Stuck In The Middle

Or towards the end. Or almost at the beginning. Not, in any event, completed.

At time of writing I have five TV shows in the rotation, two on Prime, two on Netflix and one on its own, probably not entirely legal, platform. They are:

• Good Omens 2
• Two Broke Girls
• Edens Zero
• Young Sheldon
• The Owl House

Three comedy-dramas and two sitcoms. Or if you prefer two live action shows, a cartoon and an anime. Or maybe two mainstream shows, two fantasies and one science-fiction. There's a lot of ways to box these things.

I'm not watching an episode of each of them every day. I was, before Good Omens 2 came along. The other four are all "Half-hour" shows, meaning episodes vary in length from about 21 to 28 minutes (Another way to divide them up) and I can watch four half-hours back to back, in my allotted viewing time of 90-120 minutes but Good Omens 2 runs somewhere closer to 45-50 minutes, so every time I watch an episode of that, I have to decide which of the other four to skip. So far, it's been Edens Zero every time.

Since I'm talking about Edens Zero, let's start there. God forbid we'd stick to the order as I've written it down.

Edens Zero

I don't believe in the concept of "guilty pleasures". Okay, I do, kinda, but to qualify it would have to be an interest you genuinely would not willingly allow anyone else to know you were indulging in, so by definition you wouldn't be posting about it on the internet.

Edens Zero is just a bit embarrassing to admit to, mostly because it comes laced with a strong element of adolescent smut. I'd rather it didn't but it's not awkward enough to stop me watching because other than that it's fast, funny and smart. 

The anime is a spin-off from a manga that's been serialized weekly since 2018. I know even less about manga than I do about anime and it was news to me there were weekly collections. That old saw about the similarities between the cultures of Britain and Japan keeps running true.

I'm twenty-two episodes into the twenty-five episode first season, which is the only one Netflix has the rights to show. I'll probably have to watch the second season on Crunchyroll.

The plot is marginally more coherent than some other anime shows I've tried. It veers crazily off-course occasionally but mostly it keeps to the mainline and I'm finding it fairly easy to follow, although don't let that fool you into believing I'm saying it makes any sense.

The big draw for me, as usual, are the characters, all of whom are distinctive, even the minor roles and bit players. It always helps a lot if there are characters I like and in Edens Zero I like most of the main cast, particularly Rebecca, Happy, Pino, Homura and the Four Shining Stars. 

It's not co-incidental that all of those are either female or non-human. The main male characters tend to be quite annoying, particularly the central character and primary protagonist Shiki, who is hyperactive to the point exhaustion, and Weisz, who I just want to slap. 

The animation can also be a tad sugar-crazed but only in short bursts. There are long passages where people just stand around and talk quite normally with no-one's jaw dropping wider than an anaconda swallowing a peccary and no-one cartwheeling untouched through a hail of bullets. Those are the parts I like best.

As well as the space-opera setting, which I always enjoy, there's a good deal of light satire on contemporary pop culture and social trends, most of which is nicely observed. The subplot about Rebecca's ambition to hit one million subscribers on her B-Cube account allows some good points about current social media - or social media a couple of years ago, anyway.

Perhaps my favorite aspect of the shows's social agenda, though, is the insistence on all kinds of intelligences, human or artificial, being worthy of equal respect. As a metaphor for real-world prejudice it strikes home and the current technological frenzy gives it an extra edge. It's an occasionally uncomfortable reminder that boundaries exist to be broken down, not built up, and its points are mostly well-made. 

Not bad work for a smutty adolescent fantasy. 

Two Broke Girls

Talking of smut...

I only started watching Two Broke Girls because I was flat out of sitcoms and I was desperate. I'm a lifelong sitcom fan. I enjoy both the form and the execution and while I wouldn't consider myself a true afficionado, I do fancy I have some insight borne of long experience.

On the face of it, this looked like a fairly unappealing prospect. A broad comedy set in a working-class environment (Rarely a comfortable fit for the inevitably middle-class writers.) with a very strong inclination toward innuendo. A bit of a throwback to the seventies, indeed.

It had five stars on Prime from almost a thousand reviews, though, so I thought I'd at least give it a try. That was a few weeks ago. I'm just coming to the end of Season Five (Of six.) I guess the experiment was a success.

I was at least partly right. It is a throwback. It's the kind of half-hour show that would have fitted right into network schedules in the eighties. Except if it had been shown on network TV then they'd have had to edit out so many of the jokes it'd have been a five-minute show. Maybe.

That the show aired on CBS from 2011 to 2017 says a huge amount about cultural drift. The central characters are two unmarried twenty-something women who routinely have casual sex (Transactionally, at least in Max's case) habitually drink and take drugs to the point of being almost perpetually high even while at work, steal from their employer, disrespect all forms of authority and generally behave about as badly as men in sitcoms have ever behaved.

It's all but impossible to imagine such characters being deemed acceptable network fare even in the 'nineties, let alone in the glory days of Marlo Thomas or Mary Tyler Moore. As for the script, it's a constant barrage not just of sexual innuendo but of plain talk about sex and sexuality. I've never heard so many references to masturbation, vaginas, penises and breasts outside of a medical documentary. It's as if using formal words for these things rather than the usual demotics somehow frees the concepts up for family comedy.

It originally aired next to other sitcoms I've watched - How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory - neither of which is remotely as raunchy or drug-addled. At one point it was even replaced in the slot it had occupied by Supergirl, of all things. Just knowing this forces me to a degree of cultural realignment.

So much for the sociology. What about the comedy. Is it funny? Well, pretty, yes. The script isn't always that great and the topical gags, of which there are many, really don't carry a decade on, but as with all the best sitcoms it's the cast that keeps you watching. 

I'd say there's some very solid ensemble work but mostly it's an endless round of solo turns with every performer giving the next respectful space to get the laughs when their turn rolls around. Kat Dennings as Max has amazing delayed timing which she uses to enormous effect, seemingly doing nothing while controlling the pace and the tone. Beth Behrs as Caroline is much more in the scenes in traditional sitcom fashion, holding the whole thing together as a narrative. 

Everyone else pretty much does their party piece with Jennifer Coolidge (Sophie) inexplicably drawing huge but largely unconvincing cheers every time she walks through the door. I found her character quite annoying to begin with but she wore me down over five seasons. 

Is it a classic? No. It has plenty of flaws, the premise makes no sense (At all!) it's episodic to an extreme, it lacks coherency and continuity, it's occasionally (Mildly) problematic on both gender and race. As for authenticity, they keep a thoroughbred horse in the yard of their roach-infested Williamsburg appartment in a shelter built by two visiting Mormons in a barn-raising ffs! You can see where more money gets spent on the show as it becomes successful and more money doesn't always mean more laughs.

Is it a good sitcom? Yes. It's funny, likeable and as smart as it needs to be. When you hear the theme tune you feel like getting comfortable and leaning back in your chair (Or in my case, bed.) for half an hour in a small world where nothing really bad ever happens and everyone has something amusing to say. What more do you want from a sitcom?

Well, one thing you might not want but which I got is the sight of an extremely unexpected name in the production credits. One of my favorite singers, the wonderful Rachel Sweet, co-executive produced Season Five and wrote two episodes, including the truly bizarre Episode 6. It's a far cry from the second Be Stiff tour.

Or maybe not.

That ran so long (And I barely feel I got started...) I'm going to have to split this into two posts. Possibly three.