Were it not for the awkward scheduling of aircraft, 4am would be a time long since lost to me. To be honest, staying up after 10pm is hard enough these days and if we make it midnight, we feel like we’re as street as Idris Elba.
4am is a time for young people.
You can certainly tell this from Four in the Morning, CBC’s new alleged comedy show, in which two young couples talk about the kind of things in the kind of way over-educated young people straight out of college do at 4am in the morning.
An alleged piece of ‘magical realism’ – as clear a sign it’s written by gits as if it had a purple ‘BANTER!’ logo stamped on its title sequence – it’s little more just this horrendous chat, arch dialogue that’s so self-satisfied, it probably thinks it’s just solved the problem of world peace while simultaneously creating bons mots that will endure the aeons like granite. Characters with implausibly twattish names like ‘Bondurant’ (“A manically intense, always well-intentioned, singularly focused trumpet player”) and ‘Mitzi’ monologue at one another and have Tarantino-esque conversations about conversations with psychic pigs. They talk about their love of jazz and quote at each other, while playing for one another’s boyfriends or girlfriends, or grouching about the state of the world and their lives. They visit late night fooderies that sell gorilla meat and throw bricks through any number of apparently unsecured Canadian buildings’ windows.
They do all of this without realising they’re being incredibly annoying. Because ha, ha! They’re young people.
The show, which has a ‘micro budget’ of CAN$300k per episode, feels like so much student improv, the kind of thing put on in so many fringe theatres to an audience of seven, mostly friends of the cast and crew. And to be fair, Four in the Morning is probably perfect for annoying, over-educated young people who love the sound of their own opinions at four in the morning.
But for everyone else, it’s yet another Canadian comedy show that’s terminally short on laughs.
It’s “What have you been watching?”, my chance to tell you what movies and TV I’ve been watching recently that I haven’t already reviewed and your chance to recommend things to everyone else (and me) in case I’ve missed them.
The usual “TMINE recommends” page features links to reviews of all the shows I’ve ever recommended, and there’s also the Reviews A-Z, for when you want to check more or less anything I’ve reviewed ever.
Today’s is going to be the last WHYBW for quite some time now, since I’m off on my traditional summer break from next week. Whether I’ll take all of August off remains to be seen, but let’s not start promising anything at this point.
Before then, I’ll be reviewing the first episode of Vice Principals (US: HBO; UK: Sky Atlantic) and I’ve got plans to have a look over a couple of French shows on Netflix and Amazon, too. I might even have a look at Netflix’s Stranger Things, which debuted on Friday.
I’ve already reviewed the first episode of Barracuda(Australia: ABC), but after the jump, I’ll be looking at the latest episodes of 19-2, The Kettering Incident, The Last Ship,Outcast and Preacher, as well the return of Mr Robot and the rest of season two of Marco Polo. Given that I’m going to be away on holiday, will I employ my usual July ruthlessness and purge from the viewing list any that I can’t be bothered to catch up with? It’s a possibility…
At this point, I’d normally tell you about the movies I watched last week. Unfortunately, despite my best intentions, we couldn’t get through either Joy or Hail, Caesar!, since they were both a bit dull. That might be the closest I ever get to reviewing them, but you never know.
