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A Unicorn in Our Current Culture: A Funny Television Show
A few weeks ago I was flipping through shows on Netflix, trying to find something, anything that wasn’t preachy, predictable, or political. Needless to say, this was like fishing in an empty ocean, especially since all I really want to do with my television is to be entertained. Click, click, click…
My husband got hopeful when he noticed he had somehow missed an episode of The Walking Dead, but I quickly added the caveat that any series about zombies is dead to me. I just wanted someone to make me laugh, an even taller order in a culture that has completely lost its sense of humor.
Click.
Then I stumbled upon a possibility as I recognized the guy who got famous by romancing a stone. Michael Douglas is the lead in The Kominsky Method, which also stars Alan Arkin. In fact, there’s an amazing array of famous people who pop up in the cast throughout three seasons, including fellow stoners, Danny DeVito and Kathleen Turner. Many of the faces on screen will look incredibly familiar to anyone who was alive in the eighties, and let me tell you. The show itself is a gem.
Why so?
The script is character-driven, and the show makes fun of everything in Hollywood from Scientology to obsession with identity in a way that is refreshingly honest and relatably human.
For an easy example, an actress in Michael Douglas’s fictional acting class gets a television show with Morgan Freeman, but she describes how there is some pushback on the set per the fact that this legendary actor is known to be a cisgendered man playing a nonbinary surgeon. Sandy Kominsky, Douglas’s pseudo-Stanislavski character, then comments to the blinking Millennial that he understands the offended peoples’ dilemma. After all, Leonard Nimoy got the same sort of blowback on Star Trek when it became clear he was just pretending to be a Vulcan.
Oh, the common sense!
However, there are other, more serious scenes that seemed resonated with me per a doctor trying to explain cancer in a compassionate way after talking to his divorce lawyer. He keeps looking at a gun and a bottle of bourbon each time he is left alone again in his office.
Which actor portrayed this fellow?
Bob Odenkirk from Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.
I tell you what.
The cameos from people who truly know the acting craft are endless.
Now you may ask, is there a poke or two at Trump voters/Republicans?
Sure. The show is set in LA, after all. The characters think what the characters would think in that setting, yet no one of any political persuasion escapes a barb or two in the script. (Everyone is a target, so no one is alienated.)
Regardless, it took my husband a few episodes to engage with the story as much as I did, but by Season Three, we were both really invested. In fact, we were also sad when it all ended, and that is a rarity nowadays. I laughed. I cried. I was entertained.
If you’re fishing for a new series, my review of at least this show contains loud clapping.
Also, if anyone knows of any other great series with a sense of humor, I’d love to hear what’s worth seeing. Until then, I guess it’s back to clicking…
Published in Entertainment
I’ve been going back to old shows. Desperate housewives, Psych, Monk…
Yes, I thought DH was funny. I think the soundtrack was written by the same guy who did The Sims soundtrack (video game), so the entrance feel was light satire. Which made the melodrama in the show funny.
I just watched the last episode a few days ago. I will miss the show, although the third season did lose something with the departure of Alan Arkin.
The best thing about The Kominsky Method is that it’s made by veteran writers and actors who, more than anything else, are very good at what they do. They haven’t forgotten that a comedy is, above all, supposed to be funny.
Thanks! Will check it out.
Our favorite show in the past few years (although we are enjoying the heck out of Ted Lasso)
I can’t say I’ve ever watched Desperate Housewives, but I thought Psych was cute back in the day. Monk was a little too Columbo for me.
I’ll keep this vague so as not to spoil anything for anyone.
This is true about the third season, though I thought that section had different merits. The rhythm had changed, sure, and I dearly loved the actor/agent friendship on screen, but I thought the reactions to the estate were absolutely hilarious.
Absolutely. That is 1000% my point, too.
I hope you like it! Give it a few episodes to get to know the people.
I’m so glad I’m not alone!!!! Ted Lasso? What is that about?
I’ll have to wait for Kominsky to find its way to something I don’t have to pay for. It sounds great.
Lasso is on AppleTV. They gave me a free year, so I’ve watched some of it.
It’s a fish out of water story about an American football coach hired to coach an English soccer team. Lasso is Jason Sudeikis and he’s sort of a hopeless optimist, I guess. People like it a lot–I’m a little lukewarm, but do watch it. Some claim it promotes “conservative values.”
Oh my gosh. Sign up for 3 months of Apple TV. Season 1 is available, and we’re halfway through season 2
A 2nd division football coach gets hired to manage a soccer club in England.
Stars Jason Sudeikis. Outstanding.
Interesting. I don’t think I have Apple TV, but I’ll look. By the time you add together all the different $5 fees for this or that service, you’re back to regular cable, which makes me wish for a new sort of bundle with one fee. Since we are definitely Gen X, my husband and I gave into the nostalgia and paid for YouTube long enough to watch the Karate Kid spin-off before then canceling again. In those situations, I wish there was a “rental” option, so the producers get paid, but I don’t have fees running up monthly in the background.
Well, a subscription service is definitely more tempting when I get a strong recommendation. And we lived in England, though the kid played rugby…. Hmmmm…. Thanks!!!! 😀
My boys were also rugby players. But I was raised in a soccer family (which is why I am 100% bored by soccer now). Regardless, highly recommend Ted Lasso.
You get a seven-day free trial, and then it’s five bucks a month. Lasso received twenty Emmy nominations, but I haven’t sampled their other offerings yet. Apple gives you a free year if you buy some of their products, which was my deal.
I was really enjoying Ted Lasso until the most recent episode. I was genuinely upset that they ruined it as I really liked that show. I was going to write a post about it but thought I’d wait a few weeks so I could discuss the offending episode without spoiling it for those who were yet to be offended. But the first season is absolutely wonderful (except for some crudity).
Oh, nooooo!!!! I got through the three seasons of The Kominsky Project with no badness. Maybe a little sentimentality, but that’s okay. I hate to hear that about another series, so I wonder what kind of wrong turns they took? Can you speak about that generally? I mean, did you just stop identifying with the characters??? Did it go full blown political with Lasso wearing a mask while running a marathon through a desert outside of England? Did it just get predictable?
I thought the show Atypical was pretty interesting per how the lead character was drawn on the spectrum. He has a good heart, and some of the struggles portrayed felt pretty relatable, even when there were some of the completely typical left wing slants embedded in the story line. But then the writers decided after a while that the lead character’s sister who had “normal” issues with a high school romance and dealing with her brother’s autism wasn’t interesting. She ended up dumping the boyfriend and plunging into the whole LGBTQIA+ gender pronouns blah blah thing.
The truth is I don’t even care if someone’s a lesbian, but it was just so contrived to me. And it became so painfully predictable.
It’s also no wonder Americans think more than a quarter of the US population is homosexual when the actual number is in the low single digits per self-identification. See Gallup poll here. Mind, I wasn’t offended by the change in script. Just absolutely bored by the new, totally typical direction it took. Just… out of my mind… bored.
A bit of both. On the spectrum of wokeness, it wasn’t near at the top of the charts. But it injected politics into a series that had been about sports and relationships, where it didn’t need to be. I could almost hear the writers in their little enclave saying: “We need to make a political statement. We’re about sports, and sports is all about politics, right? We’re embarrassed when we meet the writers of other series who are way to the left of us. We’re being left behind. But we are set in England and there is not much BLM over there, so how can we annoy our conservative audience in another way. We’ve been hearing that we have bipartisan appeal. Can’t have that. What else gets them angry? I know, environmentalism!”
The predictable part was introducing a 13 year old character who is of course way smarter and more sophisticated than all the adults. Like fingernails on a chalkboard.
Of course media outlets thought they were brilliant! https://ftw.usatoday.com/2021/08/ted-lasso-season-two-episode-three-toheeb-jimoh
So there will be more to come. I know that I’ve been sensitized, but I it was all so unnecessary, it made me sad they couldn’t just leave it alone.
It all sounds dreadful to me.
This is probably why I keep returning to shows from the 80s and 90s.
Except “Friends”?
Really? I like those old shows, too, but I am always thrilled to find a new one that is good. If you are into the 80s, I promise. You’ll find a lot of old “friends” on screen.
But I guess Drew doesn’t like friends????? :)
It did lose something with Arkin’s departure and I think losing Nancy Travis hurt as well. It seems weird to say that Kathleen Turner and Paul Reiser couldn’t fill those shoes, but they can’t. Still, the writing is very good and it’s better than anything on network television by far.
We’re still watching Magnum, the original one. :-)
Hats off to Kathleen Turner. I thought she was awesome. Took some guts
The Kominsky Method is a great series! I wonder if it played better to those of us of a certain age. The loss of loved ones, friends and the health issues resonated with me. As has been said a lot of good actors and actresses, a show done well.
Certainly that was the attraction for me, as I wrote in a post a while back. I suppose it’s the same reason we tend to gravitate toward friends who are are around the same age. With most TV shows, even the ones I like, I don’t get the sense that the characters are people I would want to hang around with in real life. But I think I’d enjoy a cup of coffee (or a Jack Daniel’s and Dr Pepper) with Sandy Kominsky.
We gravitate to people in the same life stage. All my friends are much older than I am save 1. We all have kids the same age and dealing with rent/ownership, work, and savings/retirement plans.
Everyone my age is doing what I was doing 10 years ago.
I am kind of in the middle per age for the characters, i.e. the leads are the age of my parents. However, I can certainly relate to loss and health issues and the need for dreams.
I am a teacher like Sandy, though I teach history, not theater. I thought some of the blank looks on some of his students’ faces were super spot on–and totally funny–when he made certain references and jokes that were outside their experience/cultural understanding.
My favorite thing about the show?
Some of the observations about human nature were super universal, whatever one’s stage in life.
As for Kathleen Turner, @annefy, yes! Hats off to her. I loved that they made her the ex-wife per the whole Romancing the Stone relationship that would not immediately occur to my own son but was the film that made them both famous. I was thinking about it, and I don’t think he’s ever seen that movie! She did do a great job, too.
For political junkies, the HBO show Veep is hilarious. It combines heavy cynicism with fast-paced physical comedy a la the Marx Brothers. But it also has a tremendous, tremendous amount of profanity.
Nothing has more profanity than “ Deadwood”( Which I thought was a great series, but definitely not for everyone)
I’m no shrinking violet. JY loved Deadwood, but I couldn’t get through it.
There was a lot of effort put into it, but also profanity for the sake of profanity. I never really understood why.
We also thoroughly enjoyed Kominsky. I appreciate the unpretentiousness of it. Michael Douglas as Sandy Kominsky has an eerie resemblance to my own dad who has crossed the 70 mark with the scruff, flop cap, and appreciation for the simple things–all while navigating the humor in septuagenarian medical issues. Arkin, as always, is outstanding. The show does what good shows do: make one feel like they know the characters personally. We’ll miss the show but watch episodes here and there to laugh again.
In a different theme, we enjoy Netflix’s Derry Girls. Set in 90s Derry, the show focuses on five awkward teens getting through their Catholic school, working class families, and excellent cinematography. Strong characters from their families, school, and the nun headmistress make for laugh-out-loud humor, irony, and innocent fun. Highly recommend (with subtitles because the delightful Irish slang can whip past you at times).
Your dad sounds awesome. Thanks for the Irish show tip!