Man, I can’t wait for this year to be over! Huh? What do you mean “it’s just January”? Really? Wow.
First off, I just want to say that everything going on right now, climate-wise, is insane. Where I am, it’s freezing, and there was no school most of the week, while the other side of the country is dealing with devastating wild fires. I’m not saying I have the solution, but it’s just a terrifying state of affairs. I hope everyone is safe out there!
I already used up my creative juices on The WBW40 this week, so if you haven’t checked that out yet, that’s on you. So, this might be a bit of an abbreviated post this week, but it still counts toward The Streak!
Trailer Park
Kinda Pregnant (Netflix, February 5)
Yeah, I know the trailer is age-restricted, but were you really gonna watch it embedded? Just go over to YouTube and come back! Done? Good. So, I feel like Amy Schumer makes the same movie, tonally, every time. It’s always the whole “Single woman caught up in society’s expectations of women” trope. I get it. She makes them because it’s relatable. Her movies, however, aren’t standard rom-coms, in the sense that she’s usually something of a deplorable person, and somewhat hard to root for. This spins out of her bawdy stand-up persona, but she’d be the first to tell you she’s not a “lady”. You watch this, and wonder “Who would lie about being pregnant?”, and you immediately realize “Oh, Amy Schumer totally would.” And it’s also about how some lies are so big that you don’t know how to back out of them. Her stand-up colleague, Steve Rannazzisi, knows all about this, as he spent a decade lying about surviving the 9/11 attacks. So, it might seem sort of “outlandish”, but some folks do find themselves in these insane situations that they can’t get out of. This looks fine. I’d watch it. I can see why it went straight to streaming, but I’d watch it. It is funny, though, how her love interests always seem to be former SNL funnymen.
Links I Loved
I’m the furthest thing from a Video Game Guy, but I came across this post, which took a look at how conversations on The History of Gaming are dominated either by Japan or America, while omitting the contributions of places, like South America, where the industry has subsisted on constantly updated mods of popular games. Whereas we’ve romanticized LAN parties, there are societies where not everyone could afford their own PCs or consoles, yet gaming flourished. It was a really interesting look into how gaming worked in those parts of the world.
Things You Might Have Missed This Week
- It’s a “Reverse Auf Wiedersehen”, as Heidi Klum is returning to host Project Runway as it moves to Disney+, eight years after leaving the show that she helped to make famous.
- I guess folks don’t like it when you mock their superhero franchises, as HBO has canceled The Franchise after one season.
- It was announced that a Grimm reboot was in development at Peacock, with a new showrunner, but the original creative team.
- Two days after the Grimm announcement, Peacock president Kelly Campbell announced she was stepping down. Coincidence?!
- Our weeklong Liberal Nightmare is over, as Max has reinstated The West Wing – a mere eight days after removing the series as a cost-cutting measure.
- There are rumors that Tom Holland and Zendaya are engaged, but Andrew Garfield is the Spider-Man everyone’s trying to fuck, after his appearance at the Golden Globes last weekend. Will she take his last name? “Zendaya Holland” sounds like the part of the country the locals tell tourists to avoid.
- The View will expand to weekends, with The Weekend View, exclusively on the ABC News Live streaming service. This feels like elder abuse…
- WWE Monday Night Raw debuted on Netflix this week, in an outing filled with highs and lows. Topanga was there (High!), but they snubbed Will Friedle (Low!). Hulk Hogan was there (Low!), as he’s entered into a deal with WWE to promote his Real American Beer (Real Low!), but the crowd nearly booed him out of the arena (Hosanna in the HIGHEST!)
I love when TV does “weird things” – ya know, things that really get people talking. Since the death of the Monoculture, these moments are becoming more and more rare. You don’t get to come into the office, and discuss last night’s “appointment television” anymore. Now, you might ask “Hey, did you catch that new Tim Allen show last night?”, and you’d be met with “There’s a new Tim Allen show?” Outside of The Big Game or The Bachelor, folks just aren’t live-watching the same stuff anymore. And, really, TV isn’t giving us many reasons to do so. So, when I heard that there was going to be a crossover between ABC’s Abbott Elementary and FXX’s It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, my “WTF?!” quickly turned into “I’m listening…”
Three seasons ago, Abbott Elementary was ABC’s new darling with all the critics raving about it. I liked the cast, I work in education, so I watched it. I enjoyed it. At some point, though, it stopped being something I was looking forward to every week. I don’t think it’s the show’s fault, but rather my short attention span. Plus, I didn’t love when the show went all anti-charter schools, but I get it. I’ve still got all of season 3 on my DVR, and none of the current season 4, so you could say I’m a bit behind. Still, we’re not talking about Breaking Bad here, so I think I can figure out what’s going on.
Meanwhile, I LOVE It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia! LOVE IT. I wish I could say I’ve been a patron of Paddy’s Pub since the beginning, but that wouldn’t be true, as I didn’t have cable when it debuted on FX (They hadn’t created FXX yet). A lot of folks don’t remember this, but Fox was actually hurting for programming at one point, so they started airing “sanitized” episodes from season 1 on Sunday nights, in order to fill a hole in their prime-time schedule. The problem, though, is that Sunny was a show that shouldn’t be sanitized (reminds me how my mom started liking South Park when she found it in syndication…). I didn’t realize this at the time, so I was just sort of like “Huh. That’s not funny at all. But I recognize that one guy from That 80’s Show.” It wasn’t until this woman I met on MySpace gave me the first DVD box set for my birthday (Seriously, don’t ask. That was a really weird year) that I finally got the chance to watch the show in its true glory. And it was GREAT. I hate when folks say “You couldn’t make that today”, but it’s sort of true here. The only reason the show is still going (and about to debut its 17th season) is that A) it’s sort of grandfathered in and B) folks fully realize that the characters are terrible people. I’ve often described it as “Seinfeld Done Right”, as there are no doubts that these are bad people. If the show ended with them all in a jail cell, you’d just think “Well, that’s probably the most fitting ending we could have gotten.” That said, there are still episodes of Sunny that they’ve had to either renounce and/or remove from streaming services (usually episodes involving blackface).
As the story goes, Abbott creator Quinta Brunson and Sunny co-creator Rob McElhenney met at an awards show last year, gushing over each other. They were like “Hey, both of our shows are set in Philly. We should cross over!” The part that I love was that this didn’t turn out to just be lip service. No, they proceeded to figure out how to make it happen, and the fruits of that planning were revealed on this week’s episode of Abbott Elementary. Now, I love how awful the Sunny gang can be, but how were they going to fit into ABC’s family-friendly, prime-time darling? Surprisingly, quite well!
Things are falling apart around the school, but Principal Ava tells her staff not to worry, as there are some volunteers coming soon. When those volunteers arrive, they’re the Sunny cast, as this is court-ordered community service for some recent offense. My favorite part was how Dennis takes himself out of the equation right off the bat. See, he’s probably the one least likely to have any business around kids, so he takes advantage of the camera crew, since Abbott is yet another one of those single cam, “What is this being filmed for?” faux documentary shows. He basically says he doesn’t give his consent to being filmed (since he’s a shady dude like that), and pretty much avoids the camera most of the episode. So, you’re left with Charlie, Mac, Dee, and Frank inserting themselves throughout the school community.
The highlight was Dee befriending Brunson’s Janine, only to then challenge her for her boyfriend – and fellow teacher – Gregory. In a somewhat rushed storyline, Abbott teacher Jacob discovers Charlie can’t read, and sets out to correct that. If anything, I was disappointed that we didn’t get Mac at his “Mackest”, since most of his storyline was trying to get Principal Ava to sign their community service form so they could get out of having to show up the whole week. Also, the writers revealed in an interview that there was an entire backstory between Abbott janitor Mr. Johnson and Frank, where they were actually longtime rivals because they once dated the same woman, but it got cut for time. In fact, it’s said that the woman was canonically known to Sunny fans, which leads me to believe it was supposed to be ShadyNasty (pronounced Sha-DIE-nusty), a club singer whom Frank loved, but lost to his brother in the 70s. Y’all know I love continuity, so that would have been incredible!
Anyway, I have to say I wasn’t sure how 2 tonally different shows like these would work together, but they pulled it off. I mean, TV crossovers are nothing new, but they usually have something in common, like the same creator or network. The only thing comparable, that I could think of, would be when George Clooney and Noah Wylie showed up on Friends, but that still doesn’t count, as they weren’t playing their ER characters (despite playing ER doctors), and both shows still shared a network and studio. So, this might have set something of a precedent here. I would have been fine if this had been the entire thing, but apparently there’s another between the two shows, set for the recently-completed 17th season of It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. So, I guess we’ll see these two titans tussle once again! In any case, the Abbott Elementary/It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia crossover episode had the West Week Ever.
