Episodes and The Clash of Two Worlds
April 7th 2020, Tuesday
Dear Blog,
I finished watching Episodes yesterday. Really enjoyed it. I wonder why they don’t make shows that involve both the Americans and the Brits that much. Pity that Showtime didn’t spend so much effort promoting it while it was on the air. The show is a blast. I also learned a few things about comedy.
First, acting is reacting. Matt in the show is simply too crazy, and it can lose its power very quickly. But you have a lot of reaction shots of the British couple reacting to the crazy things in their lives in disbelief, which makes everything more believable. You would think that playing opposite of a crazy character is an easy thing to do. After all, you are just listening. But pretending to listen and react in real-time is probably at the core of the craft of acting. And the two British actors are simply a joy to watch.
From an interview, Matt also mentioned that the show is very different from his Friends days. Because Friends was a sitcom, meaning it was recorded in front of a live studio audience, many times he would need to pause after delivering a punchline to make room for the audience to laugh. When shooting his first scene in Episodes, he was slightly jarred to find out that after saying a punchline there was no one laughing, since it was a single-camera show. I guess 10 years of shooting a sitcom definitely gave you some muscle memories. Glad he did this project. Definitely one of the best shows that any of the Friends cast had ever done since their big NBC project that first came out even before I was born. I am frankly unable to watch sitcoms with laughing tracks anymore.
Such a trend towards single-camera comedy is not always a good thing for the show. For example, 30 Rock, one of my all-time favorite shows, took advantage of the single-camera comedy genre and packed as many jokes into the episodes as they can, which made it incredibly fun for rewatching since you can find out new things almost every time. But in terms of ratings when it was first aired on NBC, not a good thing because the audience was not sure if they should laugh or not. But now with our digital technology, you don’t have to watch things live anymore. You can pause and rewind and enjoy in any setting as you please. I don’t know what it means for the creators since they still need to battle with writing, but it is certainly changing the way we consume shows, therefore changing our relationships to the content and the way emotional truth gets delivered. Let us hope that the future is on our side.
I am also listening to this amazing radio drama starring the same actor from Episodes, Stephen Mangan. I think he has a fantastic understanding of rhythm, timing, and emotional truth. Simple words become meaningful with his vocal performance. Just very fascinating.
Second. People like to watch other people suffer. Sure, most characters in the show are relatively wealthy, but we still love to see them suffer. In fact, most of the drama and the comedy comes from their struggle in their lives. There is an old cliche saying that comedy is just tragedy plus time, and I am starting to understand it more. In the face of chaos and uncertainty and all the stuff that life has been throwing at us, trying to see it in a funny way is about the most human thing we can do.
It is also worth mentioning that Matt LeBlanc is really cute. I never see him as such during his Friends days. Mostly because his character Joey was nice but dumb. The running gag was how dumb he was in the show, and that became very one dimensional very quickly. In this show, he played someone with a character, larger than life, mean, oblivious, sad, miserable, a lot more emotional dimensions. I am always leaning towards men with psychological problems more than sex symbols, although if you combine the two you shall receive no complaints from my part.
Now that I am in Europe, it is also eerily appropriate for me to watch a show about two Europeans being baffled by the American showbusiness practices. The contentious warmth, hardcore industry talk, creativity as products to sell, to market and to manage, along with many other facets that we don’t really talk about in real life. Drama gives us a chance to use exaggeration to see the truth. At least a version of it.
The Brits and the Americans. When worlds collide, humor is inevitable.
