"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Archer, "The Figgis Agency"

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.



Two seasons ago, Archer's season-long experiment as "Archer Vice" was a divisive one for fans of the animated spy spoof. The viewers who disliked the kinds of storytelling that resulted from Archer creator Adam Reed's decision to change the characters' jobs from spies to drug dealers found the fifth season to be aimless, while I enjoyed Reed's willingness to experiment that season and found the subsequent season, in which the perpetually immature Archer, new mom Lana, Malory and Ray returned to spying and worked as independent contractors for the CIA, to be the more aimless season.

But as Archer has gotten older, the show's animators have developed a knack for crafting satisfying action sequences that have gotten more impressive in scale and scope with each year. That's mostly why my favorite episode from Archer's sixth season is "The Kanes." Lana's visit to her parents' house in Berkeley presented a great balance of large-scale action (the episode's homage to the classic Bullitt car chase was second to the avalanche in "The Archer Sanction" as an impressive sixth-season set piece) and the smaller-scale kind of character-based comedy that's pulled off well by bottle episodes like "Vision Quest."

A lot of the rest of Archer's sixth season suffered from a lack of stakes. Sure, the addition of a baby to the relationship between Archer and Lana brought a bit of welcome depth to the character of Archer, but Reed seemed to be sleepwalking through the same kinds of espionage storylines he appeared to be getting bored with shortly before the "Archer Vice" revamp. Archer's new season seeks to rectify the lack of stakes by changing the show's backdrop again to Hollywood and putting the disgraced (and after the disastrous events in "Drastic Voyage," unemployed) spies to work as private investigators. The P.I. storylines will hopefully restore some stakes to the show and allow for the animators to continue to outdo themselves in the action department, and if "The Figgis Agency," Archer's seventh-season premiere, is any indication, Archer's new detective agency may just turn out to be a better creative shot in the arm for the show than the cocaine-slinging thing.

Technically, it's Cyril's detective agency, and Archer, Lana and Ray are his unlicensed gumshoes, applying their spying skills to investigative work. So far, Archer isn't exactly Michael Westen yet. In "The Figgis Agency," he gets badly bitten by a couple of attack dogs in a scene that made me wince and is straight out of The Boys from Brazil, the same movie that inspired Krieger's possible origins as a Hitler clone. He also falls down the same canyon twice and fails to notice that Cyril's client (Ona Grauer, a.k.a. Bionic Katya), a movie star who hired the titular agency to retrieve a disk that's in the hands of powerful L.A. sleazebag Alan Shapiro (Patton Oswalt, who seems to be channeling both the villainous Henry Gibson and Mark Rydell characters from The Long Goodbye), is actually an imposter. It's like if all the spy tips that pulled Michael out of countless jams as a P.I. during Burn Notice went wrong.

The Ref, whose score album will be looped on AFOS on Christmas, is the best holiday flick Netflix doesn't carry right now

What the shit, Netflix?

Even on DVD, director Ted Demme's 1994 Christmastime comedy The Ref--which, even though it was made for only $11 million, flopped at the box office but became a cult favorite afterward--still can't catch a break. While attempting two weeks ago to add The Ref to my Netflix queue so that I could rewatch it in time for the holidays, I received the following message from Netflix: "Available 1/1/2015."

Excuse me? January? After the time of the year when The Ref takes place? This isn't the first time the words "The Ref" and "lousy timing" were in the same sentence. One of the reasons why it flopped was because Touchstone Pictures dumped it in theaters in March instead of releasing it during the holiday season. The studio executive who made that scheduling decision probably also believes that Fox should go back to unveiling The Simpsons' annual "Treehouse of Horror" episode after Halloween or that presents should be opened after Christmas.

The Ref, whose out-of-print score music by David A. Stewart will be looped on AFOS all Christmas Day long (this Thursday), doesn't deserve this kind of treatment. Demme's 20-year-old movie is one of the best anti-Christmas movies ever made, although "anti-Christmas" wouldn't be a completely accurate description of the movie's attitude towards Christmas because not even its ending is totally immune to the holiday spirit. The Ref's attitude is more like "anti-Christmastime sentimentality" and "anti-fake and callous people during Christmas."

The movie's title refers to Denis Leary, who stars as Gus, a hapless burglar who's forced to play both referee and marriage counselor to the two constantly bickering hostages he's taken while hiding in the Connecticut suburbs from cops on Christmas Eve. Those hostile hostages (outside America, The Ref is called Hostile Hostages, which makes it sound like a Woody Woodpecker cartoon) are the yuppie couple of Lloyd Chasseur (Kevin Spacey), an unhappy antique store manager, and his adulterous and equally unhappy wife Caroline (Judy Davis).

As the night wears on, Gus finds himself becoming Lloyd and Caroline's hostage, and the Chasseurs' arguments about their failing marriage, the class conflict between Gus and the suburbanites and the battle of wills over who has the upper hand in the hostage situation aren't the only battles of wills during the film. There's also the game of cops and robbers between the largely incompetent local police force and Gus; the mental duel between the Chasseurs' juvenile delinquent son Jesse (Robert J. Steinmiller Jr.), who's home from military school, and Siskel (J.K. Simmons), the military instructor he's blackmailing; and the battle of wills between Lloyd's visiting mother, the heartless Rose Chasseur (Glynis Johns), and practically everyone else, including her own son. The character of Rose brings to mind the late Sir Peter Ustinov's frequent description of his famously curmudgeonly Spartacus co-star Charles Laughton: "Somebody who was hanging around waiting to be offended."

Countless Christmas movies have posited that Christmas can be the most stressful of holidays, whether it's Home Alone or It's a Wonderful Life, but Demme's movie is one of the few that emphasizes and captures quite well something many adult viewers can relate to: the discomfort and nasty invective experienced by family members who hate each other and are forced to be in the same room together on Christmas. Screenwriter Richard LaGravenese, who co-wrote The Ref with his sister-in-law Marie Weiss, drew these scenes of discord from their own experiences at holiday family dinners ("Both Marie and I are Italian Catholics who married into Jewish families, so we do have those big holiday dinners. Families always have these unspoken dramas," said LaGravenese in 1994). They wanted to explore what would happen if the unspoken tensions during those occasions stopped remaining silent and everyone started being honest. Humor mined from uncomfortable and boozy holiday family gatherings is why SNL's fake Dysfunctional Family Christmas record album commercial ("Leave me alone, please go away/I'm doing fine, just get away") remains one of the show's most beloved sketches from the early '90s, and it's also why The Ref built up a cult following after its release.

The cult following is also due to the invective being really nasty (even more so than in other non-traditional Christmas movies that aren't Bad Santa) and delivered beautifully by everyone in the cast, including Leary, Davis and Spacey, who, in 1994, was already a respected actor whom theater or TV critics would frequently write hosannas and sonnets for, but he wasn't yet a movie star. Although the late Demme said in a 1994 New York Times News Service interview that he didn't cast huge stars because he wanted "an everyman, underground, edgier feel to the characters," The Ref was built and marketed as a star vehicle for Leary, whose rants in a series of Demme-directed MTV interstitials had just brought him notoriety and whose film work at the time consisted of showy supporting roles in action flicks like Demolition Man and Judgment Night. But because The Ref didn't become the breakout success that would have taken the Worcester, Massachusetts-bred stand-up's film career to another level, instead it's better remembered as the place where Simmons--now a likely Oscar contender for his role in Whiplash--had his first feature film role. (His bit part as Jesse's stripper-loving military instructor was named after Gene Siskel by LaGravenese as a form of revenge after Siskel trashed his screenplay for The Fisher King.)

The Ref is also the place where I first took notice of Christine Baranski, who's excellent as the film's second most hateable woman, Lloyd's bossy sister-in-law, and is one of many theater-bred actors in the cast who make The Ref gel so well, as if it were a snappy stage farce with twice more F-bombs than Avenue Q. There are so many pointless stage versions of movies, whether it's Legally Blonde: The Musical or Shrek: The Musical. Because of LaGravenese and Weiss' hilarious script and the incisive dialogue, The Ref is far more deserving of the stage treatment than those movies. It's the kind of movie that, with the right stage director and the sharpest actors, would kill as a stage play (but not as a musical because that musical would be awful). Imagine the reactions Lloyd would receive from the theater audience when he finally tells off Rose ("You know what I'm gonna get you next Christmas? A big wooden cross. So every time you feel unappreciated for all your sacrifices, you can climb on up and nail yourself to it."). People would be howling just like the studio audience did when the late Greg Giraldo verbally handed Leary his ass on Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn.

The enjoyment viewers of The Ref get from scenes like Lloyd's verbal comeback to his evil mother is why Netflix's inability to carry the movie at the most appropriate time of the year--which also denies people who aren't familiar with the movie and are in the mood for a largely non-mushy holiday comedy the chance to discover it--is so maddening. The Ref is oddly comforting for people who find the holiday season to be far from comforting.

David A. Stewart's score from The Ref will be looped in the "Yell Log," all Christmas Day long (Thursday, December 25) on AFOS.

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (07/24/2012): Motorcity, Gravity Falls, Ultimate Spider-Man, The Avengers and Regular Show

A typically serene moment in J. Jonah Jameson's office

Each Tuesday in "5-Piece Cartoon Dinner," I dine on five of the week's most noteworthy animated cable shows that are found outside my Adult Swim comfort zone. The episodes are reviewed in the order of when they first aired.

According to an angry asian man post last week, at the recent 2012 San Diego Comic-Con, the Hasbro-owned Hub family channel, the home of the surprise hit My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, passed out fortune cookies with racist "Ching chong a-ling long" messages inside (a Hub network exec later publicly apologized for the racist cookies). Isn't the hero of The Hub's Kaijudo: Rise of the Duel Masters, a cartoon I've sometimes covered in this column, a half-Asian kid who has to put up with racist bullying?

Way to be as tolerant as one of your own original shows, Hub. If the channel formerly known as Discovery Kids disappeared tomorrow from my DirecTV channel roster like all the Viacom channels temporarily did during the carriage dispute between Viacom and DirecTV last week, I wouldn't bat an eye, even though legendary voice actor and current Motorcity big bad Mark Hamill is now one of the station announcers. The Hub is now that inessential to me.

Open your fortune cookie, Hub. The message inside says, "In two years, you'll end up being a 24-hour infomercial channel and then totally falter." In bed.

***

Jen's sleeves. That's what first caught my eye during Downtown when the animated sitcom aired too briefly on MTV in 1999.

Jen from Downtown

The baggy sweater-wearing Asian American tomboy's overlong sleeves also happened to be the first bit of character business that made me take notice of the distinctive animation style of the studio I later learned was called Titmouse, when studio co-founder Shannon Prynoski wrote on my guestbook (aw, guestbooks--remember those?) in 2004 to tell me she's a fan of my radio station A Fistful of Soundtracks. I e-mailed her back to say I enjoyed Downtown, as well as the hallucination sequence her studio animated for Beavis and Butt-head Do America, and she said she tuned into AFOS late at night while working on a then-upcoming Cartoon Network show called Megas XLR.

After first learning about Megas from her, I became a fan of Titmouse's work and have followed most of the studio's output since Megas, from the occasional Metalocalypse rerun to Freaknik: The Musical and now, the animated version of Black Dynamite and Motorcity. I haven't watched an entire Downtown episode in 13 years (I know that the show can be YouTubed, and its creator, Shannon's husband Chris, found a clever way to make the entire series available to its fans, but I keep putting off re-watching it), and I've forgotten all the dialogue from Downtown since then, but I've never forgotten Jen's sleeves because that's the inventiveness of Titmouse in a nutshell.

Subtle character animation has always been Titmouse's forte, and Motorcity's "Off the Rack" episode is filled with plenty of it, which is why I'm kind of frustrated that Disney XD delayed the episode until last Thursday night. If "Off the Rack" feels like an episode from earlier in Motorcity's run, that's because it's the sixth one produced by Titmouse (we're 11 episodes into Motorcity's 20-episode season), and Disney XD has been airing Motorcity episodes out of order.

Shuffling the episode order is a network business decision I don't always understand. The practice, which I first noticed back when Fox unveiled Batman: The Animated Series' first few episodes in 1992 (the first episode that ever aired, a Catwoman story, was actually the 13th one produced), makes less and less sense in an age when time-shifted viewing is making both the Nielsen ratings system and ratings-driven business decisions increasingly irrelevant. NBC did it with Homicide: Life on the Street in its first season because they didn't think the bottle episode "Night of the Dead Living," one of the earliest episodes that was filmed, would hook viewers like the season's slightly more higher-stakes episodes (like the "Gone for Goode" pilot or "Three Men and Adena") would, so they banished it to later in the season.

Delaying "Night of the Dead Living" was an odd move because I ended up finding that bottle episode (an abandoned baby at the precinct brings out sides of the cop characters we'd never seen before) to be more fascinating and rewatchable than most of the first season's other higher-stakes episodes. This wasn't the last time NBC would eff around with Homicide's episode order. Two seasons later, a similar airdate shuffle resulted in the death of a major character (Jon Polito's conspiracy-theory-obsessed Steve Crosetti) being inadvertently spoiled a few weeks before NBC aired the episode that revealed his demise.

In a less older example, Fox shuffled Firefly's intended order because they wanted to make the Joss Whedon show more appealing to the kinds of viewers they wanted to attract. The network wasn't satisfied with the Firefly pilot as a premiere episode (Fox felt the pilot had too much woe-is-me and not enough derring-do, according to the A.V. Club), so they asked Whedon to come up with a more action-packed premiere. The episode switch didn't pay off. Fox cancelled Firefly a few weeks later due to low ratings, and the show ended up becoming more popular on DVD.

Motorcity isn't serialized like Homicide was, so when Disney XD shuffles episodes around, it's not as disastrous as the Crosetti mishap, but it's still noticeable, like in "Blond Thunder" and "Off the Rack," which throws an intriguing monkey wrench into Julie Kane's efforts to hide her parentage from the Burners while also hiding her allegiance to her freedom fighter friends from her evil businessman father Abraham Kane. Julie's jeopardized double life is the kind of dramatic predicament that usually pops up early on in an action show's run to basically say to the viewers, "And these are the stakes! Stake it up! Stake it up! Stake it up!" (her parentage was revealed in the first episode, and as I said before, "Off the Rack" was sixth in Titmouse's production order). So it's bizarre and off-putting to see Disney XD delay that kind of story (which was written by George Krstic, who, as we saw in "Power Trip" and "Going Dutch," is great at raising the show's stakes) to a point in the season that's later than when Titmouse intended.

The monkey wrench into Julie's balancing act is the new Safe-T-Suit that Kane has implemented on each of his KaneCo employees, including Julie, who works as an intern for her father and is using her access to spy on his plans. The Safe-T-Suit is the latest advancement in protective wear ("Stability magnets, collar side airbags, safety form parachute pants!"). With just a push of a button on a special ring that's similar to that ring the Flash carries around his red costume in, the suit self-inflates from out of the ring and completely covers the wearer, and then it can easily fold itself back into the ring when the wearer wants to deactivate it.

(Photo source: Hair Nets and Dog Food)

But because this is Abraham Kane we're talking about here, he's secretly designed the suit so that he can hack into any suit and manipulate via Minority Report-style interfaces the movements of whichever employee is wearing a suit ring, mainly to prevent disgruntled employees from defecting Detroit Deluxe. Kane's external control is like bloodbending on The Legend of Korra, but without the creepy bone-grinding sound FX and the anguished faces in which the victims look like they're on the toilet, taking the world's most painful deuce. When his scanners alert him that a suit has been deployed outside of Detroit Deluxe and inside Motorcity, Kane deduces from the suit's hidden camera footage that a Burner has stolen it, and he activates the external control.

The tyrannical tycoon forcibly summons the Burner back to KaneCo Tower for punishment without realizing that the Burner inside the suit is his own daughter (the camera is--rather conveniently--unable to adjust its own lens so that Kane can see her face). Julie feels guilty over missing out on a recent Burners battle against her evil dad's Sector Enforcer Drones because of the duties that her cover at KaneCo entails. She bristles when Texas questions her loyalty to the Burners and calls her "Miss Deluxe" again like he did in "Ride the Lightning." So she attempts to make up for her absence by heading off to attack the Enforcer Drone factory on her own with the help of her suit's abilities, right when her dad unknowingly bloodbends her.

(Photo source: Hair Nets and Dog Food)

The technobabble-heavy resolution to the suit crisis is a bit convoluted. After Chuck helps Texas rescue from external control mode Julie's best friend Claire (the animators somehow work into the mayhem a hilarious, how-did-this-make-it-onto-Disney-XD? shot of Chuck accidentally sitting on Texas' face), Chuck eagerly hugs the girl he's had a crush on, and the hug's disabling of the suit makes him realize the suit can be shut down if its "protection threshold" is overloaded. Wouldn't it be easier to just slip the rings off the workers' fingers and shut down the suits that way? However, the visuals before and after the resolution are some of the most amazing shots this series has ever done. Mike Chilton may despise the sterile city he used to work in, but Detroit Deluxe looks mighty spiffy during the moment when Kane hijacks hundreds of his employees' suits all at once and activates "dive mode" to unleash a swarm of these frightened-looking human missiles on Mike's car Mutt. And then just when I thought the "dive mode" shot of the red flood of KaneCo workers swarming on Mutt was the episode's visual highlight, "Off the Rack" immediately tops it with shots of a Katamari Damacy-style "human ball" that Kane forms out of the workers' bodies to squash the Burners' rides.

(Photo source: Hair Nets and Dog Food)

Another visual highlight in "Off the Rack" is the aforementioned subtle character animation, especially for Julie (and Claire too, when she expresses her enthusiasm over receiving the suit). Because this is her spotlight episode, Julie does a lot of running around and spying here (she gets to reenact the "Tom Cruise dangles from a wire" heist scene from the first Mission: Impossible movie). I don't know if it's because it's cable and not Saturday morning network TV--so cartoon studios aren't forced to work under production schedules that were stricter back when ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC were in charge of cartoons, and the animation work back then was really cookie-cutter as a result--but this series, particularly during "Off the Rack," is loaded with stunning feature film-quality animation, which was such a rarity to see on the small screen back when I was a Batman: The Animated Series-watching teen.

(Photo source: Hair Nets and Dog Food)

The Ovation channel has lately been repeating Frank and Ollie, director Theodore Thomas' 1995 documentary about the legendary Disney studio partnership between his father Frank Thomas and his fellow animator Ollie Johnston, and though I'm not a Disney fan, the doc has made me better appreciate the subtle character animation that the duo was known for. Thomas and Johnston's animation style lives on in amusing tics that the Titmouse animators have given to the Motorcity characters, like the self-confident and headstrong Julie's frequent tic of resting her hand on her hip, even when she's in multiple-hologram form when she uses her trusty holographic gadget to confuse adversaries.

"I really dug animating Julie doing spy stuff... and it's made all the sweeter when the action ramps up later ([animator] Ben Li is amazing)," posted Titmouse animator Parker Simmons on Tumblr about "Off the Rack." He added, "Julie is definitely one of my favorite characters to animate when she's in confident sweetheart mode, not schoolmarm mode."

And that's another thing I enjoyed about "Off the Rack." In several episodes, Julie, whose secret double life I've been waiting to get more of a glimpse of ever since the premiere, has done nothing more than act as a schoolmarm to Mike or Texas when she's not engaged in battle or tossing her boomerang at Kanebots, so it's great to see her intensely driven character fleshed out a bit more. We've never seen Julie look frightened before. Kanebots don't scare her. What scares her more is losing control over her double life.

She's also not the screamy type--that would be Chuck--so it's surprising to see her scream for the first time in the series, when her dad hijacks her suit to make her steal Mutt from Mike and drive away to KaneCo Tower at a speed so insanely high it would make David Letterman piss his pants. But Julie quickly learns to keep her cool, and she regains her smile when Mike busts into his own car to help her out and her dad makes her repeatedly punch Mike in the shoulder. Both Julie's nicely drawn expressions while she's trapped inside the suit and the suit design itself made me think of Jen's overlong sleeves.

(Photo source: Hair Nets and Dog Food)

It all amazingly ties back to Jen's sleeves.