Tubefilter News

Conceptually clever 2 Girls 1 Cop, created and written by Erica Bardin and Susan Graham has two things going for it: hot girls and great production value…and that’s it.

Not that that’s a bad thing. I didn’t mind losing the three and half minutes to watching actresses Juliana Barninger and Daina Gozen eventually undress to their skivvies to avoid a parking ticket. However, I did find the comedy in this “comedy” to be lackluster and broad.

The basic concept is a spin on the car safety device, OnStar, only this one is called OnSluts which is designed to help hot girls get out of jams with the law. In the pilot, Cheerleaders 1 and 2 are pulled over by Officer Duda, played competently by Hal Rudnick. The girls are then instructed by the OnSluts, played by Bardin and Graham, via dashboard video, on various ways to convince Duda to throw out their ticket.

Structurally, we watch three scenarios which escalate in prurience and success until they finally force Duda to tear up the ticket by threatening to tweet a compromising picture they orchestrated with the help of the OnSluts. This final punch is the funniest bit and got a smile out of me, but nothing to write home about.

I like the basic idea of the show, it’s just that I didn’t laugh, due partly to performance and partly to writing. While clever in concept, the writing is just average and broad, unfortunately. There’s an abortion joke that falls flat, is not needed, and made me cringe; and then a smeared brownie moment that could have been funny (maybe?), but just plays as bad titillation.

From the trailer you get the idea that Tyranny is a distant relative of 70’s American thrillers, where corporations rule the world and your mind. From the three episodes I’ve screened, I was convinced it was another dystopic, post-apocalyptic thriller. Dystopia, I know, but I think timing wise, this is more pre-apocalypse. At any rate this series from creator John Beck Hofman is gripping while still competently executed for its scope.

Hofman plays Daniel McCarthy who in 1999 volunteers for a Berkley Grad student’s experiment that records his every thought and action throughout the day. Shortly thereafter he realizes he has lost memory of the last eight days and can now see the future from 2011 to 2013. And it ain’t pretty. Food shortages, bio-engineered pandemic, and picketers galore…future? Hmm, that sounds awfully similar to a certain planet I know right now. The rest of the cast is impressive, with Bond girl Olga Kurylenko starring alongside Hofman and web series standout Bitsie Tulloch from Quarterlife and lonleygirl15.

The latest installment of our weekly web series critic column Pass The Mustard. No sugar coating, no doublespeak, no hand holding. Just brutally honest reactions from one guy: Ned Hepburn. We’ll throw a handful of web series at him each week. Agree, disagree, love him, hate him, but please don’t punch him. Got something clever to say in retort? Leave a comment below. He’ll probably read it and embarrass you later. His opinions are his own, so take them or leave them. See last week’s column here.]

The Annoying Orange

Are you high or 14 years old? Do you live in the suburbs? It’s completely fucking absurd – like, X-Files absurd – that this series has over 20 million hits. That must mean that Satan is on his way. This is the kind of thing that the movie Idiocracy predicted. This is pure, pure unfunny highly concentrated, in droplet form, just purely nonsensical riffing from an Annoying Orange. It’s either high concept art or it’s just plain terrible. It made me want to drink alone on a balcony overlooking the city, listening to sad bastard music, wondering “Is this all there is in life? This?” and then keep drinking scotch. It was F. Scott Fitzgerald levels of ambivalence to humanity after watching this one, folks. This was terrible.

Wiener & Wiener

Do you want to know something? I was at the grocery store and found a thing called a Grapple. It’s an apple that’s been crossbred with a grape. It’s not bad. Anyway, Weiner and Weiner is a lot like the Grapple, because it’s not bad but it’s completely strange and I have no idea what to make of it. It’s good? Bad? I don’t like it? Maybe I do? It doesn’t make any sense except it kind of does? It’s like Urban Outfitters: The Show. Not only do all the actors and actresses look like they work there, but there’s a definite and palpable feeling of the decision to forgo plot for style points.

The latest installment of our weekly web series critic column Pass The Mustard. No sugar coating, no doublespeak, no hand holding. Just brutally honest reactions from one guy: Ned Hepburn. We’ll throw a handful of web series at him each week. Agree, disagree, love him, hate him, but please don’t punch him. Got something clever to say in retort? Leave a comment below. He’ll probably read it and embarrass you later. His opinions are his own, so take them or leave them. See last week’s column here.]

POV
This College Humor series pretty aptly reminds me of college, high school and sort of every waking moment of every major meeting i’ve ever been in. Bravo, good sirs. Tada. College Humor is sort of the Scottie Pippen of bro humor. It’s might not pull Michael Jordan numbers but still deserves to be on the cover of the metaphorical box of Wheaties.

I grew up knowing the ‘Dear Abby’ phenomena only as an ironic comedy reference. However, when I found that real people wrote in with real problems I was blown away. First of all who writes letters anymore? I think only serial killers and hostage takers, but they don’t even write they just cut out letters from magazines. Next it spoke to a time when people were more eloquent with words and didn’t feel the need to abbreviate ‘OK’ as ‘K’. Lastly, it was damn nice of that Abby to be so helpful. So, I want to pretend to know what that’s like and write a letter to help me understand Twilight With Steve Cooper.

Dear Abby, I was watching episode 7 and it didn’t make any sense. The host, fictionalized Steve Cooper (Jeremy Seglem), is in a chair and then a guy in a bad Renaissance Fair costume (The Earl of Sandwich) comes on. Then they start talking about sandwiches, because I think the guy in the bad Renaissance Fair costume is supposed to be the guy that invented sandwiches.

At one point I even found myself saying, “I’m confused”, out loud. I guess if I were IM’ing with someone about it I would’ve typed ‘C.O.L.’ for ‘confused out loud’.

OK, I get that this is supposed to be mock interview show taking benign issues, such as sandwiches…. I just said ‘sandwiches’ out loud because I got confused again. Anyway, the show takes an issue like sandwiches and tries to be serious about it, hence making it funny. Um…no. The host doesn’t play it straight enough. And the weird Renaissance guy… Um, no. So, I watch other episodes and there are other characters from other historic time periods. And I’m just like, “I get it. Next.” Then I watch another one and I’m like, “Nope.” Even the Koldcast.tv, the network that hosts the series, is confusing. I clicked on the link and it started playing some Dora The Explorer rip off commercial and I was ‘C.O.L.’ once again.

So Abs, can I call you Abs? Any way, if you could help me make sense of this series I would greatly appreciate it. I want to go on the Internet, and at the very least not seek council. I applaud the concept, but I also applaud the concept of Communism, or as Republicans like to call it, Democracy.

Now is exactly the right time to spoof vampires, because they are everywhere. Right Thoughts of a dying Atheist? They are in our books, our movie adaptations of books, even our TV show adaptations of books. Eddie Murphy, either you had bad timing, or were way ahead of your time.

As you might have guessed from its title, Intercourse With A Vampire is a spoof. The comedy is about a lascivious, rather unconvincingly seductive Dracula-type named Vampire Larry who lives with his high school sweetheart. The idea being “what if Robert Pattinson’s Twilight character Edward got older, kept his girlfriend, but was a creep.” Using that premise, Vampire picks up where creator and star Jacob Fleisher’s comedy short Twilight – 5 Years Later left off.

In terms of performance, Fleisher has the tendency to go broad with his comedy. That’s putting it politely. In the first scene of the first episode he slimes his way into bed with his girlfriend Tracy (Kristen Carney), and as they have sex his face contorts wildly, as if a GIF Party of Jim Carrey’s face from Ace Ventura: Pet Detective.

Vampire is the type of show that reads well on page, but not quite as much on screen. Some of the punch lines do work, on a Zucker brothers level, as with the third episode when Tracy lays eyes on Vampire Larry for the first time in high school. He glides down the hallway, his hair blowing in the wind. Then a smash cut to reveal Larry being pulled along on a skateboard while a woman holds a fan up to his face.

However, while some of the jokes do work the performances do less so, save a small, but funny, turn by comedian Ben Schwartz as a waiter in the episode three.

The show naturally references aspects of the current pop culture mythology of vampires, like their supernatural ability to “glamour” someone, recognizable to you True Blood fans. If this reaches into a second season they may even land a few gag references of Let the Right One In.

This is the latest installment of our weekly web series critic column Pass The Mustard. No sugar coating, no doublespeak, no hand holding. Just brutally honest reactions from one guy: Ned Hepburn. We’ll throw a handful of web series at him each week. Agree, disagree, love him, hate him, but please don’t punch him. Got something clever to say in retort? Leave a comment below. He’ll probably read it and embarrass you later. His opinions are his own, so take them or leave them. See last week’s column here.]

Spade

A Choose-Your-Own-Adventure style show on YouTube? This works. This works fairly well. This could work better. I’ll spare you the details on what the show is about as I’d recommend you get a feel for it yourself – but for what the show lacks in production cost it makes up for in inventiveness. The great thing about watching these web shows is that you get a sense of what it must’ve been like 100 years ago in the movie industry – a hell of a lot of 10 minute shorts that don’t make sense – some rising above others – and occasionally someone doing something new. Well, this is something new done very well on such a low budget. I’d love to see this with a major league budget, and I applaud them for their originality.

Plenty of terrible television programs have been conceived in a marriage of “Character-A is able to talk to non-human Character-B.” I recall one such show a while back that featured a middle-aged man who talked with a stuffed dog with the voice of Bobcat Goldthwait. It was called Unhappily Ever After, ran for 100 episodes on The WB, and looked dreadful.

How was someone convinced that such a premise could beget a program worth watching? Well, perhaps that someone was some kind of Larry Ellison-type visionary who had a brilliant idea that just couldn’t be executed because the appropriate technology didn’t exist. Or, more likely, that someone was some kind of well-connected stoner who had a zany idea and and a favor to cash in from network television. It’s too bad that someone didn’t cast Patrick Duffy nor his crustachioed friend.

Clearly it’s not easy to execute the “human talks to non-human” thing. Unhappily and Poochinski are prime examples. However, there’s something uncanny about watching Patrick Duffy calmly converse with a crab with the voice of David Leisure. Celebrities: They’re just like us! The dad from Step by Step can discuss mundane things with a crab and it’s incredibly humorous! That sentence reads heavy on the sarcasm, but I’m completely serious. Patrick Duffy talking to a crab is very funny.

What sort of charisma or appeal does Mr. Duffy possess that grants him the ability to shoot the breeze with a soft-shelled muppet and not make viewers want to disfigure themselves via the crab’s plush claws? I’m still trying to determine this. It’s a preternatural gift, as if Duffy’s stints on Dallas or The Bold and the Beautiful were all definitively leading towards the day he was to be the co-star of 90-second sketches wherein he and a crab puppet chat about modern technology or their sexual proclivities. “Surreal” would be a cliché and easy way to describe this show. The dialogue is subtle and the topics so everyday that the crab’s presence is beside the point. It would be absurd to attempt to intellectualize these videobites, as they exist on a non-rational plane.

Perhaps I’m building Patrick Duffy and the Crab up to be some epic cultural phenomenon. It isn’t. It’s just a great web series comprised of goofy vignettes shot by his son and daughter-in-law (Conor Duffy and Emily Cutler) that the guy does in his spare time when he’s not filming a soap opera. And maybe that’s part of the real reason this works.

Duffy interacts with the stuffed crab in a way that’s far more “real” than any of his interactions on daytime TV. But there I go trying to intellectualize this and sounding absurd. Just watch it. It’s good.