Idiot Boxin': Reruns, Reboots, and Chicago Sandwiches
On America's favorite TV family, The Beatles of Canadian sketch comedy, and a new show I'm absolutely enamored with.
The other day in junior high we talked about media and the pre-teens were asked what their favorite form was and Lana said, “Television,” and I felt embarassed and asked, “What about art?” because she draws and was actively drawing cats on her hand at the time.
Then I realized the absurdity of my reaction because the blessed glow of TV is the medium in which I’ve likely spent most time, in which I have dozens of nostalgic memories. For overall time-suck, maybe Computers are a contender, though I adopted those screens later.
I enjoy quality television so much I once wrote a column for Tucson Weekly called Idiot Boksen. Wanna read 2011-era Jordan blow up Modern Family? Here it is. (When I read lines like, “They're retreading old storylines like a meth-head cobbler,” I feel a swirl of both pride and shame.)
So this post is about what I’m watching lately. On a different note, I’m in a Substack Grow contingent and one commonly discussed subject is how to balance what gets sent to paid subscribers and what gets sent to free. Like, I want customers to feel treated well, but I also want folks to read what I write!
So the way this post works is there’s bonus content at the end for paid subscribers: another review of a brand new show I’m super into. If you want to read about it, The Green Room is running an Easy Summer Livin’ Sale now through July 4th.
Enough of all that! Here’s what’s shining on the biggest screen in the Green house.
The Simpsons (Disney+)
One of Lana’s crackliest passions is animation, so we have a habit of watching most any sort of revered animated shows we learn about. Our favorites are Adventure Time and Avatar: The Last Airbender, and we like to rate each series on art style, characters, kinetics, and storytelling. Our most recent foray was Arcane, an action-packed steampunk thrill-ride set in the League of Legends gaming universe, a canon neither of us were familiar with, but which we enjoyed.
After that, we took up The Simpsons.
I wasn’t sure how long to wait before introducing Lana to America’s Favorite Yellow Family and their fellow denizens of Springfield. I mean, I wasn’t allowed to watch The Simpsons when I was 12. (Though I was allowed to wear a Bart Simpson t-shirt as long as it read “Cowabunga” and not “Eat my shorts.”) But Lana’s friend was ripping through the seasons and Lana caught a couple and besides, three decades on, The Simpsons is more relic than cutting edge. Plus, the show is especially dear to Portlanders since our street names are characters, and Springfield is set in Oregon. So we watched some of the best episodes and most of them were appropriate1. Then we dove in at Season 2.
What you gotta remember is a lot of those early seasons were written by folks like Conan O’Brien and Greg Daniels, TV writers who’d later become industry legends. The jokes are gold. Outside of maybe Seinfeld, the lines and timing and delivery of The Simpsons are thoroughly embedded in the American lexicon.
While I can recite many lines of dialogue verbatim with the alacrity of Comic Book Guy, Lana is watching all of this anew, and getting a crash course on the pop culture canon of her parents’ childhoods for better and worse.
We’re up to Season 13 now, crashing through the early ‘00s, and soon I’ll be transported to the seasons I last watched on DVR with Mindy. And who knows how long the show will stay fresh to Lana’s impressionable eyes? But for now the jokes still hold up.
And the art! The Simpsons can be a surprisingly beautiful show.
Not unlike U2 or Elton John, we may take it for granted that The Simpsons is still around. (Season 33 wrapped up in May) but the show can’t last forever! Someday it will end, and that will be one of the wildest and/or tragic send offs in TV history.✊
Kids in the Hall (Prime)
While we’re stuck in the ‘90s, my most mindblowing television experience this year was watching the new season of Kids in the Hall on Amazon Prime.
For a teenage Jordan, airings of KiH and Mystery Science Theater 3000 on Comedy Central were appointment viewing, an intro to the odder, DIY elements of comedy. KiH sketches were strange, sometimes bordering on horror. The Kids scratched an itch for outsider sketch comedy which Saturday Night Live never could.
And then on my screen were the same Kids—Bruce, Dave, Kevin, Mark, and Scott—together again, in contemporary HD, as though thirty years never happened. Except, of course, decades had passed, and the Kids were old now, like a Canadian sketch comedy version of The Beatles, except all alive. The show takes this into gloriously self-referential account, conjuring a mood more revival than reboot.
At bottom line, do I recommend watching the new KiH?
The answer is two-fold:
If you ever appreciated Kids in the Hall in any way, then yes! Yes. A billion times, yes!
If you aren’t familiar with the Kids, then yes, but with reservations, because I can only view it with the bygone fondness of a formational work of art. How could the show possibly feel the same to newbies? And yet I trust the troupe’s comedy remains brilliant.
To test your Kids in the Hall compatibility, here’s how Vulture describes “Shakespeare’s Bust,” which they ranked the 5th-best sketch of the revival season overall. (It was my favorite and I laughed uproariously.)
McKinney and Foley feature in the surreal tale of a stan who brings the bard back to life only for Shakespeare to become his a**hole roommate. Better yet, Foley is a living bust whose resurrection is soon met with blood and guts gushing out of his, uh, lack of appendages. The Kids’ Shakespeare is gross-out chaotic gold that gets more and more ridiculous at every turn.
Please don’t hold me accountable if you hate the Kids. Their confident return brought joy to my heart, like seeing a dear friend after years apart. Now its time for my favorite new show of all: The Bear.
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