Television Roundup: “Room 104,” “Rick and Morty” and “Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later”.
I find that the brothers Mark and Jay Duplass often don’t get proportionate credit for the distinct brand of lo-fi cinematic humanism they’ve perfected since they stormed onto the D.I.Y. movie scene with their disarming debut, “The Puffy Chair”. These are, after all, the directors who radically re-wrote the language of the independent movie in the 2000’s: who proved that all you needed to make a great film was a camera, a clever idea, and some talented friends. Hell, even “Togetherness” — the brother’s brilliant and sadly short-lived attempt at an HBO comedy-drama — felt like another one of their shaggy, humanistic, character portraits rather than a schematic adult sitcom.
In more recent years, the Duplasses have stepped away from directing and re-adjusted their focus towards helping up-and-coming independent filmmakers in having their work seen by as large an audience as possible. It’s hard to know whether the Duplasses will ever step into the director’s chair again (in the realm of T.V., that is), so the prospect that they’d make something with the same daring emotional complexity as “Togetherness” remains to be seen.
“Togetherness” truly was lightning in a bottle: the kind of brave, rule-breaking conversational comedy that only comes once in a generation. Until the brothers announce their next directorial effort, us die-hards will have “Room 104” to tide us over. “Room 104,” like the Duplass-produced animated comedy “Animals,” is not directed by the brothers, and after three episodes, the show is still struggling to find a consistent tone that works to its narrative advantage. However, “Room 104” is refreshingly weird — in an authentic, blessedly un-self conscious way — and it proves, if nothing else, that the brothers have not abandoned their restless experimental streak.
“Room 104” is a dry minimalist anthology series where each new episode tells a different story, all of them set in the same bland, nondescript room of a motel in Nowheresville, U.S.A. The particulars of the room itself aren’t that important: the location of “Room 104” mostly acts as a springboard, off which the show’s writers and directors bounce different tones (slow-burning horror, psychosexual drama, etc.) and the strangest one-off ideas they can dream up.
From a perspective of economy, the show is marvelous. Each installment acts as a contained short film, using only the necessary ingredients to tell a completely standalone tale every Friday night. The Duplasses have made some of the funniest and most original short films in their oft-derided “mumblecore” film school, and even if they don’t direct any of the episodes here (though Mark writes a few), their fingerprints are all over the final product.
The downside to “Room 104” is one that is endemic to other anthology shows: a lack of week-to-week uniformity. Without investing in an overlapping series arc as “Togetherness” did with such brilliance, “Room 104” is content to draw viewers a beguiling doodle each week, with little interest in continuity or consistency. The first three episodes occasionally suggest a show that is still trying to figure out what it wants to be, even if these growing pains result in some wildly unpredictable and uncomfortable episodes television. Though the show has its ups and downs, and it doesn’t linger in the mind the way the best television comedies do, I trust that the brothers and their creative brain trust know where they’re going. Though “Room 104” is more of an oddball novelty right now than an actual, honest-to-goodness T.V. show, I can see it venturing off into some fascinating detours before it wraps up its twelve-episode run.
The show’s first episode, “Ralphie,” suggests a low-stakes, single-location domestic horror movie condensed to twenty-five disorienting minutes. Melonie Diaz plays a lovely young woman who is tasked to look after a sweet young boy named Ralph (Ethan Kent). When the father leaves, disturbing details begin to emerge. Ralph speaks of his evil twin “Ralphie,” who is apparently hiding in the bathroom, and implores Diaz’s babysitter not to do anything to upset him. “Ralphie” is a wobbly, only occasionally effective episode of T.V. that leans a little too hard on the creepy-kid horror trope, but the pilot’s sustained mood of uncanny dread is the best thing about it. And it all builds to a genuinely ghastly denouement, one that finds Diaz’s beleaguered lead character questioning her own sanity and whether or not she’ll emerge from Room 104 in one piece.
The second installment of “Room 104”, titled “Pizza Boy,” is a big improvement over the first. The episode is directed by Patrick Brice, who has worked with the Duplasses before in his excellent cringe-comedy/horror piece “Creep” (which Mark starred in) and also his ribald middle-aged sex romp “The Overnight” (which the brothers produced). “Pizza Boy” shares its kinky sadism and its light touch with “The Overnight,” but it’s a funnier and more focused piece of offbeat micro-comic storytelling.
“Hot Tub Time Machine’s” Clark Duke stars as a mild-mannered pizza delivery boy who finds himself sucked into the sick psychosexual head games of a beautiful and unusually affable couple (James Van Der Beek and Davie-Blue) who are staying in Room 104. “Pizza Boy” continues in the pilot’s vein of unhinged psychological horror, but it has a more firm control of its pace than that earlier chapter, as well as some genuinely ugly laughs that will have you feel guilty for having laughed at all. And the actors really shine here, particularly Van Der Beek as a psychotic yuppie who hides his twisted desires behind a million-dollar smile. The episode’s final scene wraps the whole thing up as a moribund punchline that may rub some viewers the wrong way, but I found the twist both deliciously sour as well as wholly unexpected.
Where exactly “Room 104” fits into this crowded television landscape is hard to say. The third episode suggests a darker, less linear iteration of the show that might fully emerge in later episodes, in addition to boasting Orlando Jones’ second remarkable small-screen performance this year after his ferocious turn on “American Gods”. “Room 104” might be too slight and idiosyncratic for viewers who are waiting for the Wars to Come on “Game of Thrones” or biding their time with hopes of deducing what exactly the fuck David Lynch is up to with this new season of “Twin Peaks,” but if you’ve got an open mind and a healthy tolerance for weirdness, it might just hit the sweet spot. It’s also a reassuring affirmation of the Duplass Brother’s willingness to allow young, upstart filmmakers the freedom to experiment: even if it’s on HBO’s dime.
The last time I wrote about Dan Harmon and Justin Roiland’s “Rick and Morty” on this site, the show was still a cult item: beloved by a few, but unknown to many. Since writing that piece, “Rick and Morty” has become near-ubiquitous in certain circles; who thought that a nihilistic sci-fi comedy about a time-traveling, hard-drinking, egomaniacal scientist and his nerdy adolescent grandson would become one of the most definitive television works of its time?
It took me a second to get past the show’s colorful, juvenile veneer and see to the heart of its genius. “Rick and Morty” is one of the smartest and most intellectually rigorous comedies on T.V. today, even if it disguises its more salient philosophical points behind gruesome body horror and dimension-hopping hijinks. It’s the only show I can think of that addresses motifs of man versus creation in the same episode where our heroes travel into the body of a dead homeless man who is being used as a guinea pig in a mad scientist’s basement experiment. It’s twisted, it’s not P.C., and it’s a million miles away from safe, but it’s also some of the most thought-provoking and gut-bustingly funny stuff you’ll see on T.V. right now.
The third season of “Rick and Morty” has been plagued by lots of stops and starts: false release dates, a sea of memes and in-jokes, rumors of in-fighting between series creators Harmon and Roiland. Would heightened expectations and behind-the-scenes turmoil derail the so-far successful course of one of the greatest shows on T.V.? Fear not, nerds: “Rick and Morty” is back with a vengeance, as furious, fucked-up and effortlessly funny as it’s ever been.
Season two ended with a note of uncertainty as Rick and Morty crashed a particularly squanchy wedding party and Rick found himself an intergalactic fugitive. Back on earth, things with the Sanchez family aren’t great: while Rick is hiding out in another dimension, Beth and Jerry’s marriage is on the rocks, and neither Morty nor his bratty teenage sister Summer are reacting to their new circumstances all that well.
Rick’s arc in the season three opener is perhaps the richest: we come to learn that the grand ethos fueling his crazed experiments has nothing to do with power or playing God, but rather with obtaining a discontinued Szechuan Teriyaki dipping sauce used by McDonald’s to promote the 1997 Disney film “Mulan”. Because the world of “Rick and Morty” is one defined by chaos and fueled entropy, we accept that this reasoning somehow makes perfect sense.
Season three’s second episode, “Rickmancing the Stone,” might just be one of the great “Rick and Morty” episodes to date. While Morty and Summer deal with the fallout from their parent’s divorce, Rick drags them into a brutal, pitiless post-apocalyptic wasteland where disputes are settled in cage match fights to the death. The wasteland milieu and masked, musclebound freaks of this episode are clearly cribbed from George Miller’s “Mad Max” movies, but Roiland and Harmon have never been ones to settle for mere pop culture name-dropping a la Seth MacFarlane. They use Morty’s growing disaffection with his parent’s relationship as a catalyst for the episode’s primary action: our ordinarily timid hero ends up becoming the ruling brawler of this sun-scorched slice of earthly hell, and the writers have a gas watching Morty channeling his impotent frustrations over his parent’s divorce into bare-knuckle donnybrooks with marauding alien creatures. Talk about Peak T.V. at its finest.
Episode three, “Pickle Rick,” is somehow even more blissfully bizarre. As the title would indicate, Rick’s main arc in this installment involves turning himself into a pickle — mainly, because he can (“if anybody could do this — which they can’t — it’d be because they could, which they can’t”), and also so he has an excuse to get out of family therapy.
What begins as a surreal metaphysical picaresque eventually morphs into a hyper-violent, cartoonishly gory version of the “Raid” movies where Pickle Rick murders a bunch of sewer-dwelling critters, arms himself with the brain and appendages of a rat, and viciously takes down a compound filled with armed thugs, including a long-haired badass known as “The Jaguar” who is voiced by none other than Danny Trejo. Forget “The Spoils of War,” this week’s justly lauded “Game of Thrones” episode that concluded with a “Battle of the Bastards”-style dragon melee: “Pickle Rick” is the T.V. smackdown some of us have been waiting all year to see.
To be honest, it’s often hard to convince “Rick and Morty” novices of the show’s virtues, particularly if they have an aversion towards the kind of deliberately stilted stoner comedy that Adult Swim is usually known for. This is a show that either you get or you don’t, and its creators seem to have no interest in making any kind of bid for mainstream appeal. Not that they necessarily need one: even without being accepted by the T.V. establishment, “Rick and Morty” has managed to silently infiltrate the culture in a manner that is unusual for a show with such a narrow but rabid following (if you don’t believe me, google “Rick and Morty Szechuan dipping sauce “ and see what comes up).
If “Mr. Peabody” took mescaline and listened to Hawkwind, it might look something like “Rick and Morty”. If the anarchic, irreverent spirit of “Mystery Science Theater 3000” was blended with the grotesque animated nuttiness of something like Adult Swim’s “Superjail!” or “The Venture Brothers,” it might look something like “Rick and Morty”. And yet, all these comparisons are for moot, because there is nothing on television that boasts the same one-of-a-kind mix of uproarious dark humor, mind-bending philosophy, and sly pathos as “Rick and Morty”. It’s a supremely smart show for our supremely dumb time, I can’t wait to see what Harmon and Roiland have in store for the rest of this season. Actually, I do have one comparison that might be appropriate here: “Rick and Morty” might just be the most important animated sitcom since “The Simpsons”. How’s that grab ya?
If you had told me years ago that David Wain’s aggressively silly summer camp classic “Wet Hot American Summer” would go on to be one of the most beloved cult comedies of its time and spawn not only one, but two Netflix spin-offs, I’d have told you that you were crazy. It’s not that Mr. Wain’s movie wants for guffaws or memorable moments. If anything, the movie — a zany riff on 80’s summer camp comedies like the Bill Murray-starring “Meatballs” — almost earns its mock-legendary status. It’s just that “Wet Hot American Summer” is slight by design: an agreeably thin “Animal House”-style laffer that used its retro milieu as a clothesline for gags that were either brazenly nonsensical or vulgar to the point of disbelief. Did anyone think they’d really be back for two more installments?
Wain is a committed absurdist, and even his more mainstream comedies — “Role Models,” which pairs Paul Rudd as a straight arrow with a live-wire Seann William Scott, or “Wanderlust,” an underrated satirical takedown of new-age living — refuse to be boring. His style is unabashedly broad, and I often chastise myself for chuckling at the jokes in his movies, often before giving in to full-on, braying ugly-laughing. Wain has also amassed a dedicated team of regular collaborators over the years that extends to Rudd, Ken Marino, Michael Showalter, Amy Poehler, Elizabeth Banks, Joe Lo Truglio, and more. When you deck your movies out with casts like this, your movie almost becomes funny by default.
“Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later” is Wain and company’s third trip to Camp Firewood, and as enjoyable as it may be to bask in the company of these party-loving hedonists for one more sun-soaked summer, the age of this comedic property is starting to show. Plenty of jokes are made under the assumption that the “Wet Hot American Summer” cast are no longer the feckless young troublemakers they once were: they’ve put on some weight, their hair is thinning, and they can no longer cling to the innocent dreams that once gave them purpose.
And yet Wain, for whatever reason, doesn’t feel like treating this third chapter in the ongoing “Wet Hot American Summer” saga as though any time has passed. The characters still behave like impulsive teenagers and engage in sophomoric trials of one-upsmanship. They still trade in insults and profanity-heavy slang and obsess over sex and listen to the same music they did when they were teenagers. While there’s something refreshingly earnest about Wain’s commitment to arrested adolescence, it’s also hard not to wonder if he and his writers missed an opportunity to tell a slightly more incisive story.
Listen to me, incisive story. This is “Wet Hot American Summer” we’re talking about here: the movie that Roger Ebert famously dismissed with a one-star review written in the style of that famous camp jingle “Hello Madduh, Hello Faddah”. These are movies that are committed to cheap, big laughs and surreal, smutty gags, and that is exactly what “Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later” offers.
On paper, a few things have changed. Amy Poehler’s former camp theater director Susie is now a Hollywood mega-agent who arrives at Camp Firewood with a hunky piece of man candy on her arm (a surprisingly funny Jai Courtney). Paul Rudd’s prankish, hell-raising dickhead Andy Fleckner is finding out that his mantle as camp shithead has been replaced by a preening jock who goes by “Deegs” (Skyler Gisondo, of “Vacation” and “Santa Clarita Diet”). There’s also a daffy subplot about Ronald Reagan (played by Showalter in bad make-up), who, as “Ten Years Later” alleges, was a former Camp Firewood alum.
And yet, familiarity undeniably breeds comfort in the world of “Wet Hot American Summer”: the more things change, the more they stay the same. H. Jon Benjamin’s Mitch is still a talking can of mixed vegetables given to hopping off of waterfalls and fucking diner waitresses, while Ken Marino’s increasingly desperate Victor Pulak has yet to lose his virginity nearly a decade after the events of the first film.
All of this is pretty amusing, though it’s hard to appreciate the modest, crass virtues of Mr. Wain’s style when something like “Rick and Morty” is quietly revising the language of the 30-minute television comedy. The actors all acquit themselves nicely to this goofball funhouse, and there are some new additions — Adam Scott, playing Bradley Cooper’s character from the first film after a deviated septum caused him to undergo radical surgery, and Alyssa Milano as a nanny with homicidal intentions — that really do spice things up. It’s hard not to wish that “Ten Years Later” had a little more to offer, but it’s also hard to deny that it’s a welcome relief to spend time with this gang of idiots for one more summer.
Grades: “Room 104,” B. “Rick and Morty,” A. “Wet Hot American Summer: Ten Years Later.” C+.
