You suck, television.
Look we're all for dry British imports...as long as we're talking about booze. Otherwise, you still suck television.
I don’t think there’s anything that pisses me off more than being told that something is uninteresting to me for the sole reason of “you just don’t get it.” I’m with Paul F. Tompkins on this one: “If something is inherently funny, it is relatable after the fact. I can’t plan my life around when funny things are going to happen to you.” With this in mind, I need to touch on a certain Adult Swim show that has drawn my ire in recent weeks.
Now, I know Adult Swim is a curious beast to begin with. The whole point of it is that it’s the island of misfit toys where programming is concerned. Furthermore, the whole point is that if you don’t like one show, you’ll probably like another, and so it’s all subjective. (I worship both “The Venture Bros.” and “Metalocalypse” religiously, for instance.) So, it’s with this in mind that I disclaimer the following article: For the first time, there’s a chance you might like the show I’m needling at.
The show is called “Look Around You.” It originally ran on BBC2 a few years ago, and like other Adult Swim fare such as “Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace” and “The Mighty Boosh,” it has come to America to find an audience, however obscure. The show is modeled after British classroom films of the 1980s, and if you can’t even see where that premise could be funny, you’re now alienated.
Those of you remaining, consider: The show lasted two seasons. The first were straight takeoffs of a classroom film teaching about things like the elements of the periodic table. Like, a whole episode dedicated to spoofing the element of iron. Now, I complain a lot about how spoof humor has basically died in the past decade, but this is the polar opposite end of the spectrum, and it blows also.
I’m all for dry humor, and the great English comedians have made their name and found a pretty broad American audience over the years by throwing their arms around it. However, there’s a point where dry becomes so dry that it’s not even funny. This is well beyond that. The humor is so deadpan that you could conceivably show these in a classroom, and a good ninety percent of the target audience would believe it was totally straightforward.
The second season episodes up the ridiculousness a bit more, to the point where you can tell they’re trying to make jokes, but again, it’s almost painful how unfunny it is. It’s simply people doing dumb things straightfaced. Now, those of you who love deadpan humor (I do too) might be wondering what’s wrong with that. What’s wrong with it is that deadpan humor only works when it’s people doing something ridiculous with a totally straight face. In the case of this show, they’re doing things that are only a little ridiculous, which takes away the entire point.
Now, let’s go back to the idea of not “getting” something. I get this show perfectly well. It’s designed to be a spoof of a somewhat obscure thing for a specific cultural market, and I can dig that. However, the “Monty Python” films and show did the same thing, and they went off like gangbusters the world over because they were still funny and didn’t hinge the whole purpose of their comedy on obscure references.
Then again, if you really think about it, I just compared a British show to the one British thing everyone knows, so maybe I really don’t get it.
You suck, television.
Posted by Dominick Mayer, Dominick Mayer on Jun 12, 2009 @ 12:00 am
