Category Archives: Brilliance

2013/03/14 · 10:40 am

Girls, Girls, Girls*

Well, if you still needed something to wash out the taste of misogyny and disrespect towards women after the Oscars, then a trio of announcements concerning female-centric projects might just finally cleanse your palate.  Basically, it’s Ladies Night and all the girls drink for free. To wit:

1. Comedy Central has, very wisely, picked up a ten-episode order of Broad City, a comedy based on the web series of the same name created by and starring the brilliant Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson (full disclosure: they are close personal friends and two beautiful, strong, hilarious, independent women). Loosely based on their own lives, it’s the anti-Sex and the City that Girls** isn’t. Here is the Season 2 finale, a love letter to NYC that features Amy Poehler, who is executive producing the series (and is another beautiful, strong, hilarious, independent woman):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mXbyp-sdk7I

More: K. Bell and the future Belle of the Ball…

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Filed under Brilliance, Flashback!, Freak Out Control, Good News!, Mars Investigations, The Big Screen, Virulent, Yasmine Bleeth

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2013/03/02 · 3:30 pm

Parting Shot: Say Cheese

Colby JeopardyDo you smell what the Colby is cooking? 

 

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Filed under Brilliance, Match Games, Parting Shot

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2012/11/02 · 1:13 pm

We’ll Allow it: Reginald VelJohnson in Uniform Returns!

We don’t talk enough on this blog about Childrens Hospital. In fact, we’re not sure we talk about it at all. But we’re not sure there’s a more enjoyable, twisted, irreverent 11-minutes anywhere else on television. It’s the show that we’d want to make if a) we were that brilliant and b) that demented. However, we are neither of those things, so we have to settle for staring slack-jawed at this show each week, shocked and incredibly impressed at what they’re able to pull off, both in terms of over-the-line comedy and playing with and then defying television conventions. What they also do a superb job of is pulling in amazing guest stars. And not just the big-time, drop-dead handsome Jon Hamm types, but the more obscure actors who seem hand-picked specifically to appeal to our very particular sense of humor, almost as if they’ve read our Diary of Things and People We Love (if such a book existed. And it doesn’t! So don’t even look under our pillow). Perfect case in point, Mr. Carl Winslow himself, Reginald VelJohnson, and, as usual, in uniform. But this time he trades the police blue for judges’ black.

This would have been another absolutely hilarious dumb-smart/smart-dumb episode even without Reggie. But his presence just makes it that much better, and really makes us wonder if the writers of Childrens Hospital are invading our dreams, Freddy Krueger style. Which, by the way, we’re totally cool with, if it means a cameo by Mr. Feeny (hey, he’s got hospital experience).

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Filed under Brilliance, Feeny, Good Humor, Intersection of the venn diagram of things that I love, Reginald VelJohnson, TGIF

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2012/10/24 · 11:29 am

<3<3<3 Hanx. <3<3<3

As if trying to break his own record for sheer awesomeness (holding both the World and Olympic titles), Tom Hanks has been on a tour of hilarity the past week, turning up on GMA (well, that was more a tour of obscenity) SNL, Night of Too Many Stars (where he was the only celebrity with the integrity and temerity to eat a White Castle slider on camera) and Late Show with David Letterman (we just regret that we were deprived of this). But he saved the best for last (assuming this was the closing night of Hanxfest 2012), reaching new levels of awesomeness on last night’s Late Night with Jimmy Fallon. We don’t like to throw around the word perfection too often, but we feel like it’s appropriate here. Perfection:

The best slam poetry since Charlie Mackenzie.

And for more about that particular episode of Full House referenced above, see here.

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Filed under Brilliance, Hanx, Intersection of the venn diagram of things that I love, Mancrush, Talkies, Wake Up, SF!

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2012/09/18 · 7:51 pm

Down at Fraggle Rock & Roll

Yesterday Ben Folds Five, in conjunction with Nerdist and the Fraggles, released the video for “Do It Anyway,” the first single from their new and apparently much-anticipated album The Sound of the Life of the Mind, and it’s awesome. It’s just awesome.

Let’s just run down a quick list of why this is awesome:

1. Fraggles. Duh. Obvious #1.

2. Specifically Uncle Traveling Matt. Or, as you may know him, Tarzan from Survivor: ONE WORLD!

3. Rob Corddry, doing general Rob Corddry things (the smarmier the better).

4. A pretty rocking Ben Folds Five song. In fact, it’s so good that we’ve been forced to reassess our whole perception of Ben Folds Five. Thanks to his service as a judge on the Sing-Off, Ben Folds had already endeared himself to us as perhaps the one and only genuinely polite, affable and respectful judge among all reality competitions. But that was specific to his personality and gratitude, his completely unironic earnestness and enthusiasm. It did nothing to make us think of “Brick” as anything other than an okay song that we periodically remember is about abortion which VH1 used to play every morning just before or just after the video for Sheryl Crow’s “Strong Enough,” a song we much preferred. Nor did his positivity and humor suggest to us that we should go back and give Forever and Amen a listen, that perhaps when we surmised that Ben Folds Five was for the other guys, we were mistaken. No, we just grew to really like the guy. However, this video completely calls into question everything we thought we knew about Ben Folds Five. Perhaps we had them wrong all along. 

And 7 more reasons why this is awesome…

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Filed under Brilliance, Lists, Muppets, Tyranasaurus Sex, Virulent

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2012/09/12 · 10:42 am

11 Years Since (September)11: On Grief, Despair and American Flag Speedos

“Ain’t no shame in holding onto grief . . . as long as you make room for other things too.”

Reginald “Bubbles” Cousins, The Wire 

We wanted to keep this bright and sunny and cheerful and light on the 11th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, and heed the words of Bubbles (Season 5, Episode 9) by making room for Will Ferrell sporting an American Flag Speedo. Unfortunately, we just can’t find that SNL sketch in its entirety online, either because Ferrell reveals too much of his undercarriage to get past the Hulu censors or because this sketch is included on the Best of Will Ferrell and NBC wants to protect its DVD assets. Either way, our attempt to demonstrate some levity on such a somber day was thwarted. So, instead, we will revert back to holding onto the grief and commemorate this day – and the still lingering sadness and pain – with our original choice, Jon Stewart’s personal, emotional, gut-wrenching but still hopeful words to open the first The Daily Show following the tragedy.

http://youtu.be/SXcmc2AZ6ZE

So there ain’t no shame in holding onto grief. Just don’t hold onto despair.

This should be required viewing every year for everyone, and just proves even more that we  already have our Will McAvoy.

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2012/06/15 · 1:31 pm

In Case You Were Wondering, Jimmy Fallon Is Still Killing It

We don’t talk about it much anymore, because it’s like pointing out that the sun rose in the East, it’s just the immutable truth, but Jimmy Fallon continues to be brilliant on Late Night, late night in and late night out.  His latest, The Evolution of Dad Dancing, is just the latest in what is now a multi-year string of genius, originality and unbridled fun.

(and, if you’re wondering, our Dad’s trademark dance falls somewhere in between the “Clap When You Want To” and the “Until You Hurt Your Back”)

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2012/06/12 · 1:19 pm

The Best Thing We’ve Ever Seen

Easily.

Just yesterday we mentioned how we much revere the World Champion 1986 New York Mets.  And then this comes along.  And just slays us.  And no doubt made everyone else in the coffee shop wonder why we were staring at the computer screen, completely slack-jawed, on the verge of joyful tears.  Our new favorite.

via Grantland

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2012/05/30 · 7:47 pm

Gratuitous Search Term Bait of the Day: Hall Pass

Last week in our Community season recap (and Dan Harmon era post-mortem) we listed our top five episodes from the series’s three seasons.  We included on that list “Contemporary American Poultry” because, besides being brilliant, it was the first episode to truly bring it all together and show what that series could be, the way that it could play with genre but still be entirely Community.  But if we had to identify when we fell in love with the show, that would have to be “Comparative Religion,” just a few episodes earlier.  While not as strong of an episode, certainly not as ambitious, it was the first episode we were excited to watch again (and we did).  If “Poultry” was the promise of what was to come, “Religion” was the promise of the promise of what was to come.  Which is why we were so pleased to see “anthony michael hall on community” as one of today’s top search terms.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/114575/community-fight-scene

That could be one of the top search terms for as long as this blog exists and we would never complain.

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2012/05/23 · 3:21 pm

Must Flee TV: Community – The Twilight of the First Harmon Dynasty

Today we bring you the final entry in our “Must Flee TV” series, our thoughts on the end of ‘Community’ Season Three, and, well, the end of an era. 

Full disclosure: when we wrote our Dan Harmon obituary earlier this week we had not yet had the chance to view the final three Season Three Community episodes.  We felt comfortable going ahead with the in memorial post because there would be nothing in those final episodes of the Harmon run to change our opinion of his work and influence on Community.  Unless one of the episodes was a shot-by-shot remake of an unremarkable episode of Friends, he could do nothing to tarnish his legacy, and, actually, they probably could pull that episode off (and by Season Six he probably would have gotten to that too).  But, as it turned out, the show had still yet another level to go, there were still recesses of our mind left to blow.

Perhaps only when Fox burned off the last four Arrested Developments against the Olympics has viewing a block of episodes felt so bittersweet, such a painful joy.  But unlike the Arrested finale night, the last three episodes of Community left us with little closure, and much uncertainty.  If anything, we’re sadder now than we were at the end of Arrested (obviously we could not know that it would eventually come back on Netflix, and we would have been foolish to pin our hopes on such a thing, especially since Netflix was in its nascent stages then).  We know our show is coming back, but we don’t know in what form, if it’ll continue on the same genius path, if it’ll forge something new and different, or if it’ll be a morbid a shadow of itself, a crushing reminder of what was.

Up far ahead: Our top 5 episodes of the Dan Harmon Era…

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Filed under Analysis, Brilliance, Good Humor, Greendale Human, In Memoriam, Lists, Must Flee TV, Must See TV

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