In the US: Tuesdays, Comedy Central. Starts June 23
Talking of reality TV show mockery, here comes another pastiche, albeit in a somewhat different form. Imagine it’s the turn of the 20th century and the cast of Downton Abbey have been relocated to Rhode Island. Now imagine that they’re being followed by a reality TV crew and that actually, all they want to do is everything that the Kardashians get up to, except in the milieu of the time.
So we have the show’s creators and writers Natasha Leggero and Riki Lindhome playing a pair of idiotic sisters who want to be in the list of the “400 most powerful white people”, invited to all the best dinner parties and doing sexy time with that John Ritter, if only it didn’t require 20 servants to undress them all.
As jokes written down in those paragraphs, they’re quite fun ideas and knowing that both Mad Men’s Christina Hendricks and Community’s Paget Brewster are in the show might even make you want to watch Another Period. Now try sitting through 25 minutes of those jokes being milked for all they’re worth while someone does a bit of shakycam in their direction. It’s not quite so funny then unless – and this is the important part as it’s vital to understanding Comedy Central’s comedy output – you’re either hammered or stoned.
Only you know if you’re hammered or stoned, but if you’re planning on being wide awake and alert and this is on your tele, you’ll be making a mistake. You’ll titter a bit, but without a bit of a chemical incentive, big guffaws will be as elusive as Raffles.
Time was you know that someone’s career either on the downslide or had never existed if their sitcom was on TV Land. But it seems that supposed comedy network TBS, which was actually starting to look quite promising with the likes of Ground Floor and Wedding Band, has decided to try to poach this ‘honour’. We’ve already had to endure Your Family Or Mine this year and now we have Clipped, which makes that travesty look like The Chapelle Show.
The basic premise of Clipped is both simple and forced: a bunch of Bostonians who all went to the same High School but largely didn’t hang out together all end up over the river in Charlestown, Massachusetts, working in the same hairdressers, Buzzy’s.
Buzzy’s, despite being outfitted like a barber shop and having a male boss and three male stylists, but only a female receptionist and two female stylists, is actually a unisex salon. Can you see that queue of women forming to go in? Of course, you can. Because there they are, despite all probability, on your TV screen getting haircuts that make them look like “my 70-year-old dad who has to smoke through a hole in his neck”. Appealing, non?
But the women come for one thing – one man, even. For reasons not thoroughly explained in this pilot episode, one of the skinniest of the male barber-hairdressers is a babe-magnet and professional-level baseball player and he’s just had a call from his agent; coincidentally, the insurance premiums have just gone up at Buzzy’s and the short, not at all Danny DeVito-esque boss of the shop leaves it up to the staff to work out among themselves whom to fire. Should he leave? And how will the female stylist who secretly loves him take it?
Clipped was originally called Buzzy’s Barbershop and then Buzzy’s and it’s clear from this that deciding on the title for the show is where all the creative effort went, because it’s like something you might find in a cat’s litter tray the day you come home to discover Tiddles has been licking away at Friday’s leftover curry. This is strange because it was created by Will and Grace’s David Kohan and Max Mutchnick. I say Will and Grace’s but it’s better to think of them as Partners’ David Kohan and Max Mutchnick, because that’ll give you a stronger flavour of the show’s contemporary and realistic nature, cutting edge humour and superb casting choices. Not at all on the downslope of their careers. Not at all.
Despite having that slightly noxious, cat excrement quality to it, Clipped has somehow managed to attract both Ashley Tisdale and George Wendt to its cast. Tisdale looked to be doing just fine post-High School Musical when she landed up in Hellcats, but clearly something’s gone terribly wrong since. And Wendt, who was of course Norm in Cheers, clearly has some bills to pay or a new yacht to buy, because here he’s playing a gay hairdresser who’s been in a relationship with Die Hard’s Reginald Veljohnson so long that the other hairdressers’ nickname for him is ‘Brokehip Mountain’ – gay hairdressers being a novelty in Charlestown, apparently.
The show fails at just about every level. I don’t think I laughed once in the entire pilot. Not once. It’s insulting to gay people, short people and the working class. The acting’s poor. No one is well cast, particularly the baseball-playing Mike Castle. There are even fewer Boston/Charlestown accents on display than in The McCarthys. It doesn’t even convince as a vision of life in a barber’s – sorry, unisex hair salon. How can you fail to get even that right?
About the only thing that was any good was the romantic sub-plot, but that’s just going to be two young ‘uns trying hard not to show their feelings, despite both knowing them, for about a season and a half to two seasons or longer, and who has time for that these days?
All in all, you’d be much better off in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.
In the US: Mondays, 10/9c, Lifetime In the UK: It’ll be on Lifetime or Living, you know it
As the show’s weak ratings in the US bare out, it’s hard to know what to make of UnREAL, a ‘comedy’ drama set behind the scenes of fake reality dating show ‘Everlasting’ that looks at all the manipulations and exploitation that go on in the name of entertainment and making money. For Lifetime, it’s not only a touchy subject, given how much of its content is reality TV, but it’s atypically dark, with a lack of any real heroes or heroines and themes of everything from racism and feminist analyst of stereotypes through to anorexia, drug-taking, alcoholism and rape.
As I mentioned in my review of the first episode, the show’s stronger when dealing with analyses of how reality TV works, weaker when dealing with relationships behind the camera, which mirror the ones in front. However, over time, the series does seem to have slowly lost interest in the reality TV contestants themselves, being more interested in the people behind the cameras.
This is perhaps an unwise move for UnREAL with Shiri Appleby’s reluctant enabler distinctly implausible, although there is a slightly ambiguous but successful attempt in the third episode involving her psychiatrist mother to flesh her character’s motivations out and suggest she has a personality disorder.
Indeed, most of the main characters have been fleshed out, although are still somewhat implausible. Surprisingly, English reality show star Adam isn’t the least plausible, but references to PG Tips to one side, the show’s attempts to do Englishness crunch like it’s trying to go from first to third gear without using the clutch. For example, having his Abercrombie-and-Fitch clad English friend ask “Who watches American TV?” doesn’t really suggest producers that know the UK TV market very well.
The fourth episode improves the show somewhat as it takes us into some very edgy, unusual territory, away from some of the more soapier plots although not abandoning them. If the show hadn’t lost virtually all Lifetime’s normal audience, I imagine the last of them had left by the end.
Overall, UnREAL is something of a slow but ultimately enjoyable burn, which presumably is why Lifetime’s just shoved the first four episodes onto its web site – that and the hope that the ratings might pick up through good word of mouth as a result. Despite the show’s subject matter, it’s a lot smarter than you’d think, although practically everyone in the cast has been miscast. But you’ll have to enjoy a both frothy and darker side to life – and reality TV – to really love UnREAL
Barrometer rating: 2.5 Rob’s prediction: Dead after one season
