Posts categorized “TV”

People are strange…

Even though the first two seasons dealt with psionic abilities, extra-dimensional monsters and the like, they still felt basically grounded. It wasn’t hard to believe that Hawkins was a real place and these were real, three-dimensional people inhabiting it. More… »

Awesomeness is awesome, babe, but not like you…

Earlier this week Conan O’Brien released a new website, CONAN25, which contains the entirety of the “remote” segments from Conan’s extensive late-night career. There are some absolute gems in there; Picking Apples with Mr. T is one of my all-time favorites.

To celebrate the ability to watch this much television history, here is Conan’s own boy band, Dudez A-Plenti, rehearsing and creating a music video for their smash-hit song “Awesome Girl.”

Have some awesome juice on me, baby. And be sure to comb through these archives because it’s full of comedy gold!

Are these lizards still broken…?

This Thursday evening a new Sitcom premieres on TruTV, and it just so happens to take place right here in my hometown. From the creators of Super Troopers, it’s called Tacoma FD and it’s the “FD” stands for “Fire Department.”

Y’know how Super Troopers is about a group of completely incompetent police officers? Well, the premise of Tacoma FD is that these firefighters are actually super competent, it just rains so much in Tacoma that most of the fires get put out by the rain before the firefighters can even get to them. So they have waaaaay too much free time on their hands, and hijinx ensue.

Here’s the official synopsis from TruTV:

On the heels of the breakout theatrical release of Super Troopers 2, co-creators and stars Kevin Heffernan and Steve Lemme will be donning new uniforms in Tacoma FD, a half-hour comedy set in a firehouse in one of America’s rainiest cities. Light on blazes that need extinguishing, this crew keeps themselves entertained with creative competitions, friendly first responder rivalries, and bizarre emergency calls. Leading firehouse shenanigans in the 10-episode first season are Chief Terry McConky (Heffernan) and Captain Eddie Penisi (Lemme), alongside an eclectic crew played by series regulars Hassie Harrison (Southbound), Eugene Cordero (Black Monday, The Good Place), Marcus Henderson (Get Out, Homecoming), and Gabriel Hogan (Heartland).

I confess I’ve never seen any of the Super Troopers stuff, so I don’t know if I like that style of comedy or not, but I’m definitely curious. Here’s the official trailer for the first 10-episode season.

It’s just too bad that it wasn’t actually filmed in Tacoma; it was of course filmed in Los Angeles. I’ll have to find a way to stream it after it premieres, since we’re a cord-cutted household.

Tacoma FD premieres Thursday, March 28th at 10:30/9:30c on TruTV.

“I like chuch…”

Very exciting! After a long-ish gestation, the first trailer for Open Mike Eagle & Baron Vaughn’s new comedy/variety show on Comedy Central is here! It’s called The New Negroes (which is a reference to the Harlem Renaissance of the 1910s & 1920s) and you can watch the trailer here.

I’m so excited for Mike! This show looks to be a mix of standup, music, and maybe some bizarre sketch-comedy stuff, judging from a few quick clips like this one where someone emerges from Mike’s mouth:

dat mouf…

Here are some more interesting screenshots that I pulled from the trailer. Let the speculation begin!

Open Cop Eagle…

Vid gom…

Wotta wig…

Musical hospital…

The New Negroes premieres on Comedy Central on Friday, April 19th. I’ll have to find a way to watch it since we’re a cord-cutted family!

I am here for this. So can you!

“I’m really not sure how much weight the stage can support…”

So apparently there’s a pre-scripted(!!) rap battle TV show called Drop the Mic. Apparently it’s a spinoff of a segment from The Late Late Show with James Corden(!?). I dunno, I don’t really watch the TV anymore. But I do enjoy the Muppets.

This battle has Kermit and Pepé facing off against Miss Piggy and Beaker. There are some very funny lines, and a great running gag of how Kermit keeps trying to be extra nice instead of insulting. Beaker has a gag that was very predictable but very well done, proving that much of comedy is in the execution and not necessarily the idea. Take a look/listen:

Surprise! You have been pleasured.

We’ll win the fight and then go out for pizzas…

Did you watch the big, huge, new, hour-long Steven Universe that premiered on Monday night? If not, stay the heck away from this post! Heck!

Anyhoo, the episode, “Change Your Mind,” sure seemed to be the culmination of 5 years and 100+ episodes of the show. It brought to a close pretty much all of the major storylines, and it ended, as it should, with a song: a reworking of the opening theme song of the show itself. Take a watch/listen for yourself!

Actually, my previous paragraph was not entirely truthful. The show didn’t end with a song; it ended with two songs. After all the problems are solved and everything has calmed down, Steven sits on the beach with the three people (well, sentient lesbian space rocks) with whom he began this journey in Episode 1, and sings a little coda to the whole series. It’s very simple, but it’s exceedingly sell-sung by Zach Callistan. It is, like the episode itself, called “Change Your Mind.” Here you go.

I don’t know what Steven Universe can do from here. I know there’s a movie coming out later this year, and the possibility of another season. But the whole arc of the show has now been wrapped up; the diamonds have been “defeated” and the corrupted gems have been uncorrupted. There are some dangling threads, like will the diamonds be able to successfully dismantle their horrible, oppressive dictatorship? Will gem society be able to adjust smoothly into a free society? Will Pearl ever go out on a date with the Mystery Girl? So we’ll just have to wait (for a long time, per usual with this show) to see what happens.

“Oh my God, I get it. I get it…”

The 13th(!!) season of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia ended last month. For a show that has spent more than a decade reveling in rapid-fire, gross-out, shocking, and perverse humor about the “worst people in the world,” it did something probably more shocking than it ever had before:

It didn’t make any jokes. The character Mac (Rob McElhenney), after being told both by his imprisoned father and the character Frank (Danny DeVito) that “I never really got you,” decides to come out as gay to his father via an interpretive contemporary dance routine set to Sigur Rós’s enchanting and haunting tune “Varúð.” And it is glorious.

It is perhaps one of the most triumphantly moving dance performances I’ve seen since So You Think You Can Dance’s spectacular “statues” routine set to Ingrid Michaelson’s “Turn to Stone.” Here, just watch (and listen to) this.

Oh my God, I get it. I get it.