TV Thread

[Garrett Gilchrist]

As sad as it is to see Donald Glover's Troy go, that was a superb episode of Community. (S5E5: Geothermal Escapism.)

With Dan Harmon returning as showrunner, the show is certainly back. I'm hesitant to say it's better than ever, because last week's episode, dealing with the death of Pierce Hawthorne, was very weak. A very low-budget episode set almost entirely in the study room with no directorial flair, the episode seems to have also forgotten that this show is a comedy. It wasn't emotional either.

But that's been the only weak episode so far this season. Even without Troy, this is shaping up to be a terrific year for Community.

Some deleted dialogue:


Abed: Clone Troy.

Troy: Clone Abed.

Abed: From a clone perspective I can see what an important figure Original Troy was in Original Abed's life. Original Abed spent decades unaware he could connect with other people. But his friendship with Original Troy showed him he doesn't just have to observe the world. He can be a part of it.

Troy: Me, too. Original Troy used to care so much about what people thought. But Original Abed showed him it was okay to be himself. I'm really glad those two met.

[Garrett Gilchrist]

"Weird Al" Yankovic guest stars on My Little Pony, and it's everything you'd expect it would be.

Also if you're a watcher of background ponies, this marks the first episode where Derpy is back and fully present throughout (after her reintroduction last week). Lyra and Bon Bon are also together throughout and there's even a flashback where we see a young, nerdy Bon Bon (with Twist's model), Lyra, Derpy, and Colgate. All "major" background ponies are present and accounted for in a way we don't see very often.

http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1aoxo ... shortfilms

[Garrett Gilchrist]

Goodbye Jay Leno, who hosted a very popular show for a very long time, which I never liked.

http://gawker.com/a-brief-history-of-ja ... 1517500005

It was always highly rated - higher than its competitors. And delivered what you'd expect in a late night talk show.

But a whole lot of people who like comedy never liked Leno's show.

http://popwatch.ew.com/2014/02/05/jay-l ... e-history/

It wasn't intellectual TV - it was lowbrow, obvious stuff for a mass audience. It wasn't Jon Stewart. It wasn't early David Letterman, or Conan, with their quirky, alternative-comedy bits. It wasn't the honesty of Craig Ferguson. It wasn't the likeability of Johnny Carson. I always felt that Leno was very McDonald's. I never liked his persona onscreen or his show, but he always won his time slot. Always.

It's often said that Jay just worked harder, and did everything he could to be #1, down to throwing his weight around booking guests. Letterman, for his part, has spent twenty years looking like he's not working at all. TV ratings are such a strange, messed-up world anyway. But it was what it was.

I also always felt that Conan O'Brien got the wrong audience, and should have been on after Letterman. O'Brien had a reputation as a sharp alternative comedy writer, and he then spent decades doing a show for Aunt May and Uncle Ben, so to speak.

Leno, known in his day as a sharp standup comic (which he still does), had a lot of success doing "Johnny's show," but without, in my opinion, any of the charm.

Jon Stewart and Conan O'Brien weren't doing "Johnny's show," but I think they were always trying to be Johnny ...

Well, goodbye to Jay Leno's Tonight Show. You did work harder.

[Garrett Gilchrist]

Watching It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Just saw the crack addiction in Season 2, Episode 3. Well then.

It really makes a statement. That this show is going to go places. And you'd best be ready.

[Garrett Gilchrist]

buy some apples

Michelle Creber with "I Hope You Dance."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMRrWvD8z2w

[Garrett Gilchrist]

https://24.media.tumblr.com/ee02c2fca83 ... o1_500.png

[Garrett Gilchrist]

It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia:

How Mac Got Fat
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/08/ ... 4120110810

Making the Pilot
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uSDR3w6-Kzw

Backwards messages
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=pl ... 9CBoAyBa1s

[Garrett Gilchrist]

The DVD for It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia's "The Nightman Cometh" includes a 50-minute live performance, with additional songs.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Md3knmszjk8
http://oldfamiliarway.tumblr.com/post/1 ... ometh-live

"It's Nature, Shit Happens" was filmed for the show but not used. Here it is, with a making-of.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UE6GC47NxgI

A Day In the Life of Caitlin Olson
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLlTwvGkpYA

Early Artemis scene, possibly related to the original pilot.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLlTwvGkpYA

[Garrett Gilchrist]

Sometimes you watch an episode of a series, where a character acts a certain way, or is referred to in a certain way, and you know it's going to change that character. "Oh," you think. "That's going to be the way that character is, and has always been, from now on."

Character traits get exaggerated over time. On television, if something works, they're going to do it over and over again.

So, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Season 2, episode 8. The Gang Runs for Office.

Dennis recites a script for his political campaign commercial, written by Charlie. It's incoherent.

"Hello fellow American. This you should vote me. I leave power. Good. Thank you, thank you. If you vote me, I'm hot. Taxes, they'll be lower... son. The democratic vote for me is the right thing to do Philadelphia, so doo!"

I think I remember hearing (in the Making Of videos) that this was an adlib by Glenn. It's funny, but my immediate reaction was, "This is what Charlie is from now on."

Later in the same episode, Dennis says "You clearly have a learning disability, dude."

Charlie's difficulties reading and writing were referenced in episode 2 and 6 of the same season, but this really hammered it home.

The idea of "Charlie work" and Charlie (and by extension Frank) living like an animal also got fleshed out further and further over time.

The "It's Always Sunny" Wiki, by the way, is written by people with Charlie's level of literacy. The amount of groupthink involved makes it not always obvious, but much of it is not coherent English. It's worse than a Tarantino screenplay.

This brings us to Season 5, Episode 9, "Mac and Dennis Break Up." This is a bit late in a series to be introducing major character traits, but here we are. Here, Mac and Dennis have been living together so long that they don't know what to do without one another. They can't go an hour apart. Mac is also clearly in love with Dennis on some level, and that's something I'm sure we'll be hearing a lot more about from here on out. He's also interested in muscular actors.

There wasn't much to suggest this previously. In the previous episode, Dennis modeled a woman's thong for Mac, who didn't seem to mind. But these are five people who have paired up in all sorts of different ways to screw over one another and try out harebrained schemes, and the show will continue to do this. Season 4's "Mac's Banging the Waitress" centered around who was Charlie's "best friend" - Mac or Dennis.

It's a big stretch to say that Mac and Dennis can't go an hour without checking in with one another, considering all the crazy events of previous and future seasons. There's something here showing that the characters have changed, and their lives intertwined based on who's living with who - Frank and Charlie being equally inseparable, as we've seen a lot previously. And Dee being alone and ignored by the guys. But mostly this feels like a turning point for Mac. That from now on we'll be hearing more about ... this.


EDIT: Two episodes later, Mac and to a lesser extent Charlie are hesitant to pursue Dennis' idea of turning their Dolph Lundgren movie idea into full-on pornography. Mac feels that scenes with women get in the way of an action movie.

By this point it's clear that Dennis, Mac and Charlie have lots of issues getting in the way of their sexuality. They are not mentally-healthy heterosexual men any more than they are good, normal people.

The first episode showed Dennis as vain, and in love with himself primarily. We've seen his obsession with breasts and the act of penetration, and he is incapable of seeing women as people. He engages with them on the level of pornography, and emotionally destroys them with the D.E.N.N.I.S. system (as of season 5, episode 10). He claims that this system makes women love him, but it's mainly designed to torture and discard them. A parody of the worst aspects of male sexuality, then.

In season one, episode 2, Charlie had slept with Stacy Corvelli in high school. This now actually seems a stretch for Charlie, as since then he's not been known to have dallied with any other women. He is obsessed with The Waitress and that's it - he has very little sexuality otherwise. Here's a deleted scene from 5.11 -

Charlie: "So here's the thing. This guy, he does not get women and women don't get him. You know, they just had a... you know, they butt-heads like crazy. And he does not get SEX. You know, sex is the thing that's really weird. You know, because the last time he made sex with a girl it was like gross, dude, it was just super gross, and she found him to be gross, and the whole thing was just gross, and then she, you know, later on said "Oh, I have a kid now, and it's your kid", and he was like ready to raise this kid, and he was like "I didn't know if I even had sex right to have a kid", you know, because it was so gross, and just cold, and wet, and just gross. And like everytime he thinks about sex he gets a little sick, you know what I mean, unless he thinks about sex with this one girl, but like otherwise it's like gross".

Charlie has good reason to think of sex as "gross." 3.9's "Sweet Dee's Dating a Retarded Person" introduced Charlie's classic songs "The Nightman" and "The Dayman," later made into a full musical in 4.13's "The Nightman Cometh." Charlie seems to be confessing to being molested as a child, and wanting to become a powerful man rather than a scared boy - though he denies this. Much earlier, 1.7's "Charlie Got Molested" hinted that a minor character, Charlie's Uncle Jack, is a pedophile, but this was a minor detail and easily ignored at the time. Season 5, episode 3, "The Great Recession," makes the connection clearly, with Uncle Jack and Charlie talking about Jack's inappropriate behavior when Charlie was a boy - and Jack's desire to continue that.

Charlie and Mac are both eternally childlike.

Mac became overly attached to Dennis and Dee's mother, and in 5.10 shows he's been picking up the women that Dennis discards. He likes muscular male action stars in movies, and living with Dennis. Mac's sexuality is a work in progress in season 5.

[Garrett Gilchrist]

oh my god santa noooooo


The Christmas special is insane. Genuinely traumatic, even.

My, my.


I'm curious about the parodies here, and how the series gets away with them. Of course parody is covered with certain rights under law. In 5.6, "The World Series Defense," The Philly Phanatic is given another name, sort of. The Wiki says this:

"The Phillies' mascot is actually called the Phillie Phanatic. However, Major League Baseball rejected the script, and the name "Phillie Phrenetic" had to be used in the show. This is alluded to in Charlie's rant that closes the episode, when he says "First of all, I had to call him the 'Phrenetic', his name's the 'Phanatic', but I'm gonna get sued by Major League Baseball if I call him the Phanatic"."

So Charlie says "Phanatic" anyway, at the end, kind of invalidating the whole "Phrenetic" thing. An example of the show "giving no fucks," as the internet would say. The design of the Phrenetic is also basically identical to the Phanatic.

In the Christmas show, we get versions of Hermie the Elf, Sam the Snowman and The California Raisins (depicted, oxymoronically, as Klan members). Again, the designs aren't really changed. So, uh?

http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb2011 ... 843%29.png

What doesn't work here is the parents in the flashbacks. Mac's parents especially very much look their age, and could have been recast or kept offscreen.



Also, season 6. I'm amazed they reshot that "world's cheapest intro sequence" in HD, exactly as it was ...


Also, Dennis as sociopath:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUzBK5O3wBM