DISCLAIMER! I'm a comedian. 22 years of wrestling with the double-edged creative sword of trying to say something to an audience and trying to make them laugh. It's not an either/or proposition, as it seems to be with Samir in this episode, but the metaphorical aspect of what you give to the audience no longer being yours, is certainly a truism.
I've long been a fan of The Twilight Zone, and the eighties revival was a must-watch for me in my teenage years, when I was devouring the works of Harlan Ellison and Richard Matheson, as well as Alan Moore's wonderful short comic strips in 2000AD. In our world of ongoing narrative, where even cinema releases require a knowledge of twenty preceding films, it is wonderful to wallow in an hour of television that asks many questions, and when it is over, it is over.
I thoroughly enjoyed Tracy Jordan's enigmatic appearance in a vaping cloud, and I thought all of the performances were uniformly excellent. The depiction of standup comedy was, like in The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel, necessarily unrealistic (there's only one club in these TV towns because they're expensive to build...), but effective in its simplicity. The laboured adherence to a potentially funny bit, that is delivered in a woefully unfunny way, is something I have personally seen thousands of times over the past two decades, and hearing Samir launch into it every night gave me PTSD from hosting shitty tryout nights.
I hope the rest of this series is as skilfully handled as this first installment. It's not a big showboating episode, and I am grateful for that. Along with Love, Death & Robots and Black Mirror, I'm glad the single-episode anthology is making a comeback.
Review by Adam RichardVIP 5BlockedParent2019-04-26T00:04:29Z
DISCLAIMER! I'm a comedian. 22 years of wrestling with the double-edged creative sword of trying to say something to an audience and trying to make them laugh. It's not an either/or proposition, as it seems to be with Samir in this episode, but the metaphorical aspect of what you give to the audience no longer being yours, is certainly a truism.
I've long been a fan of The Twilight Zone, and the eighties revival was a must-watch for me in my teenage years, when I was devouring the works of Harlan Ellison and Richard Matheson, as well as Alan Moore's wonderful short comic strips in 2000AD. In our world of ongoing narrative, where even cinema releases require a knowledge of twenty preceding films, it is wonderful to wallow in an hour of television that asks many questions, and when it is over, it is over.
I thoroughly enjoyed Tracy Jordan's enigmatic appearance in a vaping cloud, and I thought all of the performances were uniformly excellent. The depiction of standup comedy was, like in The Marvellous Mrs. Maisel, necessarily unrealistic (there's only one club in these TV towns because they're expensive to build...), but effective in its simplicity. The laboured adherence to a potentially funny bit, that is delivered in a woefully unfunny way, is something I have personally seen thousands of times over the past two decades, and hearing Samir launch into it every night gave me PTSD from hosting shitty tryout nights.
I hope the rest of this series is as skilfully handled as this first installment. It's not a big showboating episode, and I am grateful for that. Along with Love, Death & Robots and Black Mirror, I'm glad the single-episode anthology is making a comeback.