Investment (Episodes)

I started Episodes, Matt Le Blanc's new show, because of Matt. I mean, come on, I'm obsessed with Friends, so it makes sense for me to start the show. It just got to the end of its seven episode first season.

I actually quite liked the first episode. It was funny, and invested me in the relationship between Beverley and Sean. It didn't have much Matt, but I was okay with that. There were some interesting characters, Carol being my favorite for her entirely fake personality -- which then turned into one of my favorite characters because she's clearly in a place where she has to do it.

I thought it was interesting to have Matt playing a version of himself. I know its been done before, but I don't think its ever been done in the same way. Imagine playing someone who has your name, and some parts of your life, but other parts fictionalized. Matt does it beautifully though, and there are moments that feel really true and interesting.

So, now having finished the first season, I am going to do a half plug / half warning. Episodes is hilariously funny. I mean, really, really funny. There are some great parts to it and you get this amazing sense of what its like to be in Hollywood. It also will break your heart -- over and over and over again. These are moments that feel infinitely human, but they are painful to watch.

If you plan to watch this show, then spoilers occur after this point, stop reading. I say this because I am about to go into the painful moments. If you have been turned off by this advertisement for the show, or think you would get spoiled anyways, I suppose you can go on.

SPOILERS

I like Matt, I really do, but the pull of this show is the relationship between Bev and Sean. They are so happy and normal and in love with one another. They work well with one another. They also have normal couple flaws: Sean's inability to let go of a dream that is clearly hurting his wife, Bev's controlling personality (not overbearing as such, but she does like to know things) and a little bit her jealousy. They are people, and they are in love, and you can tell. And the show lets you know its all going to fall apart at the start, so seeing them so happy makes it hurt even more to see them being so normal with one another.

Now as the show begins to unfold, you get both of their points of view. Bev is unhappy, and its clear that she is unhappy. She wants to be somewhere else and not in America making a show that is so clearly not the show she wrote in the UK. She also has a few problems making friends, being somewhat shrewish (yeah, not particularly great feminism-wise, but she's not unbelievable, and it plays into the overall result of the show, so I'm okay with it) and Matt drives her up the wall basically because they have a bad impression of each other from the beginning.

Meanwhile Sean is happy in LA. He's the well liked writer, and he and Matt's relationship unfold nicely. It hurts later when Sean says that he has only a few guy friends. Matt fulfills a role in Sean's life that I don't think he got before. So, yes, we're happy for Sean. And the thing with Morning is complicated, but I think the show handles it delicately. After all, he is adamantly against doing anything about his feelings towards Morning and I honestly got the sense it was only a physical thing for Morning and not about the emotional things.

I totally get why Bev would be upset by this and I totally get why Sean decides to hide the fact that Morning went to the benefit with him and Matt because they are sketched out so well in the episodes preceding. So when it comes -- when Bev sleeps with Matt, you both understand her impulse, and it tears you up inside because Sean was trying so hard to do the right thing and he's getting screwed either way.

Never in my life have I watched a comedy in which the show is so depressing and laughed so much. The fight between Matt and Sean was hilarious (the perfume anyone? The cactus! The cactus!) and even the moments between Bev and Sean when they were fighting (and Matt's comedic relief) were funny. Horrible, but you still laughed. I've never seen something like that executed so well and I think it comes from the fact that the characters were so likable and their actions so understandable and human.

Plus you invest from the beginning. You want people to be happy.

I know the show was picked up for the second season, and I'm excited for the second season. I think it will be interesting to see what they do next and if they can salvage the remains of the relationships they so thoroughly destroyed in the last episode. I am invested heavily in Sean and Bev working things out. I kind of want Matt and Carol to get together, but that's random. But yes, want Sean and Bev to be together, though I don't know if they can manage it. I hope they can. There is so much between them and come on -- "You were my partner."

They are meant to be together. They write together. There is no way they can be 'just friends'.

On Comedy

There is something to be said about talent in the field of comedy, a personality that goes well with being funny. From the reading/watching documentaries about my favorite comedians (Eddie Izzard, Jon Stewart, Margaret Cho) the personality type that brings out stand up comedians is perseverance. It is not, in the end about being really funny (though I'm sure it helps). The ability to talk into the silence is what makes a good stand up comedian, and as I am currently writing a blog about writing and don't even have the guts to share my writing with my best friend, stand up is probably out for me. Not that I really wanted to do it.

The other kind of comedy you get is from writing. There are mediums to writing comedy and shows that come to mind almost at once for me: the straight up sitcom (Friends, How I Met Your Mother), the dramady (Castle, Psych), shows that are serious drama but have humorous moments and sarcastic comments (Sherlock, Doctor Who), novels that are humorous (The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, David Sedaris pieces) and so many other forms that listing them would waste your time. So the question becomes, how in these contexts, do you create comedy. And do you want to include it (the answer is yes, always yes).

Comedy looks easy and is hard while drama looks hard and is easy. You can kill someone off in a dramatic, horrible fashion easily, but you can't just have someone walk into a room, slip on a banana peel and have people laugh. So the first thing I think about when attempting to write humorously is practice.

I am a big proponent of practice. Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, brings up the point that most people who are considered to be geniuses in their fields are in fact, simply well practiced -- a lot practiced in fact. He goes into a magical number, and while its interesting, its not the major point, you can read the book if you want to know more. The point is that practice is very important. I don't think I had really grasped this until I took a class in logic and discovered that the only way to learn logic was to do logic problems, over and over again until something clicked. But then it started bleeding into other parts of my life. I realized that chemistry made more sense because I had practiced problems in it to the point where it was intuition that brought about the answer, I found that when I was saying my characters were "telling me" how the story went, it was because I have read and written for a long time, and my mind was following the path that stories go in, piecing back extraneous information from the first chapter to make it very important without me even realizing it.

Practice allows you to write without thinking about it, which in turn, allows you to write effortlessly, discovering the story as it comes out of you, and seems natural instead of forced. So, shouldn't practice help you fumble for the joke, the moment that will be the most funny? I don't see why not. Most people say when you start attempting humor, you should write in the voice of someone you admire who is funny. When you do this, you are starting to ingrain the flow of your humor, you are practicing being funny the way you want to be.

So practice, its important, but there are other factors involved, of course. These factors do depend more on genre then on anything else -- after all the joke in a sitcom is not the same as the joke in a dramady, and the joke written for TV can fall flat on the page without an actor to prop it up.

I suppose though that there is a common theme to comedy and that is taking something and expressing it in a new and unexpected way -- juxtaposing situations, or physical gags -- but always leading to some greater truth. Comedy gets to express truth through making you laugh, and I think in some ways, it makes the lesson stick better that way.

Now, if only I could write it. I'm just going to attempt witty at the moment. ;)