Disappointment Viewing

I have some regrets about the years I spent as a rock critic/entertainment gadfly. I trashed a lot of acts, some of which didn’t, in hindsight, deserve it. I remember crapping on Blondie at Ontario Place way back in the 70s and then paying for it when, years later, I asked for an interview. Deborah Harry had a long memory as it turned out. I also remember, with some remorse, grandstanding at the expense of Tom Horn, one of Steve McQueen’s last films, a revisionist western that has actually held up over the decades. I’ll also never forget the look on Jim Carrey’s face when I asked him, back in 1979 maybe, what it was like to live in a car with his family. As the first person ever to write about Jim, the look was that of a broken trust.

So although I took some big swipes at some TV shows in the old blog, I will measure this one out because I know Larry David and, without him, I never would have got that story credit on a Seinfeld which seems to capture the attention of others all these years later. Further he was close with my sister who spent the final two seasons of her life with an office at Seinfeld. Last, Curb Your Enthusiasm, was a water cooler show that single handedly kept HBO in the comedy conversation for over twenty years!

However, I have to chime in on his new series timed for America’s 250th titled Life, Larry and The Pursuit Of Unhappiness: An Almost History Of America. Or something like that. It doesn’t matter because the show, to be charitable, is a musket misfire. If having the comedy savants the Obamas on board as part-time executive producers is part of the problem, the premise doesn’t help – take key moments in American history as entry points for Larry to perform his whiny Jew schtick. The charmless results are devoid of poignancy and often veer into annoying. Just as every premise on Curb… was an entry point for Larry and his brilliant cast to cleverly improvise their way in and out of trouble, .…Unhappyness.. has no such subtleties. We see Larry complaining about airline seating, not to a United flight attendant, but to the Wright Brothers in full period costume. In another, his blather annoys Rosa Parks so much she moves to the back of the bus. We also see the bewigged David, disrupting the Constitutional Convention of 1787 with a bunch of inane bylaw suggestions.

Then there’s Larry and Jerry playing Lewis & Clark looking for excuses to tell their wives so they can disappear for about 18 months on their expedition. Remember that Lewis & Clark were 29 and 33 years old respectively. By comparison, Larry and Jerry are 79 and 72. And Rob Reiner shows up posthumously – this bit should have been cut – as George Washington with a thinly veiled screed against Donald Trump. Yeah, well Trump is still here and Reiner, director of many great films, is not. Lincoln’s famous “A house divided…” speech of 1858 somehow comes to mind. However, the bit with JB Smoove and the Underground Railroad, containing no historic figures, has a couple of laughs as Larry and JB have a unique chemistry. 

Its a little concerning that HBO is more than tacitly condoning this unabashed trolling of the USA’s celebration. As an American, this show serves no purpose other than to give ammunition to those who seek to denigrate a long and challenging history. If you were to call it merely irreverent, I would respond by saying the original  Mr. Peabody and Sherman cartoons on the ‘Moose and Squirrel’ show (If you don’t get the reference please turn the channel) were coloured with a dignified irreverence if you will. These short subjects dropped a know it all beagle and his nerdy sidekick Sherman into great moments in history through their Wayback Machine. From there they would sort of get involved in a pivotal moment but not without imparting some important factoid to their viewers, many well-read children like me who were hip enough to appreciate both the wit and wisdom provided by Jay Ward’s writers and animators. Similarly the bold hit Broadway musical 1776, was greeted in 1969 as a credible spin on history and repeated later as a well-received movie.  It even showed up as a woke revival with a black female cast in the wake of Hamilton, the biggest broadway hit of this century. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s seemingly sacrilegious but actually brilliantly platformed rap riffs sold tickets to a multi-generational audience but stayed true to the well-researched biography on which it was based. You needed to do some homework before you showed up. So impactful was Hamilton that it was responsible for a renewed interest in civics in American schools. By comparison, Canada’s colonial past has been erased by the woke morons for the simple reasons that it happened. I digress.

Sure nothing is sacred, and that has worked for Mel Brooks and Monty Python, but I am afraid David is chasing some extremely cheap laughs at the expense of Americans who are part of the firmament. I am sure in the story meetings, Larry’s approach sounded very funny if simply for the fact that he has, for the reasons stated above, well earned carte blanche at HBO. And I am also sure Larry has some love for the country – he is just a year younger than Trump – although I might not say the same about the Obamas. However, that is no excuse to reduce the key figures to buffoons. Better leave that to the Jeff Garlins of this world.

The good news is that Larry’s legacy has not been tarnished. This is merely a balk, not treason. As for me, as the late great creator of The Gong Show Chuck Barris once said, “You can’t criticize TV because it’s free.” However, nowhere near my cable bill can you see the word “free.”

+++++

In other content, there is a disturbing trend on the streamers in which a blistering good first season of a new drama is followed up with a shitty sophomore year. I think most of you will agree that Landman, once a Taylor Sheridan vehicle for Billy Bob Thornton’s unique persona, was run to ground in Season Two by Demi Moore, Andy Garcia and Ali Larter via scripts that could have used WAYZ to find their way home. Similarly, Your Friends & Neighbors in Season One featured a semi-plausible turn by John Hamm, great himself in the first season of Landman, as a defrocked Wall Streeter who turns to burglary as a career pivot. It was a giant takedown of the 1% co-starring Amanda Peet as Hamm’s ex, having departed the marriage to shtup a big former NBA player. There was a cheesy murder subplot and Hamm was suddenly trusting a cleaning lady to give him intel on the security systems in the mansions in his neighborhood. But it was Hamm so we forgave. Not so much in the second season which reduced the men, master and commanders in their fields, to snivelling idiots when it came to the introduction of James Marsden as an ‘International Man Of Mystery”. From there everybody in the show comes off as an asshole save for Olivia Munn, the suddenly repentant town slut. I know what happens – there are no scripts when the producers get a renewal and the streamer wants it back on the air in a year to keep the momentum going which leads to some slapdash plotting. Note the second season of the execrable Nobody Wants This. Even money Season Three will be the last. Not to worry. Referring back to Lord Barris, talk like this is cheap. BTW, call me if you see anything close to dialog of this quality.

+++++

Finally, from the bookshelf, I will touch on a showbiz memoir and a somewhat authorized biography. The former is Cameron Crowe’s The Uncool which came out a ways back but I’m not one of those people who will bang out a review two days after publication to get some likes on social. I needed to read this book for the simple reason that it was Crowe who inspired me to become the cranky rock critic/journalist of yore. He’s just three years younger than me but he was getting cover stories in Rolling Stone well before he was eighteen, most notably a lengthy piece on David Bowie which involved some pretty incredible access to the somewhat elusive artist, then at the peak of his own coolness. It was a couple of years later that I finally started reviewing concerts and interviewing some false idols, just as Crowe was transitioning to become the auteur behind such landmark films as Fast Times At Ridgemont High (he wrote the book and the script), Say Anything, Vanilla Sky, Jerry Maguire and the autobiographical Almost Famous, an instant classic in rock film starring Francis McDormand as his uniquely Californian mother. The book oscillates between liner notes for the film and a somewhat cathartic love letter to his mother whose passing a few years ago seemed to have brought all this forth.

Crowe doesn’t dwell on any backstage debauchery. He doesn’t even talk about his now ended marriage to Heart’s Nancy Wilson. However, with some sensitivity and more than a little melancholy he writes about a troubled older sister who passed young and gives respect to his second sister. He writes respectfully about his father but it’s his mother that he eulogizes in detail and if you liked McDormand’s performance in the film, this book makes you like it more.

People have suggested I write about my crazy backstage years but it was so long ago it’s like it happened to someone else. And The Uncool, a soft read overall for a very specific audience, arrives decades after the fact like a collection of rock ghost stories from a long gone era. For that, I’ll leave mine be.

+++++

Lorne Michaels was pretty well blackmailed into cooperating with Susan Morrison’s Lorne biography that coincided with the 50th anniversary of the institution known as Saturday Night Live. She called him and said she had an advance and was going to write it with or without him and so he reluctantly chipped in without giving away too much of his personal life. So for Torontonians and those who remember what passed for comedy in Canada back sixty years there’s some good CBC nostalgia. Those who were fans of SNL from Day One won’t learn anything new about the show’s genesis and the frat house environment of those early days, so brilliantly reimagined by Jason Reitman in the film Saturday Night. I owe Lorne a lot because not only did he know me when I was six years old but he auditioned my sister for the original Not Ready For Prime Time Players and was instrumental in the growth of my business as he gave me DVD rights to put out SNL and Broadway Video shows and specials. Lots of good stories there. But for those of you who are fascinated by successful managers this might be a good read. Michaels, if nothing else, not only had the unique ability to shepherd some very challenging talents through 30 Rock but played the executive suite at NBC with a style and grace that should be taught in business schools. And last, Lorne Michaels is the most successful Canadian in the history of showbusiness now and forever more. For that fact alone, you should read it.