During his likely valedictory appearance last week on “Late Show With David Letterman.” comic turned US senator Al Franken offered a heartfelt tribute to what Letterman has accomplished as the longest running late night host in TV history. He said that Letterman changed comedy.
This week the return and premiere of notable TV comedies, each featuring fools we suffer gladly, offer some evidence of this change. They are to traditional sitcoms what “Mad Men,” “The Sopranos” and “Breaking Bad” are to TV drama. And like those dramas they are each story and character driven.
—In the third season premiere of HBO’s “Veep,” Sunday, Julia Louis -Dreyfus ascends to a presidency for which she is woefully underqualified but of which, if she and her incompetent and sycophantic handlers say so themselves, she is deserving of nonetheless.
Veep” boils Beltway politics down to its essence; petty rivalries among people with character flaws operating within a bubble of collective lack of self-awareness. In rapid fire scenarios reminiscent of ‘The West Wing’s’ walk and talks, the characters brush against each other for maximum comic friction;
Her frantic body man Garry is shut out of her world because he has no security clearance; desperate hanger-on Jonah is repeatedly being mauled by the new vice president’s chief of staff, Patton Oswalt; Mike and Dan’s draft of her state of the union address is as devoid of content as “a diet soufflé; Gary Cole’s vacuous pollster and Kevin Dunn, her cynical chief of staff, pass for the adults in the room.
The result is an embarrassment of riches, with an emphasis on the word embarrassment.
—-“Louie,” returning for a fifth season Thursday on FX black t-shirt and all, is a self-deprecating biopic in which the character played by Louis C.K. is his own worst enemy.
In the premiere he brings fried chicken to a potluck only to end up at the wrong apartment. And after refreshing the bucket at KFC he is made to feel unwelcome at the correct event held at the apartment of a nemesis.
What follows is another demonstration of his trademark bad judgement and poor choices made in good faith complicated by a crude and sexually awkward encounter. All of which Louie’s wounded sensitivity makes tolerable, and even lovable.
—The second season of “Silicon Valley,” Sunday on HBO, is about a team of nerds punching out of their weight class.
Having last season developed a winning computer code, they discover the offers of investors courting them grow in proportion to how badly they treat them. Interest dwindles however when they overplay their hand.
What the series, created by Mike Judge, lacks in the nudity common to HBO it makes up for in the tasteless bravado found in its portrayal of the machinations of the all boy’s club business world.
—“The Comedians,” Thursday on FX, seems like a bad idea at the outset.
Billy Crystal and Josh Gadd star as presumably extreme variations of themselves starring in a series about two men with conflicting generational comic sensibilities forced to appear together in an FX series.
Neither is below sinking to the other’s level to get a laugh. But rarely does either rise above the this level. The series moves in fits and stars as does the fictional series being portrayed and is slow to build momentum. But once they get past their competitiveness – I’ll see your Emmy and raise you a Tony – a dysfunctional”Odd Couple” pattern emerges.
The pseudo reality – Billy Crystal is NOT really married to Dana Delaney – and unflattering self-caricatures resemble the style of Matt LeBlanc’s Showtime series “Episodes,” and the subplots involving an ensemble of writers, producers and network types feel under-utilized, as if fearful of distracting from the two stars. The result isn’t all that comic or original, but it bears watching.
Tags: Comedians, Franken, Letterman, Louie, Silicon Valley, Veep Posted by