Category: TV Features

On September 2, 2001, the Cartoon Network launched a new block of shows called Adult Swim. It wasn’t the first time the network produced shows not aimed explicitly at children — the surrealist talk show deconstruction Space Ghost Coast To Coast had been baffling audiences since 1994. But enabling producer Mike Lazzo’s obsession with creating cutting-edge television would turn out to be a fateful decision for the network. Adult Swim became wildly popular, and many of the boundary-breaking shows that came out of Williams Street studios proved as influential on the comedy sensibilities of the Internet generation as David Letterman had been on Generation X.

The longest-lasting of the Adult Swim Class of ’01 is Aqua Teen Hunger Force. Created by Space Ghost Coast To Coast writers Dave Willis and Matt Maiellaro, it stars an unlikely combo of talking fast-food items: a box of french fries named Frylock, voiced by Carey Means; an egotistical, disposable plastic cup named Master Shake, voiced by Dana Snyder; and the self-explanatory Meatwad, voiced by Willis. From their house in darkest New Jersey, they fend off alien invasions, fight monsters, and sneak into porn- and football-obsessed neighbor Carl’s filthy above-ground pool. Or at least they did in the first few episodes. As time went on, the plots became looser, and the humor more surreal and idiosyncratic. Willis and Maiellaro delight in coming up with weird new characters to bounce off the lead trio, such as the The Cybernetic Ghost Of Christmas Past from the Future, a robot turkey who tells shaggy dog stories; MC Pee Pants, a giant insect in diapers played by nerdcore rapper MC Chris; and a classical Greek Siren voiced by indie songstress Neko Case. Tied together with a catchy hip-hop theme song by Schoolly D, the show struck a chord, and, as other shows fell by the wayside, it served as Adult Swim’s unlikely flagship. Aqua Teen‘s biggest splash came in 2007 when an LED sign depicting a Mooninite, the series’ most popular recurring characters, briefly closed down the city of Boston when it was mistaken for a bomb. The hubbub overshadowed the Aqua Teen feature film the sign was supposed to be promoting, but that was just as well. One of the show’s great strengths is its 11-minute length, which helps free the scripts from any sort of traditional TV expectations. Stretched out to 70 minutes, its non-sequitur plotting collapsed under the weight of its own ridiculousness.

Aqua Teen Hunger Force

The current 14th season of Aqua Teen Hunger Force will be its last, but the insanity the show championed has been assimilated by the legion of YouTubers and anti-humorists that define the current comedy zeitgeist. The show’s impending demise was mourned with a candlelight vigil at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con.

After a string of wildly inventive creations in the 2000s, Adult Swim has struggled to find material to live up to the Aqua Teen legacy. The best show currently in production is Rick and Morty, created by Justin Roiland and Community mastermind Dan Harmon, which had its second season premiere last Sunday. Imagine if Doc Brown in Back to the Future was completely insane and took Marty McFly on mind-bending comedy adventures in the multiverse, and you’ve got a good idea of what Rick and Morty is like. At one point in “A Rickle in Time,” the first episode of the new season, the on-screen action was split up into 64 panels, each showing a slightly different version of the same events. The show is visually inventive, wildly funny, and occasionally hints at deeper characterization in the classic Simpsons mold.

But as great as Rick and Morty is, it still adheres to the 25-minute sitcom structure. Recent Adult Swim attempts to recapture the magic of Aqua Teen‘s 11 minutes of anarchy, such as Mr. Pickles and the Mike Tyson Mysteries, have fallen short. Last year’s breakout viral hit Too Many Cooks points a way forward for Mike Lazzo’s ongoing experiment, but it was an elaborate live-action skit. When the last quirky, limited-animation Aqua Teen Hunger Force episode airs later this summer, it will mark the end of a very strange era.

When the stars of Broadway gather in New York City on Sunday night to celebrate the best of the theater season, there will be a secret Memphis connection on stage: virtual sets designed by Memphis video designers K. Brandon Bell and Sarah Rossi.

Bell is a Louisiana native who went to graduate school at the University of Memphis. He became involved with the Tony broadcast while living in New York City, where he also met his partner Rossi, who is French. The pair moved back to Memphis to raise their three children, and for most of the year they make their living doing interactive website design, photography, and motion graphics. “I do a little bit of everything,” Bell says.

But every spring when theater awards season rolls around, their lives are thrown into chaos “We have to do the whole thing in about a month,” Bell says. “They announce the nominees at the end of April, and the next week, we come up and see all the shows.”

Rossi, along with Memphian Dan Baker, takes hundreds of detailed photographs of the sets of the nominated Broadway shows. Bell then uses those photographs to create backdrops that are then displayed on giant screens on the Tony Awards set. “It’s all LED,” Bell says. “Everything is fed directly into these giant screens. They’re 20 feet high and about 50 feet wide when you put them all together.”

These “virtual sets” were first used in 2011, after the Tony Awards was forced to vacate its traditional home at Radio City Music Hall. “They moved it to the Beacon Theatre, which is way smaller,” Bell says.

Sarah Rossi and K. Brandon Bell in the Beacon Theatre where they create virtual sets for the Tony Awards

In the old days, when the cast members from the nominated musicals would come on stage to perform numbers from the shows, a small army of stage hands would quickly recreate the sets they used every night. But that proved impractical in the smaller confines of the Beacon, so the screens were used to give the same impact while scaling the production to fit its new environment.

“Nobody had ever done this kind of thing before,” Bell says. “Not that nobody’d ever used virtual sets, but nobody had ever tried to recreate 10 or 15 sets in a month for a live TV show. It’s a weird thing to try to do, and there wasn’t a process in place for doing it. We just had to kind of figure out how to do it on our own. 2011 was a nightmare. I still don’t know how it worked out as well as it did.”

Bell says they have some degree of creative leeway in designing the virtual sets. “We’re not necessarily, exactly reproducing what we see in the theaters. But it should feel like the experience of watching the show. There’s one director who, every year, she’ll just completely throw out the whole set and make something new. It’s crazy!”

Between the Tony’s producer, director, and art department, plus all of the individual play directors and their set designers and lighting designers, Bell and Rossi have a lot of people to answer to. “If you looked at it like a set designer, it would drive you crazy. But I’m not a set designer. My whole thing is trying to make all of this work, creatively and technically. It’s not my vision, and it’s not Sarah’s vision. It’s the top dogs at the Tonys and the people from the individual shows’ visions. I’m just trying to make all that work on TV.”

Like a buxom diner waitress who’s secretly slipping strychnine into the desserts, the third season of Comedy Central’s Inside Amy Schumer cheerfully serves up its generous, sugary helpings of lethal satire to a hungry, trusting, and unsuspecting clientele that really should be larger.

So what if the ratings aren’t much different than they were? Schumer’s coming-out party feels imminent. Later this summer, she’s starring in the Judd Apatow-directed comedy Trainwreck, and as Variety’s Andrew Wallenstein noted on May 10th, this year the mass media finally sat up and took notice of her brilliant, disarming persona and the stinging, perceptive humor it serves.

For years Schumer has been poking at familiar subjects from unfamiliar angles by exploiting the contrast between what she talks about and what she looks like. No matter how often she tries to convince the world she’s not a pretty girl, she remains a size-six knockout — as one of Inside Amy Schumer‘s strongest sketches points out, Marilyn Monroe was a size eight — whose body of work often strikes you as gross and crass before it strikes you as wise and funny.

Yet to discuss or even acknowledge Schumer’s beauty is to plunge penis-first into two unavoidable traps. The first trap involves the idea that her talent depends on her appearance. This, of course, isn’t true; nobody’s pointed out that the younger, thinner Louis CK in Louie‘s opening credits looks very different from the bearlike left guard gone to seed with the red goatee bumbling through the ups and downs of season five. Nobody said Orson Welles lost talent because he gained weight.

Someone probably would say something if Schumer put on too many pounds, though — and that’s when the second trap is sprung. Her talent and opportunities don’t depend on her looks — unless she’s in the entertainment business, where they always have and always will. As a multi-talented female stand-up comic, she is forced to confront absurd, demented ideals of femininity and sexuality every day whether she wants to or not; could any multi-talented male stand-up comic say the same? Ironically, outside of the entertainment world Schumer might be the perfect woman — smart, funny, gorgeous. Inside the entertainment world, she’s a porcine, rabbit-toothed abomination with an infuriating ass whose every utterance is further proof that modern science still hasn’t found a cure for a woman’s mouth.

“Milk Milk Lemonade” and “Girl, You Don’t Need Makeup,” Inside Amy Schumer‘s pair of season-three viral-hit music videos, are catchy sing-along assaults on similarly ridiculous feminine-beauty standards. However, two longer sketches disguised as pop-culture parodies are even better: “Football Town Nights,” which explores the whole male-dominated “can rape be funny?” brouhaha by linking it to America’s obsessions with football, family, and winning; and “12 Angry Men Inside Amy Schumer,” an episode-long parody of Sydney Lumet’s preachy legal drama wherein Paul Giamatti, John Hawkes, and a bunch of other pug-ugly dudes debate whether Schumer is hot enough to appear on television. Imagine it as a studio-executive summit and feel the burn. Underneath all four of these sketches runs a strong, clear river of rage that, if you can see it, is actually quite lovely.

There is a tradition in science fiction of using aliens to comment on humanity. Pulp writers called it the “Man from Mars story.” In the 1960s, TV’s best take on the concept was Ray Waltson in My Favorite Martian. Then came Star Trek and Spock.

Spock was created by Gene Roddenberry and fleshed out by screenwriter Dorothy “D.C.” Fontana, but he will be forever identified with actor Leonard Nimoy, whose passing at the age of 83 last weekend was deeply felt by millions. A Boston native, Nimoy went to Hollywood where he first played an alien in the pulp serial Zombies of the Stratosphere. He was a prolific stage actor and director who was running his own acting studio when he was hired to play the green-blooded, half-Vulcan science officer of the starship for the pilot episode “The Cage.” When NBC rejected the first pilot, Nimoy’s Spock was the only character to survive a retooling that installed William Shatner’s James T. Kirk into the starring role. Spock was promoted to First Officer, and ships’ doctor Leonard “Bones” McCoy (DeForest Kelley) was introduced as his foil. Spock represented logic and reason; McCoy compassion and emotion, Kirk the leader was constantly trying to walk the line between the two.

Leonard Nimoy

The show debuted in September 1966, and in the first season it became a cultural phenomenon. The character’s appeal may not have been instantly apparent to NBC, but the geeks immediately recognized Spock as one of their own. In 1967, when NASA’s Mariner 5 probe flew by Venus, the guys in Mission Control donned paper Spock ears for luck. Before computers were cool and Asperger’s syndrome was part of every parent’s medical education, Spock gave brainy weirdos a hero and a role model. The complexity of human emotion, the little clues and signals that went over his head, perplexed him. But Spock was not emotionless, as he claimed. Nimoy said the first time the character really clicked was when Spock, analyzing a deadly threat, said, “Fascinating.” He was devoid of fear, not of wonder.

Appearing in 82 live-action and 22 animated TV episodes, as well as eight movies, Nimoy subtly evolved the character over the years. When the script called for Spock to knock out Kirk with a punch, Nimoy improvised the Vulcan Nerve Pinch as an alternative way to render inconvenient characters painlessly unconscious. Spock, like Nimoy, considered violence the last resort of the incompetent — which is why the climactic scene in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek Into Darkness, where Spock has an extended fistfight, was a betrayal of the character.

Spock never entirely fit in. As the first Vulcan in Starfleet, he encountered and overcame human prejudice. In 1979’s Star Trek: The Motion Picture, we see him rejected by a Vulcan monestary for his human emotions. Spock taught us to choose our own paths. By 1991, he had learned enough compassion to say, “Logic is only the beginning of wisdom, not the end.”

Nimoy was excited to be at the center of a successful franchise, but he was reluctant to become an icon. He had an incredibly varied film career, directing not only two Trek movies but also Three Men and a Baby. But things always circled back to Spock, whose resonance only grew throughout the years. Actors from Kirstie Alley to Zachary Quinto have played Vulcans on Star Trek, but they could only ape Nimoy’s gravitas, which elevated the goofiest of scripts. Even Robin Williams breakout role, Mork, was a comic take on Spock. Trying to break free of typecasting, Nimoy and the Trek producers conspired to let him go out in a blaze of glory in 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Nimoy, the method actor who never expressed emotion, delivers a death scene among the greatest in cinema history. In a way, the scene rehearsed us for this moment. But there will be no plot contrivance to bring him back this time.

Nimoy did, of course, come to embrace Spock as his legacy. A photographer, writer, and poet, he was active and curious until the end, reaching out to the next generation of fans through Twitter. His final tweet, sent from his hospital bed, said: “A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP” Live Long and Prosper.

At a glance, the new Fox series Empire looks like a serialized version of Craig Brewer’s 2005 movie, Hustle and Flow. It stars a top-of-her-game Taraji P. Henson opposite Terrence Howard as matriarch and patriarch of a hip-hop dynasty. The show openswith Cookie Lyon (Henson) leaving jail after a 17-year drug sentence and returning to claim what is rightfully hers: the successful music label run by ex-husband Lucious Lyon (Howard). Cookie is a catchphrase generator who dresses exclusively in bodycon dresses, and Lucious knows how to stare coldly across a room whilst looking deeply conflicted. Their chemistry, established in Hustle and Flow, is as potent as ever.

Apart from its excellent cast, Empire has more in common with English historical dramas than it does with Brewer’s film. Lucious, we learn, suffers from Lou Gehrig’s Disease and must leave Empire Records to one of his three talented sons: Andre (Trai Byers), the eldest, is all business; Jamal (Jussie Smollett) the middle child, is a soft-hearted composer in the mold of Frank Ocean; and Hakeem (Bryshere Y. Gray) is a young rapper who is all about the booze and bitches.

Empire

King Lear is an obvious influence, though the series is actually more analogous to James Goldman’s 1966 play about the legacy of King Henry II, The Lion in Winter. When the play went silver screen in 1968, Katharine Hepburn starred as the fierce Queen Eleanor — long imprisoned by her husband, protective of her brood, scheming for power and revenge. Empire is a vehicle for Henson, who can easily drive the show with a twitch of one of her perfectly manicured eyebrows. Cookie is proudly maternal and truly hot — a victim of love but not its fool. She can also drop hilarious lines like, “You want Cookie’s nookie, ditch the bitch.”

Empire is a formulaic musical drama, and the formula works. Episodes are peppered with topical hits (courtesy of Timbaland) and usually conclude in a satisfying party/performance. The show supposedly takes place in New York City, but you wouldn’t know it because there are about three exterior shots of buildings in the whole series. This empire is built with bedrooms, board rooms, and recording studios.

There is a pleasant unreality to Empire, founded in its weird locationless-ness and spontaneous song, and reinforced by the total unsubtlety of the writing. We learn early on that Jamal is gay and closeted. Then we learn it again and again. Characters speak to each other as if they had recently lost their memory and are trying to establish a basic grip on the facts. When Andre, who is bipolar, starts to drink in the eighth episode, his wife tells him, “Andre, your meds won’t work if you drink.” Lucious, in an otherwise uneventful moment, tells everyone for the nth time, “You don’t get it! I’m about to be dead soon!” A note to any Empire producers concerned about clarity: We do get it.

The character development on Empire is also so obvious as to be totally inscrutable. Henson, Howard, and everyone else seem to act from behind their roles, rather than inside them, communicating with pure charisma. It is a shame, and it unfortunately begs the question — if this were a family drama about white people, would the script be more subtle, the characters less-frequently reduced to one-line summaries?

Empire is only on its eighth episode, but each contains enough high drama for a whole season of another show. It will be interesting to see how long it can last, with the ticking time bomb of Lucious’ illness and the steady introduction of new (and uniquely scheming!) characters. So far, we’ve seen the family double-cross each other in the interest of power, but, on the whole, their hearts are still intact. When Cookie tells Lucious she can make him immortal if he’ll just split up with “Fake-ass Halle Berry,” it somehow seems reasonable. But if the show doubles down on itself and starts assigning unreasonable motivations to unreasonable characters, it will lose its mojo. And we’ll move on to the next sumptuous musical drama. Which won’t have Cookie, and that will be a shame.

You don’t need to know much about Breaking Bad to enjoy Better Call Saul, AMC’s new spinoff series.

I know this because I like what I’ve seen of Better Call Saul even though I’ve never seen a full episode of Breaking Bad. (Oops.) Aside from a handful of random scenes and some unavoidable background knowledge about the Walter White story, I don’t know what I’m supposed to know. But I also don’t know what to expect, and that’s a refreshing way to approach a budding pop culture phenomenon. But perhaps my ignorance is strength. I can experience Better Call Saul without hunting for Easter eggs or suffering from those involuntary “the book was better”-type comparisons.

Bob Odenkirk stars in Better Call Saul

Three episodes in, Better Call Saul resembles Breaking Bad in that it’s a crisply plotted, unexpectedly humorous and potentially grim story about a man who’s lost at sea and sailing into darkness, because it’s either that or abandon ship. This time, though, shady lawyer Jimmy McGill (Bob Odenkirk) is on deck. But he’s been both literally and figuratively pushed around by so many people so far that it’s more accurate to say he’s lashed to the mast instead of at the helm. Jimmy, of course, later becomes the ambulance-chasing attorney Saul Goodman that gives the show its title; its central mystery is when and how that rebirth occurs.

Some clues have already emerged. Each episode has opened with a significant time shift, but the first one — a black-and-white flash-forward to a time and a place where an older, balder, mustachioed McGill silently works the dough at a suburban mall Cinnabon — is the most beautiful, most suggestive and most troubling so far. How’d he end up there?

The same question lingers after the third episode’s opening flashback, a prison visit between Jimmy (now an orange-jumpsuited inmate) and his older brother Chuck (Michael McKean), a powerful attorney who we recognize from the show’s present day as a housebound paranoiac who’s taken to wearing a “space blanket” and keeping his perishable food in an icebox.

Those two scenes effectively set the borders of Better Call Saul‘s universe, but I wouldn’t be surprised if additional temporal hijinks were in store. The spaces Saul tends to find himself in are either so large (the New Mexico desert; Chuck’s darkened mansion; several anonymous roadside pay phones) that he threatens to dissolve into the air like a bad odor, or so small (the courthouse men’s room; his office in the back of a Vietnamese salon; his own car) that he rubs up against unsavory characters who reek of bad intentions and pure craziness.

The best scenes in Better Call Saul let Jimmy gab his way out of a jam, and it’s a joy to watch the scowling, whiny-voiced Odenkirk use his hands and his comb-over to animate his tall tales. It’s like he’s trying to conjure a plasma ball with every new speculation. Jimmy’s great at making strange connections that allow him to leap from one dangerous perch to the next: he’s loquacious and folksy enough to lecture a pair of skater hustlers about his old days as “Slippin’ Jimmy” the Chicago scam artist, but he’s compassionate enough to try and do the right thing whenever he can, even if that means using a “sex robot” voice on the phone. The whole doing-good-in-a-messed-up-world mantle fits him more comfortably than his oversized suits, but his actions — and that Cinnabon future awaiting him — beg the biggest question of all: How long can such compromised morality last?

Whatever happens, I hope it doesn’t involve another machine gun popping out of the trunk of a car.