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Archive for the ‘Workaholics’ Category

Spring TV 2014

Posted in Archer, Bob's Burgers, Elementary, Face Off, How I Met Your Mother, Modern Family, New Girl, Parenthood, Parks and Recreation, Project Runway, Sleepy Hollow, The Big Bang Theory, The Simpsons, Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell, TV 2014, Workaholics on March 29, 2014| Leave a Comment »

2014 continues to throw new shows into the mix while other shows are already reaching their conclusions.  It’s very hard to keep regular track of shows when networks don’t follow the rules.  It also means that new shows pop up and quickly become favorites before going away possibly never to be seen again.

We’ve learned about the cancellation of a number of shows (but fortunately, none of the great ones and surprisingly not all of the bad ones).  And of course I’ll be sad to see How I Met Your Mother end, but it had a very good run.  And Cosmos has been mind blowing.

But I find that more and more my attention is turning to cable shows.  Although we don’t watch horror shows, I’m intrigued by Fargo.  And the cable shows are so much better at taking risks with their comedies.  We started to watch Orphan Black a while ago and then lost it, but I think we’ll be trying to catch up this summer.  And in old TV news, we just learned about Destroy Build Destroy (from 2010) and we are hooked.  Good thing there’s only 20 or so episodes.

So last time, I did a tally of networks.  Let’s see who wins this time (nightly shows like Late Night boost the numbers so I put them in parentheses):
FOX: 5 NBC: 4 (6)  CBS: 3 (4)  ABC: 3 SyFy: 3 Comedy Central: 2 (4) Lifetime: 1  IFC: 1 FX: 1

I can’t believe Fox still wins, but it has four comedies that I really like.  Actually Fox comedies are almost always good until they cancel them.
NBC is teetering away, but Thursday night helps it.
CBS is the old person’s network, and they’re losing a comedy that I like (and none of those promised new comedies look any good).
ABC is slowing building it’s comedy line up back, which is nice
And the cable networks combined really shine.

Oh and speaking of TV…how awesome was the Veronica Mars movie!!!!!!
(more…)

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Nathan Rabin–You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me: Phish, Insane Clown Posse, and My Misadventures with Two of Music’s Most Maligned Tribes (2013)

Posted in "Weird Al" Yankovic, Anarchy, Books about music, Brian Posehn, Culture Shock, Death, Decadence, Drugs, Fantasy, Fears, Hannibal Buress, Ice Cube, Insane Clown Posse, Nathan Rabin, Phish, Sex, Vanilla Ice, Violence, Workaholics, Wrestling, Yuck! on January 3, 2014| 1 Comment »

youdont SOUNDTRACK: INSANE CLOWN POSSE-“Bang! Pow! Boom!” (2009).

icopSince I have posted about Phish already, it seemed like time to listen to an ICP song.  I admit that when their first album came out, they seemed goofy enough to check out their album.  I love a cartoony band that is going to “ruin America.”  But I had heard that their music was just too awful to enjoy ironically, so I never bothered with them (if I had been a few years younger, I probably would have embraced them wholly).  In the book below, Rabin says that their newer stuff is not only a ton better than their early stuff (which he admits is raw and pretty terrible) he says that it is quite poppy.

So I listened to a few of the songs that he mentions (and there are some funny lines), but I decided to focus on this one which Rabin describes as “a groovy throwback number that finds ecstasy in a bleak moral reckoning…finding the joy in the macabre and the celebration in the gothic.  Also, it’s catchy as fuck.”

That’s a highfalutin way of saying that they sing about blowing shit up.  Lyrically the song seems to be about ICP talking to their fans (in the harshest terms possible, which I guess is affection: “Cuz you’re the evilest pedophiles, rapists and abusers/All together we’ve got fifty thousand of you losers”).  It’s an insider tract and if you don’t like it or get it, well, you’re not supposed to.

But aside from the lyrics about rapists and all the cursing, this song could easily be a big hit.  It is, yes, catchy as fuck.

But I won’t be listening to more from them.

[READ: January 2, 2013] You Don’t Know Me But You Don’t Like Me

Every year my brother-in-law gets me cool and unusual books, most of which I’ve never heard of.  This year, he got me this book which I’d never heard of.  I was confused by the title (which is confusing).  The author’s name sounded familiar, but I wasn’t sure—until I saw the A.V. Club connection.  So, at first I thought this was going to be about going to interesting shows or basically having something to do with the A.V. Club.  But, as the subtitle says, this book is exclusively about Rabin’s travels following Phish for a summer and also going to some ICP Gatherings of the Juggalos.

The theme of the book is how most people have never heard the music of either band, but they have formed opinions not only of the bands, but their followers.  Rabin points out plenty of exceptions to the stereotypes, but you won’t be leaving this book thinking much more of the preexisting stereotypes than you already do.  Sure, some Phish heads are doctors, and some Juggalos are employable, but the majority are (despite his best efforts) what you think they are.  But one of the main messages that he seems to promote in the book is that each of these groups have created tribes around them.  And those who aren’t part of the tribe may scoff, but they secretly wish they could be having as much fun as the members of the tribes.  And that may in fact be true.

I’ve enjoyed Phish’s music for years, although I’ve never seen them live.  And as for ICP, I didn’t even realize they were still around—although that Workaholics episode should have clued me in.  Naturally these two bands could not be more polar opposite in terms of music and fanbase (although Rabin did encounter some crossover). So he sets out to show how he can enjoy both groups. (more…)

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TV Fall 2013

Posted in Archer, Ben and Kate, Bob's Burgers, Bunheads, Elementary, Face Off, How I Met Your Mother, Modern Family, New Girl, Parenthood, Parks and Recreation, Project Runway, Sleepy Hollow, The Big Bang Theory, The Simpsons, Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell, TV 2013, Workaholics on November 29, 2013| 2 Comments »

Fall 2013 brought in a whole slew of new shows that we wanted to check out.  And while we dropped some after an episode, we still have a few that are lingering on the DVR which we are never really all that excited to watch them.

Perhaps the biggest surprise is that a couple of shows that we thought were sure goners are still around.  And of course, there’s always those shows that we never watched and when we see an ad for it we say, “that’s still on?”

So last time, I did a tally of networks.  Let’s see who wins this time:
NBC: 4  FOX: 6   CBS: 3  Comedy Central: 1  FX: 1  ABC: 3  Lifetime: 1 SyFy: 1   (more…)

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TV 2013

Posted in 30 Rock, Archer, Ben and Kate, Bob's Burgers, Bunheads, Community, Elementary, Face Off, Go On, How I Met Your Mother, Modern Family, New Girl, New Scandinavian Cooking, Parenthood, Parks and Recreation, Portlandia, Project Runway, The Big Bang Theory, The Mind of a Chef, The Office, The Simpsons, Tosh.0, Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell, TV 2013, Workaholics on February 24, 2013| Leave a Comment »

2013 has been cruel to TV that I like.  Between the shows that have been cancelled and the shows that are ending, there’s not much to look forward to for the Spring.  Ben and Kate is gone, the US version of The Inbetweeners is gone, Don’t Trust the B—- is done (but we had stopped watching anyhow), 30 Rock is done, The Office is finishing up, Parenthood & Bunheads have budget issues which means there is some amount of question about their future and The Mindy Show is awful.

And yet, after that introduction, it’s not like there’s nothing on.

So here’s what’s on our schedule as February draws to a close.  I never bothered to tally shows by network before but let’s see:
NBC: 4  FOX: 3   CBS: 3  Comedy Central: 2  FX: 2   PBS: 2  ABC: 1  Lifetime: 1 SyFy: 1  IFC: 1 (more…)

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TV Winter 2012

Posted in 2 Broke Girls, 30 Rock, Allen Gregory, America's Next Top Model, Archer, Are You There, Chelsea?, Bob's Burgers, Breaking In, Chuck, Comic Book Men, Face Off, Glee, Grimm, How I Met Your Mother, I Hate My Teenage Daughter, Key and Peele, Modern Family, New Girl, Once Upon a Time, Parenthood, Parks and Recreation, Portlandia, Project Runway, Ringer, The Big Bang Theory, The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret, The Office, The Simpsons, Tosh.0, TV 2012, Up All Night, Workaholics on March 10, 2012| 2 Comments »

The TV Season scheduling continues to confuse me.  It’s February and two shows are done already.  And new shows are starting this week.  I actually appreciate this rolling schedule because it means new shows instead of repeats.

So hey, networks, why not go all the way and just let the shows run for twenty weeks and then end.  Stop showing reruns (or better yet, rerun them at like 2 in the morning so we can watch them if we miss them) and the introduce a new show for the next half a year.  We wouldn’t have this six weeks off nonsense of Community and Glee or three weeks of repeats of other shows.

I’m picking this week to write this simply because of the ending of the two shows.  We haven’t had a look at the new ones yet, so it’s a clean slate.

Somehow we don’t even have time to watch movies anymore, so the TV shows must be very good. (more…)

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Robert Coover–“Matinée” (New Yorker, July 25, 2011)

Posted in Funny (strange), Huh?, Meta, New Yorker, Robert Coover, The Skinny Boys, Workaholics on August 12, 2011| Leave a Comment »

SOUNDTRACK: THE SKINNY BOYS-“Jockbox” (1986).

I didn’t realize that the theme song from Workaholics was from a real song.  I loved the “I’m fresh” bit in the show, but I thought it sounded like it might actually be from something.  Sure enough, the internet led me to this.  The Skinny Boys (evidently a response to The Fat Boys) from the hip hop mecca of Bridgeport, CT put out this beatbox song (with that cool sci-fi keybaord) as a shocase for their member: The Human Jock Box.

This is a pretty bizarre track.  And I’m not even sure what they’re talking about.  But I love the hiccups around the three minute mark.  Note also how by the end of the song, the keyboard plays the riff from Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit” and then a little later “America the Beautiful” (with accompanying beatbox).  Wha??

The Workaholics bit is from 1:13 to 1:23.  You gotta be fresh!

[READ: July 25, 2011] “Matinée”

I’m not going to say how I just don’t get Coover.  Every time I read one of his stories I think the same thing: it’s clever but, well, so wha?  I know that Coover is an experimental fiction writer, but I just feel that there’s no emotional resonance to his stories.  Perhaps I like experiemntal art and music but not fiction.

There were some really cool tricks with this story.  All of the (unnamed–don’t get attached to them) characters are watching movies or are in the movies.  And so, in a series of what, infinite regresses? chance encounters? something, new characters are introduced, they watch a film (possibly of the people who were watching them?) they may or may not have sex and then the “camera” shifts to a new couple. (more…)

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