After spending literally hundreds of hours sprawled out on my couch staring into a flickering box of lights over the past six months or so it occurred to me that I needed to either spend some serious time re-evaluating my recent life choices—an activity that tends to lead to hours of hyperventilating into a lunch bag—or at the very least make some basic attempt at justifying my titanic slothfulness. With most television seasons having wrapped up now is an opportune time to analyze their relative merits so that you—the goodly FFWD reader—may avoid a similarly torturous look at the wreckage of your life. I give you: Holistic Television Reviews by Kyle Francis a tool with which to guide your (hopefully legitimate) procurement of these fine pop cultural artifacts. Naturally these reviews will probably contain some spoilers (though I’ll attempt to write around them when I can). Up second:
Party Down: Season 1
In the Los Angeles of John Enbom Dan Etheridge Paul Rudd and Rob Thomas’ Party Down no one working in the service industry is just a service industry worker. At Party Down the eponymous catering company Kyle Bradway (Ryan Hansen) and Constance Carmell (Jane Lynch) are actors Roman DeBeers (Martin Starr) is a “hard SF” screenwriter and Casey Klein (Lizzy Caplan) is a comedian. Only Henry Pollard (Adam Scott) is content to be “just a bartender” though we learn that he too was once one of these LA stereotypes—at the outset of the first season he returns to Party Down after an eight year hiatus where he perused a career as an actor the peak of which was a national beer commercial that still has him constantly recognized in public. The lame catchphrase Henry’s constantly implored to spout by strangers—“are we having fun yet?!”—is not only a forced reminder of his failure but a forced reliving a concentration camp serial number permanently etched into his wrist that he’s decided to live with rather than have removed. Henry’s charm comes from the odd sort of grace he manages to conjure in spite of his utter defeat and the whole of season one mirrors him gradually building upon this depressing theme. We’re all failures in our own way it tells us. Even what small victories we have will be Pyrrhic. Aww:
I’ll admit that when I first heart about Party Down I was skeptical. The trailer was boring the first episode is pretty lackluster and I just couldn’t see Ken Marino as anyone but Vincent Van Lowe the smarmy anything-for-a-buck private eye from Veronica Mars (a show that was also created by Thomas and written for by both Enbom and Etheridge). Like VM though Party Down does struggle through it’s first couple of episodes it finds its feet around the third where the writing tightens up the actors visibly become more comfortable in their roles and the humor leaves behind the “we don’t know who’s going to buy this so let’s be as generic as possible” ethos that’s characteristic of so many comedy pilots. For me it was ironically the VM -throwback episode written by Thomas where Henry inadvertently solves a mystery that the show finally came into its own. Cliptime:
It’s not in the above clip but Casey throws out a reference to Chekov’s Gun very shortly after this:
“You know what they say about a gun in the first act” she says. “Someone has to fire it in the third.”
“The third act of what?” Kyle snorts.
The entire episode hinges on a larger meta-joke like this one where Thomas subtly weaves together a number of observations on the two-ness of all the characters with some clever commentary on the conventions of traditional storytelling in a setting more realistic than VM ‘s. Each episode of Party Down takes place entirely at the the event the team is catering and this one centers around the innocuously named “Investor’s Meeting” where a slimy rich guy (Daran Norris VM’s Cliff McCormack) persuades a bunch of other slimy rich guys to give him a bunch of money. Through a combination of cleverness and coincidence Henry discovers that Norris’ slimy rich guy is probably scamming all the other slimy rich guys and though he’s congratulated on his detective skills by Casey (“Are you Sherlock Holmes?”) he doesn’t actually do anything but shrug his shoulders and mix some more drinks.
In a show like VM where the protagonist’s sense of justice and tendency to blindly charge off in the pursuit of it is so strong that it ultimately destroys everyone who loves her—a show with a classical “hero” in other words—a plot turn like this could never happen. But Henry is no Hardy boy. He’s a normal guy someone who’s trying to find some small happiness after resigning himself to failure so it’s only natural that his reaction would be: “Whatever. They’re dicks anyway.” It’s only when his friend Ron (Marino) looks like he’s going to be taken for his life’s savings by Norris that Henry’s essential ‘goodness’ overcomes his apathy. And thus we’re treated to the reappearance of Checkov’s (Baretta’s) gun in the third act:
Though it’s never as central as it is in this episode for the remainder of the series Party Down continues a subtle running commentary on the dual nature of the people living in Hollywood the socio-psycho-physical laws of reality vs the mechanics of fiction and the fact that comedy—good comedy anyway—is just tragedy you’re invited to laugh at:
