First, some quick introductions:

• Jonathan Gray (University of Wisconsin-Madison) co-edited Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era and is author of Watching with The Simpsons: Television, Parody, and Intertextuality.
• Amber Day (Bryant University) is author of Satire and Dissent: Interventions in Contemporary Political Debate.
• Chuck Tryon (Fayateville State University) wrote for many years at his blog The Chutry Experiment on political television, and is author of the forthcoming Political TV.
• Geoffrey Baym (Temple University) is Professor Colbert himself, having written many of the canonical treatments of Colbert, and is author of From Cronkite to Colbert: The Evolution of Broadcast News.
• Ethan Thompson (Texas A&M-Corpus Christi) co-edited Satire TV: Politics and Comedy in the Post-Network Era and is author of Parody and Taste in Postwar American Television Culture.
• Nick Marx (Colorado State University) is co-editor of Saturday Night Live and American TV and is currently editing a reader on comedy studies.

Jonathan Gray:

With each of the other major change in hosts of the various late night shows in the last few years, the new host has been given considerable scope to change the show considerably. It may still be called The Late Show, therefore, but the set’s different, the band’s different, Colbert’s not doing Top Ten lists, Rupert and Biff are gone, etc. What struck me immediately about The Daily Show with Trevor Noah, therefore, was the same old voice announcing the date, the camera swooping over a fairly familiar looking set, while the same ol’ theme song played. Interestingly, then, while a lot has been made about whether Noah can “replace” Jon Stewart, in fact he seems only to have been asked to fill the chair and role of convenor, as Jon’s show, style, and feel are very much still in play. This extends even to Noah’s comic style at time: I’ll discuss a few differences, but so much of his delivery, his play with the camera, his faces at the on-screen bad punny section titles, and so forth felt very “Stewartian.” Even the crappy, unfunny, politically sterile segment about police racism and brutality on Wednesday night’s show feels like the junk that Stewart’s lesser staff members phoned in some times.

I wonder, though, how much of this continuation is a bridging strategy. I think here of the advice I give to grad student lecturers, to teach the regular professor’s class as the professor did, and to leave changes to the second time they teach it. Maybe Week 10 or Season 2 of Noah’s Daily Show will look as different from Stewart’s Daily Show as Colbert’s Late Show is different from Letterman’s, but for now it’s a shrewd move with a not-entirely-popular choice for replacement to keep the machine running rather than reinventing it.

And run it did. Noah is good at this job. He’s funny, he mixes groany dad jokes with edge with skill, as did Stewart. He has good chemistry with the camera. He exudes an intelligence becoming of the role. Nor is he just aping Stewart completely: his own segments seem to move quicker, his delivery and pacing crisper; his relative youth means he doesn’t need to adopt the patrician mode that Stewart did increasingly; and like John Oliver, he can use his non-Americanness to great comic and satirical effect. I was not one of Noah’s many detractors, but I still expected far less than he provided in those first three nights.

Still, though, he’ll need to improve with interviews to keep me from turning off the TV half way in. While the experienced Colbert was booking Jeb Bush and Joe Biden in his first few days, The Daily Show’s bookers either lost their mojo completely, or were savvy enough to give Noah training wheels, opening with Kevin Hart then moving to the founder of a new dating app. Even Chris Christie was a wise first “real” interviewee, since one can count on Christie to know the audience and show and move the interview himself. Even then, in the interviews Noah has been feckless, clearly out of his depth, starstruck, wooden, and a far, far cry from Stewart. Admittedly, Stewart was a superb interviewer, and it’s early days, but the beauty of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart was the two shows in one — critique of the news, then an interview with bite — and unless Noah is a quick study, and as much as the producers may have kept a lot of the old Daily Show, the new one may be only half its former self. I’ll definitely stick around, though, and I don’t begrudge Noah the need to improve.

Amber Day:

This first week of Trevor Noah’s tenure on the Daily Show has had its ups and downs, but I do think that the host shows a good deal of promise.

I agree with Jonathan that the interviews have been disappointing.  In particular, the first two interviews both began with what seemed like a pre-rehearsed (or pre-agreed upon) opening joke that fell so flat as to be almost unintelligible (Kevin Hart’s supposedly disappointing gift of ties and the Whitney Wolfe conceit that interviewer and interviewee were on a date).  Like Jonathan, I may well end up turning off the program half way through (or more likely, cherry picking segments to watch on the Comedy Central website), though I do acknowledge that being a good interviewer is a skill that is entirely different from delivering a tight monologue, and one that will almost certainly take some time to develop.

On the other hand, I think that the comedy portions of the program this past week were well done.  Noah’s self-deprecating bits about the perils of trying to fill Jon Stewart’s shoes struck the right opening note, while momentum continued to pick up as the week progressed.  Here, the one segment over which I disagree with Jonathan was the correspondent piece about racial profiling and police brutality.  I thought the segment did a very good job of highlighting the radically divergent ways in which the majority of white Americans versus black Americans view the police force, while very deliberately allowing the spokesperson for a police anti-bias training program to make a case for why such a program is necessary and what it is meant to accomplish, a message that slipped through in the background while the correspondents clowned in the foreground.  Though it was certainly gentle, I think it was a form of advocacy journalism tailored for an exceedingly touchy subject.  I happened to be watching that episode with my mother-in-law, whose political views are widely divergent from my own, but it felt like a conversation starter that we were both comfortable with, while it did still have substance.

The other highlight of the week for me was the extended story on Donald Trump being akin to an African president, detailing his striking similarities to notorious military strong-men and megalomaniac dictators like Gaddafi or Amin.  Though Trump is certainly an easy target, the piece allowed Noah to use his own background and knowledge to provide global context for the American political race, while also producing a very funny segment.

Going forward, Noah will, of course, have to grapple with the ins and outs of American party politics, but he would do well to continue to draw liberally from his strengths: an international perspective, as well as a heightened sensitivity to contemporary race relations.  If he can manage to bring some of that savviness to his interviews, he will have it made.

Chuck Tryon:

During the opening monologue of his debut episode on The Daily Show, Trevor Noah promised to uphold the legacy of Jon Stewart by continuing the “war on bullshit.” For those of us who became accustomed to Stewart’s relentless attacks on cable news, however, Noah’s contributions actually look quite a bit different, at least so far. Thus far, Noah has generally offered a much more genial perspective, one that draws on his experiences as a non-U.S. native to denaturalize some aspects of American political discourse rather than focusing excessively on cable news (although he did offer a mildly humorous critique of cable news’s tendency to focus on distractions such as “pumpkin spice” season). That being said, like Jonathan and Amber, I also see plenty of room for Noah to grow into the role of Daily Show host and to adapt the format to his comedic strengths, in much the same way that Stewart refocused the show away from Craig Kilborn’s sterile, apolitical humor.

This “outsider” status was powerfully displayed in the inspired segment in which Noah compared Donald Trump to a laundry list of African dictators. Like Amber, I appreciated this segment, in no small part because it provided a more global perspective on American politics, but also because it brought a fresh perspective to the Trump parodies, which have become overly obvious in recent weeks. Other segments were somewhat less successful. I was somewhat ambivalent about the police brutality sketch, in that its politics seemed somewhat incoherent to me, but that’s likely a product of the writers finding their stride, rather than any limitations on Noah’s part. The “Panderdemic” segment also showed promise, as Noah worked to pick apart the ways in which politicians seek to appeal to specific voters, often in disingenuous ways.

Perhaps the biggest concern about Noah has been his performance during interviews. But it’s worth remembering that Stewart, especially during his early career, seemed equally star-struck during interviews. And while I’m no fan of Chris Christie, Noah was probably better served by taking a relatively genial tone with him. In fact, Noah did offer a subtle pushback against one of the common tropes of conservative politics, in which presidential candidates campaign against “the government,” even though they are part of that government. He also managed to tease out some of the absurdities of Christie’s draconian immigration policy. These moments suggest that Noah may be a quick study on American political discourse, and I’m willing to give him time to develop his skills as an interviewer while waiting for Colbert to start.

Ultimately, I think Noah will grow into his role as host of The Daily Show. It’s unfair at this stage to hold him to the high standards established by Jon Stewart, who seemed to become the political conscience of cable television over the last few years, but given time, I’m hopeful that Noah can bring a unique perspective to the fake news genre.

Geoffrey Baym:

I want to build briefly on Jonathan’s suggestion that Trevor Noah has kept “the machinery running” through his first week.  While it is right to consider what changes Noah will make to the program as he settles in to the role, I’m also quite interested in the power of the machine to operate as designed.  Or to put the point differently, we’re seeing what I would characterize as the institutionalization of the form.  When so many of us began paying careful attention to The Daily Show more than a decade ago, it seemed like something unprecedented and risky – a novel mechanism for engaging with and interrogating the public political conversation that had more to do with the particular vision and talents of the host than it did the power of formal convention or institutional lineage.  And the host himself long insisted that he was an institutional outsider, a jester throwing spitballs, rather than the opinion leader and influence broker he so clearly became.  That of course is the point of the long-running joke: “From Comedy Central World News headquarters in New York, this is The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.” Unlike those long-established and institutionally entrenched news outlets on the other channels, Comedy Central of course had no “world news” operation, nor a “headquarters” where nationally significant command and control decisions could be made.

Notably, that intro line remains – the only difference being the last two words (“with Trevor Noah”) – as does the swooping camera motion, the spinning globe, and the theme music.  All of this suggests that the joke has taken on new complexities, it seems now to fold back in on itself.  Like the institution of nightly news it long imitated, The Daily Show truly has become more than the personality and skills of its host. It is an institutional product – conceptualized by a team of producers and writers, governed by production conventions and audience expectations, and located in a particular cultural milieu.  It may have a new set, new font, and a new graphics package, but those are the same kind of cosmetic changes that all news operations make periodically, just as they bring in new anchors and new correspondents from time to time.  Certainly, Noah’s personality and interests will begin to shape the content.  Chuck and Amber are right that the Trump-as-African-Dictator gave us a glimpse at the more global and ethnically nuanced discourse most of us are expecting to see from Noah.  And of course, his interviewing skills are far from where they’ll need to be.  But through a wider lens, this Daily Show is remarkably like the last Daily Show (or the one that John Oliver hosted while Stewart was on leave directing Rosewater), and that continuity is for me the major take-away here.

Finally, there are important linkages to be made between the institutional consistency of The Daily Show and the work that Colbert (and Stewart apparently) are doing on CBS.  After nearly a month on air, the Late Show looks a lot like a more grandly theatrical, if perhaps slightly less subversive, Colbert Report.  Just the other day, John Oliver sat with Colbert for an interview, with the two explicitly positioning themselves as former Daily Show correspondents.  Oliver, of course, has taken the genre of news parody in a new direction on his HBO show Last Week Tonight, devoting 18 minutes per episode to deconstructing often obtuse public problems.  Meanwhile, back on Comedy Central, Larry Wilmore (formerly The Daily Show’s Senior Black Correspondent) is still holding on with his panel discussion program, The Nightly Show.  Scholars of TV and political communication have long been looking for “The Daily Show effect,” and finally I think we can identify one.  Jon Stewart’s show spawned numerous copycats, both in the US and around the world, but more importantly, it has seeded the landscape of political television and created a new kind of media institution while doing so.

Ethan Thompson:

A few minutes into Trevor Noah’s first interview with Kevin Hart it hit me, and I felt oh-so-stupid for not realizing it sooner: the shift from Jon Stewart to Trevor Noah is first and foremost a generational shift.

Stewart was 37 when he started back in 1999. Have you seen a photo of him recently? Noah is now just 31. Stewart’s departure was a chance for Comedy Central to reset the show with a new host who might appeal to a more youthful demo. The olds will keep tuning in anyway, and if Noah isn’t quite suited to their (my) tastes, there’s always Oliver, Wilmore, Maher, Colbert, and/or Myers to queue up on the DVR or switch the channel to later. The Daily Show may be the house that Jon Stewart (re)built, but Daniel Tosh has done more for Comedy Central in recent years, and I expect that that is the audience the network hopes to attract. I wish them luck.

I could think of at least a half dozen people I would have rather seen taking over the anchor spot, but that’s because I was thinking of established people in the post-Boomer/Generation X cohort. Dumb me, and smart Comedy Central. I thought Noah’s first week of programs was solid. He has the presence and personality to carry the show as host, and the various correspondent pieces showed that the program can sail on without Stewart’s guiding hand. I’m glad that Comedy Central is investing in Noah as a host who might cultivate another generation of satire fans.

Noah’s biography is compelling and much has been said about the potential his global perspective might bring to the show. This amorphous “global” perspective was rightly ridiculed on his first show. Still, the standout piece of the first week for me (and apparently the others writing here!) was Donald Trump: America’s African President. Whether or not this was a product of Noah’s global perspective, it was both meaningful and funny.

Television satire, especially the fake news variety, is expected to live and die by the personalities of the performers. Ever since Chevy Chase transitioned from Weekend Update host to movie star after the first season of SNL, fake news has been a springboard, with Colbert’s ascension from Daily Show correspondent to the Colbert Report to his CBS show the corresponding bookend. Stewart’s tenure is an anomaly.

The truth, of course, is the other writers and producers are largely responsible for making the show funny and meaningful on a consistent basis. I hate to take too much credit away from Noah, because I do think he has done a good job and it would be a different show without him. However, I think what Geoffrey Baym describes above as the institutionalization of news satire may ultimately be most interesting to consider. Comedy Central can choose a youthful host without a track record because the form has gelled enough that the program is not dependent upon the host the way it once was. There won’t be anything revolutionary about Noah’s Daily Show the way Stewart’s once seemed. The form, and not just the viewers, have matured.

Nick Marx:

Geoffrey’s description of the “institutionalization” of satire television and Ethan’s observation about generational shifts echo a lot of what I thought about the Stewart-to-Noah transition before last week–that The Daily Show has more or less become Saturday Night Live at this point.  That’s intended neither to slight nor compliment either show, but to highlight how both have been integrated into political, industrial, and social discourses beyond the programs themselves.  Noah’s hiring (like that of SNL’s Sasheer Zamata, Leslie Jones, or short-lived Daily Show correspondent Michael Che) was less about late-night transitions than it was about race, gender, and televisual representation.  It’s been heartening to see Noah, then, arrive in Stewart’s chair with little else around him changed and instantly shine.

Conversely, I was often much more appreciative of the way Stewart’s Daily Show shaped broader public deliberation about important topics™ than I was of his on air presence (good riddance, exaggeratedly-Jewish-Jerry-Lewis voice!).  Noah seems to be, at least so far, a much more conventionally funny and likable stand-up comedian.  I expect that we’ll see a lot more bits rooted in Noah’s race and nationality (like the Trump-as-African-dictator segment), and I hope the show will continue experimenting with correspondent segments in act one, or even entirely interview-free episodes.  Like Colbert’s Late Show, The Daily Show is clearly still struggling to find a new voice while paying proper homage to its predecessor.  Fortunately, it’s also got the charismatic ringleader to find that voice quickly.  Here’s to hoping Noah doesn’t jump ship after seven or so seasons to make buddy comedies with Will Ferrell.

Monica the Medium (premiered ABC Family, August 25 @ 8/7) trailer here

ABC Family is aggressively pursuing the lucrative demographic of Penn State student-mediums who have never played Flip Cup by featuring their very own Monica Ten-Kate with this reality show.

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This show is trolling anyone who has ever said that “kids these days” are self-obsessed, spoiled, and narcissistic. Monica, in case you hadn’t guessed, is a medium. She claims she’s also just a normal girl trying to find a job and a boyfriend. Her search for the job in the pilot is comical, inasmuch as it’s dominated by her concern over whether she should come clean that she is a medium, when everything else in the pilot suggests she’s incapable of not telling people she’s a medium (‘cause, you know, when I meet someone, this is the first thing about them that I want to know). Cutaways to the people to whom she gives “readings” are all sympathetic and glowing, meanwhile (as when a young woman expresses amazement at the fact that Monica knew her mother’s cancer had metastasized, a detail she didn’t share with anyone, but, erm, if you die of cancer, doesn’t that kind of require metastasization?).

Indeed, not once are we treated to someone who is skeptical of her abilities, motives, or mental health. Instead, the show seems intent to use her being a medium, and her friends’ and potential suitors’ acceptance of it, as a parable for how we should all be more accepting and understanding. Monica the Medium should just be allowed to be Monica the Medium, it seems to be saying … even when that involves accosting strangers with manipulative, trite sentiment about dead loved ones. Admittedly, reality television’s bread and butter lays in offering us people to judge, and boy do I judge her, but the pilot’s unwillingness to cast even an iota of doubt on her claim to talk to dead people, or on her insistence that she must pass on messages from these dead people whenever she feels like it, had me wondering whether to despise the show or Monica the Medium more. Bad joke, real sentiment: this show is now dead to me.

Jonathan Gray (University of Wisconsin-Madison) is author of Television Entertainment and Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts, and is currently studying media dislike, while disliking this show.

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“It’s really hard trying to find a guy while you’re a medium and you’re a college student. It’s next to impossible, actually.”

It would be easy to write a derisive review of ABC Family’s new foray into reality TV, Monica the Medium. I could say that Monica the Medium is certainly no Buffy the Vampire Slayer, despite Monica’s repeated uttering of bastardized versions of the core themes of that beloved series. Where Buffy intertwined humor and depth, here the sense of lightness and loving parody is missing. (I mean, there are some pretty funny lines in this series, but I’m guessing that their humor isn’t intentional…) I could also say that despite sharing a network and arguably a target demographic, Monica the Medium is no Pretty Little Liars—that ABC Family juggernaut that has managed its mix of multiple filles fatales, whiplash plot, and questionable fashion for six seasons and counting.

What Monica the Medium does offer is a somewhat awkwardly constructed glimpse into the lives of a group of college students not marked clearly upper class (a la The Hills) nor lower class (a la Jersey Shore) who cringe as their friend Monica goes into regular situations—parties, workplaces, a fashion boutique, a nail salon—and brings her emotional conversations with dead people (talking with “the spirit” as she calls it). She inserts the inappropriately emotional and the “spiritual” into each space, rupturing expected norms of behavior and replacing pleasantries with tears and cherished or (supposedly) suppressed memories. Somehow she seems to know the intimate and private and makes it public before returning to the closure of a sequence; (she does indeed finally buy an outfit and get a manicure, after in both situations speaking to multiple dead people related to the various staff).

Look, I’m not saying this is great TV; (it’s certainly no Unreal, nor even Everlasting, the fake reality show on Unreal) and I don’t know if it will find an audience, be that an audience that laughs at it or with it. But for its insistence on bringing emotion and “spirit” into the everyday (and not via horror movie tropes or destructive femme fatales), combined with its seemingly unintentional ridiculousness, it might see viewers sticking with. I for one will give it a few more episodes and will be keeping an eye on the reviews to see what pleasures it offers its viewers.

Louisa Stein (Middlebury College) is author of Millennial Fandom and studies gender, media, and audience culture.

Todrick (premiered MTV, August 31 @ 10/9) trailer here

We’re just gonna quote MTV on this one: “quadruple-threat Todrick Hall lets fans into his creative factory and introduces them to the passionate troupe of creative collaborators who pour heart and soul into his weekly videos. Unwilling to wait for Hollywood to make them stars, Todrick and his faithful crew write, choreograph, style, and direct full-scale productions weekly – all while balancing side jobs to pay the bills – to try to make their dreams come true on their own terms.”

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Todrick’s title theme song gets one point clear: this is a show about Todrick being Todrick in “Toddywood.” Todrick even assures himself in his own theme song that the show is, in fact, about him: “Just making sure!” Todrick tells Todrick. And this makes it confusing because I’m not sure how meta the first episode is meant to be. Todrick has a video idea of critiquing celebrities who will do anything “crazy” or “freaky” to extend their 15 minutes of fame. But is this a critique of himself—a castoff of American Idol Season 9 who desires fame—as he goes around town doing self-defined crazy and freaky things for attention? Perhaps he knows this, but the show and his crew don’t really seem to even be aware of this point.

Even when Todrick isn’t about Todrick, it is about Todrick. A subplot involves the upcoming birthday of his makeup artist, Nicole, but the show is less concerned about her and more focused on Todrick’s benevolence in planning a surprise birthday video (and downplaying the issue that he is forcing her to work on her birthday). Also, Todrick manages to track down one of Nicole’s (supposedly) favorite music artists, Kelly Rowland, but in Todrick fashion, he films himself with Rowland giving a shout-out to Nicole. You know, instead of giving Nicole the day off to actually meet Kelly Rowland.

However, the subplot is probably needed because the show is literally a behind-the-scenes look at Todrick’s YouTube channel, and sometimes feels it would be better just as a YouTube video. With that said, Todrick is undeniably talented and it does give a sometimes interesting, if slightly fabricated, look at the frantic and DIY nature of producing YouTube videos. Yet, as someone indifferent to Todrick, I would prefer the condensed YouTube version.

Tony Tran (University of Wisconsin-Madison) researches Vietnamese diaspora and new media in urban spaces.

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Early into the pilot, Todrick’s star writes a song as a gift for his make-up artist, Nicole Faulkner. With clipboard in hand, Todrick Hall enumerates his vision for “The Birthday Dance,” which producer Jean-yves “Jeeve” Ducornet quickly assembles by a wall of monitors and synthesizers. Hall then records his vocals, “the easy part” of the song’s compressed (and unreliably plotted) journey to becoming YouTube ephemera. Hall and his team also record a video, find costumes and develop choreography for it, and integrate fan-made clips and singer Kelly Rowland’s birthday message into it. Faulkner also sacrifices her birthday for the production, which overlaps with the shoot for Hall’s riff on tabloid culture “Who Let the Freaks Out.”

Hall’s studio visit takes two minutes of screen time, but it’s a formative moment. When MTV launched in 1981, it would have been more interested in putting “The Birthday Dance” into rotation than in crafting a narrative around its creation. Of course, Todrick benefits from a post- political climate supposedly removed from MTV’s original, racist “rock videos only” mandate (a lie Nicki Minaj challenged by asking “Miley what’s good” the night before Todrick premiered). But MTV has always commodified pop stardom as a lifestyle, with music functioning as part of an artist’s brand. In that regard, Todrick honors a programming tradition that stretches back to Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes (1985-1987). It also reveals the chipper resourcefulness and pathological entrepreneurialism often required to “put on a show,” whether the performer is a vaudevillian entertainer or a YouTube celebrity with an army of telegenic industry hopefuls, Toddlerz (Hall’s term for his fanbase), and the off-screen hand of manager Scooter Braun to raise him up. The music is incidental, but Todrick’s half-open window into pop celebrity’s psychology and invisible labor is nonetheless compelling and ripe for critique.

Alyxandra Vesey (University of Wisconsin-Madison) studies the relationship between identity politics, music culture, and media labor and her dissertation analyzes recording artists’ contributions to post-network television.

Suddenly Royal (premiered TLC, September 9 @ 10/9) trailer here

An American auto repair advisor researches his ancestry online, only to find out that he’s actually royalty, heir to the British Isle of Man. So he and his family pack up and move to their kingdom. A Princess Diaries whose star will likely never end up playing Catwoman, this seems so much like it’s faux, yet it seems it’s for real (well, as real as reality shows are), and that dude honestly thinks he’s a royal, and has done so since 2007, though he only recently moved there.

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Hey, if Donald Trump or Scott Walker could become President, why can’t David Drew Howe become King of the Isle of Man? The premise for this show is pretty amazing, as Howe finds he likes his ancestral line better than Ben Affleck likes his. This situation doesn’t exactly occur every day, which produces a fascinating generic hybrid – there’s an “outsider in bucolic England” angle that feels a lot like one of the BBC’s favorite genres (except that many of those involve murders, so oddly I was watching very closely to see who would have a motive to kill, say, the royal secretary), mixed with a bit of House Hunters International and its ilk, as middle America deals with smaller beds, horses next door, and insufficient numbers of local takeaway restaurants. Yet undergirding it all is run-of-the-mill reality television being run-of-the-mill reality television: the cutaway counterpoints, the closeups on smirks, etc. And thus watching Suddenly Royal produced an interesting experience that was both utterly familiar and fresh.

Howe may need grooming into royal material, but he’s absolutely ready for television, as I found his sense of humor a lovely mix of homey Dad-joke and dry, delicately edgy (when his daughter expresses concern about how they’ll make money on the Isle of Man, for instance, he dryly offers the possibility of plunder and pillage). Howe’s wife Pam plays his straight (wo)man well, so there’s some comic schtick on offer. And all three family members’ attitudes to their circumstance is amusing, even refreshing. This is TV being TV really well, and an engaging hour. I expected to dislike or be bored by this, but instead I will definitely watch more, and encourage you to give it a shot, even if only to experience the odd genre hybrid for an episode.

Jonathan Gray (University of Wisconsin-Madison) is author of Television Entertainment and Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts, and evidently prefers would-be-king narratives to entitled teen medium narratives.

Uncommon Grounds (premiered Travel, September 14 @ 11/10) no trailer available at this time

After having searched the world for rare coffee in Dangerous Grounds, host Todd Carmichael obviously still has more high-flying international coffee man of intrigue business to conduct in this new show that will explore various countries’ culture through their coffee.

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There is nothing particularly uncommon about this documentary-style reality program. The premiere’s flimsy narrative sees the La Colombe founder immersing himself in Japanese culture so as to secure an agreement with the company UCC to mass-produce his new coffeemaker, ‘The Dragon’ (a hybrid between a siphon and pour-over device). Along the way, Carmichael and his cameraman ‘Hollywood’ experience a night out in Tokyo with Japanese businessmen, a visit to a Sake plantation, and an Aikido lesson.

One of the program’s persistent themes involves Carmichael’s fish-out-of-water status – “I’m the loudest person in Japan, even when I’m using my indoor voice” – and its partial resolution through the identification of common cultural touchstones with respect to life and business. This is where the series is most interesting – and most revealing with respect to the current cultural moment. In Carmichael’s admiration for Japanese obsessiveness, efficiency, and precision, we see the basis for a common ground between Japanese culture and the relentlessly-driven entrepreneurialism of contemporary US culture. With Carmichael’s background as an extreme endurance athlete and risk-taking businessman, he finds a lot to admire in the Japanese work ethic and obsession with perfection. All he needs is a basic understanding of the conventions of Japanese business culture to secure the deal.

The final scene before the climactic business meeting encapsulates the banality of this instrumental approach to cultural immersion. As Carmichael meditates in a traditional temple, a voice-over relates his thoughts about the upcoming meeting. An activity that is ostensibly devoted to peace and wholeness becomes the final step in preparing to seal a business deal. This dynamic is emblematic of a program that might have offered earnest cultural exploration and exchange, but which ultimately functions primarily as an extended commercial for American entrepreneurialism, Carmichael’s company, and his new brewing device.

Christopher Cwynar (University of Wisconsin-Madison) researches public media, digital culture, and consumer-citizenship.

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According to Uncommon Grounds’ host Todd Carmichael, “Japan is the third-largest coffee importer in the world. They’re known to spend upwards of $1,000 a pound for the best beans.” On his previous show, this piece of information would initiate a trans-Pacific boondoggle for the daredevil co-founder of Philadelphia’s coffee roaster and café La Colombe Torrefaction to find the best coffee the country has to offer. But for the premiere of his new Travel Channel show, Carmichael sets his sights on Japan to find a manufacturer for his new glass brewer, the Dragon.

Carmichael anticipates that his maverick businessman posturing will create friction with Japanese commerce’s supposed “penchant for precision and detail” (though, conveniently, he forgot to pack a suit). To prepare for his presentation for Ueshima Coffee Co.’s executives, Carmichael and his cameraman Hollywood spend a week in Tokyo and Kyoto drinking with businessmen, eating sushi on the Shinkansen, visiting the Chikurin Sake Brewery, taking in a fish-cutting presentation and a multi-course meal with its owner Niichiro Marumoto, learning Aikido’s basic principles, and meditating (!) on the Travel Channel’s dime. Unsurprisingly, Carmichael hoists a box of UCC-produced Dragon brewers during the end credits–the price of doing business on basic cable.

The Travel Channel likes to cast middle-aged white male gourmands as rock stars whose escapades viewers can enjoy from safe distances. It’s a branding strategy that reeks of chauvinism, regardless of how many Uzbekistani weddings Anthony Bourdain attended on No Reservations. Uncommon Grounds doesn’t challenge this, in part because it presents culture’s commodification as international currency without problematizing the U.S.’s position in this exchange. But when the product is a coffee maker—an appliance that processes an ecologically and politically fraught consumer good—there needs to be a deeper discussion than the one Uncommon Grounds is willing to engage.

Alyxandra Vesey (University of Wisconsin-Madison) studies the relationship between identity politics, music culture, and media labor and her dissertation analyzes recording artists’ contributions to post-network television.

The Bazillion Dollar Club (premiered Syfy, September 22 @ 10/9) trailer here

A six episode docu-series that follows two startup incubator founders in Silicon Valley as they try to advise companies towards, well, a “bazillion” dollars by offering such gems like “if you’re not willing to risk everything, you’re going to fail.” Rinse and repeat with HBO’s Silicon Valley afterwards.

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This is a formulaic documentary-style program based on a 16-week startup accelerator ‘boot camp’ offered by the angel investors and startup gurus Dave McClure (of 500 Startups) and Brady Forrest (HighwayOne). Over the course of the season, these two will endeavor to help six different startups to ‘accelerate’ their growth in terms of revenue, customer, base, and, most importantly, fundraising.

The first episode sees the duo dispensing tough love and hard-bitten wisdom to Ethan Appleby of Vango, which seeks to be ‘iTunes for art’. The Fassbender-esque CEO is feeling the pressure of trying to keep his dream alive while following through on behalf of the other core workers who have sacrificed time, money, and energy to contribute to the project. This becomes a plot point as Monique, the effervescent and industrious client relations specialist, requests a raise. Appleby cannot afford to lose ‘Mo,’ but he also can’t afford to ‘give her the raise she deserves.’ The only solution is to find some more money – somehow.

The fate of the company – and Mo’s raise – ultimately seem to come down to a 3-minute talk that Ethan is to give to potential investors on a 500 Startups ‘Demo Day.’ Will Ethan be able to distill his message down to its essence and deliver it with confidence, charisma, and enthusiasm? In effect, the question is whether Ethan can effectively sell himself and embody the promise of the idea he represents. In this respect, BDC provides a straightforward reflection of a society in which many believe that the path to freedom and fulfillment involves the marketing of the self and the building of something that can be validated in the marketplace. It is an unexceptional reality program, but its portrayal of startup life is likely to appeal to those viewers who themselves dream of beating the odds to achieve exceptional success on America’s tech frontier.

Christopher Cwynar (University of Wisconsin-Madison) studies public media, digital culture, and consumer-citizenship.

*

My experience of watching of this show is a testament to the power of flow, not simply in the all-on-television form famously explicated by Raymond Williams, but including the ebbs and flows of social and cultural context. I watched this while waiting to see billionaire bigot Donald Trump interviewed on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, hoping that Stephen’s satirical fangs were still in tact. And I watched on a week in which the news was dominated by three stories: (1) young CEO Martin Shkreli deciding that his company Turing would increase the price of Daraprim – a drug used to treat patients with AIDS – from $13.50 per pill to $750 per pill, (2) young-ish former Boy Wonder of the GOP, Scott Walker, announcing the suspension of his campaign to become President, in the wake of failing to secure enough investment in either cold hard cash or likely voters, and (3) British Prime Minister David Cameron being allegedly revealed to be, quite literally, a rich pig-fucker. And thus I was so very primed to dislike the young white entrepreneurs of this show. As Vango’s head expressed regret that he “couldn’t” pay a valued staff-member what she’s worth, I wondered how much his shirt cost. As the coaches told him how to present himself, so that people will give him their money, my mind drifted to thinking about Walker boring live audiences, unable to get yet more donor money. And as the show marched its way through a tour of how wonderfully awesome, smart, and able young white CEOs can be, I thought of Shkreli, Walker, Cameron and their egos. I’ve seen too many instances of the corporate world’s excesses this week, and of “the art of the deal” hubris. Admittedly, if the show was actually gripping, I might have stayed in the here and now, instead of floating away on a current of flow, but it isn’t: it’s just yet another celebration of the uncelebratable.

Jonathan Gray (University of Wisconsin-Madison) is author of Television Entertainment and Show Sold Separately: Promos, Spoilers, and Other Media Paratexts.

Road Spill (premiered truTV, September 23 @ 10.30/9.30) trailer here

Focusing on what people really talk about in the privacy (or, nationally televised, reality television “privacy”) of their own cars. Also promised by truTV are hilarity, road rage, and moral dilemmas.

*

People Other Than Comedians In Unremarkable Cars Being Unremarkable. So, here’s how it works: regular people get in their cars and drive around, then answer tepid questions pitched at them, such as “is it too intimate to share the same toothbrush?”, “how far out of your comfort zone have you gone to please a loved one?”, “who is grosser in the bathroom? Men or women?”, or “what do you think about men in Speedos?”. I’d spare the judgment if this was something that someone did with a cheap camera and put on YouTube, but it’s so weird to see this on non-public-access, commercial television in 2015 – and a whole half hour of it – especially when some people are saying there’s “too much good television.” It might work as a radio show, albeit a boring one, but the visuals are entirely irrelevant here. Then the commentary is like something you’d overhear on a bus, in a restaurant, or at the mall. You might chortle a little and note it to someone you’re sitting next to, but you’d then go back to your conversation and zone out. So here’s my suggestion, to round out the review: next time a student wants extra credit, tell them to watch a season of this and write a 20 page paper. Make em work for it. Harder than anyone involved with this show seems to be working.

Jonathan Gray (University of Wisconsin-Madison) already has too many bios on this page.

Fashionably Late with Rachel Zoe (premiered Lifetime, September 24 @ 10.30/9.30) trailer here

Stylist and designer Rachel Zoe hosts this talk show focused on fashion, “beauty,” and pop culture.

*

It was only three minutes into the premiere of Fashionably Late with Rachel Zoe that I was thinking about Watch What Happens Live!, the Bravo late night chat show hosted by Andy Cohen. That’s not surprising given that Zoe stepped out of the shadows of her celebrity styling clients for her Bravo series The Rachel Zoe Project. It’s also not surprising given that WWHL! has been an incredible success for Bravo, and Lifetime is clearly patterning Fashionably Late in its mold, positioning it after Project Runway, which they directly nabbed from Bravo. But Fashionably Late doesn’t only carry vestiges of WWHL!—it’s also obviously attempting to mimic E!’s Fashion Police following its dramatic fall from grace this year following Joan Rivers’ death, Giuliana Rancic’s racist comments at the Oscars, and Kelly Osbourne’s departure. In fact, the segment “#whatwereyouthinking,” in which Alba was asked to reflect on some style choices from her past is a direct steal from Fashion Police.

It’s probably telling that I spent the majority of the episode thinking about all the things it cribbed from other cable channel weekly chat shows—the show itself was not terribly compelling, feeling mostly like a rehash of concepts I’d seen before. As someone who really enjoys Rachel Zoe, who has always appreciated her quirks, her unapologetic style, and her catchphrases, I felt like this venue muted her. Maybe she was so busy being crammed into different existing boxes that she wasn’t allowed to be Rachel Zoe. In truth, I enjoyed the teaser segments that aired in the weeks, days, and hours leading up to the premiere much better. (See here for one example) Here’s hoping the format loosens, Lifetime stops trying to steal its competitors’ ideas, and Zoe finds her groove. I’m not sure I’m going to hang around to find out, though.

Erin Copple Smith (Austin College) studies media industries, focusing specifically on product placement and conglomerate cross-promotion.

The Daily Show with Trevor Noah (CC, September 28 @ 11/10) promo here

Noah faces the daunting task of winning over would-be audiences likely divided into those who regard Jon Stewart as amazing and likely irreplaceable, and those whose lack of interest in Stewart or active disdain for him likely overflows to the show and the format in general. But with Trump and Walker still in the GOP race, at least the jokes and criticism will come easy.

*

Note that we will post a separate discussion of The Daily Show after it’s been on for one week

I’ll Have What Phil’s Having (PBS, September 28 @ 10/9) trailer here

Media scholars may best know Phil Rosenthal as the protagonist telling Russians why they suck in Exporting Raymond, the documentary about his attempts to translate Everybody Loves Raymond to Russia. Apparently, he’ll now be telling other people of the world why they suck (even if their food doesn’t always) in this food and travel show.

*

I was worried that the appeal of I’ll Have What Phil’s Having would hinge entirely on how easily one could digest an hour of Phil Rosenthal’s mugging. Thankfully, that’s not really the case. For the most part, the program realizes that the food and the city (here, Tokyo) are the true stars of the show. On the surface, there’s not a whole lot that distinguishes this from No Reservations beyond the hosts’ very different personae (Rosenthal’s vacillation between wide-eyed excitement and wider-eyed incredulity vs. Anthony Bourdain’s labored, hypermasculine cool). Like Bourdain, Rosenthal cracks wise through a tour of local food that covers street grub, haute cuisine, and little in between.

Although the program follows American food TV’s disappointingly traditional convention of ensuring that the viewer has a compatriot tour guide/avatar to lead our way through the unfamiliar terrain, it’s reasonably light on the Othering that winds up insulting the host city and the audience’s intelligence in equal measure. Which is not to say that it’s absent—there are a few groan-inducing references to a “Blade Runnerish” collection of bars and some exaggerated, bug-eyed reactions to still-living sashimi, but Rosenthal’s approach to cross-cultural encounters is somewhat more earnest and playful than one might expect.

But again, I’m really here for the lovingly shot food and cityscapes. On that front, the show more-or-less delivers. I’ll Have What Phil’s Having doesn’t quite reach the heights of what food television can achieve (for my money, that would be Netflix’s recent Chef’s Table, a beautifully shot, warts-and-all exploration of the equal measures of genius and madness required to be one of the world’s greatest chefs). But it’s a decent-enough food travelogue, even if it’s not adding a whole lot that connoisseurs of the genre haven’t already seen.

Evan Elkins (Miami University) researches and teaches issues pertaining to the media industries, media criticism, globalization, and digital technologies.

*

PBS’s new program “I’ll Have What Phil’s Having” suggests in its title an equivalence between its host, Phil Rosenthal (Hollywood showrunner, creator of Everybody Loves Raymond) and the audience, but you can only be a peer of Rosenthal’s if you have quite a bit of money—or fancy friends. In the premiere episode, Phil eats at a range of restaurants in Tokyo, Japan, but the majority of them are super, duper fancy (molecular gastronomy fancy). In my less generous moments, I viewed Rosenthal as a dilettante. Yet his manner is what makes him more of an “everyman,” for he balks at the most exotic fare, including eel (bones and all), ants (they taste like lemon), and freshly killed (and uncooked) shrimp.

This program is aiming for the niche covered so well on basic cable by fellow travel food hosts Andrew Zimmern (Bizarre Foods) and Anthony Bourdain (Parts Unknown). What this program has not yet figured out, though, is that Zimmern and Bourdain thrive, in part, based on the personality of their hosts. Zimmern is childlike and bold in his enthusiasm for all things gross; Bourdain is all sharp edges, but he is also an incredibly knowledgeable chef with noble aspirations. Rosenthal lacks expertise, but what he can offer is humor and a deeper look into his personal life. In particular, the show is missing its biggest possible appeal in the fact that Rosenthal’s brother is the producer! When Phil skypes with his parents from Tokyo, his father repeatedly asks for the unseen brother, Richard, much to Phil’s chagrin (“here is the son you actually love,” he complains as the camera turns towards Richard). The entire show came alive in this moment of relatable family joshing. With so much food TV out there, this show needs Rosenthal to let us see him as a father, son, husband, and brother, because those are the things to which his audience can relate.

Karen Petruska (Gonzaga University) studies the media industries, television history, and media policy.

Adam Ruins Everything (truTV, September 29 @ 10/9)

Adam Conover moves his show from a College Humor web series to the big time (if truTV counts as the big time). You can see an example of his College Humor show here, and quickly get the idea: brief explorations of a wide variety of issues, trying to uncover things and go against the current of popular belief, with comedy and irreverence.

*

Adam Ruins Everything has bold ambitions. Its first episode sees the host tackle a series of beliefs around “giving.” He notes that diamonds as emblems of romance are completely a product of De Beers’ advertising, he explores the silliness of Tom’s Shoes promising to give a free pair of shoes to a random African kid for every pair you buy, he interrogates the (il)logic of canned food drives, donating blood after natural disasters, and saving ring tabs for charity. It’s visually interesting, too: Daily Prophet-style, authors’ dust jacket photos come alive and talk to him, plenty of animation and CGI are used, and there’s a pace to it. He even gets bonus points for having professors on and (!) for using footnotes on screen to show his sources. It’s trying to be edutainment for adults, and I appreciate the attempt to debunk that which needs debunking.

But holy moly is this a big stinking pile of mansplaining. The pilot consisted mostly of host Adam Conover telling an oh-so-naïve young white woman how dumb and ill-informed she is. She was set up as one half of a couple, but somehow her fiancé didn’t need the lessons like she does. Even worse, she’s a teacher, so Conover’s performance is predicated on telling a woman who thinks she’s smart that, no honeycakes, actually you’re not. Then, when she’s disappeared, as a coda to the show, he accosts another wrong-but-pretty white woman at a bus stop. Admittedly, he embraces and owns the fact that he’s annoying, but never that he’s a sexist jerk. The show reminds us he’s “ruining” things for people too often, virtually suggesting that he’s (a very, very white) Morpheus come to give the women and schoolgirls of the world the red pill. Indeed, the CGI and animation set him up as some omniscient, omnipresent being. As much as the show seems to want to be educational, it’s draped with the ickery of talking to a male audience who are presumed to have had the blue pill, and who just need a few more factoids as arsenal in their mission to fix all the pretty little heads of the universe. Maybe future episodes will see him lecture dudes too, but it’s utterly tone deaf for a pilot to be this full of mansplaining, so I’ll just put the show down over here and not come back to it.

Jonathan Gray (University of Wisconsin-Madison) has numerous bios up this page.

The Brain with David Eagleman (PBS, October 14 @ 10/9) trailer here

A six-part study of the brain, how we think, how we feel, and how it all works, hosted by neuroscientist and best-selling author Eagleman.

Fear the Walking Dead (AMC, premiered August 23 @ 8/7) trailer here

A spinoff of The Walking Dead follows a family in LA at the beginning of the outbreak, Fear begins with a six episode season, but already has an order for a second season of fifteen episodes, guaranteeing many more deltoids will be eaten, and many more “don’t go out there” commands will be ignored.

note: see Amanda Keeler’s full-length review here

~~~

Public Morals (TNT, premiered August 25 @ 10/9) trailer here

Another police drama set in New York City, this one focuses on the Public Morals Division and hence lots of vice. Star-executive producer-writer-director Edward Burns is joined by Justified bad guys Michael Rapaport and Neal McDonough, 30 Rock’s Cecie, Katrina Bowden, and Elizabeth Masucci.

*

At first sight, Public Morals looks great: strong actors giving great performances; a morally ambiguous setting at a moment in time when things are changing rapidly; and enough of a family plus job plus crime story to keep us entertained. So why is Public Morals releasing all its episodes shortly after the premiere simultaneously? Part of the answer needs to dig deep into current changes in audience demands through the Netflix/Amazon model. Part of the answer needs to address the way TV shows have become so much more complex and experiment with forms of pacing that are not conducive to the 45 minutes a week format.

But as I was watching the first episode of Public Morals, I wondered if we’ve finally simply hit the point where we’re tired of watching white dudes being white dudes yet again. It feels like all too many cop stories we’ve seen—albeit with possibly better zeitgeist awareness and better characterizations. Yet I can’t help but wonder whether we deserve a different story in 2015. In fact, I kept on waiting for scenes in which Muldoon’s wife showed up, because her awareness of how the world is changing around them was a breath of fresh air amidst all the pretty young prostitutes. I’ll give it a few more episodes but I, for one, would like to hear someone else’s story and maybe look at this time period through someone else’s point of view for a change.

Kristina Busse (independent scholar) studies fan fiction and fan communities and is co-editor of Transformative Works and Cultures.

Pickle and Peanut (Disney XD, premiered September 7 @ 9/8) sneak peek here

Jon Heder is a pickle, Johnny Pemberton is a peanut, and they are friends. Of course they are. This new animated offering comes from Fish Hook and Almost Naked Animals’ Noah Z. Jones.

*

Pickle and Peanut isn’t very good. It might also prove to be the bro-iest cartoon on TV right now. Both of these things are a pity, as it’s probably the most forward-looking cartoon on Disney XD aesthetically speaking, drawing from such sources as vaporwave, hipster rap, the doodle-like artwork of such programs as Regular Show and the surreal, VHS-like graphics of Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job. I want to get my hands on its credit music. Above all else though, this show about a pair of slacker best bud supermarket employees owes its existence to the cultural impact of Adult Swim on the adult (and now, children’s) animation landscape. Pickle and Peanut might be the first show on Disney XD to be actively fostering a stoner demographic.

Perhaps more importantly, it might be the first time I’ve seen a show that’s trying to be a stoner comedy on training-wheels, affecting the same detached (yet nostalgic) pop culture saturated white-boy sensibilities that can so often be seen in Adult Swim shows and skewing them towards a younger audience. That is to say, they remove the swears and deflect the sexuality entirely onto codified “no-homo” rituals and the broad construction of female characters as entirely vapid objects of attraction. The phrase “Yoga Pants” is repeated as something of a mantra at one point. It’s early days still, and I’m prepared to give this one a chance (both the aforementioned Regular Show and the wonderful Adventure Time began with similar buddy comedy formulas), but this first pairing of episodes is a shaky start. The prospect of grandma jails and zit monsters should really deliver more, if only in terms of creativity. Indeed, I would grant more credit to the idea of a humongous pimple bringing sudden popularity to its host if I hadn’t already seen it done much better on Invader Zim, or indeed just two seasons ago on Bob’s Burgers.

Camilo Diaz Pino (U of Wisconsin Madison) studies animation cultures with a focus on transnational circulation.

Bastard Executioner (FX, premiered September 15 @ 10/9) trailer here

Sons of Anarchy showrunner-actor-director Kurt Sutter and partner in life / partner in SoA crime Katey Sagal’s next outing should feed Sutter’s ample taste for blood, set in Medieval England, and focusing on a warrior who can’t seem to lay down his sword as much as he’d like to do so. True Blood’s Stephen Moyer joins Sagal, Sutter, and star Lee Jones.

*

Bastard Executioner begins with a lengthy crawl, a history that may function primarily as realist motivation for mayhem. BE asks for comparison to Game of Thrones and also evokes Middle Earth – see the happy couple gamboling along the village street. In his New York Times review (15 September 2015), James Poniewozik finds BE to be “thin” as drama, “one turkey leg away from a Renaissance Faire.”

Gendered violence is a foundation of BE’s story setting. It establishes a man’s cruel nature. A sex scene appears seven minutes into the pilot — older man and much younger woman; “a barren hole with swollen meat,” he complains. It motivates the vengeance that will work toward an independent nation-state. BE calls upon an established inspiration for rebellion against British overlords. Offscreen violence energizes rebels in Braveheart (Mel Gibson, 1995) and The Patriot (Roland Emmerich, 2000). In BE, wretched cruelty visited upon women and children is piled on taxation that supports the lifestyle and power of the 1%.

It is a cruel world. BE has lots of on-screen violence and close-ups of body parts being violated accompanied by squishy sounds. In the novel The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley, 1983), the story of Arthur and company remains with the women while the men are off fighting. Staying in the domestic space of the castle saves reading pages of descriptions of hand-to-hand combat and dismemberment on bloodied fields. Instead, a paragraph or two summary of the battle suffices.

By the end of the pilot, three women – the mysterious healer, the newly widowed Baroness (oriented to social justice and with a mystical connection to the land), and the newly widowed executioner’s wife — appear to have agency. Two have been liberated from sadistic husbands. With BE, one can fast-forward through the mayhem to follow the womanly power.

Mary Beth Harolovich (University of Arizona) is a film and television historian, and a founder of Console-ing Passions.

*

Within the first ten minutes of The Bastard Executioner, the plot for the first hour becomes clear to any longtime viewer of television—from the moment you see our protagonist’s beautiful, young, blonde, and super pregnant wife appear, you recognize (yet dread) that she’s never going to make it. Our hero gets vengeance, yet that scene of brutality left me as unsatisfied as it did the hero—must the audience be forced repeatedly to glimpse a dead baby’s tiny body in order to experience the slight (but unsettling) schadenfreude of the bad buy Baron getting his comeuppance?

There is a lot of gore in this pilot—an arm is hacked off, a head is separated from its body, at least two people have daggers/swords thrust through their skulls—yet my chief complaint about this program is not its violence, nor its predictability. Rather, I was disappointed by the lack of character development. For some reason, medieval dramas seem to forget that folks who lived in the past were just as human as we are. The character who becomes most intriguing is one who lives largely in the background of the two-hour opener. The wife of a “punisher” is called upon to expose that another man has taken on the identity of her (deceased) husband; instead, after a rather touching apology from the stranger, she accepts the stranger as her new mate and father of her children. What an interesting moment and choice! There is a mysticism that runs through the pilot that offers some mystery—why do our hero and “the witch” character share visions?—but largely this program opts for cliché and empty shock over character distinction and growth.

Karen Petruska (Gonzaga University) studies the media industries, television history, and media policy.

Moonbeam City (Comedy Central, premiered September 16 @ 10.30/9.30) trailer here

Parodying Miami Vice and its ilk, though looking a lot like the stills for Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and also looking and sounding very Archerian, Moonbeam City unites Elizabeth Banks, Will Forte, Rob Lowe, and Kate Mara in an animated show about Moonbeam City PD.

*

First draft: Whatever. [switches over to You’re the Worst]

…

Second draft: Elizabeth Banks is better than this. This year, she’s reprised her part in Wet Hot American Summer, hit a home run with Magic Mike XXL, and directed Pitch Perfect 2. Kate Mara is better than this too. In a better version of Hollywood, she’d star opposite Ellen Page in True Detective instead of getting boxed out of Fant4stic.

The “this” in question is Moonbeam City. The animated series was created by Scott Gairdner and riffs on Miami Vice as Archer does with James Bond (a dog whistle I can’t hear, though obviously Comedy Central would want some version of that for itself). Banks and Mara play beleaguered police chief Pizzaz Miller and by-the-book detective Chrysalis Tate to grossly incompetent “loose cannon” Dazzle Novak, voiced by Rob Lowe. Will Forte kills time as Novak’s professional rival, Rad Cunningham.

Moonbeam City apes Patrick Nagel’s geometric sensuality and synth pop outfit Night Club offers an atmospheric score. But by the end of the pilot, I was as fed up as Miller and Tate. Novak is the butt of the joke, but the show never indicts his boorishness. Instead, strippers orbit him and he beds a singer of indeterminate Middle Eastern descent whose name he can’t pronounce. Finally, the comedic flatness Moonbeam City tries to purloin from Archer requires a straight man who doesn’t realize he’s crazy. Rob Lowe was a walking Nagel painting in 1985, but he’s no H. Jon Benjamin. Television doesn’t need more programs like this, but Jon Hamm would have been a better choice (also what better way to take the heat off your last Mad Men Emmy nomination than parody @80sDonDraper?). Moonbeam City is falling apart; the better show would focus on Banks and Mara reassembling it.

Alyxandra Vesey (University of Wisconsin-Madison) studies the relationship between identity politics, music culture, and media labor and her dissertation analyzes recording artists’ contributions to post-network television.

Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy (Disney XD, premiered September 26 @ 9.30/8.30) trailer here

Hoping to capitalize on the success of the film, this animated offering also aims to pick up where the film left off. No Chris Pratt, but probably lots of Disney’s good will and hopes for success.

*

The Guardians of the Galaxy animated series answers the age old question: if someone farts in space, will anyone laugh? And although I’m glad I can finally sleep at night knowing the answer (and I won’t give it away here), I did expect more from this extension of the Marvel Universe.

On a basic level the series is fine — perhaps better than fine (I must admit my exposure to the current animation landscape is limited). The animation is super sleek, and the series relies on a team of experienced voice actors who all do their part to keep things interesting. However, although the show is full of wise cracks and one liners, it feels more akin to typical animation banter we’ve seen a million times than the delightfully irreverent humor of the movie.

It’s also worth noting that the story of a misfit crew of scoundrels roaming the galaxy is almost identical to Disney’s other new series, Star War: Rebels. This is unfortunate for Guardians considering Rebels is a far superior animated series on every single level. Where Rebels pulls you in using interesting re-occurring themes and relatively complex and evolving character relationships, Guardians leans heavy on plot lines to get us hooked, and seems content to allow the movie to do the heavy lifting in the character development department.

The bottom line is, for being based on a movie that was a breath of fresh air to the Marvel cinematic universe, the series isn’t breaking any new ground for animated television. That being said, if you like loud laser battles every 5 – 8 minutes and really thought what the movie needed was more space farting, tune into Disney XD on Saturday nights at 9:30 eastern!

Nicholas Benson (University of Wisconsin-Madison) is a media and cultural studies scholar with a focus on production cultures, media franchising and failure.

*

Donning his trusty Walkman, Peter-Quill (Starlord) danced onto the screen of DisneyXD this weekend in the new animated series Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. The series is an adaptation of one of the Marvel film series’ most interesting films, characterized by a strong ensemble, its morally ambiguous characters, and distinct sense of humor. Retaining the tone from a blockbuster film in an animated tv series is extremely difficult and Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy succeeds admirably in this goal. In its first episode the series found its characters often torn between their heroic and mercenary influences and while the somewhat extreme distillation of each of their character traits for the pilot left much of the humor on Quill’s and Rocket’s shoulders, that humor was consistently strong.

The film’s greatest strength was in the complex but ultimately supportive dynamic of its central team and the series exploits this dynamic well. At first the extent to which the voice acting and physical features, some of which seemed troublingly more Caucasian, of the characters diverged from the original was jarring. However, I found it easy to adapt as the new variants of key characters kept the essence of the original personalities and dynamics effectively. As suggested by the series roll-out, which included the release of animated shorts exploring the background of each character, Guardians of the Galaxy is not just invested in the space adventure of the moment but in the mysteries of its characters’ pasts and their evolution as a team. I am neither a committed Marvel fan nor a franchise purist, and so the adaptation to the new format may bother others more; but, for me, the television series has managed to keep much of the film’s magic and made me into a future viewer. Besides, who can say no to baby groot?

Kyra Hunting (University of Kentucky) studies genre, representation and children’s media.

Indian Summers (PBS, premiered September 27 @ 9/8) trailer here

“New” only inasmuch as it’s new to American TV, this show follows a group of socialites at the foot of the Himalayas in the age of the British Raj. Julie Walters stars.

*

If anyone has the right to tell the story of India’s fight for independence, it is British television makers. This story begins with the white British perspective of main character Alice arriving on a train. One of the main characters in this show is Indian, but we literally don’t hear him talk for the first 15 minutes, and the POV is decidedly white British. Thus, the stiff-upper-lip motif abounds. “Oh no, a home rule terrorist has vandalized a portrait of Queen Victoria. Tea time anyone?” The show seems self-aware and reflexive about colonial oppression, but there seems to be a winking ambivalence here. Yes, one of the earliest shots is a close-up of an Indian servant washing the door sign on the elite British Simla Club that reads “No Dogs or Indians.” Evidence of colonial oppression, check. But the camera invites us to relish and appreciate how fun imperialism was for the white people, as we see them glammed out in lavish period costumes singing, dancing and fucking in their elitist clubs and mansions, drinking champagne and being called sahib (or mam sahib for the lady colonists) by their native servants. This is all to say that Indian Summers seems to want to complicate Britain’s colonial history, as if to argue, see, things were not as black and white as you may think. Those Indian activists were cold-hearted killers, see? Plus we’ve cast a lot of hot Indian actors for all the interracial affairs! And there are strong female characters! I am going to keep watching, because I’ll watch any historical melodrama that promises plenty of sex scenes. I’m interested to see how race, gender and national identity are complicated as the show progresses, but I remain skeptical that this show can transcend the imperialist past it seeks to interrogate.

Eleanor Patterson (University of Wisconsin-Madison) studies the cultural politics of post-network broadcasting.

Benders (IFC, premiered October 1 @ 10/9) trailer here

A comedy examining God’s chosen sport, hockey, and a bunch of guys in an amateur league.

*

I was hopeful about Benders, especially after last week’s “sneak preview” episode. That episode had a hockey-centric plot, some solid jokes, good character dynamics, and was only slightly offensive. Goon (2011) it was not, but it wasn’t bad. The official premier episode, however, shuttled hockey to the episode’s bookends for the real plot of the episode: The main character, Paul, is asked by his grandfather to kill him, and Paul agrees to do it. This is not It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia; these characters do not lack empathy. So why would you introduce them to an audience by having one choke his grandfather to near-death? Even more difficult to understand than this plot of ante-patricide is the episode’s continuous homophobic dialogue. It may originate from the show’s Rescue Me lineage or as an attempt to represent how men police masculinity, but it creates an atmosphere of aggressive homophobia that is antiquated and alienating. This line of joking is so pronounced within this episode but almost entirely absent in the preview episode. Maybe they grew up and realized that “no homo” is not the fount of humor they thought it was, but I doubt it. You’re better off watching Goon and Sirens and thinking of what might have been.

Charlotte E. Howell (University of Texas-Austin) is researching religion on television dramas from an industrial perspective.

American Horror Story: Hotel (FX, October 7 @ 10/9) teaser here

Lady Gaga joins the cast for this season’s outing, which takes its inspiration from numerous haunted hotel horror films, and from the Hotel Cecil and Elaine Lam’s death that went viral. Everyone involved has promised it will be darker, which is good, because psycho clowns who rip off their masks to reveal festering wounds was just way too breezy.

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To understand why he is not thrilled with tv’s current horror shows (including AHS), tv critic Neil Genzlinger turned to Stephen King’s “three types of scariness” from Danse Macabre (1981): revulsion, coming face-to-face with a monster, and the dread (NYT, 7 September 2015).

AHS: Hotel certainly has revolting images as well as verbal descriptions of revolting images. Viewers are invited to come F2F with monsters and oddities – sometimes fleetingly but also in extended scenes of sexual torture of men. An observation: AHS appears to avoid visual exploitation of female victims.

In AHS, one can see how style intends to produce dread and/or perhaps an awareness of the conventions. This is much better articulated in Fear the Walking Dead as its characters explore darkened houses or hallways unaware that they are at the verge of the zombie apocalypse. Similarly, the AHS seduction scene at the outdoor screening of Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922) was weak. One could see the intent of the gazes but the style did not deliver lusting with the eyes as well as it might have.

In the credit sequence, the Ten Commandments flash by but not in numerical order. Perhaps this invites fans to engage the text, to see if the ordering of the commandments is suggestive of story development. The commandments writ in neon horror red suggests the debauchery that will take place in the hotel. Were I a talent show judge, I would say “good song choice” for the vampiric blood and sex orgy that plays out over more than five minutes to the hard sex anthem from the band She Wants Revenge – “maybe this is danger and you just don’t know … I want to tear you apart.”

While AHS: Hotel builds visual/aural energy through lurid sexuality, the show presents a story foundation about families that are emotionally tortured. AHS enjoys the sex, but the parent-child relationship should provide the enduring melodrama for the season.

Mary Beth Harolovich (University of Arizona) is a film and television historian, and a founder of Console-ing Passions.

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Is horror meant to be a seductive sheen of velvet red, petite blonde, emblazoned gold? An unstitched embroidery of retrograde modernity tropes? Blanched to the cross, cut off from sons, powdered by a central elevator, shifted by eerie hallways? Lipstick and a wayward kiss, monsters hogging warts, sushi with radiation, neighing carnival carousels?

Majestic 1920s trying to pass as a disfigured 2010s is not horror. The vacant exposition of a mother needing to protect a junkie son is not horror. Perfect bodies barely connecting is not horror. American Horror Story: Hotel is seductive enough in its first thirty minutes, but whatever it lapses into as an entirety of an episode is not horror.

I’m not looking for more than five minutes of my fix of American beauty (which stodgily remains white, if also queer). I’m not looking for more than ten minutes of Gaga-ing over a pride of celebrities and their “jawlines for days.” I’m not looking for more than twenty minutes of entering and exiting stunningly staged horrendous rooms. I am looking for more than a hat tip to the Best Exotic Budapest Hotel California.

Bring me to a hotel whose abandoned dilapidation I can use to critique the tongued luxury of capitalism. Dress me a Los Angeles that doesn’t know the terrifying paradox of a void fashion mecca. Infuse fresh blood—real warts, internalized crucifixion—into the tired mother-son emblem. Give me a reason to be scared for, not by, the characters.

I’ve only seen the first season of AHS, but recently I’ve seen some good horror, especially in film. This installment of AHS, or at least its first episode, is all color palette but no muse. Emptied hotels can be such potent portrayals along the ruin porn genre. AHS: Hotel sort of gets the porn but misses the ruin.

Ritesh Mehta is a recent PhD in Communication from USC, and studies popular entertainment and production culture.

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I am an enormous fan of American Horror Story‘s first two seasons. In both of these seasons, the narrative centered on strong central characters, allowing the ensemble to orbit with limited intrusion. The last two seasons suffered in part from a lack of focus, jumping from character to character in endless false starts and wasted opportunities. Though I can’t ring the funeral toll on this season yet, I worry about the number of seemingly disconnected storylines and important characters offered in episode one. Although nominally connected, the pilot episode already presents two strong narrative poles as well as a number of as-yet largely disconnected side plots. American Horror Story works best when constructed like a solar system. This is an asteroid field.

But in other ways, this season appears set to surpass the high marks of previous American Horror Stor[ies]. Though to varying degrees, formal artistry has remained consistently strong. To my taste, it reached a zenith exploring the temporal disorientation of its main characters’ subjectivity within the claustrophically too-unified space of confinement in a mental institution. This season appears to double down on its already-impressive style and, incidentally, engages with spatial and temporal disorientation comparable to its best efforts. The most notable aspect of the first episode was set design with costuming arriving a close second. Center framing and symmetrical staging perfectly displays the geometric complexity of the art-deco interior design. In being too balanced, shot composition paradoxically offers an uncanny sense of unbalance hidden just below the aging carpet in the hallways. The richly saturated colors are equally well-suited to denote the luxurious setting, the eccentric costuming, and horrific set pieces.

Taken as visual art, this season appears headed to its highest achievement yet. I hope it can deliver a narrative worth caring about, but I’m not optimistic.

Philip Scepanski (Vassar College) studies television history, media theory, and comedy.

The Last Kingdom (BBC America, October 10 @ 10/9) trailer here

BBC America (and BBC 2) gets in on the Game of Thrones action with this tale of the founding of England in the ninth century, complete with swordplay, bodice ripping, and warring tribes, adapted from Bernard Cromwell’s best-selling Saxon Stories novels.

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The Last Kingdom arrives on BBC America courtesy of a co-production with Carnival Films, the production company that brought you ITV’s Downton Abbey, and it was commissioned by and will air on BBC Two later this month. ITV saw its reputation burnished by Downton Abbey’s success in the U.S., and the BBC is surely hoping for the same from The Last Kingdom, as the corporation fights off Tory marauders trying to plunder its license fee funding and ransack its public service orientation. BBC director general Tony Hall (presumably) won’t take on Conservative culture secretary John Whittingdale swinging a sword fiercely while fully engulfed in flames like Last Kingdom’s Viking warlord Earl Rangar, but spectacular images like that do help to make this an engaging opening hour and bolster the BBC’s case that its system can foster enthralling drama that keeps up with the likes of HBO’s Game of Thrones. If you do like the “macho dudes with beards and heavy furs gore each other to achieve supremacy in period times” genre, this series seems likely to engage you, as its first episode offers an intriguing and shifting set of “good guys” and “bad guys” in detailing late-Ninth Century battles to control England. Unfortunately, the opening episode does overwhelmingly feature guys, outside of a few women there to be sexually assaulted, gutted, or wooed as the plot needs. Critics have seen four episodes, and a number of reviews (like this and this) contend that the series gets more thematically complex and character-rich as it goes along, so I will keep watching in hopes of seeing it get there. I also will keep an eye out to see how Tony Hall and his band of public service broadcasting warriors try to capitalize on the likely critical praise for this series in their own fierce battles over the future of England.

Christine Becker (University of Notre Dame) is currently working on a research project investigating cultural hierarchies in contemporary American and British TV.

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If you seek a moodier, grey-toned knock off of Game of Thrones with less humor and fantasy and more animal skins, then look no further than The Last Kingdom. Real British will have to wait until October 22 to watch their own history on BBC 2, making it clear who this show is primarily for: Americans. TLK is also produced by Carnival Studio, known for packaging lavish British heritage for hungry American viewers in the past with Downtown Abbey. This show doesn’t have much exposition; while GoT built up to the conflict between warring factions with a first season of intrigue, replete with graphic violence and lots of sexposition, The Last Kingdom gets right down to business. Within the first fifteen minutes we are knee deep in gritty battle scenes. And, while rape and beheadings and sword fighting are present in TLK, I will say that it is refreshing to see that this show does not fixate on these elements in the same way that GoT seems in delight in gore and rape and general ultraviolence from a voyeuristic gaze that makes me, for one, feel complicit in objectifying suffering as pleasure. The Last Kingdom is also more straightforward in supplying us with a clear cut central protagonist named Uhtred (say it ten times fast and you have 50% of this episode’s dialogue… Uhtred Uhtred Uhtred Oh no Danes! Uhtred Uhtred!). Extra points if you recognize Rutger Hauer among the wrinkle-faced dirty characters that populate this show; shame on them for killing him off in the first episode. TLK’s obvious preoccupation with a hypermasculine warrior narrative makes me wish this show had more of GoT‘s ambivalent gender politics. But I have high hopes for Uhtred’s sidekick/lover Brida, so I’ll stay tuned to see what happens.

Eleanor Patterson (University of Wisconsin-Madison) studies the cultural politics of post-network broadcasting.

Fargo (FX, October 12 @ 10/9) trailer here

How will Fargo follow up on an amazing first season of dark comedy, murder, and deceit in the snow? The new cast for a new story includes Patrick Wilson, Kirsten Dunst, Jean Smart, Jesse Plemens, Brad Garret, Bokeem Woodbine, Ted Danson, Nick Offerman, Cristin Milioti, Adam Arkin, and for the oddity factor, Kieran Culkin.

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I realized that all three of the reviews I’ve done this cycle for Antenna have been for shows that are based on other things. Minority Report is a sequel to the film; Heroes Reborn is an extension to the original show; Fargo is based on the film of the same name. While there are things to like in each of these shows (well, maybe not Heroes), it’s really only Fargo that I’m tempted to continue watching, and it’s interesting that Fargo is also the show that deviates the most from the original in terms of plot. But in terms of tone and subject matter, it is a dead ringer.

Despite being incredibly violent, there’s a subtle beauty to Fargo. In the shoot-out in the diner, for example, a quick image serves as a metaphor for the series as a whole: blood mixes with milkshake; violence splashing against innocence; red and white spilling onto the floor. The everyday banalities of life mix with shocking violence.

I like this sort of imagery because it’s not overt. The camera doesn’t linger over it. There’s no reference to it. No one comments on the mixture dribbling onto the floor. But it’s there and it reflects the way simplicity is often the most subtle of all storytelling.

Watching this new season of Fargo unfold, I experienced something I haven’t experienced for a very long time—the sheer delight of having no idea what to expect. I love laughing as we go to commercial break because I literally have no idea what’s going to happen next. Last year I binge-watched the first season of Fargo; this season I’m eager for those pauses so I can reflect, learn, and be surprised.

Paul Booth (DePaul University) studies fandom, time travel, and digital technology and is the author most recently of Playing Fans and Game Play.

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Season One of Fargo started small and, thanks to a host of poor decisions made by selfish characters trying to save their own skins, sprawled out to lots of bloodshed and death. This season starts much bigger, with machinations of an organized crime family and a future president lurking about the edges. The cast of characters, though, is still filled with peppy Midwesterners quick with poorly conceived crimes and an “All right, then,” and as a result, Fargo feels kitschy and delightfully macabre.

The show’s inciting incident – a triple murder at the Waffle Hut – illustrates its tone. Fargo is darkly funny, poking at the characters’ provincial regionalisms and in the retro glory of its 1979 setting. At the same time, the violence is no joke; the premiere alone features five deaths, four of which are quite bloody, even if they are also a bit bumbling.

While the cast is a parade of recognizable faces (some made barely recognizable by creative facial hair and a liberal use of hair feathering) who comprise a strong ensemble already going interesting places, the show may feel the loss of its central villain. In the previous season, Billy Bob Thornton’s Lorne Malvo was an ominous, malevolent force of reckoning. His evil was both competent and compelling, providing a necessary foil to the cheery façade of the setting. Season Two thus far has lots of criminals and blood, but no black hole around which the action can swirl.

Fargo will get to “the Sioux Falls incident” mentioned in Season One, and the premiere sets up Midwestern mob revenge and a presidential campaign. If the narration balances these sweeping stories with the tiny details that made the first season (and the film) work so beautifully, it should be well worth the ride.

Anne Gilbert (University of Kansas) studies fans, digital culture, and media industries.

Whether in the explicit pronouncements of pop culture commentators or in a cursory cruise of off-network, late-night television, there is ample evidence that young men remain both the primary producers and targeted consumers of much mainstream comedic content.  In the two years since the above-mentioned pieces, however, a number of incidents have invigorated offscreen debate about comedy and gender: among them, David Letterman firing his booker for sexist practices and remarks; Daniel Tosh shouting down a female heckler with a rape joke; Seth MacFarlane’s embarrassing song-and-dance at the 2013 Oscars; Jerry Seinfeld’s curiously tone-deaf take on diversity in comedy; and, perhaps most notoriously, Saturday Night Live’s clumsily PR-controlled search for and eventual hiring of African-American female cast member Sasheer Zamata.

Although it may be optimistic to suggest a correlation between those conversations and the recent programming decisions of comedy outlets, such dialogue does affect the discursive context in which we watch and talk about their shows.  In this light, the seemingly necessary belongingness between men and comedy dissipates a bit when considering the representational politics of Comedy Central’s spring lineup–namely, Kroll Show, Broad City, and the soon-to-return Inside Amy Schumer.  It isn’t just that comediennes star and/or figure prominently in the programs’ sketchy stories, something into which the network has put perfunctory effort in the past with The Sarah Silverman Program and Strangers with Candy.  Discourses of gender and sexuality additionally provide a generative grammar for the shows, imbuing their comedic portrayals of race, class, and homosocial bonding with the kind of polysemy customarily ascribed to Comedy Central’s much-lauded news satires.

The most simultaneously silly and insightful segment of Inside Amy Schumer’s first season, for instance, was a recurring bit called “Amy Goes Deep” which had the host interviewing, among others, a well-endowed man and a female dominatrix.  To be sure, the segments (like most sketches on Inside) use sexuality as a way to provoke and titillate viewers initially.  As the interviews progress, however, Schumer refrains from the sort of moralizing too-often implicit in portrayals of sexual taboos and instead gestures toward broader discourses about the ways in which we talk about those taboos.

Although nominally starring a male comedian and trafficking in the gendered caricatures so common among male-targeted comedies, Kroll Show is actually a “full-frontal assault on dude culture and the ideologies that support it, but in dickfest drag.”  It’s also the most cuttingly satirical sketch comedy show about television since Mr. Show.  Kroll’s favorite targets are the vapid fame-mongers, low-rent aesthetics, and crass commercialism of reality television.  Instead of merely reproducing and displaying televisual conventions with the lazy referentiality of an after-“Update” SNL-segment, though, recurring sketches like “PubLIZity” and “Rich Dicks” consistently ask viewers to consider the cultural and industrial discourses that construct and make commonsensical certain gendered representations of reality.

Of course, there exists real danger in the potential that viewers will decode the superficially heterosexist humor in these programs with the same unblinking acceptance as they do a show like Tosh.0.  It certainly doesn’t help, either, that Comedy Central has a tired habit of promoting its shows with the most memorable, “I’m Rick James, bitch!”-iest of sound bites.  Nevertheless, the infinitely mutable nature of comedy (and of the media infrastructures increasingly invested in it) means that no matter how loudly any one voice shouts, there are always plenty of hecklers.

As with any sketch comedy program, Kroll Show – a vehicle for comedian and The League star Nick Kroll – is heterogeneous. But it privileges certain sketches through multiple segments and narrative progression. One sketch in particular produced a spinoff in this week’s second episode (“Soaked in Success”), suggesting particular importance within the series’ overall text. Last week’s premiere episode (“San Diego Diet”) parodied the “overprivileged, incompetent young women go to work” reality genre (think Kourtney and Kim Take Miami) in a sketch that spins off to a “successful at serving the overprivileged” reality parody (think Dr. 90210) in the second. The first, PubLIZity, centers on a pair of women, both named Liz, who run a publicity company. In response to a client’s request for “something tasteful,” they organize a branded party, “Pirate Girl Rum Presents a Rockin’ Beach Bash to Benefit Cupcakes for Canine Cancer.” The client, a rare straight man for Kroll Show, summarizes, “The event cost $20,000 and it brought in $4,000 and I feel foolish.”

Conflict arises in this sketch as the industrious Liz butts heads with the more easygoing one. The work of organizing overwhelms hardworking Liz who is left to manage alone as the other’s superficiality distracts from the party. Deciding that her dog is too ugly, second Liz visits an animal plastic surgeon, Dr. Armand. Addressing the doctor, Liz explains, “I don’t want something in my house that’s, like, ugly… you wouldn’t talk to an ugly person.” Dr. Armand reassures her, “No, I don’t. I only hire very attractive people and my third wife is one of the most beautiful people I know.” The second episode elaborates on Dr. Armand in a sketch posing as a spinoff of PubLIZity. Armand of the House, as it is called, follows the doctor’s exploits dealing with his bratty son and distant wife. His dysfunctional family life is due in large part to his image obsession. As suggested in the first episode, Dr. Armand chose his spouse based on looks and in return she cannot even bother to hide that her interest in Dr. Armand is purely material. In demonstration, the doctor purchases his wife’s intimacy with jewelry. When the moment comes, she fakes an Ambien coma while he awkwardly dry humps her in the least erotic sex scene ever. The younger Armand and, in another sketch, “Gerry” Bruckheimer’s son represent the offspring of the image-obsessed. They are, for lack of space to elaborate, the worst.

In the 1991 Steve Martin film L.A. Story, a character praises the city because, “No one is looking to the outside for verification that what they’re doing is alright.” These sketches criticize L.A.’s insular culture, but are simultaneously a participant in its navel-gazing. As a parody of reality television’s focus on the parasitic industries that groom the images of the people and things that in turn run Hollywood’s mass media image production, these sketches play a game of infinite regression. The meta-meta-meta-discourse brings out the mutant traits of its too-small cultural gene pool.

Straight men often function as an audience surrogate, offering an orthodox logic against which the humorous twisted logic can contrast. The one significant straight man in these sketches, who should infuse some level of logic into the situation, has no effect on the goings-on. In another, similar sketch titled “Rich Dicks,” L.A.’s idle rich completely ignore the warnings of a put-upon maid, reminiscent of Zoila from Flipping Out. In this way, these voiceless “straight men” represent more particularly in this the viewer of these fictional shows. Ignoring the techno-democratic promise that a showrunner might read our tweets, on this side of the screen from a unidirectional mass media, reasonability seems to have very little voice in that world.

Kroll Show thus reflects an implicit viewing strategy with regards to much reality television: we laugh with a sense of superiority at that insular, overprivileged world. The only difference is that most of the shows on E! and Bravo pretend to not be in on the joke except that once a week, Joel McHale shows up to paratextually snark on our behalf. With programs like the ones Kroll Show critiques, distinctions between dominant and oppositional approaches break down to the point where the categories cease to mean anything. So while part of a critical discourse of class and image, Kroll Show is not critically outside of the programming it critiques. Instead it recreates, albeit more explicitly, a dominant reading position that masquerades as oppositional.

Some of those failed Comedy Central shows have attempted to create comedy with a satiric edge more akin to Dave Chappelle than Tosh’s frat-boy humor. Unfortunately, those shows have done a lousy job of it, amounting to uninspired clones. Chocolate News was the “Black” Daily Show; of course, Mind of Mencia was the “Latino” Chappelle’s Show. But these exhibited none of Chappelle’s talent for comically exploiting audience anxieties about race and identity politics, which, it turns out, is more difficult than it looks. However outrageous his sketches might be (the first episode featured Clayton Bigsby, “Black White Supremacist”) Chappelle was doing some complicated cultural work, making meaningful comedy if not outright satire for an audience that was “post-PC” not because it dismissed identity politics, but had largely internalized them.

I’m not sure what the success of Tosh.0 tells us about the “post-PC” status of the Comedy Central audience—at least I can’t speculate on it right here at the moment. But I am anxious to continue to watch the latest program to follow Tosh.0, Key and Peele, which appears to be tentatively picking up the mantel of satiric sketch comedy that Chappelle abandoned, largely due to his concerns about what meanings audiences were making from it. But if the premiere episode of Key and Peele is any indication, it will do so in a much more restrained way. That premiere contained nothing so shocking as Chappelle’s Clayton Bigsby, and one reviewer, in fact, described the duo’s comedy as “genteel.”

What I thought was both interesting and funny about the show was how almost every segment centered on the performance of identity. When Key and Peele appeared onstage after the opening segment, they immediately told the audience they were both biracial, and made jokes based on the notion that they routinely “adjust our Blackness” depending on the company they are in. Although the first of these jokes was that they do this to terrify white people, the segment ended by suggesting that the “Blackest” performances occur when “white-sounding-black-guys” get together. Rather than keeping the focus on race, (and this is wise given the 18-34 male demo) most of the segments focused on the performance of masculinity. In the cold-open, the two “man/Black up” their phone conversations to save face in front of one another; in another, they recount to each other arguments with their wives or girlfriends, culminating in calling them “Bitch,” but always in supreme fear they will be caught doing so. A recurring bit in the show parodied Lil Wayne in prison, where he becomes very self-conscious about putting on his tough guy act.

For my money, the best segment of the show had actually been circulating on YouTube prior to the premiere, and already has an ancillary Twitter feed: #obamatranslated. That segment featured Peele doing a spot-on impression of Obama while Key serves as his “Anger Translator.” The lines for Peele’s Obama must have come verbatim from an assortment of his real comments, but Key’s impassioned and physically animated translations (such as shouting “I am not a Muslim” through a megaphone when the Tea Party is mentioned) served as the kind of catharsis, for me at least, that I’ve been wishing to get from a caricature of the president but no one (including Fred Armisen) has been able to get a good angle on Obama. It takes two, apparently.

Maybe Chappelle’s Show was a program for the Bush era, when it took something really significant to shock and it felt good when it did so. And maybe Key & Peele is a show for the Obama era, not because—like Obama—its stars are biracial or “genteel,” but because culture that intentionally shocks has become so mundane. The comforting reassurance of the sitcom has morphed into every episode Family Guy meeting its quota of “bad taste” by offending enough different “interest groups” that audiences are sure none of it can actually mean anything or matter to anyone. And however much South Park’s creators might like us to believe there’s a qualitative difference between the comic irreverence of Family Guy and South Park’s satire, I have to confess that what had once seemed to me an air of indignant outrage, now seems more like studied insouciance.

There are some things that should remain shocking. A congressman shouting “liar” at the president, for example. The suggestion that there is actually a “War on Christmas.” The fact that Mitt Romney is worth more money than the previous eight presidents combined. I hope Key & Peele choose to satirize this stuff, because I’ll be watching, and I hope some of the Tosh.0 crowd sticks around and does so, too.