Network: Fox; Genre: Comedy; Content Rating: TV-PG; Classification: Contemporary (Star range: 1 - 4);
Seasons Reviewed: Complete Series (1 season)
I generally criticize people who judge a show on the first few episodes. But, then there are those truly awful works that pronounce themselves loudly from the beginning and are beyond repair. If 'Method & Red' turns a corner, I'll happily be the first to update it. Edited with a chainsaw and so resounding unfunny that it pierces the gut, if 'Method' were to suddenly do a 180 and find a vision it would still have to fight to get out of the Hall of Television Shame. You'll find it in the newly added Fox wing next to 'The Pitts'.
Heterosexual life-partners Method Man and Redman live in a gated community surrounded by uptight white people, led by their Realtor neighbor lady (Beth Littleford, 'The Daily Show'). It's 2004 but you wouldn't know that from the dinosaur programming department at Fox. Watching this show you'll get to see jokes, ideas and cinematic techniques that you'd think were abandoned by the sitcom years ago. It's another in a line of TV shows and movies about "white people and black people trying to co-exist in this wacky world". I'm not going to throw around the overused word "racist", which the show certainly isn't - just small-minded with a world view limited to easily identifiable clichés. 'Method' could just as easily be imagined as a 1950s minstrel show that network executives have proved they can pull off without Amos and Andy in blackface when they have these two B-grade rappers running around oafishly acting out their own stereotypes. Not that the white people are depicted any better. All of which are the usual snobby, repressed, uptight, squares. The show has never met a tired stereotype it didn't like. The whole affair feels warmed over - like Method and Red are telling us jokes they heard someone else tell at a party, but don't actually have experience with. It might have made for some great culture clash comedy if it had the slightest bit of insight on anything it was saying. Instead it's a very broadly drawn fish out of water series that turns the clock back to even the days before 'The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air' where we had a prominent black family living the high life in Beverly Hills.
The purpose of the show, like any rap song, is to stroke the ego and allow its star to talk about themselves. We see their hoochies, their mansion with a flat-screen TV in every corner (how is this funny?), them getting freaky with babes in the hot tub and their bling, but we also see them being propped up by some of the oldest sitcom jokes the world as ever seen. We see them turning soft or helping a little kid face bullies (who, of course, recognize them). We see them trying to be kind to neighbors and being treated like thugs. We see Method's feisty mama. We see a neighborhood war over loud music. It's enough to make you wonder if it's hip now in the rap world to sell out and humiliate yourself in a cornball sitcom? To say that this appeals to the hip-hop crowd is an insult to the hip-hop crowd. It's a show that uses rappers and a music video look to give it the appearance of edge, when 'Method' is actually about as hip and edgy as a Gary Marshall movie.
I'll state the obvious: nobody on the show can act. Nobody. That includes a very disappointing Beth Littleford, because we know she can do better. It also includes our two heroes. The two rappers, known less for their raps and more for their collaborations and buddy-comedy acting work in 'How High' are wholly inept and phony even while playing themselves. The dialog is specifically designed to be unintelligible for anyone who isn't fluent in street slang. But even with an updated Ebonics dictionary in hand, you still have to sort through the garbled voices and slewed unprofessional articulation of the Men. They don't just need acting and speech lessons; they need to be completely overhauled if this show is to last beyond a few weeks.
The show is slapped together like a McG music video with hackneyed speed up tape and quick, cartoonish zoom-ins. But that isn't even the worst of it. 'Method' actually brings back something I though was long gone after it was shouted off the air in 'Sports Night' the laugh track in a single-camera series. I don't mind laughter in a single-set sitcom, it makes the show feel like a play sort of. But in a single-camera series where there is obviously no audience? To implement this is so staggering stupid it begs to know whose idea (at Fox, I'm sure) it was. So here, every time Method Man gets slapped by his tightly wound, but well-meaning momma we get the mental image of some poor schlub at Fox turning up a dial on a box to tell us that it's time to laugh. Ouch. The sad part is, that this is one show that needs it.
½
