Drake and Andy Go to the TVs week 5

by andybeckerman

Jesus, this is a bit late again. Well, sue me. I dare you to. Go ahead. Find a lawyer, put a fat freaking check in his hand, and sue me for all I’m worth. WHICH IS NOTHING. I have no savings, no property, whatever small amount of stocks I had is now about as financially sound as the US auto industry. So go ahead. Sue me for posting this late, and let’s see what happens. Oh, you’ll garnish my wages? Fine. It’s not like I can buy anything anyway with the meager sum I earn, so go nuts. All I have are my TV and Drake’s delightful conversation. And after he dies in a freak accident a few weeks from now, I won’t even have that. Sigh.

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Drake: Hey, apparently you were looking to have me help you with some sort of skeleton hooker situation?

Andy: Help me, I am dead. Resurrect me. Breathe life back into my weary body.

Drake: Oh sure.

Andy: But don’t do it literally because I am terribly homophobic.

Drake: Long story but I actually know how to do that.

Drake: Hold on.

Andy: Did you just call me a hard on?

Drake: Umm no? Do you want me to? Where’s your head at tonight?

Andy: How dare you, sir. Calling me a piece of shit. Why, if I wasn’t dead, I’d have half a mind to cane your buttocks raw. With a cane.

Computer simulation of what this might look like.

Drake: Yeah, I kinda got that the first time. The cane. You’re threatening me rather early tonight. Did you work out the temp thing?

Drake: Did you work out the temp thing?

Andy: No, I still work a terrible temp job. And will for the foreseeable future, unless a meet a rich woman that wants to support me. Uh, or I find a better job.

Drake: So rich ladies, feel free to contact the Lampoon.

Andy: Or me directly. Can I put my telephone number here?

Drake: Sure. [No. –ed.]

Drake: And while your at it… How about some interests

Andy: While I’m a tit? Fuck you. I oughtta stab your face off with razors.

Drake: I’d be mad. But you’re clearly having a mild stoke. Which is actually working out pretty well for me.

Andy: Once again, how dare you bark improprieties at me. I am certainly not masturbating lethargically.

Drake: Hey if you’re going to do something, do it right.

Andy: Or like the writers of Heroes say, “If you’re going to do something, do it trite.”

Drake: Ahhhh. That was painful. Well ok, sir, they liquidated the writing staff. Thoughts?

Andy: Well, they fired Loeb and one of the other writers. Maybe the NBC higher ups read this column.

Drake: It’s probably the only reason.

Andy: My thoughts are that I don’t want Pushing Daisies to be cancelled because I love that show, and for once I’d like to see Bryan Fuller succeed. But if it is, he’s back on Heroes.

You’re telling me that the network can’t figure out how to promote an Emmy-award-winning show? Who the fuck are they? FOX?

Drake: I hear nothing but good things about that.

Andy: So, you don’t watch Pushing Daisies. What about Friday Night Lights? The latter of which just had a sublime episode last week.

Drake: Not often. But I’ve seen it. Feel free to get into it though. In all honestly, I watch a lot of fucking TV, but there really is just too much to actually cover everything at one time.

Andy: I’m just constantly amazed by the verisimilitude. Where most writers would force their characters to externalize their feelings, the writers of FNL are content to let the actors do their job. So a lot of the work is internal.

Drake: See when I write, the characters never externalize. Ever. They just bottle it up inside until they lash out at their TV reviewing partner in horrible bloody catharsis. That’s unrelated though.

Andy: Since when am I a fictional character written by a hack?

Drake: ….keep it bottled up….keep it bottled up…soon our day will come…

Andy: And where most shows try to produce emotion through shots of the characters staring blankly at each other, the characters in FNL actually produce emotions when they look at each other, and they’re so talented that they can produce very complicated states.

Drake: Well I may check that out then. See, I thought the show was mostly just a young cast brought in largely as eye candy. That that was the appeal.

Andy: That may have been the original appeal, and before I got into it, I thought it was just some show about football. And there certainly are some actors on there that traded off on their good looks the first season or so. But by and large, the ensemble is immensely talented. So, don’t hold their looks against them. Like women do to me. But in the opposite direction.

Andy: Ladies, behind this lizard-like flesh beats the heart of a less-lizard-like man.

Drake: You heard it here. Dial in. This lizard man can be your lizard cabana boy!

Andy: Feed me grubs.

Drake: Pricing to be determined.

Andy: So, the thing is with FNL, it goes pretty terribly off the rails in the second season, thanks, I think, to NBC execs throwing their weight around. Where the show’s drama is usually germane to the characters, in season two, a lot of it is artificially created.

Brad Leland: Hey Jesse. I just read the scripts for season two. It’s a real tragedy.

Jesse Plemons: Oh, they’re going to go kind of dark?

Brad Leland: No, I mean, the suits started fucking with the creative end, and it looks like season two is going to be a real piece of shit.

Drake: The Suits interfering is really starting to be a theme. What’s your take on the Heroes thing? Cause public opinion seems to be rather split.

Andy: What on firing Loeb? I think it’s a good first move. But the problem with the show is systemic. Getting rid of a shitty writer here and there won’t do anything.

Drake: Yeah I’m torn because while it clearly wasn’t working, whenever the execs come in and start screwing with the writing staff, the show is usually going in the tank.

Andy: You have to re-think the entire thing from the ground up. There’s so much promise in doing a superhero story set in the real world, but I think the writers don’t take that seriously, and they also seem to hate their own characters.

Drake: And Ali Larter for some reason. Which is too bad. Cause she seems perfectly nice to me.

Andy: What I mean by that is that they don’t take the characters seriously. Like Nate.

Drake: Yeah, I agree.

Andy: See, Adrian Pasdar is a good actor. But they take little advantage of that.

Drake: No advantage. (And side note, instead of fixing any of this, they have decided to just had an opening where Masi Oka and Parkman rap. No bullshit.)

Andy: It’s like when The O.C. started to go downhill. There was no character continuity. Things would happen that would ignore earlier events. So, wasn’t Pasdar elected to congress back in the first season?

Drake: Yeah he was.

Thank god I never have to attend meetings or interact with anyone else in government or sit on committees or talk to my constituents or anything else that any other senator would ever have to do ever.

Andy: But in a show that’s flailing and that’s forced to create drama rather than letting be naturally generated, the characters are constantly moving through different states that bear no relation to their former ones.

Drake: Ah OC Season 3 - 4…you made so little sense…

Andy: Or Peter. First he’s a nurse, then he’s an amnesiac, then he’s from the future, then he’s etc.

Drake: And then on top of that they time travel

Andy: And then on top of that they time travel.

Drake: Revealing information not only to the time traveler, but to the audience and often yet another 3rd party who didn’t time travel at all.

Andy: Which might be cool if the writers were creative in any way, or if there weren’t executive mandates forcing the storylines in certain directions.

Drake: Well and they’ve really never defined how any of that works.

Andy: No, because they themselves don’t know. Ron Moore, the exec producer of Battlestar Galactica, had a giant show bible coming into the miniseries that defined a large part of the BSG universe and the characters.

Drake: Right, which is great.

Andy: And the only reason people like you and I care about a show as shitty as Heroes is because there’s actual promise in the idea. And because we don’t want to watch another fucking cop/medical/law procedural.

Drake: Law and Order: Extra Special Victims Unit. “The victims are really fuckin’ special.”

Andy: Law and Order: FYV.

Andy: (That stands for “Fuck You, Viewer”.)

Drake: Actually though there are some great procedurals. I’m not knocking that. But it’s certainly over saturated.

Andy: What are the ones you like?

Drake: That are still around? ER was great in it’s infancy. Original CSI probably. Before it starting moving to Miami to start covering the Latin dance craze.

Andy: “These are my ER scrubs.”

“Eeee, are they?”

Drake: Wow. That was a basically a pirate joke.

Andy: “Eeeee, argh they!”

Andy: Do people still dance the Mambo #5?

Drake: I can’t anymore, without crying.

Andy: That was a popular song, right? “Brando #5″?

Drake: Oh ok. One final thing I’d like to get into.

Andy: Hit me. Not literally though. I am frail.

Drake: Because remember last time, I was trying to let you know about Biggest Loser.

Andy: Yesssssssssss.

Drake: Good. You remember. Well apparently, one of their featured trainers got arrested for beating the hell out of a six year old. There’s no really joke here. Just that.

Andy: Yeah, I can’t think of anything funny. Maybe if I didn’t think tens of people would be reading this.

Drake: Initially this was maybe the worst show in existence…and then they also beat kids.

Drake: So it’s like I’m trying to work with infinity plus one.

Andy: Superinfinity.

Drake: Exactly. It got worse, somehow. Next week they’re going to have to bring in dogfighting.

Andy: Michael Vick raping a dog and beating up an entire schoolyard of children.

Drake: Yeah I don’t think I’d watch that.

Andy: Michael Vick vs. Vic Mackey, who would win?

Drake: Vic Mackey. Cause justice is one his side. Also he’s scary fuckin’ dude.

Andy: He’s a copkiller. Justice is definitely not on his side.

Drake: In this case it is.

Andy: These episodes are getting more and more intense. At every moment with Shane [from last week], I thought he or his wife or his kid was going to be shot by a gang member.

Drake: Ok I’m gonna run. Since we’ve covered domestic abuse. Which…I’m gonna say it…kind of a downer.

Andy: Only for those who’ve been abused.

Drake: Wow. What middle aged lady isn’t gonna pay good money for a gigolo with that level of insensitivity! Enjoy dying alone, Andy!