"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: The Venture Bros., "Rapacity in Blue"

Occasionally on Friday, I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. It's the "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week. Stream "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," my one-hour mix of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, right now!



Remember Melanie Hutsell? She's the SNL featured player-turned-regular who never really gelled on the show back in the '90s and whose sole highlight was a killer Jan Brady impression she brought over from her time as a cast member of The Real Live Brady Bunch, the '90s stage show that restaged Brady Bunch scripts word-for-word. Like with so many other sketch comics who failed to blow up on SNL, Studio 8H just wasn't the right venue for Hutsell. And then like another short-lived female SNL featured player, Casual star Michaela Watkins, Hutsell resurfaced on the Amazon show Transparent, where she stole one scene (while Watkins has managed to steal two whole Transparent episodes).

It's one of the most satisfying scenes during the largely downbeat second season of Transparent (created and showrun, by the way, by Jill Soloway, who happens to be another Real Live Brady Bunch alum), and the scene made me think, "Wow, this is the same lady whose dorky dance moves forever ruined Van Morrison's 'Moondance' in that unfunny SNL 'Moondance' sketch? She's funnier here." On Transparent, Hutsell plays a newly outed lesbian mom at the school attended by the kids of self-absorbed, perpetually unhappy Sarah Pfefferman (Amy Landecker). Hutsell's perceptive character bluntly tells Sarah the words that she, a Pfefferman as selfish as the other Pfeffermans, needed to hear this whole time: "Can I just, like, say something to you and just try to help you out a little bit maybe? Nobody cares about what you do. I mean, I know you think they care, but they don't. You know, people walking around at our school, they're mostly thinking about carpools and play dates and homework..."

The Venture Bros. has a few things in common with Transparent, like the gender fluidity of some of the Ventureverse characters and the way you sometimes root for Dean to get as far away from Dr. Venture as possible (which Brock temporarily did when he quit the OSI and moved out of the Venture Compound) in order to be his own man and live a normal life. It's similar to how you root for Rabbi Raquel (Kathryn Hahn) and Syd (Carrie Brownstein) to get as far away as possible from Josh (Jay Duplass), Sarah's younger brother, and Ali (Gaby Hoffmann), Sarah and Josh's little sister, respectively, because Rabbi Raquel and Syd are such decent, normal people who don't need to be made miserable by their respective lover's insufferable bullshit.

The animated show is also as sharp an exploration of narcissism as Transparent. A minor character in the Doc Hammer-scripted "Rapacity in Blue" experiences with the Monarch a moment just like the Hutsell/Landecker scene from Transparent. Manolo (Hal Lublin) is a Latino handyman who's involved with renovating the Monarch's childhood house. Though his dialogue has largely been unremarkable, "Your wife no home"-type shit, we get a hint that Manolo has a normal, well-adjusted (and apparently, '90s sitcom-watching) life outside the craziness of the Monarch's home when--after having to endure the Monarch's endless chattering about his indecision over suiting up as his deceased socialite dad's recently unearthed alter ego of the Blue Morpho--he basically tells the Monarch he's not the center of the universe in a kind-of-polite-but-not-really way that's unmistakably Hammer.

http://gothdean.tumblr.com/post/139800063907

"I don't really care about this" are words that immediately won me over onto Manolo's side, just like how "Nobody cares about what you do" made me take notice of Jan Brady again.

Shows I Miss (Already): Better Off Ted

I know Better Off Ted's not officially cancelled yet, but the fact that ABC burnt off an episode on New Year's Day and is burning off two more eps on the same night--this Tuesday night, to be exact--indicates the hilarious but little-watched series is being taken out back and shot.

Ted, which is narrated by the title character (Jay Harrington), who's like a kinder, gentler, health-conscious Don Draper, is about the research and development department Ted runs at the morally dubious conglomerate Veridian Dynamics. His neurotic scientist underlings Phil (Jonathan Slavin) and Lem (Malcolm Barrett) toil over inventions like vegetables full of anti-depressants, "weaponized pumpkins," "Hushaboom technology" ("War just keeps getting better") and a motion-detection system that throws Ted and his team into panic mode when they discover that its sensors are unable to recognize black people (an eerie foretelling of HP's racist face-tracking software!).

It took me a while to warm up to showrunner Victor Fresco's latest corporate satire--his signature creation is another corporate satire, Andy Richter Controls the Universe, which also co-starred Slavin--but now I consider Ted one of the most consistently funny single-camera sitcoms currently on prime-time. I can always count on Ted to contain five or six strange and absurdist lines that crack me up (the sexual harassment-themed ep that ABC burnt off on New Year's, "The Great Repression," rattled off way more than five or six and was endlessly quotable, with great lines like a reference to a lengthy hug as a "Midwestern handshake"). Community, Parks and Recreation, The Office, 30 Rock, The Venture Bros., How I Met Your Mother and even Modern Family--which I like despite its occasionally sappy concluding voiceovers--have the same batting average as Ted's.

I've never seen former Arrested Development ditz Portia de Rossi play an ice queen before. (Did she play one on Ally McBeal? I wouldn't know. I'm a guy. I wasn't into Ally McBeal.) She pulls off the ice-queen act incredibly well as Ted's boss Veronica, whose callousness towards lesser human beings like her little sister never fails to amuse ("When my little sister came along, I was very jealous. That feeling never went away, even when she was older and I put testosterone in her orange juice, so she became hairy and unlovable and got kicked off the gymnastics team for doping"). Mrs. DeGeneres is the scene-stealing MVP on this show, much like Alec Baldwin on 30 Rock and William Shatner on Boston Legal, although on some weeks, she's been edged out by Andrea Anders as Linda the eccentric product tester.

When Ted premiered last spring, I felt at first like Fresco was just rehashing material from Andy Richter. But then I got onboard when I realized that "Whoa, Veridian's a pretty evil corporation, and the show's not going to sugarcoat Veridian's evilness or make this workplace one big happy surrogate family" and that the main female love interest, who's often boringly written on these sitcoms, is kind of nutso--a nice change of pace from "idealized, humorless girl-next-door" or "shrill, stick-in-the-mud female foil." Anders is a riot as Linda, a misfit and audience surrogate who hates the corporate world and continually finds ways to rebel against it, whether it's secretly writing a children's book that she hopes will be her ticket out of Veridian or responding to the craziness of Veridian by being even crazier than the company itself. Linda is the source of many of the show's most absurdist lines, like her random nickname for Ted at the beginning of the aforementioned kids' book ep ("Bloopity-bloo"). She's like a Midwestern working class version of the original Manic Pixie Dream Girl, Katharine Hepburn in Bringing Up Baby, except more attractive (peep the Xena outfit) and not as scatterbrained. This enjoyably written character and the loony, "Hushaboom technology"-worshiping universe that surrounds her and the level-headed Ted are some of the many reasons why I already miss Better Off Ted. Thanks a lot, According to Jim-loving Nielsen family dipshits.

Black Tie Affair: Jimmy J. Aquino's Lacuna Matata, Part 3

In this installment of "Lacuna Matata," I try my damnedest to recall another obscure TV gem that doesn't deserve to be so obscure. I promise this one's way more obscure than Mighty Mouse: The New Adventures, which some people don't think was obscure enough to be the focus of a "Lacuna Matata" installment.

Whatever the hell happened to Jay Tarses, veteran comedy writer and creator of too-brash-for-prime-time, sophisticated and smart-ass TV (Buffalo Bill, The "Slap" Maxwell Story)?

While Googling desperately for anything I could find on my favorite Tarses creation, the short-lived Black Tie Affair, my search took me to a post in which the blogger writes at length about his--as well as my--favorite performance in the ultimate '80s teenage underdog flick, Teen Wolf: Tarses as the basketball coach.

I'll let "intensities" have the floor:

Unlike the great majority of Teen Wolf characters, Coach Finstock is something of a rarity in 80s teen movies--the adult authority figure who seeks neither to inspire or oppress the youth under his command. He is not motivated by a desire to teach, nor is he looking to project the failures of his own adolescence unto the kids he's teaching. In fact, Coach Finstock doesn't seem motivated by much of anything--he even seems fairly uninterested in whether the team wins or not, which as a Teen Movie coach, should really be his only concern...

The Coach offers Scott these words of wisdom, which I would consider to arguably be the greatest quote in all of film history:

"Listen, Scott, there are three rules that I live by: never get less than twelve hours sleep; never play cards with a guy who has the same first name as a city; and never get involved with a woman with a tattoo of a dagger on her body. Now you stick to that, and everything else is cream cheese."

Plopped in the middle of this clichéd, Jeph Loeb-scripted high school flick is a performance from a sharper-witted, less hackneyed movie. Methinks Tarses, not Loeb, wrote most of his own character's dialogue because the "three rules" speech sounds like it's straight out of Black Tie Affair.

If you love Kiss Kiss Bang Bang and the Harry Lockhart, Gay Perry and Harmony Faith Lane characters like I do, you'd also enjoy Black Tie Affair, a private eye genre parody/homage with a similarly reluctant and in-over-his-head hero/narrator, Dave Brodsky (a pre-West Wing Bradley Whitford). He spies on cheating spouses like Cody Man fashion catalog tycoon Christopher Cody (John Calvin), the husband and business partner of his client Margo Cody (Kate Capshaw), not because he enjoys detective work, but because this analog man in a digital world wants to be able to continue running his musty, two-story Bay Area used LP store:

"Speaking of crime terminology, what the hell do they mean by forensics? And what exactly is a bunco squad? Police talk, I hate it."

"I do insurance fraud, Polaroids and 33 1/3 LPs. Two things I don't do? Compact discs and murder."

Brodsky's investigation of Chris is complicated by both his feelings for his attractive client and the body of a murdered woman Chris discovered at his hotel:

"When she called, I thought it was just a normal job--dress up in funny clothes, sneak into a strange room, snap pictures of a couple of naked people and hope the check clears. Now it looks like murder: the World Series of the detective game. Which means I've got to get off this case prontissimo."

(Thanks, Thrilling Detective and Gray Lady archives, for keeping alive three of the only few quotes I could find from Black Tie Affair. Entertainment Weekly's Lisa Schwarzbaum, who gave the show a C- in 1993, was out of her mind. I'll take Tarses' "manufactured drolleries" any day over the overwritten sentences that often make Schwarzbaum's reviews a chore to read.)

Adding to the other complications in Brodsky's case is his attraction to Chris' mistress, catalog supermodel Eve Saskatchewan (she and Margo were named after the rival actresses in All About Eve). Black Tie Affair gave me my first glimpse of recent Law & Order perp and '90s indie movie queen Alison Elliott (The Underneath, The Wings of the Dove), whose miniskirted appearances as Eve are another favorite memory of mine from a show that was doomed from the start.

Black Tie Affair was originally titled Smoldering Lust, but a few weeks before the NBC show's long-delayed premiere, the Peacock turned chicken and changed Tarses' original title to a less sexually charged one that they felt wouldn't offend already-pissed-off affiliates and advertisers. According to the New York Times' piece on Tarses, the network didn't even bother to tell him his show was renamed. Tarses learned about the title change from a reporter. The new title resulted in the last-minute removal of vocals from composer Patrick Williams' lite-jazz opening theme because the lyrics referred to the old title, which would have made more sense with the horny opening credits freeze-frames (a yuppie couple disrobes and makes out under the sheets) rather than Black Tie Affair.

The new title had very little to do with the show's neo-noir tone and was another in a long list of dumb titles that fail to lure us or tell us what to expect from the show or film. (Latest dumb title from a great show? Better Off Ted. Why did the person who came up with that title--I doubt it was creator/showrunner Victor Fresco--feel the need to rip off the title of John Cusack's teen suicide flick? What does Better Off Ted have to do with the show's backdrop, the research and development division of a conglomerate? And why did they have the title refer to Ted the straight man and narrator, who, despite being well-played by Jay Harrington, is the least interesting character in the ensemble? It's like if instead of Taxi, James L. Brooks called his ensemble show Alex's Garage. Why couldn't they have called it R&D? What is the deal with Grape Nuts? They're neither grapes nor nuts!)

NBC had little faith in a half-hour, laugh track-less show that wasn't quite a sitcom and wasn't quite a drama either (Tarses' Coach Finstock-style response to the Times about how to categorize Black Tie Affair was "I don't know how to describe it"), so the network burned off its episodes in a summertime Saturday night deathtrap time slot.

Besides Whitford's self-loathing yet likable outsider hero--he was like a Bay Area version of Jim Rockford and his iconoclasm reflected Tarses' outsider nature--and the clever and novel idea of having Brodsky run his agency from a used record store instead of a standard P.I. office, I also dug how Black Tie Affair wasn't an overt spoof in the mold of the Naked Gun movies and Carl Reiner's Fatal Instinct, though there were jabs at "police talk":

Mr. Tarses says he has more in mind than mere lampooning. "Sometimes it gets pretty heavy, down the road," he said, not wanting to reveal too much about pending episodes. "There are some pretty dramatic confrontations." The four main characters, he acknowledged, are not as ingratiating as Molly [Dodd] was. "I think these people all have a bit of an unsavory air to them, and you have to grow to like them," he said.

Then came the fly-covered cherry on the top of NBC's shit sundae: after four Saturday night airings, Tarses didn't get to show those dramatic confrontations he promised because the network gave up on Black Tie Affair and chose not to air the other eight episodes that were already completed, which left the show's mysteries unresolved.

Who was the mystery woman Chris found dead in bed in the first episode and who killed her? Who will Brodsky choose to bed? Margo? Eve? Or maybe even Cookie, his underappreciated and much less neurotic assistant (played by hot Korean American model-turned-actress Maggie Han, star of another short-lived gumshoe show, Murphy's Law)?

And going back to the mystery at the top of the post, whatever the hell happened to Tarses?

After the cancellations of Black Tie Affair and Public Morals, an even more controversial 1996 collabo with Steven Bochco that only aired once, Tarses the outsider vanished from the production side of TV. Perhaps he was fed up with the creative differences he kept having with network execs since the '80s. Tarses fled to BBC Radio, where he created and starred in Revolting People (2000-06), a sitcom set in Colonial-era Baltimore.

Since his disappearance, network/basic cable TV (or rather, the part of it that doesn't involve assembly-line procedural franchises and reality shows) has kept up with Tarses' brand of smart, cinematic and laugh track-less comedy, which has been carried on by his grown-up children, Matt, a former Scrubs writer/producer whose most recent credit was Worst Week, and Jamie, a network exec-turned-producer of My Boys, where their father has made a couple of guest appearances. Even so, scripted TV still needs the elder Tarses. I wonder if he has another gem like Black Tie Affair left in him. Basic cable, a place where the standards are looser than the networks' and the creative freedom Tarses used to fight for is totally encouraged, would be the perfect playground for him.

Now that the mystery of Tarses' post-Public Morals whereabouts has been solved, what about the mysteries in Black Tie Affair? A DVD release of the complete, mostly unaired series is long overdue (I refuse to watch torrents of the series). I still want to know who killed the dead chick in the hotel room.