The Chris Gethard Show 141: Should We Keep Doing This Show?

In my last post, I talked about how network TV shows have their creative direction constantly affected by the network's ability to cancel or renew them.  In an age of long-term story arcs, the network show is never quite sure just how long it will last.  On the exact opposite end of this spectrum is The Chris Gethard Show.  A product of public-access television and Internet streaming, the show can go on for precisely as long as the creators keep showing up to the studio.  And as a call-in/variety show, Chris Gethard doesn't have to think about when a story goes on to be wrapped up.  Theoretically, this show could go on forever, or at least until New York is underwater.

This is the most absolute form of creative freedom you'll find in TV (as in most popular art forms, freedom and obscurity go hand in hand).  But as we've all learned from Uncle Ben, with great power comes great responsibility -- or, more precisely, with great freedom comes great significance.  Ending Chris Gethard would be a deliberate act, one that cannot be blamed on ratings or storylines.  There can be no "save our show" campaign, as the fans would have to uncomfortably argue that the show should be saved from those who create it[1].  I don't like to talk about "agency", but in independent art the agency of the creator is both blessing and burden.

"Should We Keep Doing This Show?" is a mostly symbolic attempt to extend this agency to the fans of the show.  The format is about as barebones as Chris Gethard gets: each caller phones in and responds to the titular question with either "yes" or "no".  After three weeks of deliberation and ambivalence by the creators, the yes-or-no format is refreshing in its directness, although it doesn't stop one caller from hemming and hawing through a longwinded list of TV analogies.

This episode is the culmination of a month-long arc titled "Evolve or Die", with each episode dealing in some way with the possible impending end of the show and the possibility of its reinvention.  This is another divergence from the chronological world of the TV series, which resists both evolution and death.  If anything, there's a palpable fear of The Chris Gethard Show becoming an institution, or even a regular job.

In part this is a discomfort with the show's success and its ever-growing cult following.  A few weeks prior, a remarkably sober panel discussed how Gethard could no longer describe himself as the underdog.  What was a scrappy public access call-in show watched by no one is now an internationally-watched show that is praised and criticized just like any other TV program (by people such as myself).

The Chris Gethard Show's improvisational interaction with its audience and friendly, accepting ethos (summed up by Mal Blum telling the audience "no one should ever be alone" the previous week) created an affectionate bond between performers and audience that was far beyond the usual relations of fandom.  Several viewers have spoke of the show as a kind of therapy.  But what is becoming increasingly clear is that this relationship is not all warm feelings, but also constitutes a responsibility, perhaps even a burden.  In previous episodes, Gethard despaired at the idea that he would have to stay on the air to keep helping people through their mental issues.  He said that it wasn't his responsibility to look after the mental health of strangers, especially at the expense of his own mental health, and that's certainly true.  But perhaps what's psychologically helpful about the show is precisely that it allows the audience to believe that they aren't strangers to Chris Gethard and the rest of the cast.

After weeks of experimentation, including the shocking cold open of "Why Did You Stop Watching The Chris Gethard Show" and the solo lunacy of "I Can Be Bad All By Myself", we get a conventional Chris Gethard opening: Murph screams at the camera, the LLC play the opening theme (sans Hallie this time), and the panel introduces us to the theme for the week.  It's a classic Chris Gethard panel too, with all of the show's regulars.  This return to convention serves two purposes in the episode.  Firstly, giving the audience what they've come to expect after weeks of scorning them is a gesture that helps invite them back into the fold.  (Although this is mitigated a moment later when Gethard chastises the audience for chanting.)  Secondly, it repeats the typical opening with the knowledge that this might be the last time it happens.

The actual call-in portion of the show is fairly straightforward.  There's some early pretense at keeping score, with Bethany drawing a tally on Jesse's chest, but pretty much everyone who calls in says "yes", and even the few who say "no" just want to see the crew work on other projects.  Whatever mixed feelings that are felt by the crew aren't shared by the audience.  This puts the creators of the show in a somewhat awkward position.

What emerges from the conversation is less a sense of creative exhaustion than physical exhaustion.  Gethard says "I'm very tired, almost all the time.  I'm growing up.  I don't know if I want to spend my whole life getting hit with broom by relative strangers".  As such, this string of episodes has felt a lot like Gethard asking the audience and the rest of the crew permission for a decision that he's already made, frustratingly disguised as a discussion.  This is permission that, for the most part, the audience refuses to give -- most if not all would be accepting of Chris's decision to end the show, but there are few "nos" among either callers or panelists.

But a funny thing happens.  A guy calls from Pakistan, and talks briefly about the weird cricket-star-lead revolution that's taking place in his country.  Gethard gets excited at the prospect of connecting to someone in such a radically different situation.  Towards the end of the episode, a guy with tattoos ased on the show calls in and proceeds to blow everyone's minds.  Far from the dejected, exhausted Gethard of "Why Did You Stop Watching?", we have the Chris Gethard of endless and uncomplicated enthusiasm, the force of positive energy that provides the ethos of the show.  He starts making plans for "If we come back".  By the end of the episode, I was distinctly more convinced that we'd see the show return than I was at the start.  The audience renewed their commitment to the performers, not by simply voting "yes" but by engaging Chris on a human level.

As usual, there's a lot more weirdness going on around the edges of the episode's main topic.  The set of The Chris Gethard Show is designed to convey total anarchy: there's Mimi on the Hoops, a man behind the plant, and a bunch of people in costumes sitting behind the main action.  These aspects are rarely commented on, but there's a sense that any one of these people could step up and become the protagonist of the show at any time.  Starting with its tradition of including "randoms" on the panel, The Chris Gethard Show has made the line between performer and audience porous to the point of nonexistence.

This sense of anarchy extends to the show's proceedings, where unexpected tangents often take on a life of their own.  The most notable example was a monologue by the Human Fish.  Besides being a great visual, the Human Fish usually doesn't do much more than his typical "A vs. B" judgement.  But suddenly, he speaks at length, and of course he has a complex inner life, and the flimsy backstory about him being here to learn about human society becomes meaningful and even touching.  The moments that have been self-conscious markers for the show's dumbness, like the "eat a burrito off my belly" episode, are moments of hope here.  When he announces that he will be returning to the sea, it's a more poetic rationale for why it might be time to end the show than any other justification made over the last month.

Less memorable is a recurring bit where the writers try out "characters we have to get on the show before it ends", which are of course all stupid one-note puns (Santa and Satan, Dr. Heckle and Mr. Snyde, the Nun-Chucks).  The purpose of The Chris Gethard Show's writers, as the show is usually better when it's being spontaneous, and as such the writing has often been the but of jokes.  This hews pretty close to the alt-comedy isn't-it-funny-to-think-someone-would-laugh-at-this routine, which I'm not a big fan of.  But even these jokes are enlivened by the positive energy that flows through The Chris Gethard Show, which suggests that maybe terrible puns deserve to be celebrated as well.

If this is the last episode of the show, it will be an odd one but definitely a fitting one.  Lots of television series, some quite mainstream, have done self-reflexive finales, but I can't think of any that have tackled the act of ending a beloved show so head-on.  But even with such a seemingly depressing topic, so much positivity comes flooding in through the phone lines and the energy of the performers.  Even the grimmest episode of "Evolve or Die" had a moment where a story about Gethard going to a baseball game made everyone crack up.  Even though I hope the show comes back, there would be no more appropriate way to end than everyone beaming and trying not to laugh at the end of a night they were prepared to be miserable.

[1]Although this hasn't stopped Doctor Who fans over the past decade.

Samurai Flamenco 2: My Umbrella Is Missing

We're all familiar with the superhero genre, and the kind of ethical calculus that it's made cliche. Over and over again, in comics and in movies, we learn that with great power comes great responsibility, that we need to break the law in order to enforce justice, and that it is up to heroic individuals to make the world safe for the rest of us. This has become so generic that we no longer notice its odder elements: how superheroes violate law and order in order to uphold it, or how they are simultaneously a symbol of patriotic strength and national weakness.

Samurai Flamenco makes these contradictory elements of the superhero myth visible. The titular hero is obsessed with pursuing law – not the abstract Platonic ideal of law that most heroes hold themselves to, but obscure bylaws and regulations. It deals with the modern experience of law and governmentality, in which control appears not as a massive centralized god, good or evil, but through a thousand petty fiefdoms. The comedy stems from Samurai Flamenco (the character, not the series) mistaking the reality of law for the fantasy, and engaging in a quixotic quest to punish jaywalkers and litterers across Tokyo. This is goofy humour, but it wouldn't be funny if it didn't draw on deep and somewhat dark contradictions in our world.

The first episode of Samurai Flamenco established the outlandish premise of the series and focused on the collision of Hazama's idealism and reality. This collision occured in both the physical confrontation between Hazama and the wayward youths and the conversations between Hazama and the skeptical Goto. “My Umbrella is Missing” goes more into the ethos of Hazama's quest, taking it seriously in a way the first episode didn't.

The episode opens with a run-in between Flamenco and a middle-aged woman who takes her garbage out thirty-five minutes too early. Flamenco already has a prepared speech, which comes off as compensation: he proclaims that “They call me Samurai Flamenco”, as if he did not create the identity for himself, and insists that “I am not a suspicious character”. Instead of the hero meeting the call of danger, as Joseph Campbell would have it, in Samurai Flamenco the heroic persona comes first and then later searches for danger.

Having been confronted by an enforcer of minor laws, the woman goes to the police. This seemingly natural response shows how deeply engrained law has become in our psyche: the only response to its imposition is to turn to other forces of law. The police initially decline to pursue Flamenco, but their very act of calming resident fears turns them into another version of Flamenco: their chief business is attempting to suppress harmless acts. We then see Goto putting out his own garbage early, suggesting the kind of everyday hypocrisy that problematizes Goto's own claim to be an enforcer of the law.

This is what Samurai Flamenco draws its humour from: the essential meaninglessness, or at least fluidity, of the term “crime” or “criminal” in everyday life. We are all criminals, whether it be copying a file in the wrong way or driving at a steady 10 miles above the speed limit. In this way the system of law draws us all into its web, ensuring our daily interaction, visible or invisible, with the state. But despite the fact that we all break the law, we also have a kind of reverence for it, as seen in figures like the superhero. We believe in a platonic ideal of law and order that has little relation to the petty bureaucratic regime – and it is this gap between ideas and reality that Samurai Flamenco finds so hard to grasp.

This episode chooses a curious example of everyday crime: umbrella theft. I'm assuming that this is a Japanese cultural thing, as I've never heard North Americans describe taking someone else's umbrella on a rainy day as normal behavior. To us, it would appear to be a tremendous imposition on private property, even if the money value lost was negligible. Thus we have an episode in which all of the characters wonder why Hazama cares so much about stolen umbrellas, while the Western viewer wonders why they care so little. Ironically, this destabilizes the idea of law even more, making clear to a Western viewer that both the particularities of law and the social enforcement of it differ between societies. If even the abstract idea of Law is different in different places, then perhaps it does not exist at all.

At its root, the umbrella theft depicted in this episode is a version of the “tragedy of the commons”. This idea, so often repeated by the defenders of capitalism, is that private property is necessary in order to compel people to behave responsibly. As the usual example goes, if no one is the owner of a field used for grazing, no one will have motivation to maintain that field, and eventually the utopian idea of a common field will go to waste. Similarly, by ignoring the protections of private property, umbrella theft leaves well-meaning individuals to get caught in the rain, as with the sick child in the story Hazama tells.

Our superhero's origin story, in addition to being humorously mundane (the tragic death is instead a tragic flu), can also function as an origin story for capitalism. This episode stacks the deck by attaching a charm from Goto's absent girlfriend to his stolen umbrella. The umbrella is not just a device to keep dry, but stands in for a genuine human relationship. For Goto, the love of his long-distance girlfriend is conveyed entirely through objects, whether it be the charm or the cell phone on which she sends him text messages.

“My Umbrella is Missing” transforms the capitalist norms of private property into affective relationships [1]. The climax of the episode consists of Flamenco racing a train in order to recover Goto's umbrella. This reverses the imagery of popular quasi-anticapitalist narratives: we have human physicality against cold machinery and personal relations against an indifferent society, but the right to property [2] is identified with the heroic individual and romantic relationships, while the cold machine is identified with a kind of descent into communitarian anarchy. This kind of reverse Ludditism is not new, but was predominant in capitalist art during the Cold War, with the heroic entrepreneurs of Atlas Shrugged being perhaps Exhibit One.

Obviously Flamenco's quest is meant to be silly, but the musical cues and Goto's reactions in this episode suggest that there is a kind of nobility to it. It may be quixotic, but Quixote was after all fighting for moral values. The moment we are supposed to begin thinking that there is something to Flamenco's quest is not when he is standing up for collectively-determined bureaucratic rules such as garbage collection dates or noise ordinances, but when he is standing up for our right to our possessions. The umbrella plot suggests the possibility of a Samurai Flamenco that is fundamentally reactionary in the same way that most superhero narratives are.

But I think there's also a progressive, or at least disruptive, Samurai Flamenco, that has a habit of picking away at easy narratives. The deconstructionist bent of the show is on full display in the scene in which Hazama performs in a video for the idol group Mineral Miracle Muse (the name a parody of Morning Musume). We were first introduced to MMM in the ending credits, which initially seemed like the ED to an entirely different show. That show would be the cliche idol show that exists for little other purpose than to have cute girls acting moe. Credits sequences, like music videos, are more or less narrative-free images. Even in more or less realist shows, the credits often indulge in spectacle, with a prime example being in fact the opening credits of Samurai Flamenco, which depict Flamenco battling a giant robot.

The ending credits in the first episode present us with a spectacular image of idealized femininity. We don't understand why we're seeing the image, but at the same time the image itself is immediately comprehensible, thanks to the larger culture we're immersed in [3]. In the second episode, we see the creation of the image. Rather than existing in itself, the image is placed within the context of economic production. We get to see not just the cameras that shoot the idol singers, but the financial and professional forces that shaped the video.

Of course, the knowledge that music videos are produced instead of appearing out of the ether is hardly deconstructionist. The narratives of creation have themselves become vital images in our culture: the brilliant artist hard at work, the Behind the Music narrative arc. What's new in Samurai Flamenco is Hazama's total disengagement with the image he's part of.

Hazama seems to be on autopilot for most of his work as a model. He allows his pushy agent to construct his public image. Hazama is more concerned with another public image, that of his masked alter-ego. While speakers are playing MMM's upbeat pop music, Hazama is singing along in his head to a sentai hero's theme song. At first we don't hear either song, making the group's dancing appear hollow and disconnected. Then, we hear both songs at once. Both are commercial products contained within a spectacular image: the pop album and the action figure. But the juxtaposition makes both appear ridiculous and jarring. These pop-cultural images are very familiar to us, but Samurai Flamenco juxtaposes them in order to make us hear them anew, and recognize them for the empty spectacles that they are.

I haven't seen the rest of Samurai Flamenco, but I've heard from ripples across the Internet that it takes a rather darker turn in later episodes. This doesn't really surprise me. The first two episodes of the series are overtly comedic in tone, but the comedy is based on some pretty bleak ideas. It is not just that we will never live up to our dreams, or that our dreams are ultimately only empty images. It is that our dreams are ultimately just as sad and petty as the rest of our lives. Hazama risks everything to fight for truth and justice, and ends up harassing people about their recycling. American TV has recently been consumed by dramas about the question of means versus ends, or whether evil means justify a good end. Samurai Flamenco doesn't let that good end be – instead, it reveals law and morality to be an elaborate joke. The darkness is not what we do to reach our goals, but the goals themselves.

[1] Most advertisements do a similar thing, transforming a consumer object into an affective statement or the embodiment of a personal relationship.

[2]Technically speaking, an umbrella is a possession, not property in the typically Marxist sense. No communist is going to want to take away your umbrella. I'm arguing that in this narrative it serves as a symbol for genuine property, such as the land in the traditional “tragedy of the commons” story.

[3]For Western viewers not familiar with anime tropes or idol culture, this may instead be another cultural gap.

The Weekly Wipe 1-01

The Weekly Wipe is ostensibly a new series, but it really isn't. Charlie Brooker has been doing his sardonic examination of television, the news, and the weird spectacle that results when they intersect for four series of Screenwipe, two series of Newswipe and various one-off specials, as well as his columns. The Weekly Wipe name seems to mostly signify that the show has moved to BBC2. The theme song is the same as previous Wipe series, and the opening graphics are in the same vein as Brooker's previous shows. As such there is little to nothing in the way of introductory material, and really noting to tell a new viewer what the show's all about. There's a reassuring aspect to this, especially for a long-time fan. Brooker has probably made enough programs that he no longer counts as a jaded outsider to the world of television, but he still acts like one. It's a routine that might have grown old if it weren't for the continued amount of material that the inane world produces.

Brooker's role is to be a kind of surrogate TV watcher: while he is ostensibly the object of our attention, he is really a kind of ally on our side of the screen, helping us react to the true objects of the program. This is the same kind of relationship between viewer/subject and object that is present in shows like Mystery Science Theatre 3000. We are literally watching someone watching TV, but they are watching TV better than we ever could, never lacking a witty remark or a cogent analysis.

This triangulated viewing is sort of insidious and sort of disruptive. It is insidious because it makes us forget that we are watching a product of the entertainment industry and, in the case of the BBC, the state: by making Charlie Brooker an ally in our cynical viewing of television, The Weekly Wipe allows us to forget to apply the same cynical lens to Brooker himself. The Weekly Wipe, a product of the media as much as anything else, masquerades as the anti-TV show. Like AdBusters, it literally sells us the idea of not buying.

But this is perhaps too cynical. There is a generally disruptive edge to Brooker's point of view. What he calls attention to is not the worst of television (although the egregiously bad usually does make an appearance) but the sheer banality of most of what the medium broadcasts, endless hours of C-list celebrities doing trivial tasks, news presenters waiting around for something to happen, and go-nowhere discussion of minor political scandals. Call it the vast wasteland argument redux: with thousands of hours of television produced every day, most of them are not so much offensive as oppressively meaningless.

Brooker makes the unusual decision to start this episode with a barrage of actually significant news stories. He begins with strife in North Africa, about which he can barely manage a joke, then moves on to Iran's space program, followed by a ruckus about a Jimmy Saville caricature appearing on a British kid's show. All of these are quick, twenty-second bits, but already in them there's a kind of trajectory from serious, real-world issues which Brooker's snark-infused, pop-culture-saturated view can barely address, to issues of media representation which are more awkward than anything else. These items are never brought up again in the episode, but their presence suggests the possibility of a different Weekly Wipe, a perhaps more serious show that focused more on what's soberly termed “current affairs”. Maybe something more along the lines of Newswipe. By opening Mali and then immediately jumping into The Tweenies and Lance Armstrong, Brooker almost seems to be engaging in a moment of self-critique: “Sure, we could have a serious discussion about a bloody war that you don't know anything about, but that's not what either of us are here for”. Brooker both gestures towards the higher aims of a program like Newswipe and dismisses them in one motion.

The actual opening bit is an analysis of Lance Armstrong's public “fall from grace” and how it was a media spectacle from beginning to end. Whereas sports media played Armstrong's steroid trials as a tragedy, Brooker pictures it as a comedy, where a man continually denies what everyone knows and then finally makes a tearful confession, expecting all to be surprised. The truth of the matter is that Armstrong has very little to apologize for, especially when most of his opponents in the Tour de France were also doping, but Armstrong plays the whole thing with such awkward self-seriousness that it's hard not to laugh. The clip where he responds to accusations by saying “I'm sorry you can't believe in miracles” is particularly hilarious.

As such Brooker has very little work to do. The attraction of The Weekly Wipe and its predecessors is how they put together these news stories, which one has undoubtedly heard told several different ways through our diffuse but strangely repetitive media, in a way that is both concise and captures the story's inherent ridiculousness. This episode uses the ad clips that try to sell Armstrong's tell-all with Oprah like a pay-per-view boxing match, which would have otherwise been instantly lost to the archives, to reveal how Armstrong's confession was a media-generated spectacle from start to finish. Brooker makes a good crack about Armstrong visibly turning into Tony Blair, but his commentary is really superfluous.

The conclusion to the segment focuses on Channel 4's coverage of the news, which featured a long series of man-on-the-street interviews of “people sitting on or near bicycles”. This is exactly the kind of banal, material I discussed above, which is meant to be instantly forgotten as the dead air of 24-hour news networks. But this is the material that the news is turning to more and more, as budgets are slashed and social media starts breaking stories: instead of figuring out what's going on, news anchors are content to ask you what you think is going on. This is democratic and even in some ways admirable, but it does make one wonder what the point of watching the TV news is when you can just read Twitter directly. By going into the memory hole and retrieving this unremarkable segment of television, The Weekly Wipe highlights the mental bankruptcy of the contemporary news media. Instead of spending ten minutes interviewing strangers on bikes, which probably took up the better part of some poor anchor's day and a lot of film, they could be trying to figure out what's going on in, oh I don't know, Mali – there's that bit at the beginning again.

The next segment moves into even further inanity with a segment on Splash!, which might as well be titled Diving with the Stars, except that might have actually been another show (my memory is hazy on this). Brooker describes the show as trying to cash in on the feel-good moments of the Olympics, but ending up as just another reality show with C-list celebrities doing inane tasks like falling into water. What The Weekly Wipe is so good at is focusing on the parts of TV we're not supposed to think about, and are barely supposed to remember: advertisements, for one, but also filler shots like the ones of Olympian Tom Daly wandering around poolside in his suit, meant to be self-serious window dressing but highlighted as absurd when isolated from context and given a pithy description by Brooker.

Notably, the surprisingly extensive dissection of Splash! focuses not on what Splash! wants the viewer to take away from it – the identity of the “celebrities”, the athletic prowess of Daly, funny moments and inspiring moments – but rather the overall structure of the program, and how hollow it is. In this it's not too different from the work I've been doing on this blog, although with pithy jokes instead of extensive theoretical tangents. For instance, Brooker calls attention to how, since diving only takes about five seconds, there's a lot of filler, that TV white space I was describing above. Reading a text against the grain doesn't always mean proclaiming it terrible or revealing all of its hidden reactionary agendas. Sometimes it means looking at the contradictions and suppressed contexts. Other times it just means paying attention to the 67 minutes of a NFL game that consist of standing around, instead of the 11 minutes of play you're supposed to remember.

Brooker's figure is not, however, that of the critic, and he would probably never use phrases like “reading a text against the grain”. His persona is that of the everyman sitting on the couch and yelling at the TV – the everyman-turned-critic. If Brooker does not give us virtuoso close readings of a given television show, it is perhaps by design. The boorish shouts and one-liners that intersperse TV clips suggest to the viewer that critical viewing is ultimately not difficult and arcane but is within all of our mental grasps. Seeing criticism like this can be empowering in a way that academic discourse is not. However, there are risks to this egalitarian promise. The first is that we might come to believe that shouting at the TV is enough, and that being able to joke about the crap we watch makes us immune to its effects. The second risk is that we might instead just choose to watch cultural figures like Brooker or Joel McHale on The Soup digest our culture for us, turning their criticism into just another product to be consumed.

Brooker experiments later in the episode with adding additional voices to The Weekly Wipe, suggesting alternative models of criticism. This is something that Brooker has done throughout his run, with the most notable other voices being the short films of Adam Curtis, which practice more wide-ranging cultural criticism, and the monologues by Doug Stanhope. Curtis is unfortunately nowhere to be found, but Stanhope does have a segment situated around his perspective as an American.

This Stanhope segment is a bit different from earlier ones, as it cuts between Stanhope giving a monologue to the camera, sitting on a couch in the middle of the road (the natural dwelling place of Americans). The two speeches seem absolutely identical, with a perfect flow between them, and this highlights the artificiality of Stanhope's schtick. Stand-up comedy is meant to sound spontaneous and effortless, like someone speaking off the cuff or going on a rant about something that's been bugging them, but of course in reality it is carefully prepared, practiced, and memorized down to the last word. The way this segment is edited suggests that ultimately, while Stanhope may pretend to be the libidinal voice of the common man, his comedy is ultimately a produced routine like anything else.

The content of Stanhope's routine is interesting because it seems to go against the , and not just because it argues that, as Brooker sarcastically summarizes, “America is great”. Stanhope argues, with some degree of irony, that all of America's base entertainments and trashy products are something to be celebrated. He describes a hypothetical British person's amazement at the options on a breakfast menu and the bizarre way in which Americans pour drinks. Stanhope's premise is faulty here, as it's doubtful that any Briton would be surprised by American culture, which has infested the rest of the world. Still, there is something to his argument. All other things being equal, it is better to have ten different ways to do your eggs, or frozen hotdog-on-a-sticks. These things may be trashy and in bad taste, but they make people happy. We have to pay attention to the insidious underside of this abundance – “the wars and the torture” that Stanhope refers to – but that doesn't make the abundance itself bad, as the AdBusters clan would have it, but the ways in which the abundance is produced. Even when it comes to the junk television that Brooker likes to lampoon, surely it's better to have 500 channels of junk like we do today than to have 3 channels of junk like in the 60s.

This kind of crass hedonism, whatever its merits, goes distinctly against the ethos of Brooker's critical practice. It is the editorial reply designed to give balance. Stanhope's segment also acts, like the opening clip from Mali, as a way of suggesting the limits to Brooker's work. By cross-cutting between separate but identical routines, The Weekly Wipes suggests how ironic and humorous approaches to popular culture can be entirely complicit with the culture industry. Stanhope believes that he is in on the joke, but the real joke is that it doesn't matter whether or not you're in on the joke, because you're still eating at Denny's just like the unironic slob next to you[1]. Brooker at his best aims to elevate his criticism beyond a mere ironic knowing, and Stanhope's segment shows why.

There are two new segments for the new series which attempt to add more voices to play off Brooker's. One is “Points Off You”, which mostly consists of Brooker reading the vilest and most inane social media comments on the events he's been discussing. He does dredge up some bad comments, but so could anyone with a working Internet connection, and Brooker's comments just seem like obvious chiding. One could accuse this segment of the same “let's see what on Twitter” approach as much of the contemporary news media. The other is something of a panel discussion on Django Unchained with two nervous British comedians, which never really goes anywhere, mostly because it requires Brooker to be the straight man against the not particularly outrageous guests. In these two segments the series is attempting to engage with different voices, even in a purely confrontational way, and introduce some different-looking material from previous Wipe shows. But thus far The Weekly Wipe is not really sure about how to execute these segments, and it shows.

The best voices here are made-up ones, the everyman duo of Barry Shitpeas and Philomena Cunk. Brooker uses these characters as a kind of counterexample to the cynical but informed viewing he practices in the bulk of the episode. Barry and Philomena suggest not so much that TV viewers are stupid, but that an uncritical viewing of television gets you to believe some very stupid things.

In this episode we get their reactions to the serious nature doc series Africa. This segment produces the funniest lines of the episode, with descriptions of animals such as “hairy men monsters, tall horse monsters that run around like deck chairs would if deck chairs ran, and these kind of vagina head monsters that fight in ponds” or “looks like they filmed Rocky in two giraffes by mistake”. There's a kind of childish, almost endearing quality to Barry Shitpeas's ignorance that makes him the most strictly humorous character on any of Brooker's programs.

But in their own way Barry and Philomena reveal as much through their commentary as Charlie Brooker does. The ignorance of their characters allows them to be convinced that there are no people in Africa, which reveals how Africa erases millions of suffering people and millennia of African culture in order to make a nice animals how. The Weekly Wipe uses willful stupidity as another way of reading against the grain. It applies intelligence to a dumb show like Splash! and applies stupidity to a supposedly intelligent and highbrow show like Africa, and both approaches work well. There's a kind of power to brazenly ignoring the cultural codes that we all take as a given, which is why TV characters from Homer Simpson to Tony Soprano captivate us as much as they repel us.

The segment that follows is Brooker's attempt at a serious political riff, this time on the gun control debates in the USA. The overall argument is that America is a country gone mad, and not mad in an entertaining, goofy way like Stanhope argues. The music drops down into a deeper register that suggests a mounting doom underneath the silly distractions of television. There are a few great bits in this segment, such as footage from an office training video that suggests employees run and hide in the event of a shooting, but for the most part it doesn't feel that different from something that would air on MSNBC. Brooker is not saying anything controversial or even original, and by locating the problem strictly in America he allows himself and his primary audience to take a distanced perspective that doesn't require any self-reflection or really any action more than a tut-tutting about the barbarians across the pond.

This risk is always present throughout Brooker's work, as well as in similar series such as The Daily Show and The Soup. It's easy for a viewer to come away from these programs thinking they are superior to the shows that Brooker mocks, that they are sitting at the cool kids' table and all that is needed to fix the world is for other people to stop being such idiots. An effective politics, to say nothing of a meaningful life, requires both self-examination and a capacity for empathy with others despite their problematic traits. If we start believing that we are better than other people because of the products we buy or the TV shows we watch then we are falling into capitalism's lies no matter how much irony we may do it with.

I would argue that Brooker falls into this trap much less than, say, Jon Stewart. While The Daily Show presents a cheering crowd and a supporting cast that lionize Stewart as a heroic truth-teller. Brooker, on the other hand, almost always appears alone, sitting on his couch in a dimly-lit room. If he is a target for viewer identification, he is also a sad image, a withdrawn and bitter loser who takes his rage out on harmless TV spectacles. To align ourselves with Brooker through the act of viewing is also to call into question what we're doing watching TV in the first place.

Political issues come up again in the episode's final segment, in which Brooker gives a sarcastic commentary to a fawning BBC interview with Prince Harry, who is currently bombing Afghan civilians. Brooker mocks the banality of the report, as well as Harry's remarks comparing the war to a video game, but he really doesn't touch on the ideological underpinning of the report, which tries to make a brutal war of occupation into a soft human interest story using the image of the Royal Family as a bizarre synecdoche of modern Britain. Brooker presents this interview as banal fluff, putting it in the same category as something like Splash!, but that doesn't really capture the sickness of a news media that would air something like this.

Brooker is at risk of becoming a cuddly curmudgeon, the type of figure that gets paid to come out and do his misanthropic schtick to a cheering audience. Or he could use his program as the opportunity to do genuine criticism in the public sphere, showing viewers a new way to look at not just TV but the world around them. This episode has more of the former, but it has enough of the latter to keep me interested. If there's anyone that can validate the meta TV show as more than just a simulacrum, it would be Brooker.

[1]Did The Weekly Wipe set Stanhope up to look bad? I don't know, and intent really doesn't matter. I wouldn't put it past Brooker and his crew to intentionally use Stanhope as a foil for Brooker's cynicism. But the style that makes this segment so exposing could just stem from an attempt to promote Stanhope's stand-up show, or from a director who's been watching too much Louie.

Community 4-08: Herstory of Dance

It's kind of hard to talk about any fourth-season episode of Community without placing it in comparison to the first three seasons, which have been reduced to a homogenous mass of quality, ignoring the ways in which Community has always varied greatly from season to season and even episode to episode. If we want to praise a fourth-season episode, we say that it could comfortably fit into the first or second season. Most of this discourse is the very boring discussion of quality and "jumping the shark" which takes up so much of TV criticism. A lot of it is also grounded in the figure of Dan Harmon as auteur, an idea which ignores not just the death of the author and all that jazz but the hundreds of other people that make Community what it is [1]. Another issue with the way people talk about this season of Community is that it papers over both the discontinuities within the Harmon-led seasons and the continuities between new and old.

Despite the undeniable changes, the fourth season of Community is engaging with the same question as the second and third (maybe not so much the first) were: in a cultural landscape cluttered with a century of pop-cultural referents and a thick layer of irony and media-savviness, how is it possible to create something as seemingly straightforward and sentimental as a sitcom? How can we get past our postmodern detachment and recognition of having seen this all before in order to reach some kind of genuine moment of catharsis, whether it be a big emotional Winger speech or simply a belly laugh?

"Herstory of Dance" attempts to grapple with this problem in several ways. Plot-wise, it's a very conventional sitcom episode. The A-plot is about a character telling a small lie, and piling increasingly ridiculous lies on top of it to avoid embarrassment, which is the basic formula for many if not most sitcom episodes. The B-plot is about a character going on two dates at once, which is openly lampshaded as a cliche. Every joke carries with it the weight of history; we cannot watch it without being aware that this, like any other sitcom episode, is a rehashing and recombination of long-established tropes.

Maybe that last bit isn't entirely true. There are sitcoms that occasionally have the power to surprise, and certainly plenty of sitcoms that do their best to make the viewer see their content in a straightforward way, not comparing it to comedies past.. But Community sees this all as misdirection. In its view, every TV show (and maybe every cultural product) is a rearticulation of what's come before, and that's wonderful. It celebrates the cultural literacy of itself and its viewers, and maintains a half-ironic, half-sentimental relationship to the hackiest of plotlines. This is true in not just the broader sweep of the plot but also small gags that work as tributes, like the line of tape between the two dances in this episode, reminiscent of every sitcom "feuding siblings split the house in two" plot. Abed has become the core of the show because he's simultaneously the most culturally literate and the least cynical. Unlike Jeff (the ostensible lead) who simply disdains the predictability of the world around him, Abed celebrates it and makes it work for him.

These ideas, and the ways in which "Herstory of Dance" communicates them to various degrees of success, are all circulating in the opening scene. This is one of Community's much-vaunted table scenes, where the characters interact with each other and make jokes at each others' expense without the pressure of an ongoing narrative. These moments are kind of utopian, just long enough for one to get a glimpse of the kind of camaraderie and free exchange that exists when the group is in stasis before the events of any given episode disrupt this status quo. They're usually the funniest part of the episode, and one often feels the desire for a whole episode of nothing but the study group sitting around the table chatting. Part of me thinks that such an episode would be the best thing Community has ever done, and its best episodes are usually ones that hew close to the study space but never entirely dissolve into plotlessness ("Competitive Calligraphy" and "Remedial Chaos Theory" com to mind). On the other hand, fully giving into the temptations of simply hanging out with the characters would probably result in disappointment. Maybe it's best if the study space hang-out is some glimmering place we can only ever see glimpses of.

We get especially few glimpses here, as the plot intrudes early. What back-and-forth there is centres around the Pierce-designed American version of Inspector Spacetime, a callback to a plotline in the generally (and somewhat unfairly) pilloried "Conventions of Space and Time". This is ultimately then not much of a table scene (although it was more of one in my memory of the episode), so the big paragraph above about the utopian space of the study-room table is conjured entirely by the presence of the study-room set. Which may just speak to my ability to be easily sidetracked, but I think it also demonstrates how sets can build up complex emotional associations over the course of a show, sitting right in the centre of series space. As a single-camera comedy, Community doesn't have a lot of sets that have this quality, but the study room definitely does.

The Inspector Spacetime jokes aren't funny, but they do serve an important purpose here. In its opening seconds "Herstory of Dance" draws the same dichotomy that fans and critics draw all the time -- between somewhat obscure but clever and complex cultural objects and popular but simple and stupid ones. The dichotomy between the British and American versions of, well, anything usually illustrate this [2]. Community aligns itself with the obscure and the outsider, befitting its status as a cult television show.

If we imagine TV shows as existing in a Bordieu-esque cultural field, Community has made a conscious move towards the sphere of autonomous art, although not necessarily the kind of avant-garde work that Bordieu meant by that term. Instead it gestures towards the status of the cult, which falls somewhere in the middle in terms of cultural prestige, esteemed by nerds and pop-culture aficionados (like Abed) but not necessarily by a higher cultural authority (although one wonders whether such authorities even exist in a significant form today). Community has made similar moves in the past by referencing cult texts ranging from Dungeons & Dragons to spaghetti westerns, but the connotations of these references are distinctly different. With the dismissal of Dan Harmon fans are more inclined to see new Community episodes as not autonomous works of genius but as a commercial production affected as much by studio whims as by artistic inspiration. So the kind of references and in-jokes that would once be seen as simply a natural expression of the show's cult aesthetic can now be read as an attempt to preserve that aesthetic and reassure fans that Community is still Community. The exact same joke or reference could take on radically different meanings depending on which season it occurred in. This is not to suggest that either of the previously-mentioned readings are incorrect or distorted, but rather that a text's meaning is always rooted in the historical conditions of its production and reception.

There's a much more natural and effective example of meta-humour that immediately follows this, which is the black-and-white Dean that comes in to invite the group to a "classic Greendale dance" (another reference to the show's past). This is a great visual gag that the costume commits utterly to, which makes it all the more jarring. The Dean's black-and-white image stands in contrast to the typically bright colours that Community uses, and he literally looks like a segment of film cut from an old film or TV show and transplanted inside the world of Community. The Dean is not dressed as anything natural, but as a mediated image. His jarring presence within the colour world of the study room also makes us see the seemingly natural world of the TV mise-en-scene as an artificial, mediated image as well. This defamiliarization, the act of making the audience aware that it is watching a TV show, is the result of much of the Community's meta-humour, but the Dean's costume defamiliarizes in a way that is new and hence much more productively jarring. And all of this without much in the way of explicit reference to or discussion of his costume.

So anyway, the Dean's announcement of the Sadie Hawkins dance leads to Britta calling out the fake feminism of that kind of event and proposing a counter-dance. Of course, she confuses Susan B. Anthony with 90s alt-folk singer Sophie B. Hopkins, and spends the rest of the episode scrambling to cover up this mistake. As in most of the plotlines that draw on her quasi-activist side, Britta is more or less right about the dance, which sort of makes me uncomfortable with how ridiculous the show makes her. Britta's a much stronger character when the writers get away from the trope of the flighty, superficial female activist, which is both reactionary and misogynist (see also: Bluth, Lindsay). Of course, this is a comedy and it has no obligation to play anything straight, but it's disappointing to see a generally intelligent program fall back on hoary stereotypes that ultimately make any kind of political engagement look ridiculous [3]. Abed's pop culture obsession, on the other hand, is the source of a lot of jokes while nevertheless being presented as valuable and worthwhile in a sincere way.

But politics aren't really the point of "Herstory of Dance", despite a title that references the long-mocked rhetoric of 1970s feminism. The A-plot quickly becomes about Britta's stubbornness and refusal to admit she's made a mistake. Again, this is a standard sitcom theme, and interestingly enough it's one that isn't openly identified within the episode. The usual story of this type would result in increasingly strained and ridiculous attempts to maintain the charade, with lies piling upon lies until the whole thing collapses, the lying character fesses up, and there's a moment of cathartic reconciliation. This is not what happens here.

Britta is mentored in duplicity by Pierce, who identifies with her desire to not give Jeff the satisfaction of his usual cooler-than-thou mockery. As others, this is a bit of a rehabilitative turn for Pierce, whose character has basically degenerated to a stock racist old coot since his central role in the second season. Even if he is motivated purely by spite, he is unusually supportive of Britta and ultimately responsible for the plot's happy ending. Chevy Chase's affect in this episode is even notably different from usual, less angry and more happy and open.

Moreover, through the scenes of Pierce sympathizing with and supporting Britta, "Herstory of Dance" introduces the idea that being the butt of a joke matters, and it's something that characters like Britta and Pierce are aware of and have to live with. Which is really one of the central ideas that "Herstory of Dance" and Community at large insist on: jokes, the ways we tell them, and the ways we remember them, matter. Using "Britta" as a synonym for "mess up" is funny, and Community lets us laugh at it, but it also reminds us that it's much less funny if you're Britta. A seemingly extraneous scene of Jeff berating Britta, right after the premise is established, helps to reinforce the stakes and produce Jeff's status as the cool jokester as a kind of hierarchical position. Jeff physically looms over Britta in the scene, which is in part simply due to the heights of Joel McHale and Gillian Jacobs, but the framing of the camera specifically seems to emphasize the smallness of Britta. By contrast, in both the opening and scene Jeff and Britta are seated, in a position of equality and equilibrium, and in the conclusion Jeff sits down when he admits he has been bested.

This scene is repeated a couple times as Britta's pretense that she originally meant Sophie B. Hawkins balloons into a pretense that Hawkins herself will play the dance. We anticipate the usual payoff of confession, forgiveness, and reunion, but then Sophie B. actually shows up, summoned by some obscure Pierce magic. When Jeff asked if she did it, Britta says "If it's possible to make something happen by willing it, then yes". While there's a plot explanation for it, "Herstory of Dance" subtly suggests that yes, perhaps it is possible to make something happen by willing it -- or by proclaiming it forcefully enough. The lie becomes truth, and discourse becomes reality. Instead of Britta being punished for her deceit, her stubborn pride and insistence on a coherent narrative -- her "commitment to the bit", as Jeff puts it -- ultimately win the day.

An ending like this could only be found in a comedy as thoroughly postmodern as Community. Not only does the main plot of "Herstory of Dance" invert the usual sitcom moralism, it draws on the idea that our discourse and the stories we tell ultimately shape the reality we see around us. The struggle over the definition of "Britta" in this episode suggests the mutability of language and discourse. "Britta" was first simply a name signifying an individual, but it eventually came on to take on a second meaning of "screw up", which of course stemmed from and influenced the meaning of Britta the person. This suggests that rather than there being a simple one-way relationship between a word and its meaning (or its sign and its signifier, if you will) the two are part of a complicated web of ideas. Community celebrates this mutability of meaning and the free play of signifiers, most frequently in its rapidfire wordplay but also in larger plots such as this one.

The B-plot in "Herstory of Dance" also rests on distinctly postmodern grounds (which is to say grounds that are shaky, uncertain, and possibly entirely ficticious). Abed re-enacts a plot from countless sitcoms by trying to go on two dates at the same time. As is typical of Abed (and of Community) he does it not out of any interest in either of the women involved but out of a desire to fulfill a trope. "I'll get to wear two outfits, mix up their names, maybe hide under a table" he enthuses.

This is more than a simple lampshade hanging. Community emphasizes the performative aspect of comedy. The humour in Community does not arise from an unplanned and organic collision of characters but from people actively deciding to be comedic characters. In the background of this episode is Troy desperately trying to create a set of wacky hijinx, openly attempting to put together a comedic plot as a rival to Abed's. "Herstory of Dance" also suggests that, while Abed's enactment of these tropes may be artificial, so would any other choice. Prior to embarking on the two-dates scheme he was making a conscious effort to "display growth" -- that is, to perform an idea of character development that is just as artificial and referential as zany sitcom tropes[4].

But not all of Community's characters have equal access to irony and performativity. In this plotline Abed is the postmodern author, self-consciously regurgitating tropes and stories -- and four women are the passive characters in his scheme. Annie, Shirley and the girls they suggest Abed to are not allowed much if any meta-knowledge, and are left out of the play of tropes and texts. Unlike Abed, the women are motivated by straightforward, unironic emotion, and "Herstory of Dance" largely does not take these emotions seriously -- Abed's two dates vanish once their narrative purposes have been served, and Shirley and Annie are swept up in Abed's new romance. None of them seem to mind being passive objects in Abed's shenanigans, and Community has suggested in the past that this is the right attitude to take for those not blessed with metafictional magic (most notably in "Virtual Systems Analysis").

This gives the Abed plotline a distinct lack of stakes. In a straightforward rendition of this trope, the tension would consist of the protagonist trying to avoid having his plans exposed and being rejected and humiliated by both women. But for Abed said humiliation, rather than being legitimate emotional damage, would just be another part of the story -- he would be rather pleased that his shenanigans resolved as they always did on TV. Because of this there's little to no dramatic tension. While dramatic tension is certainly not necessary for a comedy plot, it's hard to centre ten minutes' worth of jokes on self-consciously repeating something everyone has seen before (as Community has discovered the hard way several times).

Enter Brie Larson's Rachel, the lowly coat check girl. Rachel proves herself a better love interest for Abed than either Shirley's churchgoer or Annie's "quirky girl"[5]. She immediately recognizes the appeal of Abed's play and is conversant in the same tropes and references that he is. Unlike the other women in this plotline, Rachel is fully fluent in Abed's meta-language of cultural references, and can partake in his narrative play as a full and willing participant. Notably, though, she still only takes on the role of helper, providing costume changes and distractions for Abed as he exercises his master plan.

Rather than becoming an equal participant in Abed's metafictional play, Rachel takes the role of a viewer substitute. She responds to Abed's antics just as an idealized Community viewer would, with a mixture of unquestioned enjoyment and savvy understanding. She figures out the tropes he's playing off without having to be told, loves them ("it's one of my favourite bits") and moreover loves Abed's re-enactment of them ("I think it's awesome"). Her reactions signal that the viewer should see Abed's ruse as entertaining and not sociopathic. I'm quite interested in this subject of viewer substitutes in TV, which occurs in everything from Homeland to Mystery Science Theatre 3000, and hope to do some Serious Academic Writing on it in the future.

But back to "Herstory of Dance". Abed is so caught up in his performance of the two-dates plot that he fails to realize the romance plot he is now involved in, and as a result alienates Rachel. As he says, "I was so caught up in one trope that I missed the trope that was right under my nose -- that the right girl was right under my nose". Of course, he deals with it by making a big public declaration of love, a trope that Rachel had previously identified as being one of her favourites [6]. She accepts it, and even the direction of the scene is straight out of any teen movie. (These movies aren't usually set at college, but Greendale is basically high school for adults, so there you go).

And so we have a romance plotline told entirely through metafictional play, moving from trope to trope like a high-wire act, without ever touching some kind of authenticity. Except Community isn't content to leave it at that. Before the proverbial cane pulls Abed and Rachel off stage, Rachel proposes that on their upcoming date they act out another sitcom plot. Abed is tempted, but ultimately wants to "do real". The suggestion is that Abed has "shown growth" by moving past his complex meta-jokes and embracing authentic and emotional human interaction. But "Herstory of Dance" has already established that this romance plotline is just another trope, and "doing real" would just be another kind of performance. If Abed and Rachel went out for a dinner and a movie, they wouldn't be doing so out of some kind of authentic prehistoric desire, but because a dinner and a movie are part of the cultural romance narrative. Community knows this, but it seems to want to forget it in favour of a traditional form of closure.

This is the central tension at work in much of Community. For all of its postmodern awareness, it also has a penchant for moments of straightforward sentimentality. When Jeff uses "Britta'd" positively, it may be a message delivered through postmodern wordplay, but it's also one that conveys an honest friendship, an emotion that the show takes seriously. When it comes to the relationships between its characters, Community is about as far away from cynicism and critical distance as you can be, often resulting in big emotional speeches and group hugs.

This is something that a lot of contemporary artists seem to be grappling with -- how to tell stories with genuine human emotion when we live in a postmodern culture that distrusts any such straightforward emotional displays. This is why former postmodern authors like Jonathan Franzen and Michael Chabon have drifted over to writing stoutly naturalist bourgeois family novels. Community has a more complex answer to this challenge. It suggests that real emotions and genuine desires are still in abundance, but the way we express them now is through reference and metahumour. Even Jeff's final text message in "Herstory of Dance" is narrated in a sarcastic voice (as Britta presumably reads sarcasm into the message at first). This is the postmodern condition, according to Community: sappy sentiment conveyed through cynical posturing.

What's striking is that it does this while often being line-for-line the funniest comedy on TV. (Less so in the fourth season, admittedly). Postmodern theorists often talk about the liberatory potential of linguistic play, but it's hard to find anything joyful and liberating in struggling through a volume of Derrida. (Although I'm sure old JD was having fun while writing it). Community actualizes the joy of postmodern play and makes it broadly accessible. The endless referentiality of Community's script may admittedly be a shallow idea of play that depends the objects of commercial mass culture, but if nothing else it provides an example of how metafictional play can happen in the broadest-aiming, most conservative cultural realm -- that of network television. And that's no small feat.

[1]Arguably the exodus of writers and directors from the show over the past couple of years has made much more of an impact than the departure of Harmon alone has.

[2]Of course, many British shows that are held up as obscure works of genius in North America are viewed in their home culture as broad entertainment, Doctor Who being the most prominent example. Anglophilia has more than a bit to do with this, but I would say that the difference mainly demonstrates how the public status of a work shapes our view of it.

[3]In this respect Britta forms a dyad with Shirley, whose devout Christianity is the source of most of the jokes surrounding her character, and is never really anything but a joke. Some would praise "going after both sides", but I think ultimately this suggests a "centrist" politics that views both political extremes with equal horror, which ultimately supports the status quo if not absolute apathy. (The linear political spectrum is also a heavily flawed idea). This ultimately obscures the radicalness of the current state of the world. Of course, Community isn't and doesn't have to be about the neoliberal world order -- it takes place in a comforting fantasy world in more ways than one. But invoking real-world politics as a source of jokes makes it easier to believe that we actually live in that fantasy world where everything will be all right by the end of the episode.

(I may have just Britta'd this review.)

[4]Just think of all the things that dramas (and increasingly comedies) do to flag to the viewer that they're developing characters and are hence Quality Television. Think of long philosophical monologues, revelations about a tragic childhood, or extended romance plotlines. Alternately, just think of every flashback plotline on Lost, and you should have a good idea of what I mean by performing character development.

[5]The "quirky girl" Kat is a pretty expert parody of the archetype that appears in countless movies and films, the one who is supposed to be a loveable free spirit but more closely resembles, as Troy puts it, "a toddler with a growing disease". Nathan Rabin famously dubbed this trope the "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" and denounced it for the nice-guy misogyny it embodies. I can't really argue with Rabin, even if the term he coined has been overused, nor can I deny that Community gets a lot of good comedy out of Kat. However, it's interesting to contrast the portrayal of her and that of Abed, who suffers from a similar level of oddness and arrested development. Abed is self-consciously aware of his quirkiness and the tropes it embodies, and expresses his strangeness through approved American popular culture. By contrast Kat seems to be remarkably unaware of her strangeness and expresses her strange personality in a straightforward and honest manner. For this she is entirely a joke, someone that can be shrugged off without incident, whereas Community sympathizes heavily with Abed's eccentricities. Of course, not every character can have a complex internal life, but one wonders if Kat would be presented as more relateable if she made the occasional comment about how she totally resembles that girl from Garden State right now. There's a larger point to be made here about postmodern metahumour and social deviance, but this is already a bit of a tangent.

[6]Interestingly enough, when Kat makes this comment, Abed dismisses the public confession by say ing that it "takes something private and makes it a public performance". This is funny in a kind of subtle and ironic way, as Abed is clearly in the midst of making a public performance out of private romantic affairs. Whereas in a straightforward two-dates plotline the man (and it's always a man who attempts this) wants to keep his plans entirely secret and private and is doing the scheme because of internal motivations, Abed is performing for an audience -- himself, Troy, Rachel, and implicitly the TV viewers. Abed should know better. In Community, everything is always already a public performance. Maybe he just needs to read his Butler.

Futurama 7-13: Naturama

The anthology format is one that doesn't always work, especially for half-hour shows.  (Note that here I'm talking about episodes that are themselves anthologies of shorter pieces, not Twilight Zone-esque) anthologies of stand-alone episodes.  For instance, at this point when it pops up on The Simpsons it usually signals an indifferent space-filler (or maybe that's just any contemporary Simpsons episode).  But Futurama has always made this format something of a special event, usually a season-closer, recognizing in it the potential for unbridled play.

The Futurama anthology episode is usually the equivalent to the old comic book What-If stories, quite literally for the old "Anthology of Interest" episodes.  By exploring alternate universes and continuities, one can not only reveal more about the "real" universe of the story but also transgress the usual boundaries of the episodic format.  In "Naturama" the writers take particular delight in killing off regular characters and otherwise teasing alterations of the status quo that would never fly in the main series.

"Naturama" imagines the central characters as animals, a fairly hokey premise, but fortunately the various writers do more than cute-dog jokes.  Like the previous season finale, "Reanimation" has an ostensible gimmick uniting the three shorts (there it was a change in animation style) but also has a thematic undercurrent cutting through all of the stories.  Here all three are about love, in particular the hopeless and frustrating side of love, as well as the collision between personal will and the dictates of nature.

The first segment, "The Salmon", references the well-known but still bizarre mating rituals of the salmon, a natural metaphor for a fatalistic worldview if there ever was one.  The story uses the Fry-Leela romance, which has at this point become more of an occasionally-referenced myth than an actual plotline, and exploits all of those mythic associations.  Of course, graphing human romance (especially a star-crossed romance involving a love triangle with Zap Branigan) onto animal mating behaviour is specious anthropomorphism, but hey, that's the whole episode.

What's more interesting is the parts of the salmon lifestyle that aren't anthropomorphized.  When asked his name, Fry-fish replies "I don't have a name.  I'm a salmon."  Similarly, the short makes a lot of hay out of the actual sex act, involving the female laying eggs and the male jizzing on them.  The almost scatological and definitely bestial specifics of the act contrast with the attempt to overlay a very human romance narrative on it.  "The Salmon" constantly undercuts its central premise by pointing out how absurd that premise actually is -- a strange maneuver, but an interesting one.

The second short, an obvious take on Lonesome George featuring the Professor as the eponymous turtle, is more of the cute-animal story one would expect from the overall episode premise.  Other than Mom's sourness, the characters here only visually resemble their Futurama incarnations, and the story at large is an uneasy mixture of sentimentality and dark-humour cynicism.  It's a perfectly fine seven minutes of television, but other than a few lines about parasites and lifespans it lacks that alienating dynamic that interests me most about this episode.

That dynamic returns in spades in the final segment, which again deals with a strange mating process -- that of the elephant seal.  (Incidentally, one has to compliment the Futurama writers for not only being able to dig up these bizarre biological corner cases but using them to create further jokes and not just chuckling at the idea of seal sex).  Bender is reincarnated as a "beachmaster", keeper of a massive seal harem, which is a divergence from canon Bender -- who isn't interested in lust any more than any of the other sins -- but one that allows him to retain the characteristics that make him appealing.  The Amy/Kif romance is also interpreted into a new form whilst retaining its essence, the beta-male-makes-good storyline.  If anything, it becomes more impactful in a setting where the term "beta male" is not a metaphor.

The story itself is filled with strange ambiguities.  Amy is treated as genuinely in love with Kif, but gleefully joins in every pile on Bender.  Kif heroically challenges Bender to a fight, and is promptly squashed.  At the end bender is still content in his throne, although the beta males have secretly impregnated many of the females.  There's nothing revolutionary about a story where neither good nor evil wins, but there's usually a message, whereas here there's just unpleasant things happening.

The Phil LaMarr-voiced narrator assures us at the end of the second segment that "nature is horrific, and teaches us nothing".  It's comically overstated, but in the end that does seem to be the main take-away from "Naturama".  As much as we may wish to ascribe human characters or motivations to animals -- George is lonesome, the salmon long for their home, the beachmaster is slothful and indulgent -- ultimately only a mixture of biology and raw chance rule.

This is not an especially new idea, with the idea of nature as meaningless violence going back at least to Hobbes.  The general acceptance of evolution means that it's a fairly widespread idea.  What "Naturama" points out is the way in which we attempt to elide this view through narrative, whether it be ascribing human characteristics to our pets or the full-scale anthropomorphism of a Disney movie.  It does this by constantly calling attention to the ridiculousness of its own narrative conceit, a surprisingly bold movie for a show as long in the tooth as Futurama.

Of course, it does leave us with one final question: is this realm of random violence and meaningless endings really all that different from the one we humans live in?

Next week: "I got rope, I got duct tape, I got a tazer..."

Wilfred 2-10: Honesty

The first season of Wilfred was substantially foused on Ryan's relationship with Jenna.  Not only is Jenna the impetus for the entire series, being the one who asks Ryan to look after Wilfred, but many first-season episodes were driven by Ryan's attempts to get close to Jenna or split her and Drew up.  In the second season, however, she's taken a bit of a backseat, to the point that it began to seem that every episode started with Wilfred explaining how Jenna was on vacation.  This was largely beneficial to the show, as Jenna doesn't really have that much comedic potential and the possible scenarios surrounding her were more or less exhausted in the first season.  But when she returns in "Honesty", not as a supporting character but a major one, it does feel as though Wilfred has returned to its roots.

This is actually the kind of episode that feels as though it should have been much earlier in the season, dealing with the fallout of the first season finale and not the barely-mentioned events of the second season thus far[1].  It relies heavily on knowledge of the cascading series of disasters that closed out the first season, which are a bit cloudy in even my memory.  On the other hand, this does fit into this season's overall arc of Ryan making amends and inching closer to becoming a normal human being.

The impetus of the plot is Jenna's attempt at regaining her journalistic credibility, but this quickly is transferred over to Ryan's own personal neuroses.  The genuine favour she asks of him would involve him talking with his father, one of Ryan's prevailing hang-ups, so of course that doesn't happen.  But Ryan's failure to overcome this fear for the girl he likes leads him into a guilt-driven attempt to fabricate a story, which naturally spirals into absurdity.

So far this is par for the course.  This is the basic comedic machine of the series: Jenna (sometimes replaced by Kristen or Amanda) incites Ryan to action, usually through guilt, and his errant attempts at making her happy are inflamed and made both absurd and disastrous by the intervention of Wilfred.  This is a very traditional sitcom structure, and its absurdism and dark comedy Wilfred is a very traditional comedy, right down to the moral of the week.  While you would never see a plotline involving the main character pretending to be a deranged cat murderer on, say, The Cosby Show, the underlying beats of the story -- for instance, the moment where Jenna thanks Ryan for his attempts to help but only aggravates his guilt for creating the problem -- are pretty similar.

That moral of the week is a little skewed here, however.  On the surface the story reinforces the preschool lesson about honesty being the best policy -- Ryan and Jenna finally come clean about their respective misdeeds, and it ultimately leads to a better relationship and less guilt.  What's more, this honesty also allows us as an audience to see the characters in a new way, in particular Jenna's admission that she was consciously manipulating Ryan throughout the first season.  This isn't really novel -- the hot girl who takes advantage of the weird guy with a crush on her is a well-worn one, probably driven by the tendency of screenwriters to be frustrated weird guys -- but it does suggest a sense of interiority that was absent from Jenna before.

But there's still a great deal of deceit that goes on and remains uncorrected at the end of the episode.  Jenna still has no idea that when Ryan looks at her dog he sees a foul-mouthed Australian in an animal suit.  If we look at illusion as a kind of metaphysical deceit, then Ryan still has no idea whether he can see Wilfred honestly, and Wilfred himself is a cauldron of deceit and tricks (as Ryan argues early in this episode, Wilfred lies to him all the time).  On a smaller scale, Jenna ends the episode without ever learning about Ryan's connection with the cat kidnappings or that Ryan never called his father.

So what's the take-away here?  Is the lesson that deception and illusion are wrong except for when they work out for the best, a la A Midsummer Night's Dream?  Is it just haphazard plotting undercutting the alleged larger message?  Neither explanation really satisfies me.

Rather, I think this reflects on Wilfred's idea of morality, which is probably most closely akin to Catholicism.  Honesty is not, in this episode, telling the absolute truth about everything.  Rather, honesty is about confession.  Ryan only can be honest by admitting that he is a sinner and asking for forgiveness.  Many other episodes of Wilfred follow the model of confession -- Ryan at first denies that he's doing anything wrong or suffering from any kind of sin (past episode titles: "Avoidance", "Anger", "Pride", "Fear"), and is healed by admitting his weakness in the episode's conclusion.

The Catholicism comparison also highlights why guilt is such an important driving device.  (This might come off as a joke, but I don't really mean it that way.)  Wilfred is the human (er, canine) embodiment of guilt, the voice in the back of your head always suggesting that you aren't living your life according to the moral code that you believe in.  This would explain the sometimes contradictory nature of the show's "lessons" -- guilt can get you no matter what you do, and there can even be paradoxical guilt over the failure to embrace new-age morality about putting the past behind you and living life to its fullest, which Wilfred advocates in the episodes where he isn't hounding Ryan for past misdeeds.  So maybe Wilfred isn't the figure of unrivaled id that he's usually taken for, but a strange kind of conscience (a superego, to go all Freudian).  If this is true, it's a conscience that is, perhaps like real consciences, constantly unsatisfied.  But the series suggests that maybe this kind of thinking can lead to positive results after all.

In this episode, everything works out because of Ryan's one act of honesty.  Now knowing what she experienced, Jenna is able to use that experience to sell a potentially hokey "investigative report" on pot candy.  The deceit that Ryan formerly embodied is transferred to the inanimate stick of candy.  (Its deceitful, destructive high is carefully separated from and contrasted with the open, inhibition-lowering pot that Ryan and Wilfred smoke at the end of almost every episode.)  Jenna regains her job, Ryan regains her friendship, and things inch closer to, if not a happy ending, at least the basically stable first-season status quo.

But of course, there are Ryan's still-unrevealed deceits, his inability to confront his father, and his potential insanity.  Wilfred's central characters only progress through two steps forward and one step back.  But that is, the show suggests, enough.

Next week: "A Challenge From the Devil! Fudo, Be the Demon for Those You Love!!"

[1]This along with Jenna's general scarcity this season is enough to make me suspect that there were some scheduling issues with Fiona Gubelmann, although I have no idea what else she has going on.