Wow, the already-dead Vertigo comic iZombie is hardly like the hit CW show it unleashed

iZombie--the first CBS procedural outside of Elementary that fortunately doesn't feel too much like "a Dad show" (it airs on the CW, a joint venture between CBS and Warner Bros., so that qualifies it as a CBS show)--was one of network TV's most pleasant surprises last season. I don't care for the "Dad show" writing of most procedurals, and the case-of-the-week structure that's such a fixture of those procedurals initially made me doubtful about latching onto iZombie when it debuted. But the farcical and mildly supernatural elements iZombie added to that structure--like how whenever assistant medical examiner Liv Moore (Rose McIver), a zombie who must snack on brain matter to keep herself from going full zombie, wolfs down a murder victim's brains to grab clues from the victim's memories, she also absorbs the victim's personality traits--immediately won me over as they freshened up a walking corpse like the tired case-of-the-week format.

What's a Dad show, by the way? It's any procedural with an alphabet-soup title. The forensic heroes in these interchangeable procedurals quip a lot but aren't all that compelling when Daddy takes their one-liners away. It's "keep it on in the background while folding laundry" TV that doesn't require so much attention from exhausted, pooped-out and drowsy dads who find Mr. Robot or Rick and Morty to be too taxing for the brain or too morally ambiguous as light entertainment. It's fast food TV.

Criminal Minds is particularly shitty and unwatchable: it plays into every 92-year-old Fox News viewer's fears about how the world outside his door is going to hell in a handbasket. It fetishizes serial killers and is full of everything I despise about both the serial killer genre and torture porn, so it bugs me that smart comedic performers like Paget Brewster and Aisha Tyler have attached themselves to a dour, pretentious and repugnant show that's so beneath them. And I know the Asian American blogosphere worships the modern-day Hawaii Five-0 because the show gives juicy roles to Asian American actors--sure, as an Asian American, that's a nice thing to see--but I otherwise don't understand the worship: Five-0 is essentially another right-leaning Dad show from CBS.

Loosely based on a comic DC's Vertigo imprint published from 2010 to 2012, iZombie is, like any other CBS procedural, full of forensic experts who quip and often drop geeky pop-culture references, but it's far from a Dad show. The sharp writing and not-so-dour-and-pretentious sensibility of Veronica Mars creator Rob Thomas and frequent Veronica Mars writer Diane Ruggiero-Wright, iZombie's showrunners, are among the reasons why iZombie never feels like I'm spending a week inside the mind of a 92-year-old Fox News viewer. The elderly murder victim whose racist personality traits Liv acquired in "Grumpy Old Liv," the second-season premiere, is clearly Thomas and Ruggiero-Wright's way of mocking the 92-year-olds who eat up Criminal Minds or CSI: Cyber.

iZombie may be imbued with the DNA of Veronica Mars--Liv is the same kind of plucky detective heroine who, during Veronica's run, captivated fans of neo-noir, feminists, feminist fans of neo-noir and neo-fans of noir feminists--as well as the DNA of what Ruggiero-Wright has cited as the part of The Matrix where kung fu skills are uploaded into Neo's mind, but a bit of Orphan Black seems to have also been slipped into the show like the chunks of brain matter Liv slips into her lunch. The show is a weekly acting exercise for the New Zealand-born McIver--and she's been killing it, whether as an immature frat boy, an extremely sensual artist, a stoner who talks to imaginary friends or, this week, a melodramatic, stiletto-obsessed "Real Housewife of Seattle"--like how the scenes where Tatiana Maslany has to play either a clone impersonating another clone or a clone impersonating another clone impersonating another clone are a crazy exercise each week for Maslany.

It also features the best ensemble on a Thomas show since Party Down. There isn't a weak link in the iZombie cast. Sure, Detective Clive Babineaux (Malcolm Goodwin), the Seattle cop who turns to Liv for help on his cases, is a tad underwritten as an audience surrogate, but he's an effective foil to both the personality changes Liv experiences (Clive has, like the Santa Barbara Police Department on Psych, been led to believe her visions stem from psychic abilities rather than zombie ones) and the morgue humor of Dr. Ravi Chakrabarti (Rahul Kohli), the supervising M.E. who keeps Liv's zombie side a secret from the rest of the police.

As drug dealer Blaine DeBeers, the now-former zombie who got high on his own (tainted) supply of a drug called Utopium--the cause of the underreported emergence of zombies in Seattle--and was responsible for Liv's transformation into an Undead American, and Vaughn Du Clark, a narcissistic energy drink magnate who's perhaps even more ruthless than Blaine, David Anders and Steven Weber, respectively, are the best kind of villain for a show based on a comic: they're blessed with comedic timing, but their performances are also carefully modulated and they're never prone to treating the material like camp or pantomime. Anders' turn as Blaine, the machinations of Blaine and the downward spiral of Major Lillywhite (Robert Buckley)--Liv's amusingly long-suffering ex-fiancé--from idealistic social worker to completely broken, Utopium-addicted killer of zombies are key to why the non-procedural half of iZombie is rarely "keep it on in the background while folding laundry" TV.

Before penning YA novels and creating shows with both passionate cult followings and unfortunately short life spans, Thomas was a member of several Texas rock bands--which is funny because people who aren't familiar with his TV work frequently confuse him with Matchbox 20 singer Rob Thomas, so his past as a musician in Texas hasn't exactly helped to distinguish him from the Matchbox 20 guy--and his not-so-hackneyed tastes in music led to a lot of well-chosen existing songs on Veronica Mars. Those same tastes have also been integral to the existing song choices on iZombie. The show opens each week with a great forgotten tune, "Stop, I'm Already Dead" by the now-defunct Deadboy & the Elephantmen. The scoring work of regular Thomas show composer Josh Kramon is equally solid, like whenever it emphasizes the primal nature of Liv's zombie side with just the use of percussion.

Professional hat tip to #iZombie music supervisor Kasey Truman for Stop I'm Already Dead http://t.co/V2G6dklyUP @DaxRiggsFans @chopshopmusic

— Joel C. High (@cre8ve_ctrl) April 3, 2015

Why I, a latecomer to The Rockford Files, became a fan of the classic P.I. show and the late James Garner

The legendary James Garner died yesterday at the age of 86. The following is a repost of "Watch The Rockford Files and call to see if Paul can score some weed," from January 16, 2009. In the '09 piece, I mentioned my goal to watch every episode of Garner's classic show, which I became a fan of several decades after it was cancelled.

I still haven't completed that goal, and I should really get my ass to Netflix Instant and marathon the hell out of Rockford again because Netflix has every single episode of Rockford (including the ones where Garner's knees were clearly wrecked, yet he didn't lose a beat and remained a trooper through it all). And also because Garner was truly one of the greatest.

(Photo source: Soref.TV)

Your friends do it and you've probably done it too: catch up on a show your lazy ass has put off watching by setting aside an entire weekend to view the DVD box set in one marathon sitting. Back when 24 first hit the DVD market, various writers who missed the first season chose to catch up with the show on DVD and recapped in real time what it was like to watch the first-season discs in one sitting, while a writer I used to work with picked the '80s version of The Twilight Zone for his weekend DVD marathon. A couple of years ago, those writers inspired me to do a similar marathon thing with the box sets of another cult show: The Rockford Files, Stephen J. Cannell's clever reinvention of the private eye genre, which starred James Garner in his signature role as rugged everyman gumshoe Jim Rockford.

Alright, so it's not quite a marathon. I haven't even viewed all 123 episodes yet, but my goal is to eventually see them all on DVD or via Netflix's media player for PC users. As of this writing, I haven't reached season five yet.

I picked Rockford because I was a fan of Veronica Mars (which starred Forgetting Sarah Marshall's Kristen Bell, a Star Wars geek who should have Jedi mind-tricked the CW assclowns into bringing back her show). Before I started renting the Rockford DVDs from Netflix, I had only caught Veronica's spiritual granddaddy once or twice on cable, so I wanted to better acquaint myself with Rockford on DVD, where it's uncut and commercial-free (on Hulu, it's not commercial-free). The older the series, the more it gets chopped up by syndicators to accommodate commercial breaks, which grow annoyingly longer with each passing year. So that must mean Adventures of Superman reruns will eventually be edited down to 10 minutes, and George Reeves' flying sequences will be sped up so badly it'll look like the Metropolis underworld slipped some crank into the Daily Planet watercooler.

Rockford still draws a cult that's pretty rabid, though not quite as huge as Veronica's online fanbase. Slackers like the main character's pal in Ben Folds Five's "Battle of Who Could Care Less" dig Rockford reruns because Jim is one of them. They identify with a hero who'd rather go fishing with his father Rocky (Noah Beery) than do his job. The fans who still visit the alt.tv.rockford-files newsgroup continue to exchange favorite Garner wisecracks, and a couple of fan sites list every wacky message Jim received on his answering machine during the opening credits.





On disc, Rockford has aged better than most '70s shows, thanks to quirky, sharp and timeless scripts penned by staff writers like Cannell, future Sopranos creator David Chase and Juanita Bartlett. Seventies TV comes in three modes: schlocky (the Krofft variety shows, anything with Glen A. Larson's name on it), sanctimonious (M*A*S*H, Norman Lear's shrill shoutcoms) or a hideous mash-up of both (Hawaii Five-0, the "Fonzie gets a library card" era of Happy Days). Rockford is one of the few '70s shows I've seen that's neither of the above, and whenever the series did address a serious issue--like the flaws of the grand jury system in its most celebrated ep, the Bartlett-scripted "So Help Me God"--it did it with class and zero preachiness.

"Brokedown Merry-Go-Round" Show of the Week: Rick and Morty, "Rixty Minutes"

Every Friday in "'Brokedown Merry-Go-Round' Show of the Week," I discuss the week's best first-run animated series episode I saw. "Brokedown Merry-Go-Round," a two-hour block of original score tracks from animated shows or movies, airs weekdays at 2pm Pacific on AFOS.

With "Rixty Minutes," Rick and Morty made both TV history and social media history last weekend as the first cable or broadcast network show to ever premiere an entire episode on Instagram (Adult Swim posted the episode in clips that totaled more than 100 and were each 15 seconds long, due to the clip size limits of Instagram's video-sharing feature). Like the troubled launch of the Veronica Mars movie on Flixster/Ultraviolet, which infuriated the movie's Kickstarter donors that same weekend, Rick and Morty's nutty Instagram experiment/stunt wasn't without glitches, although they weren't as big of a pain in the ass as the Veronica Mars clusterfuck: some clips wouldn't play after I clicked on the "next clip" arrow icon on the video window, so I had to close the window and go back to the Rick and Morty account's thumbnail menu to reactivate the clip that wouldn't play.

At the Smiths' house, technology is hardly as glitchy as Instagram's video clip feature or Flixster, thanks to the genius of Rick Sanchez, who despises the insipid Bachelor episode that his daughter Beth and her family are watching together and has discovered a way to make ordinary TV much more entertaining. Rick rejiggers the Smiths' cable box so that it can pick up cable TV from any parallel universe ("How about Showtime Extreme in a world where man evolved from corn?"). Then he tosses to Beth, Jerry and Summer a pair of VR goggles that allows them to see what the parallel versions of themselves are like, through the eyes of their parallel counterparts (it's the same kind of goggles Rick used in "Rick Potion #9" to locate the parallel universe he and Morty fled to and currently call home), just so that he and Morty can have the newly upgraded TV all to themselves. The way that Rick's half of the episode is structured--after the cold open, he spends nearly all of his screen time parked in front of the TV, flipping through weird program after weird program--is why "Rixty Minutes" is the perfect Rick and Morty episode for Instagram's 15-seconds-per-clip format instead of a more narratively busy episode like "M. Night Shyam-Aliens!" or last week's "Raising Gazorpazorp."

To make the programs and commercials in "Rixty Minutes" as weird and nonsensical as possible, co-creators Justin Roiland and Dan Harmon ad-libbed the dialogue for almost all of them (and then the animators worked from there). It's like a drunken Axe Cop, fueled not by the imagination of some cartoonist's baby brother but by the imagination of a couple of grown-up comedy writers improvising in a recording studio (one of whom isn't shy about his love of booze while performing or working, and you can even hear him slurring his words while voicing the police captain in a cop show spoof about a detective with baby legs). At the end of his voiceover during the trailer for an action movie starring a Dwayne Johnson lookalike, Harmon can be heard laughing over the title he came up with for the movie (Two Brothers), and at the end of the clip of a Garfield parody called Gazorpazorpfield, Roiland cracks up too while pretending to be Lorenzo Music doing the voice of Gazorpazorpfield (by the way, Rick and Morty's discussion of the weirdness of both the late Music voicing Bill Murray's Ghostbusters character on The Real Ghostbusters and Murray later voicing Music's old Garfield role in the Garfield movies made the day of this Murray fan and former Real Ghostbusters viewer).

Roiland and Harmon corpsing is funnier than the actual bits themselves. In fact, most of these fake shows and ads aren't really all that funny, although the fake cereal commercial--think a Lucky Charms ad reimagined by Tom Savini--is a delightfully sick and twisted riff on how sociopathic the kids often used to be in animated General Mills cereal ads. And I especially like the jabs at Chris Parnell's old SNL stomping grounds and the way that the SNL cast can get so oversized and unwieldy in certain seasons during the scene where Rick stumbles into SNL from another reality ("It's Saturday Night Live! Starring a piece of toast! Two guys with handlebar mustaches! A man painted silver who makes robot noises!"). Sadly, just like SNL in our reality, their reality's SNL would rather add a piece of toast and a silver man who makes robot noises to its cast than an Asian American comedian.

As amusing as some of the parallel-universe TV clips are (dig the split-second shot of alt-Game of Thrones), the "drunken Axe Cop" half of "Rixty Minutes" is overshadowed by Beth, Jerry and Summer's B-story, which, unlike last week's episode, addresses some of the ramifications of Rick and Morty's actions at the end of "Rick Potion #9." The B-story also proves that Roiland and Harmon can shift from humor to seriousness in an animated show as masterfully as the latter showrunner does in live-action form whenever he handles the darkest or most serious moments of Community.

The discoveries Beth and Jerry make about their lives in other realities (Beth learns she's the wealthy and respected hospital surgeon she always wanted to be instead of merely being an animal surgeon, while Jerry learns he's a movie star who's banging Kristen Stewart) cause them to become further disappointed in their present lives and their strained marriage. Harsh words are once again exchanged between Beth and Jerry, and out spills the truth they've tried to keep hidden from Summer, who's been wondering why she can't find any parallel versions of herself in Rick's interdimensional goggles: Beth wanted to have an abortion when she learned she was pregnant with Summer, whereas in the other realities that Beth and Jerry are starting to wish they lived in, they never had kids. Summer takes it well and decides to run away from home.

What follows is the best non-comedic scene Rick and Morty has done since the eerie, Mazzy Star-soundtracked conclusion of "Rick Potion #9." Morty, who's never really been seen bonding with his big sister, yet he doesn't want her to leave (possibly because he's been through enough craziness and upheaval in his life already), attempts to stop her from running away by revealing to her something as equally screwed-up as her situation. That, of course, is fleeing his badly Cronenberged reality to assume the identity of the deceased Morty in this reality and then burying his counterpart's corpse in the backyard.

(Photo source: Morty and Rick)

"And every morning, Summer, I eat breakfast 20 yards away from my own rotting corpse," confesses Morty.

"So you're not my brother?," says Summer.

"I'm better than your brother. I'm a version of your brother you can trust when he says, 'Don't run.' Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everybody's gonna die. Come watch TV," says Morty.

It's Morty's way of saying "I don't want you to leave because you're my big sister and I've been through enough" without using those cheesy words. It also marks a fascinating shift in Morty's once-weak-willed character. He's starting to adopt Rick's nihilist worldview (as exemplified in the pilot by Rick's breakfast table line that "There is no God, Summer. You gotta rip that Band-Aid off now."), except he's way more compassionate about it than Rick. We got hints of this compassion while he was trying to raise Morty Jr. to be less homicidal and more civilized in "Raising Gazorpazorp," and I can't wait to see what happens when this conscience of his re-emerges when he stands up to Rick at his worst, at some point later in the season, according to Roiland.

And Morty gets Summer to stay without giving her a godawful Miller-Boyett sitcom hug (while Beth and Jerry's teary reconciliation--right after they're both moved by seeing their parallel counterparts find their way back to each other--borders on Miller-Boyett-y, but fortunately, it's soundtracked by Belly's 1995 song "Seal My Fate," which is hardly as excruciating as typical Miller-Boyett hugging scene music). I'm so proud of Morty, and I'm so proud of this goddamn show.



Stray observations/other memorable quotes:
* Sarah Chalke, who was cast as Beth because of her ability to burp on cue, finally gets to make use of this talent when Beth belches just like her drunken dad while she knocks back wine by herself in the kitchen with the interdimensional goggles on.

* Check out the Afro puffs on the B.A. Baracus counterpart in the A-Team-inspired Ball Fondlers.

* "You know, me and Morty are having a blast. We just discovered a show called Ball Fondlers. I mean, I don't wanna rub it in or anything, but you guys clearly backed the wrong conceptual horse."

* "I'm gonna... move to the Southwest, and... I don't know, do something with turquoise!"

* "And returning for his 25th consecutive year, Bobby Moynihaaaaaaaaaaan!"

* This has to be a Harmon line, because it references both his own Community feud with Chevy Chase and Chase's behind-the-scenes SNL confrontations with Bill Murray and everyone else who worked on the show: "Interesting fun fact: uh, Moynihan and Piece of Toast hate each other. Apparently, they've got some real creative differences."

* Here's yet another sign that we're far from sappy, clean-cut Miller-Boyett territory: The post-credits tag of "Rixty Minutes" is a photo montage of the Smiths on vacation in a universe where hamsters live in people's butts.

(Photo source: Reddit)

The people who run Sleuth have no Cloo

When NBCUniversal (now one word instead of two) added Sleuth to its stable of cable channels in 2006, it was an alright idea for a channel: Nick at Nite with guns. For its first couple of years, Sleuth's 24-hour lineup was comprised of reruns of NBCUniversal-owned cop or detective shows like Dragnet, Magnum, P.I., Miami Vice and the always-worth-revisiting Homicide: Life on the Street.

But like so many other channels, of course, Sleuth has strayed from its original purpose. These days, DirecTV channel 308 is an ill-defined dumping ground for reruns of current original shows from its sister station USA (Royal Pains, In Plain Sight)--and Walker, Texas Ranger. With content like a doctor show (Royal Pains), a cop show with very little detective work because of its focus on witness protection (In Plain Sight) and a cop show with no detective work that's only watchable when Conan O'Brien's around to butt in with snarky and appalled commentary (Walker), the name Sleuth doesn't make much sense anymore. Cloo--the new name that Sleuth will assume on a yet-to-be-confirmed future date a la the still-inane 2009 conversion of its other sister station Sci Fi to Syfy--makes even less sense. What's next? NBCUniversal rebranding USA as YouSA? (They also own Telemundo. Maybe they should rename it YouEse.)

Occasionally, Sleuth has done something nice like temporarily revive a show I've longed to see again (Keen Eddie, The Rockford Files) or air a 007 marathon or the surprisingly good 1973 made-for-TV caper movie/unsold anthology show pilot The Alpha Caper, which isn't on DVD and stars Henry Fonda as a forcibly retired parole officer who teams up with the ex-cons he used to watch over--two of whom are played by Leonard Nimoy and Larry Hagman--to hijack a shipment of gold. But otherwise, as a fan of the private eye and caper genres, I've found Sleuth to be a wasted opportunity, regurgitating too many of the same broadcast network procedural reruns that can already be found on USA (House, NCIS).

Unless it's airing a White Collar episode I've never seen before or a Burn Notice rerun with a useful spy tip I need to jot down, Sleuth isn't worth my time. The channel's so cheap it doesn't have any on-air hosts or any original programming that could have given Sleuth a distinctive personality, like how breezy procedurals have become USA's forte or how FX has become synonymous with edgy comedies and gritty and violent but intelligently written dramas (the only original show that Sleuth has produced is a 2006 I Love the '80s-style special about "America's Top Sleuths").

It's owned by NBCUniversal and it's called Sleuth (that is until the name change to Cloo takes place), so why isn't the channel diving into the NBCUniversal library, with its vast history of influential crime shows, and pulling out classic sleuthy properties like Columbo (R.I.P. Peter Falk) or the other NBC Mystery Movie shows? Shouldn't a channel called Sleuth be a little, uh, sleuthier?

Also, as someone who stopped finding Law & Order interesting after an ailing Jerry Orbach left the mothership (although the later pairing of Jesse L. Martin and Jeremy Sisto was a great and too-brief one during the mothership's Law half, as was the duo of Chris Noth and Annabella Sciorra on Criminal Intent), I don't think Sleuth needs to be another repository for Criminal Intent and Special Victims Unit reruns (TNT has exclusive rights to reruns of the mothership, which explains its absence on the NBCUniversal channels' schedules). Okay, maybe Criminal Intent is tolerable once every weekday, but a five-hour Goren-thon like the ones Sleuth often does is overkill. Plus, Sleuth is the sixth channel on the dial that currently airs Criminal Intent reruns, after USA, Bravo, Oxygen, WGN and the local MyNetworkTV affiliate. Enough already, man.

"Rock Box" Track of the Day: Pixies, "Where Is My Mind?"

Song: "Where Is My Mind?" by Pixies
Released: 1988
Why's it part of the "Rock Box" playlist?: It turns up at the end of Fight Club, while the nameless Edward Norton character and his girlfriend Marla (Helena Bonham Carter) watch the results of the Norton character's plan to free everyone from the stranglehold of credit card companies by obliterating all the companies' office buildings. "The ending of the film provided a bit of a prelude to the global financial crisis that the world is currently embroiled in," says a Popdose blogger about Fight Club's final scene.

A year before Fight Club's 1999 release, the frequently covered Pixies tune made its first soundtrack appearance in the Adrien Grenier/Clark Gregg coming-of-age flick The Adventures of Sebastian Cole, which is about the strained relationship between a misfit teen and his cross-dressing stepdad and is worth checking out if you ever wanted to know what Agent Coulson from the Iron Man movies and the upcoming screen version of Thor looks like in a lady's wig, a dress and heels.

Inspired by the odd behavior of the little fish that followed around Pixies frontman Black Francis while he went scuba diving in the Caribbean ("Animals were hiding behind the rock/Except for little fish"), the tune has turned into a go-to song for conveying inner turmoil or insanity. "Where Is My Mind?" has also been used in Veronica Mars' "Driver Ed" episode, Criminal Minds, The 4400, HBO's stylish and well-produced promos for its broadcast premiere of The Dark Knight, It's Kind of a Funny Story (which features a piano-only instrumental version by French pianist Maxence Cyrin instead of the original Pixies version) and the full-frontal flasher chase scene in Observe and Report (where the flabby flasher's dick flaps back and forth in vomit-inducing, psyche-scarring slow-motion to the tune of a faithful cover version by City Wolf).

But the most effective use of "Where Is My Mind?" remains the conclusion of Fight Club. The oddly uplifting track will forever be identified with the uplifting sight of every credit card company being blown to smithereens.

Terriers, the P.I. drama that's often mistaken for an Animal Planet reality show, releases its charming theme song--and AFOS is streaming it

At comments sections and message boards about Terriers, FX's new San Diego-based series starring Donal Logue as a tenacious ex-cop-turned-unlicensed private eye and Michael Raymond-James as his equally tenacious ex-con partner, the show's viewers have constantly asked, "What is that catchy theme song? I've been whistling it all day long even though the co-worker next to me gives me this look that says 'urge to kill rising.'"

The tune is an original piece called "Gunfight Epiphany," written and performed by Terriers score composer Robert Duncan, who also wrote the opening title themes for Terriers producer Shawn Ryan's previous show The Unit and Castle (as well as the music during a hilarious score-related gag from Castle's first season). The iTunes Store released an extended version of "Gunfight Epiphany" today. (An A.V. Club commenter who prefers the Terriers theme's earlier title "Steel Neena" remarked that "Gunfight Epiphany" makes it sound like a Mars Volta B-side.)

As a fan of The Rockford Files and Veronica Mars, I've been loving the hell out of this show, a superb beach noir in the vein of Rockford and Mars. Like those two shows, Terriers skillfully balances smart-ass humor with pathos and to borrow the words of Vulture's Emily Nussbaum, "takes its characters' moral lives seriously, without ever being pompous." The creation of Ocean's Eleven and Matchstick Men screenwriter Ted Griffin, Terriers is also the sole gem in what has been an unexceptional fall TV season.

Unfortunately, Terriers has been doing so poorly ratings-wise (Mars had this problem too--why is the P.I. genre ratings Kryptonite?) that Logue and Raymond-James have embarked on a cross-country tour to spread the word about their show and host episode screenings for college campus audiences. As a show of support for Terriers, I'm adding "Gunfight Epiphany" to daily "Assorted Fistful" rotation on A Fistful of Soundtracks.

Oh, and watch Terriers Wednesday nights at 7 Pacific (10 Eastern) 10 (7 for West Coast DirecTV viewers like myself) on FX. It's far greater than its misleading (and as Logue has admitted in interviews, poorly chosen) title would have you believe.

Party Down, "Constance Carmell Wedding": "The Holo-what?"

This weekend's second-season finale of one of my current favorite shows, the Starz single-camera comedy Party Down, is rumored to be the series finale. The show's chances of being renewed by Starz have dimmed because it was a project that was nurtured by higher-ups who are no longer part of the channel staff, and they've been made even more dim by sucky ratings, as well as Party Down star and co-producer Adam Scott's decision to not return for another season (he became a regular on Parks and Recreation) and the decreasing availability of some of Scott's co-stars due to more stable employment opportunities that have emerged from pilot season. If Friday's finale was the last we see of the losers at Party Down Catering, it was a nice way to go out.

If you've never seen the underwatched Party Down, it's an uproarious and cynical portrayal of dog-eat-dog Hollywood, told through the eyes of cater-waiters who moonlight as actors, stage moms or underemployed screenwriters when they're not serving hors d'oeuvres to douchey showbiz bigwigs or the "blonde-haired nobodies with perky tits and bad skin" that Patton Oswalt encountered in one of the greatest things he ever wrote, a blog post about his miserable experience at an L.A. gifting suite (which I luckily saved to my computer before it was deleted from his blog). In other words, Party Down is the anti-Entourage. It's the darkest and funniest sitcom about not making it since Taxi.

The You Offend Me You Offend My Family blog does a wonderful series of posts called "Movies That Should Have Starred Asians." Party Down isn't a movie, but it belongs on that list. It's about failure and underemployment in Hollywood, and nobody's had it harder in that town than Asian American male actors, who have been stuck with some of the most demeaning roles in the biz. The one question I've had about Party Down throughout its run has been "Why is this group of struggling actors and screenwriters missing an Asian guy?" Now that the regular cast is without Scott (who's been terrific as Henry the lost soul and disillusioned actor who can't escape being recognized for his beer commercial catchphrase "Are we having fun yet?") and possibly Ryan Hansen, I'd be pissed if Party Down's yet-to-be-determined third season doesn't fill one of those empty spots with an Asian guy. (John Cho's without a TV series again. He'd be perfect on this show.)

Viewers who hate inside-showbiz sitcoms like Entourage or are tired of them will be relieved to know that not every episode of Party Down is about Hollywood (when HBO was initially interested in picking up Party Down, they pushed the creators, who include Paul Rudd--yes, that Paul Rudd--and Veronica Mars mastermind Rob Thomas, to make the project more of an inside-showbiz sitcom like so many other HBO shows, and the creators balked at having to recycle that exhausted genre, so Party Down ended up at Starz instead). In some eps, bumbling team leader Ron (Ken Marino, who along with Hansen, is one of many Veronica Mars alums who reteamed with their old boss on the new show) and his cater-waiters have found themselves working non-Hollywood functions like a young Republican club meeting or a college football star's NFL draft day party.

The show's versatile settings (and the rich material that arises from the waiters' reactions to each different setting and their encounters with the strangers they would mingle with) are among my favorite aspects of Party Down. The fact that the changing settings are really the soul of Party Down also means the show can never go stale, and it can survive the departure of a regular like Scott or Jane Lynch, who was an invaluable part of Party Down until she had to leave to join the cast of the surprise hit Glee. (Lynch's shoes have been ably filled this season by Megan Mullally as Lydia, an always cheery stage mom from outside of Hollywood whose lack of knowledge about the industry, pop culture or sexual slang like "cougars" and "bears" have resulted in some great reactions from her youngest co-workers, Martin Starr's self-described "hard sci-fi" screenwriter Roman and stand-up comic Casey, played by Lizzy Caplan, whose unexpected farewell to clothing in True Blood is the only reason to watch that show.)

In "Constance Carmell Wedding," Lynch reprises her role as Constance--a '70s/'80s starlet whom you might barely remember from such Skinemax mainstays as Scream Weaver, Walnuts and Dingleberries--and who's now a client instead of one of the waiters of Party Down Catering, which she hires to cater her wedding to an elderly movie producer (an initially unrecognizable and sickly-looking Alex Rocco from The Godfather and The Friends of Eddie Coyle). The inevitable meeting between Constance and her replacement Lydia does not disappoint. Seeing Lynch and Mullally share the screen while their characters compete for attention from the Party Downers is like watching one of those Doctor Who eps that unite the current actor who stars as the Doctor with a previous actor who played him, except the Doctor now has a vagina.

The element I missed the most during season two due to Lynch's absence was the dynamic between Constance and Hansen's not-too-bright actor/supermodel/skirt-chaser/wannabe emo rocker character Kyle, whom Constance was often seen giving muddled showbiz advice to. Constance's interaction with this male version of her younger self--they look alike, and at times, they even think alike!--made Kyle the seemingly douchey pretty boy an even more likable character than bitter nerd Roman, whom we were tricked into sympathizing with early on in the series until we realized, "Damn, Roman is a worse asshole than the assholes he snarks about." (In a couple of nicely underplayed dramatic moments during a first-season ep, Kyle saw a group of potential drinking buddies ridicule Constance behind her back, and then he ditched them to hang out with Constance, an applause-worthy move that's a great example of the show's unpredictable and nuanced writing and must have won over viewers who thought Kyle would be a rehash of Hansen's douchey Veronica Mars character Dick Casablancas.) The finale revisits this dynamic in a hilarious wedding reception scene where Kyle and his emo band perform a song about struggle that could have been the perfect Party Down opening theme if it weren't for certain lyrics. Kyle doesn't realize his lyrics are repulsing Constance's older Jewish guests ("Yeah, they brand you a star/Put you on the midnight train/Going very far/Line you up and give you a number/Shoot you down/Throw you away/We will not surrender!") until Constance has to interrupt him to point out the questionable imagery, to which Kyle replies, "The Holo-what?"



The finale also reaches a pivotal point in the arc of a duo that's even more interesting to watch than Yoda and Luke Runwaywalker, mostly because of the chemistry between Scott and Caplan: Henry and his equally sharp-witted, on-again/off-again girlfriend Casey, who landed a bit part in a Judd Apatow movie and has been attempting to pull Henry out of his disillusionment with acting. Since it's Scott's final ep as a regular (or if the show gets axed, it's the final ep for everybody), this often downbeat show ends with a rarely seen ray of hope when Casey becomes so distraught over getting deleted from the final cut of the Apatow flick that she... nah, if you have a PC and a Netflix account, you have to go stream the finale now to see for yourself.

Watch The Rockford Files and call to see if Paul can score some weed

Your friends do it and you've probably done it too: catch up on a show your lazy ass has put off watching by setting aside an entire weekend to view the DVD box set in one marathon sitting. Back when 24 first hit the DVD market, various writers who missed the first season chose to catch up with the show on DVD and recapped in real time what it was like to watch the first-season discs in one sitting, while a writer I used to work with picked the '80s version of The Twilight Zone for his weekend DVD marathon. A couple of years ago, those writers inspired me to do a similar marathon thing with the box sets of another cult show: The Rockford Files, Stephen J. Cannell's clever reinvention of the private eye genre, which starred James Garner in his signature role as rugged everyman gumshoe Jim Rockford.

Alright, so it's not quite a marathon. I haven't even viewed all 123 episodes yet, but my goal is to eventually see them all on DVD or via Netflix's media player for PC users. As of this writing, I haven't reached season five yet. On Inauguration Day Tuesday, Universal Studios Home Entertainment will release Rockford's sixth and final season.

I picked Rockford because I was a fan of Veronica Mars (which starred Forgetting Sarah Marshall's Kristen Bell, a Star Wars geek who should have Jedi mind-tricked the CW assclowns into bringing back her show). Before I started renting the Rockford DVDs from Netflix, I had only caught Veronica's spiritual granddaddy once or twice on cable, so I wanted to better acquaint myself with Rockford on DVD, where it's uncut and commercial-free (on Hulu, it's not commercial-free). The older the series, the more it gets chopped up by syndicators to accommodate commercial breaks, which grow annoyingly longer with each passing year. So that must mean Adventures of Superman reruns will eventually be edited down to 10 minutes, and George Reeves' flying sequences will be sped up so badly it'll look like the Metropolis underworld slipped some crank into the Daily Planet watercooler.

Rockford still draws a cult that's pretty rabid, though not quite as huge as Veronica's online fanbase. Slackers like the main character's pal in Ben Folds Five's "Battle of Who Could Care Less" (the source of the title of this post) dig Rockford reruns because Jim is one of them. They identify with a hero who'd rather go fishing with his father Rocky (Noah Beery) than do his job. The fans who still visit the alt.tv.rockford-files newsgroup continue to exchange favorite Garner wisecracks, and a couple of fan sites list every wacky message Jim received on his answering machine during the opening credits.

On disc, Rockford has aged better than most '70s shows, thanks to quirky, sharp and timeless scripts penned by staff writers like Cannell, future Sopranos creator David Chase and Juanita Bartlett. Seventies TV comes in three modes: schlocky (the Krofft variety shows, anything with Glen A. Larson's name on it), sanctimonious (M*A*S*H, Norman Lear's shrill shoutcoms) or a hideous mash-up of both (Hawaii Five-0, the "Fonzie gets a library card" era of Happy Days). Rockford is one of the few '70s shows I've seen that's neither of the above, and whenever the series did address a serious issue--like the flaws of the grand jury system in its most celebrated ep, the Bartlett-scripted "So Help Me God"--it did it with class and zero preachiness.