A beautiful grind: Some of the best jokes on The Grinder come from composer Jeff Cardoni and music editor Ryan Castle

Every year, there's a bunch of "funniest shows you're not watching," and Fox's The Grinder (no relation to the gay dating app Grindr), which hasn't exactly been pulling in Empire season 1-type numbers but has been devastatingly hilarious, definitely falls under that category this season. Rob Lowe and the showrunning duo of Jarrad Paul, who's best remembered for his role as the struggling screenwriter of the wonderfully titled Beverly Hills Gun Club on the 1999 Fox cult favorite Action, and Andrew Mogel have somehow come up with a character who's even funnier and stranger than Chris Traeger, Lowe's fitness-obsessed, touchy-feely character from the beloved and similarly underwatched Parks and Recreation (although this new show's shtick of Lowe giving other men intense, head-rubbing "man hugs"--"Everyone should get hugs from Rob. It's like a massage," said Fred Savage about his Grinder co-star in New York magazine--initially felt like a rehash of Chris kissing a typically flustered Ron Swanson on the lips on Ron's birthday or Chris weeping in Ben Wyatt's arms).

On The Grinder, the former Brat Packer stars as Dean Sanderson Jr., a pampered Hollywood actor who grew tired of the network TV, uh, grind. After quitting his role as Mitchard "The Grinder" Grinder, a super-brilliant maverick lawyer, on The Grinder, a long-running Fox legal drama that's as popular overseas as Baywatch was in countries where nobody speaks English but they all speak in worshipful tones about C.J. Parker as if she were a bottle of Coca-Cola, Dean Jr. has returned to his hometown of Boise, Idaho to check in on his younger brother Stewart (Savage) and their close-to-retirement father Dean Sr., who are both actual lawyers (as Dean Sr., William Devane doesn't really get to do much, but Devane does enough with his character to make us realize where Dean Jr. inherited all of his weirdness and sunny optimism, and like everyone else in the Grinder cast, Devane's able to do a lot with just one or two lines).

But Dean's stopover in Boise turns into a permanent stay when he realizes he wants a more normal life like Stewart's--Stew is happily married to Debbie (Mary Elizabeth Ellis), and they have two kids, Lizzie (Hana Hayes) and Ethan (Connor Kalopsis)--and he wants to be the Grinder in real life, and his delusions of taking the most absurd TV tropes from his old show and bringing them into the much more mundane reality of practicing law continually irritate Stew. Unlike Dean, who believes he doesn't need to pass the bar to practice law, Stew went through years of law school and hard work to get to where he's at today at Dad's law firm (Stew has also gotten the chance to blossom far away from his celebrity brother's shadow, so he resents having to go back to being the Sanderson brother who's not the center of attention in Boise).

Dean's favorite response to any person's admission that a goal or strategy is impossible is "But what if it wasn't?," a line his character used to frequently say on the old show. As Todd VanDerWerff notes over at Vox, "Dean doesn't know how our 'real' reality works; nearly everyone he encounters is so excited to get a taste of Dean's version that they go along with whatever he says should happen." However, there are two lone holdouts in Boise who object to whatever he says, and they are Stew and Claire (Natalie Morales, another Parks and Rec alum), the Sanderson & Yao firm's attractive new hire.

Claire is the only character other than Stew who has always found the plot twists on Dean's old show to be ridiculous. Dean is under the impression that Claire's dislike of both his vanity and his cluelessness about legal procedure in the real world is actually that old network TV cliché of masked sexual tension and that she's his love interest on this new show called real life, just like all the equally hot female second-chair characters he got to make out with when he played Mitch (Emmanuelle Chriqui and Arielle Kebbel are among the sultry "Grinder girls," and it's remarkable how they're able to not corpse whenever Lowe overdramatically slides office supplies off his desk before each of his love scenes with them for the show-within-the-show). But Claire is genuinely not interested in Dean (she prefers Dean's nemesis Timothy Olyphant, who nicely plays a very Zen--as well as douchey and childish--version of himself), and feminist viewers have interestingly found Dean's pursuit of Claire to be The Grinder's weakest element and way too reminiscent of the "Boyle wants to date Diaz and won't take no for an answer" storyline that Brooklyn Nine-Nine thankfully abandoned early on in its run.

Meanwhile, Debbie stands by her man Stew, but we get a slight inkling from the body language of Ellis' rather underwritten character (I'm enjoying how Ellis handles Deb's incredulous reactions to anything, particularly whenever junior-high-age Ethan emulates his Uncle Dean, but what the hell does Deb do for a living at her office?) that Deb's secretly enjoying the intrusion of TV reality into our reality a lot more than her husband is. She appears to be as fascinated by that intrusion as she is by the old show's implausible writing (whenever she and the other Sandersons are seen watching The Grinder or The Grinder: New Orleans, a spinoff starring Olyphant as Mitch's brother Rake, Deb's curling up with a relaxing glass of wine, as if the Grinder franchise is some trashy yet highly entertaining paperback, which it essentially is). Deb has the look of someone who sees Dean's weirdness not as an embarrassment but as an advantage for Stew and a welcome challenge to push Stew out of complacency and make him the best lawyer (and Sanderson) in any reality. Maybe the recapper community should start calling her Lady Macdeb.

The Grinder is a great mismatched sibling/business partner/buddy comedy in the vein of The Odd Couple--the Jack Klugman/Tony Randall one, not the Matthew Perry/Thomas Lennon one--and Savage is a terrific and relatable everyman foil to the bizarre Lowe in his first regular series role since 2006 (Savage had taken a quasi-Dean-style break from acting to become a prolific TV comedy director, working for shows like the one that introduced his current TV wife to comedy nerds as "the Waitress," It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia). But the things that make The Grinder really stand out as a mismatched sibling comedy are the way that, as VanDerWerff puts it, the collision between TV reality and our reality borders on becoming a horror movie and, of course, the show's extra doses of Community-style meta-humor.

Dean, who's quick to recall storylines or tropes from his old show as if he were Manhattan E.A.D.A. Jack McCoy rattling off the names or outcomes of past trials from other courts, is basically Abed with abs. He's constantly talking about the rules of either TV logic or the TV industry like Abed--who, in my favorite moment of Abedness on Community, drove the super-pretentious professor at a Who's the Boss? studies course crazy over his elaborate theory that Who's the Boss? ruled in favor of Angela as the boss--used to do. For instance, Dean brings up the difficulties many showrunners experience whenever they have to follow up the pilot with the second episode while he's playing back his old show's second episode for Stew's family during, of course, The Grinder's second episode.

As clever as those bits of dialogue about TV logic are, the juicy little clips of the show-within-the-show, which foreshadow the themes of the A-plot during each of the cold opens, are actually more enjoyable as moments of meta-humor on The Grinder. In those clips, The Grinder astutely makes fun of a certain kind of early '00s network TV show that, due to changing tastes and the popularity of anti-hero dramas on both streaming services and cable, doesn't really get made anymore, except by CBS or TNT: the procedural as glitzy wish-fulfillment fantasy, anchored by the noble and hyper-competent cop or attorney who can do no wrong and always gets his man (or woman). On the show-within-the-show, the Grinder never settles and never loses a case. This gives him a better win record than that of Perry Mason, who was allowed to lose only once on CBS.

The show-within-the-show contains some nods to the soapy writing from one of Lowe's own post-West Wing attempts at wish-fulfillment TV, the 2003 NBC flop The Lyon's Den, in which he starred as the most idealistic and virtuous attorney in a law firm full of sharks. Mitch's scenes are even lit to look exactly like The Lyon's Den. In the name of justice, Mitch frequently pulls unlawyerly stunts that, in the real world, would either get him disbarred or cause evidence that could have benefited his clients to get thrown out of court, like disguising himself as another litigator with the help of a mask straight out of Mission: Impossible. Every episode of the show-within-the-show also finds him pulling some unbelievable skill out of what the ambiguously gay Craig Robinson thug character from Pineapple Express would have referred to as his little sexy ass, like the ability to canvass a crime scene more effectively than any other homicide detective in the city. All that's missing from Mitch is a cape.

If all this reminds you of Horatio Caine, the Miami-Dade police lieutenant who was written like a superhero and played by David Caruso as if he were auditioning to be Hyperion in a Marvel Studios screen version of Squadron Supreme (Hyperion's the only orange-haired male superhero I could think of), that's exactly who The Grinder is spoofing. Mitch even punctuates a courtroom scene with the Horatio-style donning of shades at one point. There's also a great little jab at Caruso's well-documented ego when Cliff Bemis (Jason Alexander), the creator/showrunner of both Dean's show and its spinoff, plans to kill off Mitch on The Grinder: New Orleans, and Stew reminds Cliff that Dean has a clause in his contract that says only Dean has authority over Mitch's fate--a deal that's similar to the one that was demanded by Caruso, who, in the universe of Jarrad Paul and Andrew Mogel's show, became so convinced that he was Horatio in real life that he asked for a clause stipulating that Horatio can't be killed without his permission.

Netflix's Master of None is revolutionary, and not just because it's the first half-hour comedy filmed in pimptastic 2.35:1 (ask your film nerd friend)

The following contains spoilers for the final two episodes of Master of None.

Asian American men have been so badly stereotyped and emasculated by Hollywood (peep the Long Duk Dong catchphrase montage from "Good Morning Orlando," last week's Fresh Off the Boat episode, for a refresher course) that several Asian American male indie filmmakers have worked to counteract those stereotypes by casting either themselves or much more polished Asian actors as romantic leads, one of many kinds of roles Asian American men only rarely get to play outside the indie world. But to be honest, even though it's nice to see these directors defying stereotypes, too many of these indie flicks--or more commonly these days, YouTube shows--have turned out to be underwhelming or banal in execution. (A rare example of an indie flick with an Asian American guy as a romantic lead that isn't so underwhelming as a movie is 2011's struggling musician comedy Surrogate Valentine, and although it was directed by a white guy, Dave Boyle, it's thoroughly suffused with the creative voice of Surrogate Valentine star and co-writer Goh Nakamura.)

It's not surprising that the similarly conscious-about-race Aziz Ansari and his fellow Parks and Recreation colleague, writer Alan Yang, the creators of Netflix's remarkable new half-hour comedy Master of None, chose to open their show's very first episode with the ultimate in "Hey, I have sex too! I ain't no emasculated dork like how Hollywood likes to portray me!" moments during stories told from Asian American males' perspectives. Master of None's first glimpse of TV commercial actor Dev Shah, Ansari's alter ego, is Dev in the middle of banging Rachel (former SNL featured player Noël Wells), the record label publicist who will become Dev's permanent love interest later on in the season. The opening scene is the first of many figurative middle fingers Ansari and Yang, whose counterpart on the show is Kelvin Yu's Brian, satisfyingly deliver throughout the show to racist power players from Hollywood who either contribute to marginalizing Asian Americans, whether they're Indian or, in the case of Yang and Yu, Taiwanese, or continue to be in doubt about giving them screen roles like "one of the jobs Bradley Cooper's characters do in movies," as Dev says at one point.

Our idea with Brian was to make an Asian character that is portrayed as sexually capable like real Asian people https://t.co/rEyVuhZrTs

— Aziz Ansari (@azizansari) November 9, 2015

But because Ansari isn't such a vain comedy star--you can tell how much vanity a male comedy star has by how often he gets the staff writers to write shirtless bedroom scenes for him, like the bizarre amount of shirtless bedroom scenes that were written for the late Richard Jeni during his short-lived '90s sitcom Platypus Man--Ansari amusingly cuts short his own first-ever on-screen moment of athletic, TV-MA-rated (but without any nudity) lovemaking. He has his own character's condom suddenly break.

The broken condom scare leads to both frantic Googling of fun facts about pre-ejaculate and an emergency Uber ride for both Dev and Rachel to the nearest pharmacy for a Plan B pill and--because Dev is as passionate a foodie/drinkie as Ansari--an irresistible bottle of Martinelli's apple juice. The mishap perfectly kicks off a series of anxieties Dev experiences about children (he doesn't completely hate them, but like Ansari, he doesn't plan on having any), marriage (again, like with Ansari, the idea of it intimidates Dev), texting etiquette (another subject Ansari has been preoccupied with in his stand-up act), accepting certain acting roles that would pay well but could also cause him to be labeled an "Uncle Taj" and various other life choices.



Master of None--which gets its title from a 2006 Beach House song about a person who hops from fuckbuddy to fuckbuddy but winds up being lonely (the tune is featured at the end of the third episode, "Hot Ticket")--is Ansari's first big endeavor into auteurist TV (he also directed two of the 10 episodes that Netflix dropped all at once last Friday). The show interestingly structures itself as a series of mini-movies--hence the "Master of None Presents" logo during the main titles of each episode--and breaks away from both the joke machine rhythms of network TV ("Alan and I didn't want the show to be so cut-y. Sometimes I'd watch Parks and it's so fast-paced," said Ansari to the A.V. Club) and the studio set-bound nature of many network sitcoms like Parks.

Instead, it embraces the commercial-free pacing of Netflix and favors long single takes during street conversations or hallway exchanges like Dev's amusing exchange with his friend Arnold (Eric Wareheim) about the frustration of being unable to tell if Eminem's 8 Mile theme "Lose Yourself" is being rapped from the point of view of Em or his 8 Mile alter ego B-Rabbit ("[Linklater] has been a huge influence on me, and he has been for a few years," said Ansari in that same A.V. Club interview, while discussing his love for the long takes during Linklater's Before trilogy). The show also favors location shooting in New York (and, for one episode, Nashville) and, in what has to be a first for a half-hour comedy, cinematography shot in the 2.35:1 aspect ratio. That's the same aspect ratio all the Star Wars movies and Bond flicks (except Dr. No, From Russia with Love, Goldfinger, Live and Let Die and The Man with the Golden Gun) are filmed in.

Master of None cinematographer Mark Schwartzbard makes beautiful use of the ultra-widescreen frame. At first, the Scope aspect ratio seems like a bizarre choice for a half-hour comedy. But when Schwartzbard continually composes shots as clever and playful as the one where Brian and his laconic immigrant dad Peter (Clem Cheung) finally bond while reading The Economist, but due to Peter's Ron Swanson-like discomfort with expressing any kind of emotion, they're sitting far apart and at the edges of the frame rather than shoulder to shoulder (or when Schwartzbard sometimes composes shots that are just plain gorgeous), the aspect ratio suits the show.

What makes a shitty trailer? (Horrible music and comatose-sounding announcer copy)

Examples of the not-so-shitty work of Mark Woollen's trailer house (Photo source: New York magazine)

Movie trailers are a form of advertising I first became fascinated with in 2005, when I started experimenting with using '70s movie radio spots as interstitials to introduce the next piece of music on AFOS. For example, if the next tune on AFOS was the Love Unlimited Orchestra's "Theme from Together Brothers," it was going to be preceded by an actual Together Brothers radio spot from 1974.

A few months later, playing around with those old radio spots made me realize the audio from the spooky Batman Begins bat noises TV spot worked fantastically as a similar intro for any Batman Begins score track on the stream. This saved me the trouble of opening GoldWave and recording an intro to ID the composer and score album for every single track on the four different playlists AFOS consisted of at the time (today, AFOS consists of 56 different playlists).

From then on, I scoured the Interweb tubes for every single trailer or TV spot for a movie or TV show I could get my hands on and then re-edit into interstitials (and I continue to scour for trailer audio, as well as shorten them for radio because a lot of trailers contain huge chunks of wordless visual action or vague-sounding dialogue that would make no sense on radio). I wound up getting a few thumbs up in listener e-mails and on Twitter for this trailer-audio-as-interstitials approach. Someone tweeted that AFOS has a DJ Food vibe because of it. It was better than the occasional harsh criticisms I used to receive about the sound of my voice on AFOS.

Check out A Fistful of Soundtracks on tunein. Its got a DJ-Food feeling to it.

— CharlesHBissonnette (@CharlesHBissonn) October 18, 2013

Fistful of Soundtracks on itunes radio - Starts each track with a sampled quote, superb.

— Liam OC (@LiamOC) May 12, 2009

By 2006, I had listened to so much trailer audio that I stopped dismissing trailers as annoying commercials that would always get in the way of my enjoyment of the feature presentation, whether I'm watching that feature in the theater or on disc, and I started to respect the art of producing and editing these trailers. I've become a fan of the Buddha Jones trailer house's laugh-out-loud funny trailer campaigns for 2011's The Muppets and Muppets Most Wanted, and I've grown to admire Hollywood trailer producer Mark Woollen and his eponymous trailer house's inventive work on the campaigns for films like Little Children, In the Loop and Gone Girl.

"Mark has the difficult task and very rare talent of finding a film's DNA in 120 seconds. Once he finds it, he translates it not by revealing its story but by expressing, in a clear but mysterious way, the film's emotional essence," said Alejandro González Iñárritu to New York magazine about Woollen, who crafted the trailers and TV spots for Iñárritu's Best Picture Oscar winner Birdman. Woollen has been pushing for stylish trailers that move away from extremely on-the-nose and frequently parodied trailer styles like the tired comedy trailer template The Simpsons once made fun of in its fake trailers for an Ed O'Neill sports comedy called Soccer Mummy and a Going Ape/Dunston Checks In-ish piece of shit called Editor-in-Chimp.

Some of my all-time favorite trailers, like the ones for Albert Brooks' Real Life and the 2002 documentary Comedian, don't even include any footage from the film and are amusing short films by themselves. I also started to respect the art of narrating trailers. I had listened to so much trailer audio by 2006 that I started to be able to identify the names of the voices behind the voiceovers. Before 2006, I used to often get Hal Douglas, the announcer who appeared as himself in the Comedian trailer, mixed up with Don LaFontaine, because their authoritative voices sometimes sounded the same. After 2006, I was able to tell them apart, and I can now do the same with any announcer who's become more prominent in the trailer voiceover biz since the deaths of LaFontaine and later, Douglas ("Yo, that's Ashton Smith in that TV spot. And that's definitely Keith David. Or is that Dorian Harewood, the voice of NBC? Nah, that's definitely David").

So when Childrens Hospital regular Lake Bell starred in and directed In a World..., an indie comedy about a post-LaFontaine trailer voiceover industry (as well as the Bell character's frustrations over that industry being such a sausage fest), I felt like she made that movie just for me. The movie's opening montage of archival footage of LaFontaine at work was excellent as an opening title sequence, and I especially enjoyed how a lot of In a World... took place in recording studios, a world I'm familiar with from my days of either being involved with college radio or recording content for AFOS inside a cozy and loungey studio.



It's also great whenever any publication takes an In a World...-like look at the trailer biz and discusses at length the unknown history of cutting together trailers or, in the case of the A.V. Club, the stylistic choices that go into making a standout trailer (one "AVQ&A" panelist says, "While I appreciate the art of a tasteful teaser, sometimes I just want to be told exactly what the hell is going on," while another panelist says, "My answer happens to be the opposite... I like a trailer that doesn't tell me anything about what's going on"). The A.V. Club's September 25 Q&A with its own staff writers about "What makes a great trailer?" inspired the bloggers over at The Solute--a film discussion blog founded by film lovers who became online friends in the surprisingly calm and civil comments section of Pitchfork Media's much-missed The Dissolve--to discuss examples of terrible trailers for good movies.

The Solute post scores points for not overlooking the most notorious recent example of coming attractions that are so atrociously made that they're incongruous with the word "attraction" and they wind up diminishing the attractiveness of whatever film they're hyping. That example would have to be the shitty trailers that caused the surprisingly enjoyable Edge of Tomorrow to get squished at the box office as if it were Tom Cruise's body getting run over by an Army truck.

But the king of terrible trailers for good or great movies has to be the American trailer for the Samuel Goldwyn Company release of Henry V, Kenneth Branagh's 1989 big-screen directorial debut. In 1989, the most talked-about trailer campaign belonged to Batman, not just because the footage presented a dark Batman who had never been depicted on screen before, but also because of the extremely minimalist approach of the Tim Burton film's 1988 teaser trailer: no voiceover narration, no music (Woollen's Little Children trailer became notable for also containing no music) and not even an appearance by either the title of the film or its about-to-be-ubiquitous, Anton Furst-designed logo at the end of the trailer. The minimalist approach was due to Warner Bros.' eagerness to rush a teaser trailer into theaters to intensify the buzz for Batman. It's funny how the Batman teaser's lack of narration ended up influencing a lot of trailers today when it was really a result of the trailer house not having enough time to record narration for the teaser. A similar minimalist approach also distinguished another trailer from 1989: the original U.K. trailer for Henry V, which opted for no narration and simply relied on Shakespeare's dialogue and Patrick Doyle's epic score from the film to sell the drama and gritty war-movie feel of Branagh's first Shakespeare adaptation for the screen.



Doyle's very first film score kicked off a long-lasting cinematic partnership with Branagh (before Henry V, Doyle had scored Branagh's 1987 stage production of Twelfth Night) that continued recently with Doyle's score for Branagh's version of Cinderella earlier this year. The Henry V score remains my favorite work of Doyle's. That's why selections from the Henry V score are in rotation on AFOS. "One of Pat's great gifts is for melody, and I wanted every tune to make an impact. The great set pieces needed underscoring as powerful and immediate as the words themselves," wrote Branagh in the Henry V score album liner notes.

Henry V's 14-minute St. Crispin's Day speech score cue, which Doyle has covered on piano in his recent Varèse Sarabande release The Music of Patrick Doyle: Solo Piano, is the Branagh film's most memorable example of underscoring that's as powerful and immediate as the words themselves. The Crispin's Day cue also became a staple of trailers or TV broadcast promos for feel-good movies in the '90s. But the Henry V cues that actually better sum up for me the drive and pulse of Branagh's film (recently reissued on Blu-ray by Shout! Factory) are "Opening title--'O! for a Muse of fire,'" which was used in most of the British trailer, and "'Once more unto the breach,'" which is in rotation on AFOS. So how did the trailer house that produced the American trailer for Henry V manage to fuck it all up? It stupidly didn't use "'O!' for a Muse of fire,'" "'Once more unto the breach'" or any other cue from Doyle's exceptional score. The chintzy synth music in Henry V's American trailer is, to borrow a line from Henry V, like a foul and ugly witch limping so tediously away. Cue Jean-Ralphio.

Why the fuck does the American trailer music sound like walk-in music at a 1988 Christian leadership retreat? The music that was chosen by the American trailer house is so atrocious and shoddy-sounding I actually removed as much as I could of it from the intro that transitions into either "'Once more unto the breach'" or "'Non nobis, Domine'" whenever they get streamed by AFOS. Also, the music, which doesn't sound like anything Doyle would ever compose, fails to convey that this is the kind of non-stodgy and visually interesting Shakespeare movie that's capable of a remarkable shot like the epic tracking shot Branagh came up with to powerfully illustrate the costs of war. To its credit, the American trailer doesn't omit Shakespeare's dialogue to make Henry V more palatable to American moviegoers who either are unfamiliar with the play or doze off whenever they hear Shakespeare. But unfortunately, it tacks on an announcer who delivers some of the most drab-sounding late '80s/early '90s trailer copy this side of the 1993 Batman: Mask of the Phantasm trailer ("It was one of history's greatest adventures, led by a soldier who wouldn't retreat").

Combined with that feel-good music that creates the notion that this movie is boring homework, the addition of a cheesy announcer totally kills the mood and the aura of political intrigue that were more effectively indicated by the film's British trailer, a trailer that, stylistically, is much closer to the largely voiceover-less, Woollen-style trailers that are being made today. Henry V's American trailer is exhibit A in how not to shape a trailer out of historical material that can be difficult to market to a non-art-house American crowd, as well as how not to make a trailer, period. "The Samuel Goldwyn Company presents a bold new film by Kenneth Branagh"? Nah, B, it should be "The Samuel Goldwyn Company misrepresents a bold new film by Kenneth Branagh."

Selections from the 1989 Henry V score are in rotation during "AFOS Prime."

Fresh is the word: Checking in on Fresh Off the Boat

I was all set to dislike ABC's Fresh Off the Boat before its premiere. It wasn't because it was going to take celebrity chef Eddie Huang's candid and raunchy memoirs about his hip-hop-soundtracked childhood in Orlando in the '90s (which I've read only one or two excerpts of) and water down that book for network TV, which was what Huang, the show's off-screen narrator, said he was initially frustrated about while he consulted on the writing and filming of the Lynn Shelton-directed Fresh Off the Boat pilot (I wish Huang did a little more research about ABC sitcoms before he signed up to do business with ABC: someone should have reminded him it's the home of The Middle and The Goldbergs, not Louie and You're the Worst). I was all set to dislike the show for a different reason: it was going to be another goddamn story about second-generation Asian Americans dealing with identity issues, assimilation and generational differences with their elders.

As someone who's watched a shit-ton of Asian American indie movies, that kind of story was, for a long while, the only kind of Asian American indie flick that was getting made, whether it was Red Doors or American Chai. We're so underrepresented or poorly depicted in everything else in pop culture, and this shit is the best we can do on our own? It was becoming as much of a tired formula as Katherine Heigl rom-coms or "Die Hard on a boat!"--or "Die Hard in an office building!" The earnest indie drama about Asian American assimilation became so grating and hackneyed that graphic novelist Adrian Tomine spent the first five pages of Shortcomings hilariously tearing it apart.

"Why does everything have to be some big 'statement' about race? Don't any of these people just want to make a movie that's good?," grumbles Shortcomings' main character, Berkeley movie theater manager Ben Tanaka, after sitting through yet another Asian American drama about generational conflict.

My beef with the assimilation story has been more like "Can we get something else other than the assimilation story, like a story outside the family? Maybe a movie or show about an Asian American guy handling the many absurdities of the dating scene on his own? We do have lives outside the family, you know." That's why Emily Kapnek's Selfie was such a breath of fresh air--it was mostly about the love life and workplace dilemmas of John Cho's modern-day Henry Higgins, a pharmaceutical marketing whiz who gives rebranding advice to the show's social media-obsessed Eliza Doolittle counterpart, Karen Gillan's Eliza Dooley, and not once did the show insert Henry's parents into the narrative--and that's why its cancellation still stings. So after ABC deleted Selfie, I thought, "Alright, so the show I've longed to see on network TV for over a decade didn't last. I don't like the fact that you're yet another assimilation story, Fresh Off the Boat, but you better be damn well as funny as Selfie was."

Fortunately, Fresh Off the Boat is genuinely funny as it glimpses at the complexities of identity, and its slightly skewed take on the coming-of-age sitcom is what sets it apart from the overly earnest assimilation stories Ben Tanaka and I don't care for. That's mostly due to the guiding hand of showrunner Nahnatchka Khan, the veteran American Dad writer whose signature creation is Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23. Khan's sharply written mismatched-roommates comedy revealed James Van Der Beek to be a skilled comedic actor and featured the great unsung pairing of Krysten Ritter and Dreama Walker, who were often so hilariously expressive without dialogue that I could easily picture Ritter and Walker as silent movie comediennes, and I even wished for Khan to do an entire Don't Trust the B---- episode as a silent movie.

All I wanted from Fresh Off the Boat was for the show to retain the weirdness Khan brought to Don't Trust the B----, and it's been doing that frequently. Part of the effectiveness of the surreal gags about the hellishness of the back of the school bus Eddie (Hudson Yang) and his friends ride while pretending to be comatose in "Showdown at the Golden Saddle" is due to the episode never showing what goes on in the back of the bus, as if it's too unpleasant to show on network TV. A classmate character's obsession with an NES game based on the 1980 movie 9 to 5 is a dead-on riff on how NES games would be spun off from the strangest licensed properties, whether it was Home Alone or Wayne's World. And there's a great little scene in "Persistent Romeo" where Evan (Ian Chen), Eddie's youngest brother, screams like a little girl for what feels like two hours after he loses to Grandma Huang (Lucille Soong) during poker. I don't know if it's a reference to this '90s moment, but that would be wonderful if it were. Something about male characters screaming like little girls while their expressions remain absolutely blank always kills me (it must have killed a Fresh Off the Boat crew member too because he can be heard audibly chuckling on the set off-screen while Evan screams).

It helps that Fresh Off the Boat takes some of its stylistic cues not from All-American Girl, the last network sitcom to center on an Asian American family (not counting the TBS show Sullivan & Son), but from the often enjoyable '80s period piece Everybody Hates Chris, which itself took stylistic cues from Everybody Hates Chris co-producer Howard Gewirtz's Oliver Beene, a 2003 Fox sitcom that took place in the early '60s. I remember watching All-American Girl in the '90s and being underwhelmed by it like so many other Asian American viewers, mostly because its version of Margaret Cho--whom Huang actually turned to for advice while initially struggling with the changes that were being made to the depiction of his own life as an 11-year-old--wasn't the Margaret Cho I was familiar with from her raunchy stand-up act. The dominant creative voice on All-American Girl actually belonged not to her, but to a veteran of the lily-white Empty Nest, a huge sign that Cho's show was doomed.

Fortunately, Fresh Off the Boat doesn't have a guy from Empty Nest in charge. Instead, it's the comedic mastermind behind Don't Trust the B----, surrounded by other writers of color like How I Met Your Mother veteran Kourtney Kang and stand-up comic Ali Wong. There wasn't a single authentic bone in All-American Girl's mad-homogenized and heavily micromanaged body, whereas Fresh Off the Boat captures many aspects of Asian American families quite well (like the Huangs' couch being covered in plastic or the Huang parents' "success perm," which isn't just a Chinese thing--it's kind of a Filipino thing as well) and gets a lot of the '90s right, whether it's the music Eddie prefers or the mom jeans look rocked by his cantankerous, Caddyshack-loving mother Jessica. Can we talk about Constance Wu for an hour? She's doing wonders with her role, turning it into something more nuanced than the Tiger Mom caricature that could have emerged in much lesser comedic hands.

Wu is actually much younger than her character, like how Nick Offerman, in real life, is much younger than his Parks and Rec alter ego Ron Swanson, but Ron is such a unique comedic creation that you can't picture anyone else but Offerman playing him had the casting gone differently (except maybe Sam Elliott, who wound up guest-starring as Ron's counterpart in Eagleton), and only Offerman could bring him to life so effectively. I feel the same way about Jessica Huang now. Despite her youth, Wu just brings a certain bearing and dimension--not to mention a certain kind of comic timing--to Jessica that I don't think any other actor could pull off.

Another hero of the show--and this person isn't getting as much praise from the press as Wu--is whoever has been music-supervising Fresh Off the Boat. Securing pricey hip-hop classics by the likes of Ol' Dirty Bastard and Snoop Dogg--it's thrilling to hear on a network sitcom all these tracks I grew up with just like Eddie--was probably no easy feat. The show's '90s hip-hop soundtrack is anchored by an original theme song by Danny Brown, whom Huang himself recruited to record the theme, probably just for the thrill of saying that he slipped Danny Brown, who often makes 2 Live Crew look like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, into an ABC family sitcom. The brief tune introduces Danny Brown to a new audience and will hopefully get those viewers to become enthralled by the Detroit rapper's storytelling skills in tracks like "Grown Up" and "25 Bucks."

But perhaps my favorite musical moment on the show so far takes place in "Showdown at the Golden Saddle," when Eddie's crush on his neighbor and babysitter Nicole (Luna Blaise, who looks like a teenage Krysten Ritter) is soundtracked by the DeBarge-sampling remix of the Notorious B.I.G./Faith Evans/Mary J. Blige tune "One More Chance." As with all the other existing songs on Fresh Off the Boat, you don't hear "One More Chance" on network TV every day. That "One More Chance" remix is like "I've Got You Under My Skin" to a certain generation. It's that smooth of a song. I could easily imagine Tom Haverford and Donna Meagle ordering bottle service at the Snakehole Lounge to the sounds of "One More Chance" at one time or another. The airing of "Showdown at the Golden Saddle" last week was a stroke of beautiful timing too: yesterday was the date of Biggie's death.



If the show hadn't been able to nab almost all those hip-hop chestnuts that have appeared so far, Fresh Off the Boat would still soar anyway. The writing is frequently sharp (in her piece "Fresh Off the Boat uses black culture to talk more candidly about Asian culture," critic Danielle Henderson put the show's unique Asian American perspective best when she said, "I can't help but feel like Fresh Off the Boat is going to help another generation of kids feel like they're a little less alone"), and the cast, with Wu and Randall Park (as Eddie's dad Louis, whose Orlando steakhouse business is actually a Filipino fried chicken joint in Glendale) as the standouts, is an enticing collection of comedy nerd favorites (Park, Paul Scheer) and always-welcome serial guest stars (Ray Wise, C.S. Lee buried under a success perm wig). For a show that's another goddamn story about second-generation Asian Americans dealing with identity issues, assimilation and generational beefs, Fresh Off the Boat is far from stale.

Parks and Recreation (2009-2015)

The last remaining show on NBC that was from the great underwatched Thursday night sitcom lineup that lasted on that network from 2009 to 2013 (the other shows on that lineup: The Office, 30 Rock and, of course, Community, now a Yahoo Screen show), Parks and Recreation takes a bittersweet bow tonight. It's a bow made even more bittersweet by the death of Harris Wittels, one of Parks and Rec's key writers, a week before the airing of the series finale. He was one of many staffers who appeared on the show as examples of the countless crazies who make up Pawnee, Indiana, the show's setting: in Wittels' case, he played Harris the frequently stoned animal control employee. Some feminists hated Wittels for outspoken things he said about free speech that they found to be offensive, while both men and women in the comedy community--particularly anyone from the Parks and Rec fam--adored him and his joke writing, whether on Twitter (a great example of a Wittels tweet: "I don't know if there's a god or not, but I will say this: Cap'n Crunch Oops All Berries is bomb as fuck") or for Parks and Rec.

A special tribute to Wittels from his Parks and Rec colleagues has been tacked on to tonight's hour-long Parks and Rec series finale. The skewed sensibility of writers like Wittels, Megan Amram, Alan Yang, Aisha Muharrar, Joe Mande, Chelsea Peretti and, of course, Parks and Rec co-creator/showrunner Michael Schur helped make Schur's show about small-town government stand out as a small-town comedy. There are small-town comedies like The Andy Griffith Show that older generations of TV viewers tend to love for their likability and warmth, and then there are small-town comedies like the later seasons of Newhart and Parks and Rec--well, actually seasons 2 to 7 of Parks and Rec, to be exact--that are on another level of humor and aren't just merely likable and warm. Post-season 2 Newhart and Parks and Rec are also crazy as fuck. And underneath Parks and Rec's warmth lurks an often biting view of politics outside the world of Pawnee, reflected in its portrayal of the crazy politics within Pawnee.

I always liked how Parks and Rec is basically The West Wing for comedy nerds whose political ideologies echo The West Wing's but who have grown sort of jaded about politics since that older show's demise and have found several of The West Wing's frequently parodied speeches to be too hokey and Hollywood-slick to take seriously anymore (West Wing alum Rob Lowe was even part of the Parks and Rec cast for most of its run, and when Bradley Whitford showed up as a Parks and Rec guest star, that was another enjoyable little collision between the West Wing and Parks and Rec casts). Parks and Rec's idealism was tinged with a satirist's sharp-eyed view of the absurdities of things like government infighting, corporate doublespeak (like whenever Amy Poehler's Leslie Knope had to deal with the local candy manufacturer Sweetums) and this season, Silicon Valley office culture. Speaking of which, both the presence of the fictional Bay Area startup Gryzzl in Pawnee and a three-year time jump--which should have sunk the show but didn't--have resulted in an extremely enjoyable final season full of futuristic sight gags and pause button-worthy Easter eggs, an additional treat on top of Poehler finally getting her longtime wish for Bill Murray to play Pawnee's long-unseen mayor, all the show's longtime threads getting paid off with well-earned emotional moments (Donna tricks everyone into finally calling Jerry by his original name: Garry!) and all the hilarious side characters, from Jean-Ralphio to those accountant dudes who are always seen fangirling over the presence of their former colleague Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott), taking a final bow. My favorite pause button-worthy season 7 Easter egg would have to be this, an exhibit at the William Henry Harrison Museum that displays all the cool things about the alternate reality where President Harrison didn't die 30 days into his presidency:

These other season 7 Easter eggs were pretty funny too:

(Photo source: Warming Glow)

By the way, why have I left out season 1 of Parks and Rec? Like so many other sitcoms, the show hadn't quite found its voice yet in that abbreviated first season. Parks and Rec's second season led to one of the greatest course corrections of any sitcom since the transformation of The Odd Couple from a strangely airless retread of the 1968 Walter Matthau/Jack Lemmon movie version in the single-camera format to a livelier, funnier and sharper buddy comedy energized by its switch to the multi-cam format.

That course correction mostly had to do with tweaking the heroine at the heart of Parks and Rec, Leslie, via the writers' wise move of changing her from a drab Michael Scott clone to a hyper-competent Tracy Flick type, but without a class-conscious chip on her shoulder and with a ton of friends who will take a bullet for her, whether it's that "beautiful tropical fish" Ann Perkins (Rashida Jones), Ben, Leslie's soulmate and now husband, or breakfast food-loving libertarian Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman), Leslie's mentor (and occasional adversary, ideology-wise). Rewriting Leslie into the straight-woman figure we know and love today shouldn't have worked, but it totally did. And that--along with the fully realized, Springfield-esque universe that surrounds Leslie--is why we have six great seasons of Parks and Rec (although some will argue that seasons 5 and 6 were when the show stumbled creatively a bit), all coming to an end tonight.

iApplaud the iPod's demise

Apple is quietly retiring the original iPod line after 13 years. Boo-fucking-hoo. I bought two iPods--I had my first one, a third-generation iPod Classic, engraved with a line from De La Soul Is Dead, "I got the bidox, let's do this like Brutus!," back when Apple allowed customers to have any kind of message engraved on the back of their iPods for a few extra bucks--and both those excellent rectangles died on me after only two or three years of use.

It's an excellent rectangle for those two or three years, and then afterwards, you're just bitter over how it's no longer excellent. I haven't bought another iPod since my second one, a black iPod Nano that replaced my dead third-generation iPod Classic, stopped working smoothly a few years ago. Even though I recharged its battery repeatedly, the Nano was starting to turn itself off in the middle of songs, just like how I chloroform myself whenever I hear an Iggy Azalea track coming on.

I spent so many hours filling each of those iPod hard drives with music and organizing the playlists that when those devices finally broke down, I felt like all those hours of curating were wasted. It made me wish walkmans didn't become obsolete because unlike iPods, an entire library of music wouldn't get wiped out along with the tape player when it would break down.

These days, I rely on just my MacBook to bump music. Apple needs to build portable music players that last longer than two or three years. The day when it does that is the day I cop another portable music player.

Wow, Ben Wyatt's taste in music on Parks and Rec is... so Ben Wyatt

In last week's Parks and Rec, April Ludgate (Aubrey Plaza) was trapped in a car in sweltering D.C. weather with her boss, congressional campaign manager and Star Trek: TNG fanfic author Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott), and she glumly glared at the camera as she regretted putting on one of Ben's mix CDs, which he called "Benji's Cool Times Summer Jamz Mix." The audience heard only one of Ben's jams, Salt-N-Pepa's "Shoop"--as did April, whose consciousness must have left her body by the time that Salt thanks her boo's mother for a butt like that--and now the show's official Facebook page has gone the extra mile and posted the rest of Ben's "Summer Jamz Mix" on Spotify.

These are songs you play at a wedding, where overplayed pop songs go to die and where "Call Me Maybe" and "Gangnam Style" will go to die soon. The uptight Ben is like a Top 40 station stuck in 1996.

I love the attention to detail regarding the characters' musical tastes on Parks and Rec. Ben's CD collection in his car consists mostly of '90s mixtape-style soundtrack albums like the Pulp Fiction CD because Ben loves how those albums are like mixtapes from his favorite directors, a detail that seems to be lifted from Scott's past as a teenage film geek. The actor has admitted in interviews that he admired filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee so much as a teen that instead of bedroom posters of athletes or half-naked starlets, which is what most teenage guys prefer, Scott would put pictures and clippings of his favorite directors up on his bedroom wall.

The apathetic and snooty April is a Neutral Milk Hotel fan, just like Parks showrunner Michael Schur. Her not-too-bright husband Andy Dwyer (Chris Pratt) leads the unsigned Pawnee rock band Mouse Rat, which, according to its fake site, "takes inspiration from the greats--Dave Matthews Band, Counting Crows, and recent (but solid) discovery Train--and then spins it out of control" (I once had a job where I had to rummage through small-town rock band sites and post links to them on my company's sites, and all those bands' bios of themselves sounded exactly like Mouse Rat's, especially during the description of acts like Train as "great"). Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman), who's unabashed about his libertarian politics, isn't as unabashed about his secret off-hours life as saxman and Eagleton smooth jazz sensation Duke Silver, a hit with the (older) ladies of Eagleton. Former Entertainment 720 CEO Tom Haverford (Aziz Ansari), an Indian American who thinks he's the Diddy of Pawnee and lists Flo Rida as one of his heroes, has, of course, a weakness for the Dirty South sound and '90s R&B.







Like April, Tom finds Ben to be terminally uncool. I wonder what Tom's reaction to Ben's "Summer Jamz" CD would be (Tom would probably say, "You still listen to CDs? Ha!"). I also wonder what a Tom Haverford Spotify playlist would look like. It would likely include Soulja Boy's "Turn My Swag On," which Tom rapped along to at the Snakehole Lounge while kickin' it with former Indiana Pacer Detlef Schrempf, and T-Pain's "I'm N Luv (Wit a Stripper)," which Tom briefly sang while in costume as T-Pain.

(Photo source: Uproxx)

But what would the rest of that playlist look like? It's time to step into Tom's mind and think like a man who thinks he's so baller.

"Joints That Tom Haverford Probably Bumps on His iPhone" tracklist
1. Soulja Boy Tell'em, "Turn My Swag On"
2. T-Pain featuring Mike Jones, "I'm N Luv (Wit a Stripper)"
3. Montell Jordan, "This Is How We Do It"
4. Fat Joe featuring Lil Wayne, "Make It Rain"
5. Ginuwine, "Pony"
6. Ginuwine, "Differences"
7. R. Kelly, "You Remind Me of Something"
8. R. Kelly featuring Ronald and Ernie Isley, "Down Low (Nobody Has to Know)"
9. The Isley Brothers featuring R. Kelly and Chanté Moore, "Contagious"
10. R. Kelly, "Summer Bunnies"
11. R. Kelly, "Ignition Remix"
12. Jodeci, "Get on Up"
13. Johnny Gill, "Rub You the Right Way"
14. H-Town, "Part Time Lover"
15. The-Dream featuring T.I., "Make Up Bag"
16. Jay-Z, "Change Clothes"
17. Mystikal featuring Nivea, "Danger (Been So Long)"
18. Ludacris, "Southern Hospitality"
19. Rick Ross featuring Styles P, "B.M.F. (Blowin' Money Fast)"
20. Flo Rida featuring T-Pain, "Low"
21. Jamie Foxx featuring T-Pain, "Blame It"
22. Waka Flocka Flame, "Hard in Da Paint"
23. Jay-Z and Kanye West, "Otis" (the video even features a cameo by Ansari as Tom)
24. Kanye West, Big Sean, Pusha T and 2 Chainz, "Mercy"
25. Kanye West, Jay-Z and Big Sean, "Clique"

(Photo source: Flavorwire)