So last night was the premiere of FX’s new comedy block, complete with new seasons of Louie (wildly regarded as the best comedy on TV, but I think is a little too inconsistent for that label), and Wilfred (widely regarded as one of the worst, and very consistent in that label), and the series premieres of “Brand X with Russell Brand” and “Anger Management with Charlie Sheen.” And I feel like both are a step in the wrong direction for the network that FORMERLY had great programming (The Shield, Rescue Me, Damages) but has since seemed less and less interested in quality.
Anger Management: I thought Wilfred (a one joke show where people think it’s just hilarious if a dog acts as a man, and includes many, many jokes about humping things as a result) is bad enough, but at least it’s not cheesy enough to have a laugh track…something an FX comedy has never had and never should have again. This show just seems all wrong for a cable network like FX: lame, stagey, lazy, formula-driven, and like every tired old sitcom that even CBS is sick of making.
I began to get very suspicious of this show when the “clever” promos seemed to be all about Charlie’s past (lines like “Everyone deserves a 24th chance” as a train derails in the background) and didn’t show any actual clips of the show. So last night’s first two episodes confirmed all my worst fears when the show turned out to be (stylistically) a clone of Two and a Half Men. Each scene is shot on cheesy, over lit stages with canned laughter at jokes that aren’t funny, realistic, but are hopelessly contrived. This time, Charlie thinks he can protect himself from rampant misogyny and crazy charges by 1. surrounding his central character with women (a bimbo in his Anger Management class, Selma Blair’s hot-for-him-therapist, his bimbo ex-wife, his sitcom-cute and understanding daughter, a crazy stalker, etc.). 2. Making his character the sane one, a therapist even.
So the women gambit is a bust the second you realize this show is still trafficking in the type of derogatory female stock characters Two and a Half Men did (all women are hot for Charlie or crazy stalkers realllllllly hot for him). And making Sheen the straight man in his own show has the effect of neutering it, he’s trying so hard to appear sane and normal that he forgets to appear funny. A much better show could have been done if they accurately remade the movie “Anger Management” (this is supposed to be loosely based off the movie of the same name…but too loosely) and let Sheen run wild in the Jack Nicholson role of a crazy, wild-man therapist with no laugh track, and a different setting every week.
Here, he’s too busy trying to rehabilitate his image as Charlie Sheen, crazy internet blowhard. So instead he’s steered back to the days when he was Charlie Sheen, the mediocre, sexist sitcom star of Two and a Half Men (a show that is only “outrageous” to anyone who’s never been to a Hooters). And if you were never a fan of that Charlie Sheen (I prefer the Wall Street, Platoon-era Charlie Sheen that actually wanted to act instead of play himself), then you most likely won’t go for this overly tame, overly lame FX show that refuses to “unleash” Sheen with all the freedoms of basic cable. Perhaps that’s because, as I suspect, there isn’t so much a wild man rock star at the center of Sheen, so much as a buffoon who only thinks he’s cool. Grade: D+
Brand X with Russell Brand: What the fuck is this thing? It’s not a talk show (Russell has no guests, and really only talks about himself for thirty minutes), yet it’s not a comedy show (that would require laughing) as the uncomfortable-looking studio audience can attest. It’s not really about current events (as Russell babbling about the Dalai Lama for 15 straight minutes proves), yet Russell pretends to care about them. I can’t call it stand-up either, since that would require jokes.
I don’t know…it really just seems like Russell standing up there jabbering into a microphone for thirty minutes while his live audience looks simultaneously bored and terrified, depending on how close this obviously needy, googly-eyed beast gets to them. The closest this thing gets to momentum is when Russell is berating people about religion, but that same thing can be done vastly better nearly every week on Real Time with Bill Maher.
Watching this show, I just felt like a hostage to another “wild man” who isn’t nearly as wild as he thinks, and is too busy failing at being funny/smart/hip to notice he’s actually caked in flop sweat, not rock star cool. It’s never fair to judge a show solely on its first episode, but it would be even more unfair to make me watch two episodes of this. Grade: F