You can blame Bernie Su for the new, improved (?) and fantastically terrible punny title for my web series review column. However, he knows what he’s doing with pliers and a sledgehammer, so I’d just not make a federal case of it.
I am not the biggest fan of puppets, but I would not go so far as to say that puppets and I have a dislike of one another. When done right, a puppet act can showcase brilliance to a universal audience. But often what happens is:
The novelty of having cute-looking inanimate objects talk about shocking things wears thin quickly,
The use of puppets try to take the focus away from weakly written humor, or
It’s just made for a very narrow audience, and was never meant to appeal to me, anyway.
Exit Row easily sidesteps the first pothole. We’ll talk about the other two later, but let’s get into the breakdown. The show follows characters Chuck and Ralph, two (thankfully) empty air sickness bags as they sit in neighboring airline magazine pockets. From the press release, they “grapple with everything from love, betrayal, friendship, identity, in-flight etiquette, and life ad nauseum from the perspective of a seat back pocket.”
Production of the show is ridiculously simple, and Puppet Heap’s puppeteers James Godwin and Tim Lagasse smartly don’t try to do too much. They absolutely know their stuff – pretty much every major puppet act you’ve seen, they’ve had a hand in it – including a Chappelle’s Show episode, which, unfortunately, contained my least favorite sketch they had (see: problem #1, not that it was the puppeteers’ fault). So it’s no surprise that on Exit Row, lighting, sound, and the puppet work are all great, particularly after the first episode, where they panned the dialogue to different channels, providing a sense of space in audio form.
