Network: Spike TV; Genre: Animated Comedy/ Satire; Content Rating: TV-PG; Classification: Contemporary (Star range: 1 - 4);
Season Reviewed: Complete Series (6 episodes)
If you blinked you missed it.
'This Just In...' was the one original program on SpikeTV that had some staying power, any potential to put the network on the map as a serious contender and a respectable alternative to The Cartoon Network's wildly popular Adult Swim. It was on for all of 6 episodes before the network cowardly ran away from it. Back to wrestling, 'CSI' reruns and the deplorable 'The Joe Schmo Show'. Created by Steve Marmel, it is an animated comedy satirizing topical current and political events, written the week the show airs (owing a little credit to 'South Park 'here) except the hook here is that it comes from an unapologetically conservative point of view. And a conservative that isn't a radical right-winger either. Great day in the morning.
Brian Newport is a conservative Republican in college, surrounded by and preaching his big picture, linear logic politics (almost to the point of obnoxiousness) to a world of liberals around him that don't want to hear it. The resulting effect is completely refreshing, especially when you look around and realize that before this you could count the number of openly conservative-minded comedies on the air today on one hand and still have 3 or 4 fingers left over. The show does justice to the view and doesn't labor it's points but gives equal skewered timing to everyone - a stark contrast to the raving shoehorned soapbox speeches of other shows.
And, agree with it or not, watching this show you are going to see stories, jokes and slants on the news that you won't see anywhere else. Instead of David E. Kelley or Dick Wolf cramming their own brand of slander down our throats about the president this show delivers us a 180 degree spin on that. As in 'Bushwacked' when the show proposes the novel idea that George Bush is a brilliant, snotty, Yale graduate who consciously mis-pronounces words and talks in a Southern twang in order to appeal to common voters. Newport's explanation for why paying taxes is actually a good thing (in moderation, of course) is more detailed an nuanced than anything in the broad generalizations we are expected to swallow from liberal series as to why we are to, for example, believe in global warming or weep for victims of the death penalty.
Taking the 'Bushwacked' example, it's an original idea, but not particularly funny which, unfortunately, sums up almost everything about this show. It suffers from the same lazy comic ailment that plagued this year's increasingly feverishly left-wing 'Whoopi': the misconception that just dropping the name of a celebrity or well-known politician is enough to get a laugh. Name-dropping falls just in line behind puns and fart jokes as the most mind-numbing and tedious form of comedy there can be. Not since the sparkling writing of 'Murphy Brown' has a show been able to pull it off with any resounding success. So aside from a well-deserved jab at Tina Fey (proof the show is closer to the cusp of reading what's hip than most) I was never provoked to actual laughter by it. Even when some of Marmel's ideas and character quirks are if you think about them quite funny ones; such as the idea that Newport is such a political junkie we see a 'Hannity and Colmes' poster displayed prominently on his wall with the Colmes scratched out. We need more shows on TV as open to political dissection as this one.
Like I said, this was a somewhat refreshing show that had potential. It was, at best, marginally funny hampered by a slow pace and Marmel lacking the sharp comic delivery to really sell most of the gags. But it's ridiculous to expect the series to be completely ironed out after only six episodes. It was a show of ideas in a landscape of mindless TV and I wish I had the chance to get to know it better. Spike dropped the ball big time.
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