Shows I Miss (Already): Selfie (with guest blogger Adam from Slant Eye for the Round Eye)

There are several things I'm going to miss about the short-lived Selfie, a hashtag-era reimagining of Pygmalion that has been rescued from post-cancellation limbo by Hulu and will finish out on Hulu the rest of its 13-episode run, starting today. They include the genuine chemistry between Karen Gillan as narcissistic pharmaceutical sales chick Eliza Dooley and John Cho as her marketing guru co-worker Henry Higgs and the rare and groundbreaking sight of an Asian American male as a romantic lead on a single-camera comedy that's not a YouTube show. Cho's Harold & Kumar franchise has been putting Asian American guys in romantic lead roles for three consecutive movies and an upcoming Adult Swim animated version now. It took 10 goddamn years for prime-time network TV to catch up to Harold & Kumar.

I'll also miss any scene where Gillan dances (especially to Wiz Khalifa) and that wig Gillan has to wear as Eliza (after Gillan had all her hair shaved off to play a bald alien warrior in Guardians of the Galaxy) somehow stays on; that little kid whose sobs sound like Eddie Murphy laughing; and the solid character writing and visual panache shepherded by Suburgatory and Selfie creator/showrunner Emily Kapnek, the Frank Tashlin of single-camera comedies. Like Tashlin, Kapnek started out in animation, which explains the strong visual sense she brought to both Suburgatory's first two seasons (before a huge budget slash really affected that show) and Selfie.

Kapnek's Nickelodeon background--I often forget that Nick nurtured Hey Arnold! and Dora the Explorer, kids' shows with lead characters of color--also explains the incredible diversity of the worlds of Suburgatory and Selfie, both casting-wise and music-wise. The huge amount of interracial couples on Suburgatory and Selfie nicely reflects the world outside the TV screen, and I'll always adore Kapnek for soundtracking a Suburgatory scene at a house party with Full Force's "Ain't My Type of Hype" from House Party.

But there's one thing none of the few TV critics who have been in Selfie's corner have noticed about the show, and I think I might miss this element most of all: the pause-button-worthy attention to detail in the show's cutaways to screen shots of social media. Those screen shots were dead-on about the dumb or vacuous things that are often said in comments sections and on social media feeds.

Henry Higgs' off-screen mom is every single Asian immigrant parent who stupidly parrots Republican bullshit, and I love how Selfie captured that in its Facebook screen shots. So of course, like any other non-stereotypical and genuinely funny show that nails a little aspect or two of Asian American life like that and doesn't feel like it was written by aliens from outer space who studied only clips of Long Duk Dong from Sixteen Candles or Fisher Stevens in brownface from Short Circuit on their spaceship viewscreen and think this is how all us Asian guys behave, Selfie gets cancelled.

What will you miss about Selfie, Adam? Take it away.--JJA

***

It Was Just a Good Show
By Adam Chau

Above everything else, I just liked "Selfie." It was warm, cute, funny--I knew what to expect (from a general POV) and each week it was something I started looking forward to. It was one of those shows where I could feel myself getting more invested because at it's core, I related to it. I laughed with it. I talked to the TV when I watched it. Say what you might about how they got some things wrong--I think they got a lot more right.

It's like the title. People have talked about the title of the show as being a part of it's downfall but how was that any worse than "The League" or "7th Heaven" or "Ally McBeal"? I'll argue that maybe it was a better title than people credited because it was too close to their faces. It's like the underground rapper that gets signed by a major label, or who's song you start hearing more of on the radio and start seeing on television. Are they any less artistic just because more people started to like them? It's easy to write "Selfie" off as a pop-culture-in-the-now-epm style title but when you think about why we do it, the overall arc of picture taking in general, and then what we do with them in the connected world from a larger social networking perspective with more connections and more spheres of influence--it stood on it's own.

I think that's the thing that gets me the most about the cancelling of "Selfie" is that it just wasn't appreciated and it could have been a great hit--for someone. Maybe not for ABC. But for someone. Because we loved Eliza. We loved Henry. They weren't perfect. They had their quirks. But so do we. And that's why we watch. Because we can relate. Because we've all jumped in the lake, or wanted to, at least once in our lives, or did the occasional "Hmm...I wonder what they're up to now..." searches and from that POV "Selfie" really did offer storylines that multiple different groups could relate to. I'll miss that piece of the show where I'm not just watching something that interests me or keeps my attention, but that also references some of my everyday life (versus something like "Storage Wars" which I occasionally like to watch but that has nothing to do with my daily life).

But "Selfie" did.

And absolutely, I will lament not being able to watch a show with John Cho as the lead because he's just a good actor who I like to watch on the screen, big or small. Almost every year he's in a new movie while at the same time also working in television. It's not just me. Other people like him too, and he was a recognizable face that anchored the show for millions of people that tuned in.

Yeah.

I'll miss that.

Minnesotan blogger Adam Chau runs Slant Eye for the Round Eye and contributes posts to YOMYOMF (pronounced "yawm-yawm-eff").

5-Piece Cartoon Dinner (06/12/2012): Tron: Uprising, Motorcity, ThunderCats, Young Justice and Dan Vs.

She's got the body of a 21-year-old and the hair of a 71-year-old.

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.

It's been an interesting week for superhero cartoons. One show is being killed, while another is coming back. I can't say I'm a fan of either show, but the latter used to open each week with one of the best TV theme songs ever.

Nothing Marvel Animation does surprises me, including pulling the plug on The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, which is what the studio did last week (Australian viewers, for some odd reason, have been receiving the show's second-season episodes several weeks before we do, while Disney XD will begin burning off the rest of the season later this summer--on Wikipedia, its return date is listed as June 24). Earth's Mightiest Heroes isn't a perfect show like most Marvel fans make it out to be--animation-wise, it pales in comparison to much of the work of present-day DC Animation--but due to the solid work of story editor and frequent writer Christopher Yost, it's better-written than most Marvel cartoons.

I particularly like how there's constant turnover in the team like in the Avengers comics and many other superteam comics, as well as the way Earth's Mightiest Heroes approaches the team members as what I call "people first, heroes second." For instance, most of them, particularly Iron Man, are frequently seen unmasked or outside of their costumes, a departure from older superhero cartoons where the heroes rarely took off their suits, which always looked stupid. If Superman took a nap in the Hall of Justice on Superfriends (which was exactly how that Superfriends episode where Supes was transformed into a boy ended), he'd still be wearing his effing cape.

And before live-action Avengers writer/director Joss Whedon and Mark Ruffalo finally figured out how to make the usually one-note and boring Hulk an interesting and complex character (three words: "I'm always angry"), my favorite version of Hulk was Earth's Mightiest Heroes' reimagining of him as a more intelligent brute and less like a man-child who demolishes English as much as he demolishes brick walls (sorry, '70s Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno version, but you were better at depicting Dr. Banner than you were at depicting his green self, who, to borrow a favorite Hulk word, looks puny compared to the Yostverse Hulk). This take on Greenie, which is closer to how Peter David wrote him in the Incredible Hulk comic in the '90s, reminds me of the brooding and laconic version of Little John on BBC's Robin Hood. I wouldn't be surprised if Avengers Assemble, Marvel Animation's next (and reportedly Ultimate Spider-Man-style) incarnation of the Avengers characters, goes back to dumbing Hulk down.

Speaking of unsurprising things, the theme tunes that open Marvel cartoons are typically wack or drab, except for the late '60s Spider-Man theme, Rooney's Iron Man: Armored Adventures theme and some of Bad City's "Fight as One," the Earth's Mightiest Heroes theme, which is too watered-down-Linkin-Park-ish for my tastes, but I like how the first few lyrics in the first-season version of "Fight as One" correspond to each Avengers founding member without using their names ("Tormented and attacked" represents Hulk, while "Lost from when we wake" is about Captain America). A far better theme than "Fight as One" is the banger of a theme that opened DC's Teen Titans. Although I loved that Puffy AmiYumi theme and any episode that pitted the Titans against Malcolm McDowell's '60s-obsessed Mad Mod, I wasn't a fan of the show. But I'm glad it's coming back, even though it's in that cutesy chibi character design I don't usually care for. On some weeks, the chibi-style New Teen Titans shorts, which reunited the original show's voice actors, have been the highlight of Cartoon Network's "DC Nation" block (my favorite of these shorts is, of course, the one that brought back Mad Mod).



Cartoon Network announced last week that DC Animation will be expanding these New Teen Titans shorts into a half-hour Teen Titans Go! series that will air next year during "DC Nation." In terms of superhero comedies, I prefer New Teen Titans over the forced wackiness of the recently renewed Ultimate Spider-Man, although I'd rather see the return of The Justice Friends from Dexter's Laboratory.

***

Even though everyone in The Grid is as obese as an ironing board, I'm starting to warm up to Robert Valley's stylized Tron: Uprising character designs, which we see more of in the series' second episode as it introduces other characters besides the principals. (If you peep Valley's site, it's full of even more impressive artwork by the Gorillaz "Feel Good Inc." video animator, including previews of a comic of his that features ladies who are too hot for Disney XD.) But the only Tron: Uprising character whose design still doesn't look alright to me is the lead character Beck's. His Matt LeBlanc face doesn't match Elijah Wood's distinctively Elijah Wood-ian voice.

(Photo source: Cartoon Brew)

In "The Renegade," Beck's heroism from the first episode has made enough noise in The Grid to cause gladiators to begin to murmur of a renegade who will save them and stand up against Clu the dictator and his henchman General Tesler (Lance Henriksen). Beck inadvertently ends up getting captured by one of Tesler's recognizer ships and is forced into the same kind of gladiatorial games he rescued his friends Mara (Mandy Moore) and Zed (Nate Corddry) from being shipped off to in "Beck's Beginning."

One of Beck's fellow prisoners is Cutler (Lance Reddick), a former soldier who fought in what was known as the ISO War (introduced in Tron: Legacy, ISOs are not "programs" like Beck and his friends but are human inhabitants of The Grid that their creator Kevin Flynn tried to protect from Clu, who slaughtered all of them for being human, except for Olivia Wilde's Quorra, the last surviving ISO). Beck plots to escape from the arena with Cutler, who believes the renegade is the presumed-dead Tron (Bruce Boxleitner) and is eager to fight beside him in the uprising he's started. The veteran isn't aware that the renegade is actually Beck, who's assuming Tron's mantle. Maybe Cutler should flee first to a barbershop in Argon City because his '90s flattop makes him look too much like Allen West.