Flight of the Conchords - Season 1

What would you call Flight of the Conchord’s kind of comedy? Offbeat, deadpan, characterised by lack of canned laughter, revelling in social awkwardness, and of course, musical. Reminds me of Spinal Tap (naturally), British comedies like The Office and also of, strangely, Napoleon Dynamite, and it deserves to stand alongside them! All the characters are played by comedians and it shows in their use of comic timing, expressions and tone of voice - it creates a slightly ironic feel to the whole thing that is affably daft, when it can often be in other shows and movies, pretentious. It’s helped by the Conchords amusing willingness to lampoon themselves and their homeland (New Zealand) frequently.

Murray Hewitt stands out especially as the Deputy Cultural Attache to the New Zealand Consulate by day, band manager of the Conchords by… day as well. He can‘t manage them at night, the band isn‘t allowed to do gigs at night because in Murray’s words “You could get run over, pickpocketed, erm... fall down a manhole, bump into people, murdered... imagine that. Or even just ridiculed.” Every episode, Murray seems to be sitting under the Sword of Damocles trying to juggle his two jobs, the unreliable Bret and Jemaine and his on/off wife, and of course burdened by their collective yoke of ignorance.



The episodes are obviously contrived to fit around the band’s songs, not that that’s a problem! They range from straight parodies (Inner City Pressure) to completely abstract pieces (Mermaids). Naturally, fitting with the calibre of the show, they’re all clever and enjoyable, but I think the pastiches of popular songs are definitely the best. The Conchords have a keen ear for satire. In a take on (what I assume to be) Black Eyed Peas “Where is the Love?” we get delightful lyrics like: “Now there's junkies with monkey disease // Who's touching these monkeys, please // Leave these poor sick monkeys alone // They've got problems as it is”. Keeping up the quality of these amiably mocking songs will be their biggest challenge in the second season (now showing on BBC er… well, one of them).

Despite the difficulties of bending a plot to fit around very varied indeed songs, Flight of the Conchords manage to pull it off - the sitcom part of the show is smooth and well written. Besides, the songs don't need to fit exactly, the daftness is what's so endearing. Bret and Jemaine, playing Bret and Jemaine, have great charm and acting skills as parallel versions of themselves, though I admit I can’t picture either playing any other roles. Except Figwit, of course.



Flight of the Conchords is high quality throughout, with only one bad episode (their Bowie impressions aren’t as good as they think they are) out of twelve. If you have any sort of sense of humour, give this a watch! If you don’t, well, try Bremner, Bird and Fortune.

****

The Wire - Season 1

Omar is fascinating, such an interesting character - for one, black and gay, what? Yes! Wickedly powerful, Robin Hood of the ‘hood, Omar, clad in a long black coat, swings his sawn-off and robs drug dealers like a sort of karmic collector. This Angel of Stickup along with the flawed but dedicated police team and the clan’s own internal conflicts are ripping apart the Barksdale organisation, the top drug dealers of West Baltimore.



D’Angelo, nephew of Avon Barksdale, the boss, is a player in the drug empire. The first episode sees him escaping murder charges thanks to back-tracking witnesses, returning jubilantly to the Black Bada-Bing strip club (Orlando’s). As punishment for his carelessness, Avon, “the king“ in D‘Angelo‘s chess analogy, demotes him from his “tower” down to “the pit” -I love the fantasy imagery here- setting him up for a lesson in humility. There he meets his new workers, a bunch of kids; Poot, worthless; Wallace, 15 going on 11 and Bodie, instantly obvious as the most intelligent and tough of the lot, the only one that dares to challenge D‘Angelo. I don’t care a thing for Poot, but Wallace is adorable and Bodie commands some sort of admiration (up until he kicks the dog). In any case they're more than the 2D villainous dealer robots you'll encounter in other shows.



D’Angelo seems uncomfortable in his middle-management role and seems the regular dealer scumbag, but I began to like him a lot after the only witness in his case who testified is murdered and he shows genuine guilt that it was for his benefit. So much, that when the police ask him to write a letter to the fictional kids of the capped, he emotionally obliges in doing so until his repugnant lawyer arrives and slaps him on the wrist. D'Angelo, The Philosophical Dealer, always seems trapped in the cogs of the machine, reluctantly being pulled through and crushed psychologically at every step of the way. I both admire and pity him a lot, he’s one of my favourite characters for his complexity - he serves to show the futility of trying to do the right thing in a world of survival and maximising profit, a parallel you'll notice in the Police Department too.

The whole atmosphere is great, the middle class who have caught this in America or on the BBC here in the UK have become immersed in the trials and tribulations of the underclass of Baltimore and can now probably tell you a thing or two about dealing drugs in “the projects.” Mostly written by two white guys, the black characters are a) in the majority, reflecting actual Baltimore demographics, and b) fully fleshed out, aware of their race but not defined by it. There are no 100% bastard characters and no pure paragons of virtue, either. I often think black characters and women are used as vehicles for some idealistic concept the writer wants to convey/quota he has to fill, in other shows and movies, not as full characters. Back to the two white guys, though, they are more than qualified to write this thing. The creator, David Simon, was a crime reporter in Baltimore and Ed Burns was a homicide detective and they freely admit a lot of stories and characters in The Wire are based on actual events and people.

I have only good things to say about this show. The episodes are slow paced, painfully so if you’re used to fast moving crime drama like CSI, but that works in its favour. The series plays out like a book, episodes described as “chapters” and never resorting to tacky TV devices like flashbacks to important details (bar once in the pilot episode). There is no emotive music telling you what to feel, only music actually present in the scene, but the coldness and harshness of only having ambient noises hits hard when bad things happen, harder than a plinky piano piece montage could. Shots are imaginative and artful most of the time. Sometimes, we’ll see camera shots from a CCTV camera; I really liked this and felt it could even have been used a bit more, but I’m not complaining about the camera work.

If you watch the first episode, don’t fit the characters into the crime drama slots you’re used to, they’re much more than that. McNulty might be a maverick cop who doesn’t play by the rules, but he doesn’t have the superhero qualities and irrepressible sense of justice that usually comes with that. He’s far more human than that. Keep an eye out for the way the institutions and their bureaucracy mimic each other, it’s great fun to notice how the police hierarchy works in a similar way to the drug dealer organisation. This season, and what I’ve seen of season 2, have set the Wire up to be one of my all time favourite TV shows and I’ll be reviewing each series as I finish them on DVD.

*****