to catch an assortment of  loiterers, litterers, and literal cat-burglars. He’s also trying to solve the murder of his grandmother, who appears frequently in dream sequences, and who’s voiced—via a series of recently unearthed pizza-parlor answering-machine tirades—by the late Josephine Baker. This season’s been erratic, with more plodding than plot, but Dave McGitten’s aces physicality wakes up even the slowest scenes, and the end credits, for the most part, are properly spelled. Gums may not get people chattering, but it’s certainly got teeth.

Tags: TV recaps

TV Recap: “Actual Miles” S4 E17

(Please note: I’m posting this BEFORE the series finale airs on the West—spoilers abound!)

And so it ends: After four seasons and 20,000 miles in the same car, refusing to exit, Miles Donahue finally opened the door and stepped outside, having at last found the Fuddruckers drive-thru where he was conceived. And when he got there, the screen turned mauve, a ska-punk version of Smash Mouth’s “All Star” played, and the words SO LONG YA SUCKERS!! scrolled across the screen. Thus concludes Actual Miles, one of the most heart-fistingly suspenseful shows on TV, and the first drama to take place entirely within a banana-peel-strewn Peugeot.

Has creator Max Tarkin been screwing with us all along? Until now, every single episode of Actual Miles consisted of the same word-for-word, shot-for-shot set-up: Miles picks up a hitchhiking neighbor, tells her of the time-traveling car he invented just to watch his parents have sex, and then tries to sell her his Garfield “Wheely Cool” steering-wheel cover. Yet every week, we kept watching, convinced Tarkin had some big reveal planned. Could half of America really have just watched the same 68 hours over and over again? Guess there’s only one way to be sure. Better dust off those Actual Miles season-one DVDs, and hit the gas all over again.

Tags: TV recaps

TV Recap: “Spade in Full” S1 E11

Like most critics, I’ve always found producer Skip Beretta’s high-stakes, low-waists USA Network actioners to be variations on the same sexy-gal-gets-amnesia-and-is-forced-to-fight-crime-while-also-trying-to-raise-national-awareness-of-amnesia theme, whether it be the vigilante sous chef of Paprika Nights, the vigilante suitcase repairwoman of Carry-on Thuggage, or the vigilante doula of Vigilante Doula. So I ignored Spade in Full for most of this season, until its dynamo ratings forced me to take a second look. And guess what? While star Natalia Scawitcz is still clearly struggling with her English—she pronounces “revenge” as “riboflavins”—this story of a Las Vegas sunglasses-kiosk employee who gains the power to project a spade on the left side of her face has picked up considerable steam.

Thankfully, Beretta’s ditched the show’s main plot, in which Scawtiz’s character keeps stealing phone books, in the hopes of recognizing her own name; after three or four episodes, she was still in the Bs, while the audience had jumped right to the ZZZZZs. Now Scawitcz’s dealing with real-world, relatable problems: The chaffing of summer earmuffs; the leering of gambling addicts; and, of course, Scawitcz’s misguided, heartbreaking attempt to disguise her affliction with blackface. As for the actual crime-fighting part, Chad Benedict’s dashing human-trafficker disappeared after just one episode, leaving a major plot-hanger unresolved, and a Prius full of Tamir schoolchildren still presumably in the Nevada desert. It’s typical Beretta-style laziness, and while Spade‘s reshuffled itself in the last few weeks, I’m still not ready to double-down.

Tags: TV recaps

TV Recap: “The Blimey Boys” S1 E1

British comedy is lot like British chocolate: It’s exotic and randy when it’s hard to find, but once it hits stateside, you realize it’s tasteless, and that a lot of words are spelled differently. Such is the case with The Blimey Boys, which, despite being a YouTube sensation for six years, simultaneously “debuted” on BBCA and BCAT last night. By now, everyone knows the troupe’s best-known sketches: “Milkshake Handshake,” “Mum’s Turned Into a Wigga,” and, of course, “Harper Lee’s Mud Wrestling 2006,” the latter of which most of which us can recite cold, and which has aged poorly, thanks to all the Hans Blix jokes.

What last night’s “special edition” did add, though, is a new series of interstitial interviews starring Liam, Phig, and Hazeen, whose famed animosity (and, if the U.K. tabloids are to believed, increasingly competitive agoraphobia) meant they had to be filmed separately. While there are a few revelations shared by the three men–Phig claims that Pete Doherty smoked his fright wig halfway through the “Dr. Whosit-Whatsit-Now-Aye?” sketch–it’s mostly a lot of dead parroting of old stories. Next week’s installment, though, constitutes a real DVR (or, as they call it over there, DVOUR) alert: Finally, after four years and two Parliament inquiries, we’ll get to see the controversial “Prednisone Percy” mini-musical. “Blimeny gee,” boys. Blimeny gee, indeed.

Tags: TV recaps

Get Those ASME Ballots Ready!

A few recent pieces I managed to knock out before my self-imposed paternity exile: For New York, mini-profiles of comedians Hannibal Buress and Tom Scharpling; for Vulture, an exhaustive analysis of the seven-part(!) American Pie franchise; and for Spin, a review of Fucked Up’s David Comes to Life.

On Baseball, Bergeron, and Beleagured Dads

Two new stories from the most recent issue of Wired: The first is on legendary baseball statistician Bill James, who also turns out to be an expert on all things crime-related; the second is on the unlikely endurance, influence, and importance(!) of America’s Funniest Home Videos.

The Top 25 of Everything (2010 Edition)

Off the top of my head, in no particular order:

1) Louis CK, in all his glory
2) Superchunk, Majesty Shredding
3) Drake feat. The-Dream, “Shut It Down”
4) Scott Pilgrim vs. The World
5) ?uestlove’s Celebrity Stories
6) ESPN’s The Two Pablos
7) Mad Men‘s “The Suitcase” episode
8) That paragraph from George Saunders’ “Escape From Spiderland” story in which he compares birds to “earth’s bright-colored nerve endings.”
9) Kanye West, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
10) Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
11) Freedom
12) The M.I.A. review collage on fourfour
13) Prince at Madison Square Garden, 12/18/10
14) Best Coast, “Boyfriend”
15) Marc Maron’s WTF podcast
16) Three book series I should have read years ago: Dune, Charles Willeford’s Hoke Moseley books, and The Walking Dead
17) Katy Perry, “Teenage Dream”
18) LCD Soundsystem at Terminal Five, 5/20/10
19) Robyn, “Dancing on My Own”
20) Kevin Hines doing a thirty-minute, one-man improv scene at a UCB Cage Match
21) The Fighter
22) ESPN’s No Crossover: The Trial of Allen Iverson
23) Delocated
24) Ted Leo vs. Fucked Up at the Matador 21 festival in Las Vegas, 10/1/10
25) Friday Night Lights (duh)

For Space Reasons, I’ve Omitted My Scathing 2006 Charticle Re: Cat Power and Steven Seagal

A few months ago, Spin magazine’s archives were made available on Google Books. As someone who grew up reading the magazine, this makes me very happy; as someone who has trouble reading long stretches of text on computer screens, it makes me blind. Anyway, I posted links to a few of my older-ish Spin articles on the “About” page. How much you care about these things depends upon how much you care about mid-aughts Carlos D soundbites (I imagine Carlos D still cares about these things very much). That said, this is still one of my favorite pun headlines of all time.

Hello Again

I’m officially back from my Internet sabbatical. Just to recap: For three months, I had no access to email, Twitter, Wikipedia, YouTube, iTunes, GPS maps, or Hulu. I used my Kindle to read the New York Times, but only because that edition doesn’t update throughout the day, so it was more or less like reading the regular paper. I also kept my back-up software running, so I wouldn’t lose any work. Other than that, I stayed entirely off the grid. The only time I cheated was when I downloaded a book to my Kindle, though I deleted it an hour later and bought the paperback edition. I’m somewhat embarrassed by this slip-up, mostly because the book in question was God Emperor of Dune.

I went offline because the Internet was making me crazy. I was spending countless hours on the web, yet getting little work accomplished. Entire afternoons would vanish, and I’d have nothing to show for them, save for a bunch of illicitly acquired .zip records I’d never find time to listen to. Perhaps not surprisingly, the three months spent without web access were incredibly productive. They were also, at times, incredibly dull.

Every day was pretty much the same: I’d wake up early, read the paper for an hour, and write for most of the morning and afternoon. Around 5 or so, I’d check to see if any new mimeographs had come in, and then figure out how to get through the rest of the day without access to retro pornography or cat videos. Usually, I’d call a few friends, watch the news, and then read for several hours. Once I was through with that, I’d look up and notice it was only 8:30. It was a lot like retirement. I’d never complain about having too much downtime—it’s like complaining about having too many drink tickets, or too many hugs—but on these slower nights, I’d often find myself wondering how the hell I filled my time in the pre-web era. I probably sat around in front a word processor all night, waiting for someone to come up with a device that let you watch old public-access commercials while taking multiple Star Wars trivia quizzes.

That said, while I was occasionally bored living offline, I was never unhappy. Granted, I missed reading sites like Videogum and Vulture, and I can only imagine how many idiosyncratic indie-rock debates I was being shut out of. But for the most part, I’ve never been so relaxed. Gone was the urgent need to constantly refresh my email and news readers, a need driven by the usually unfounded fear that something important was going on, and that I was missing out on it. And it was immensely satisfying to come up with a joke or a story idea and simply enjoy playing with it for a few hours, rather than going online to discover that 3,287 people had already thought of it. These sorts of anxieties didn’t exist for me until the web came along, and I was happy to lose them for a few months. The more distance I had, the more I realized that the Internet can be kind of a jerk at times.

Going offline also demonstrated just how many of my day-to-day pleasures had been disrupted by the web. Conversations with friends, for example, are much more revelatory and fun after you’ve been cut off from their Twitter and Facebook feeds, and therefore have no idea what the hell they’ve been up to; I can’t remember a time when I was so genuinely curious about other people’s lives. Even music sounded better, as the lack of hourly downloads forced me to concentrate on albums for days or weeks at a time, something I hadn’t done since college. I also rooted around my existing CD collection, looking for albums I’d only listened to a couple of times before shelving them away. This yielded a few unjustly forgotten gems. It also proved, once and for all, that no career-spanning box set needs a fifth disc.

The main thing I learned from all of this, though, was just how much I enjoy being in the dark. My favorite moments of the last three months occurred when I had no idea what the hell was going on, both in my life, or in the outside world. I wandered around towns, or even my own neighborhood, with the GPS off and my eyes wide open. I actually talked to people I’d just met, rather than waiting to go home and glean their interests from their Facebook profile. I just sort of let things happen, which is tough to do when you’ve become accustomed to having the web plan and predict everything out for you. Don’t get me wrong: I understand why people look up the menu before they leave for the restaurant, and why they memorize the set lists weeks before a band comes to town. But after a certain point, the web turns you into your own worst spoiler. It all reminds me of a book I read once, about a tyrant who’s granted the ability to see into the future, only to discover that life without surprises is pretty boring. Then he turns completely into a worm. It’s called God Emperor of Dune. You should download it sometime.

POSTSCRIPT

During my three months offline, I tried to keep track of every random person, place, or query that popped randomly into my head, with the intention of Googling them all once I reconnected. So far, I’ve only bothered to follow up on a couple of them. The complete list, presented without context, is below.

- Bran Van 3000

- The filmography of Bruce Dern

– Porcupine quills

– Charles Willeford

– “Sitting Round at Home”

– History of must-see TV

– Tom Eagleton biography?

– When did drunk driving become DWI become DUI? [Note: I’m not sure what this means]

– John Reed’s Pancho Villa book

– The supporting cast of Pennies From Heaven

– Bobcats

– The pointer sisters’ ‘70s output

– “The pizza connection heroin trial” (2/21 times article)

– Has any dance producer sampled the opening bassline of Fleetwood mac’s “everywhere”?

– What causes déjà vu?

– Can drinking black coffee affect scorpion bites?

– Why are snooze alarms 9 minutes?

– Was Capricorn One a hit when it was released?

– What did Timothy Hutton do between Falcon and the Snowman and Beautiful Girls?

– What’s the production history of Dune?

– Machine gun macain

– Do eyeballs grow?

– Does the wiki entry for Santa Claus identify him as a fictitious character?

– Transcription of the phone conversation from Pailhead’s “Ballad”

– Why do people in Jumper watch NY1 if they live in Michigan? Was this noticed by critics?

– Jimmy Giuffre

– Douglas Trumbull still alive?

– What are [crazy former co-worker no. 1] and [crazy former co-worker no. 2] doing now?

– When was the last time someone was killed by being tied to the train tracks?

– Do cats swim?

– What is Thin Lizzy’s “Sitamoia” restaurant?

– What happened to that waterside restaurant in Bellefonte, Pa?