| Thursday, February 23, 2006 |
22:42 - Seth McFarlane, You Got Served™
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I believe that in the space of about two minutes, Drawn Together just went from a show I'd been enjoying as intermittently-ingenious—intermittently-irritating and generally underrated, right up to the top of my short list.
See, all this second season I've felt that the writers have really reached a groove that was missing in the first season; last year the episodes struck me as very scattershot and incoherent, perhaps as a result of the writing not quite having got ahold of the style of injokes to use, or perhaps because I wasn't paying attention closely enough. Or perhaps, as is my going theory, because last season they were trying too hard to stick to the "reality show" schtick and the "cartoon and animation clichés" schtick at the same time. Each of those schticks is rich enough in potential material to sustain a whole show, and I think this second season—now that it's downplaying the "reality show" stuff and focusing more on the animation gags—is a lot more consistent in its delivery. There's plenty of mileage to be gotten just out of the animation injokes alone.
Nothing's a better demonstration of that than tonight's episode, which carelessly tosses out a whole armload of potential material just in a throwaway in the first minute or two: the "original cast", consisting of characters like Stimpy (with what had to be a Billy West cameo), a Transformer, and a 19th-century political cartoon of a woodcut pig wearing a "Congress" sash. One might have thought that the real cast had covered all the bases of possible animation genres to make fun of, but this tells us that they've only just scratched the surface. So did the rest of the gags in the episode, from the Popeye jokes to the Fugitive reference and the Pee-Wee's Big Adventure-esque chase sequence.
But what stomped me flat this time through was the bit in the middle where Wooldoor is released from "jail" (the mall security waiting area) in a direct Shawshank Redemption crib. It went on for several minutes and spanned several scenes, faithfully reprising the "reintegration into society" bit from the movie, with shabby brown suit, rural accent, grocery-store job, the whole sequence. And as I watched it, and as it kept on going from gag to gag (crucially, adding its own twists and well-timed resolutions), I found myself mentally composing a blog post comparing that scene to Family Guy, and saying, in effect, "That's the way to do it."
(As opposed, of course, to winkingly gratuitous five-minute cutaways to retread the bizarre chicken-suit fight thing, or the pointless and resolutionless straight-up recitation of the "Goodbye, Farewell" song from The Sound of Music, or the joylessly by-the-numbers Willy Wonka parody, or the endless and lazy "Remember the time when..." gags that have earned Family Guy the cherished and elusive contempt of the Something Awful writers.)
I'm thinking these things to myself as Wooldoor sits on the sidewalk with his lemonade cup in hand... and then Lois and Peter walk by, heads hidden off the top of the screen, and drop coins in his cup.
I swear, I couldn't recover my breath for a good minute afterward. Capri came in to investigate what that pounding noise was—it was me repeatedly smacking the arm of my chair.
I sit in awe of these writers. They know how to make fun of things. They know how to convey what it is they're mocking through the subtlest of comedic style statements. They know how to make you feel like you're part of the gag. Their work will be studied someday.
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Brian Tiemann
