Hello, friends and welcome back to The Challenge: Total Madness Stock Watch. After bidding adieu to Asaf last week, this week is a women’s challenge and we also get our first team challenge of the season, as they are put in groups of three and told to run 15 boxes of “ammo” to a drop spot a mile away for the first leg, with the three fastest teams getting to chuck those boxes out of a helicopter at a target in the second leg.

The team of Jordan, Wes, and Jenny dominate the first leg, followed by Fessy, Kyle, and Melissa and then Cory, Swaggy C, and Dee in the third group to finish. Jordan, Wes, and Jenny do terribly in the helicopter drop section, only getting two boxes to hit the target as Jordan struggles to figure out the proper time to tell them to toss the box. After missing their first two, Fessy serving as the spotter gets into a rhythm and their team hits the target on their final seven attempts, but Cory gets it right from the jump and his team hits on all nine tosses and earns their spot in the Tribunal.

Jenn performs terribly in the daily challenge, is a rookie, and has angered Dee by being flirty with Rogan, so she knows she’s the most likely to get thrown in. Bananas and Wes decide to mess with her and help craft an awful speech in which she admits to being the weakest player and tells the rest of the girls they should want her to last as long as possible because she’d be easy to beat in a Final. Wes then casts the first vote for Jenn and she gets voted into elimination in a landslide. The Tribunal nominates Jenny, Tori, and Big T as the three they’ll consider to put in against her — with all three angling to be put in and Tori and Jordan applying major pressure to Dee to throw her in so she can get the much needed red skull to earn a possible spot in the Final.

At the elimination, T.J. announces that along with the three nominees by the Tribunal, a member of the Tribunal can vote themselves into an elimination as well, giving Dee a chance to take out Jenn herself. For reasons passing understanding, Dee decides to still vote for Jenny, instead of taking the layup that is Jenn and the easy way out of having to anger either Jenny or Tori and Jordan, because they easily would understand if she took that opportunity. Jenny destroys Jenn in a barrel flipping competition, as Jenny gets all of hers flipped (sometimes going one-handed) while Jenn can’t even get past the first.

Dee admits being a bit mad at herself for not taking the opportunity and T.J. expresses some disappointment and bewilderment for that choice as well. Next week, we’re blowin’ up trucks, because this year’s budget is apparently $Texas.

STOCK WATCH

STOCK UP

Jenny: Not only is she now the only woman with a red skull, she was dominant in both the elimination and the daily challenge. After winning the first challenge, she has now won a daily, been in the top 3 of another, and won an elimination. She is looking the part of the favorite and as long as she keeps up this pace she will cruise to, at the very least, the late rounds of the competition if not a Final.

Fessy: Fessy’s team didn’t win but he has been a hoss through two rounds. He’s come in second in both of the daily challenges thus far and it’s hard to imagine anyone wanting to deal with him in an elimination. The question he’ll have to answer is whether he can find an alliance that will help him get into an elimination so he can earn a red skull — or if he can simply win a daily and throw himself in.

Cory: It seems like some time off from The Challenge has done Cory some good. So far he has been in both Tribunals thanks to a win this week (where he was the catalyst serving as the spotter in the helicopter) and somewhat randomly being asked in last week because he’s viewed as a net neutral. He seems, to this point, to be avoiding the pitfalls of past Challenges by laying relatively low as far as not causing drama or making his “hitlist” public as he did when he was younger, and, coupled with quality performances, it’s paid off through two weeks.

Aneesa Reaction GIFs: Aneesa didn’t show up a ton this week, but when she did she helped make great television. First, she pops up in a confessional laughing at how Jenn had a “full face” on for the daily challenge and looked great while not doing anything.

Later, when Jenn is reading her awful speech she produced this tremendous GIF. I’m always in on random cutaways to vets like Aneesa when young folks do stupid stuff.

STOCK DOWN

Dee: Scared money don’t make money, and not throwing herself in against Jenn in what was very clearly going to be a physical elimination is going to haunt Dee. Not only was it going to be a walk to a red skull, she could’ve taken care of her own beef with Jenn, and avoided starting anything with Tori and Jordan. Instead, she now has enemies in the game and gifted the strongest woman in the game a red skull. That partnership with Jenny better pay off soon or she’s in trouble.

Jordan: The effort from him as spotter in the helicopter was, truly, pitiful. He then got cranky and wouldn’t clap for anyone and was pouting off to the side, and now has most of the house seemingly happy to root against him from guys to girls. He’s so, over-the-top all-in on making sure Tori gets to a Final that he’s going to end up playing a reckless game and jeopardize both of their chances.

Rogan: Like Nany last week, Rogan’s hopeful love interest is gone and, worse than Nany last week, he’s also further pushed away a possible strong ally in Dee who still somehow wanted to make things work with him. He looked strong a week ago with a winand was close to the top 3 this week, but he doesn’t have an awful lot of friends and seems to be doing poorly at the social part of the game to this point.

It’s been weeks since leaving your home for non-essential reasons was a socially acceptable thing to do, so everybody is finding new ways to pass the time as this period of self-isolation continues. For Megan Thee Stallion, that means hopping on Instagram Live and re-writing her hit “Hot Girl Summer” to reflect the current times.

During the broadcast, Megan danced and rapped along to the song, modifying some lyrics to be about the coronavirus and social distancing. Some choice lines include, “I’m on quarantine, so you know I ain’t boppin’,” “It’s a quarantine summer and you know I ain’t lit,” and, “Got corona on your lip, you know you can’t get no kiss.”

Aside from this, Megan has kept busy in other ways. Like a handful of other musicians, Megan has offered to pay bills for fans who are struggling financially due to the pandemic. She also recently expressed that she would love to collaborate with Jordan Peele on the horror movie she has been writing. Meanwhile, she recently refuted the claim that all she can do is twerk by listing off some of her other goings-on: “I go to school and I rap and sometime I be cookin’. I’m a dog mom. I’m an awesome friend.”

Watch Megan re-work “Hot Girl Summer” above.

I never ventured beyond the mythical curtain in my local video store growing up, but I do remember the thrill of watching the Family Guy episode that Fox initially banned, which is basically the same thing. “When You Wish Upon a Weinstein” was intended to be the season three finale, with an initial airdate of February 21, 2002, and the series finale. But Fox executives, worried that the episode would come across as anti-Semitic (it’s about Peter befriending an accountant after wishing for a Jew), pulled “Weinstein” from the schedule, leaving “Family Guy Viewer Mail #1” as the unintentional finale.

Of course, Family Guy came back three years later (it’s still on to this day, with 344 episodes and counting), and “When You Wish Upon a Weinstein” eventually aired on Adult Swim on November 9, 2003, two months after coming out on DVD (that was the peak-behind-the-curtain thrill I spoke of earlier), and on Fox on December 10, 2004. There is, however, a banned episode that has never aired on American television.

Here’s a sample line of dialogue:

PETER: “It’s a woman’s responsibility to carry it to term.”
BRIAN: “Well, what if the woman is raped?”
PETER: “Maybe she should have thought of that before she asked me for directions.”

I think you can see the issue. Directed by Joseph Lee and written by Danny Smith, “Partial Terms of Endearment” was meant to be the season finale of Family Guy season eight in May 2010, but, like with “When You Wish Upon a Weinstein,” Fox pulled the episode. Unlike “When You Wish Upon a Weinstein,” it still hasn’t made it to broadcast. It wasn’t Meg taking off her shirt and showing her third nipple to the Count from Sesame Street that the network opposed to — it was the frank discussion about abortion. In the episode, an old friend from college asks Lois to carry her and her husband’s baby as they’re unable to conceive. She agrees, but when the couple dies in a car crash, she decides to have an abortion, against Peter’s wishes. Spoiler: Lois gets the abortion, though not before Peter is asked what if he looks “at the ultrasound and see that the baby is gonna be born with no arms and no legs,” and he replies, “You name it Matt.”

“Times really have changed,” creator Seth MacFarlane told the New York Times about Fox’s decision at the time. “The network is making a decision that is, unfortunately, probably based on people’s current ability to handle and dissect controversial narratives… There’s nothing about [a woman’s right to choose] that should be any different than doing an episode about gay marriage or an episode about the oil spill.”

When Mr. MacFarlane presented the concept to Fox, it warned him that the subject matter raised a red flag, but allowed him to produce the episode anyway… But the Fox network decided not to show [the episode]. The network said in a statement that it fully supported “the producers’ right to make the episode and distribute it in whatever way they want,” and declined to elaborate on its decision. A spokeswoman for Adult Swim also said in an e-mail that there were “no plans to air that episode of Family Guy.”

“Partial Terms of Endearment” still hasn’t aired on Fox or Adult Swim, despite the latter’s emphasis on off-beat programming. It did make its TV debut on BBC Three in the United Kingdom on June 20, 2010, though, and was released as a stand-alone DVD with the Family Guy Presents: Seth & Alex’s Almost Live Comedy Show special. There was also a live table read in 2009, where the line “I’m here to save the unborn – after they come out of the vagina, they can go f*ck themselves” drew a “smattering of applause,” according to the Daily Beast. It’s not part of the Family Guy Volume 8 or 9 boxsets, and isn’t on Hulu, either. But “Partial Terms of Endearment” is available on Amazon Prime video for $10, along with other “special” episodes like the Star Wars parodies, or you could always make like Seamus Levine and become a pirate, as suggested here.

Is “Partial Terms of Endearment” worth the controversy? Honestly, having seen the episode, it’s no more “offensive” than any other episode of Family Guy; there’s a “special animal Olympics” joke that’s as [loosens shirt collar] as any of the abortion talk. It’s fine! “Partial” has a 7.3 rating among IMDb users, which is par for the course among season eight episodes. With one exception: “Road to the Multiverse” (9.1), which is my favorite episode of the entire series so far. If you’re going to watch any season eight episode, make it that one. What it lacks in “banned from TV” controversy it makes up for in quality.

Although the Looney Tunes spoof in “Partial Terms of Endearment” is pretty funny.

(Via New York Times)

Ryan Reynolds is best known for playing two comic book characters, for better or worse: Deadpool (for better) and the Green Lantern (for worse). But did you know that in the same year that the Merc with the Mouth made his mouth-less debut in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, Reynolds played another superhero? I didn’t, because the movie only made $13,514 at the box office, which makes sense, as it only played in three theaters.

Paper Man is (this plot synopsis takes a turn, hang on) an “inspirational comedic drama about an unlikely friendship between Richard, a failed middle-aged novelist who has never quite grown up, and Abby, a 17-year-old girl whose role in a family tragedy years earlier has stolen away her youth. Both are unsure, both are afraid to take firm steps forward, and both are looking for that special friend – that connection – to help guide them into the future. Since his childhood, Richard has mostly relied on the imaginary one that resides in his head – a costumed superhero known as Captain Excellent.”

Reynolds plays Captain Excellent, as Lifewire editor-in-chief Lance Ulanoff recently discovered. “I randomly selected a movie called Paper Man on Amazon Prime. I have so many questions for @VancityReynolds,” he tweeted, tagging Reynolds, who responded, “I have zero answers.” He looks looks a cross between Superman and Victor Zsasz in Birds of Prey, with a dash of Ken from Toy Story 3, as a treat. It looks… yeah.

Reynolds isn’t the only big-name star in the cast, though: there’s also Jeff Daniels, Emma Stone, Lisa Kudrow, and Succession favorite Kieran Culkin. But at least they didn’t have to dress up like this. How long before Captain Excellent joins the MCU?

Late-night TV musical performances look a lot different now than they did a couple months ago. Instead of taking the stage in front of a studio audience, artists have been forced to perform from their homes as the coronavirus pandemic is keeping people inside. So far, this has typically resulted in simple videos of artists performing a song on acoustic guitar or piano, but Dua Lipa decided to do something different for The Tonight Show yesterday.

She virtually guested on the program and performed the song seated in front of a blank wall. As the song began, though, her backgrounds started changing. Lipa was backed by time-lapse footage of city activity like cars driving and people walking, and she was sometimes flanked by her backing band or dancers. At one point, she even found her way onto the Tonight Show set.

Aside from the performance, she also chatted with Fallon, discussing why she decided to release Future Nostalgia early, the pressures of making a second album, and the merits of dance-crying.

Watch clips from Dua Lipa’s appearance on Fallon above and below, and read our review of Future Nostalgia here.

Dua Lipa is a Warner Music artist. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

The white whale for anyone whose humor censors and set-up detectors are fried from overuse is a joke that cannot be explained. Music, at its root, is just math, and comedy is mostly just a surprise-generating engine. We can know these things intuitively and still enjoy them, the job of the artist is to make us temporarily forget. To lose yourself in a joke or a song is a kind of leap of faith, an act of willfully seeing the ghost in the machine. In those few moments you belong to the spirit world.

The best joke is a coincidence of cosmic proportions that feels like it could only have happened in just that way, and only just the once, where the mechanisms behind it are either impossible or pointless to explain. I think that’s why I was so obsessed with Nathan For You, a show that felt like the ultimate anomaly. It was a show that was elaborately planned and meticulously staged and yet everything funny about it only seemed to happen by accident. It stands as one of the most weirdly edifying television experiences I’ve ever had.

Nathan For You followed comedian Nathan Fielder as he “helped” apparently real struggling businesses, by designing elaborate, convoluted solutions to their business problems. In the show’s intro, he pitched himself as the ideal consultant because he had “graduated from one of Canada’s top business schools with really good grades.” This as the camera flashed across a transcript showing three Bs, an A, and a C, in classes with comically vague titles like “strategic management.”

Some of his early episodes showed him helping a yogurt shop by creating a buzzworthy “poo-flavored” yogurt, designing a fake viral video for a petting zoo, and creating a “rebate” for a gas station that was impossible to collect — even after the patrons ran up a hill. Along the way, it introduced us to a series of fascinating oddballs, like a foul-mouthed private detective who seemed to hate Fielder, several celebrity impersonators, and an obese ghost expert who described an incubus as an entity that “basically has sex wid em until they died.” The ghost expert died during the show’s run, becoming a ghost himself.

Nathan For You wasn’t the first comedy ever to mix documentary segments with scripted, to introduce us to oddball characters, feature a host who was awkward and dry, or be funny in a way that was hard to explain. Jackass, the Ali G Show, Tim & Eric (who produced the show), and Tom Green (often unfairly left out of discussions like these) all feel like spiritual precursors, to varying degrees (with Eric André running in parallel). Yet Nathan for You was singularly itself, and I’d like to think was perfect for its cultural moment.

Subtly underpinning every gag was the idea of late capitalism as a dehumanizing hellscape. Succeeding at business in Nathan For You almost always required treachery (faking viral videos, exploiting fair use to create a coffee shop that would compete with Starbucks by looking like Starbucks) and disdain for the customer (making them run up hills for a few cents, assuming they’d be too dumb to know Johnny Depp from a bad Johnny Depp impersonator). His “solutions” turned what should’ve been intuitive interactions — eating chili or buying yogurt — into rube-goldbergian attempts to extract profit. Whether those attempts even succeeded or not was almost beside the point; the point was to try.

Creating these elaborate, quasi-inept business plans, meanwhile, required an expert’s grasp of LA Craigslist and how to exploit it, and an intuitive understanding of what people would be willing to do. Without desperation and the gig economy, Nathan For You couldn’t have existed.

In playing a more awkward, desperate version of himself (a running gag was Fielder creepily hitting on women), he cast himself as the ultimate parody of a McKinsey consultant, some snot-nosed preppy virgin sent to “fix” a business he knew nothing about, the banality of evil made flesh (pre-empting by years the rise of Pete Buttigieg). When Fielder’s solution to fix a yogurt shop was to design a flavor that was deliberately inedible, the joke was on the market. The way to make money is to literally feed your customers shit.

Critics love to find our own worldviews reflected back at us in other people’s art, but I don’t think I’m projecting here — in a 2015 LA Times profile, Fielder said his show had been partly inspired by the mortgage crisis:

“I was really obsessed when the mortgage crisis happened and how it came down to these personal moments between people where someone senses something’s wrong, but they don’t want to speak up,” Fielder told Libby Hill.

“For Nathan on the show, ethics are not on my radar as much,” Fielder said of the version of himself he portrayed on the show. “Risk and effort don’t seem to register and it’s inspired by that modern Wall Street mindset of finding loopholes.”

Which is to say, the Nathan Fielder that Nathan Fielder played on his show was overtly a parody of amoral capitalism. It doesn’t matter how you do whatever you thought was your job, it’s how you game the system.

The show had a clear format, but not really a formula, and for the finale, it threw out what rules it did have. In place of joke-Nathan trying to joke help a business for a half hour, there was a slightly less contrived version of Nathan helping a Bill Gates impersonator from a previous episode try to reconnect with a long lost love — in a two-hour finale, “Finding Frances.” It’s hard to overstate what a surreal thing this was to be able to see on basic cable television.

It was a wonder that Nathan For You ever got on the air in the first place, but the finale was its swan song — brilliant, strange, empathetic, hilarious, and occasionally creepy. It stands as one of the greatest, strangest, most heartfelt and funniest things I’ve ever seen on TV. Legendary documentarian Errol Morris called it “unfathomably great.”

“Finding Frances” took what was normally a sub-theme in Nathan for You and made it the theme — an attempt to make genuine a human connection in a world that seems designed to thwart them. And like virtually all the other episodes, that attempt turned quixotic. This was a show that asked not only why we can’t make more genuine connections but whether we even deserve to.

It ran just four short seasons, but considering the kind of coincidences and candor it took for it to work, it’s a wonder we even got that many. It was a show about strategic planning whose appeal rested on plans going awry. That’s hard to plan for. Nathan For You manages to stand as both the show we deserved and a show we didn’t deserve.

Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

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Netflix’s Brews Brothers is raunchy, ridiculous, and right up the alley of folks who’d love to go out and have some beers right now, but given our current situation, are wise enough to stay home and live vicariously. The set-up is exceedingly simple. The show hails from brothers Greg Schaffer (That ’70s Show) and Jeff Schaffer (The League), and it’s loosely based upon their relationship. Alan Aisenberg steps up as the Greg-like character, Wilhelm, and Mike Castle picks up the Jeff-like character, Adam. They’re estranged, warring beer snobs — each insufferable in their own way — who are attempting to resurrect a struggling LA brewery. As one can imagine, the two very much step on each other’s nerves in the process but must learn to work together. In that way, it’s a very predictable show, but it’s surprisingly charming in the process.

Honestly, I could stop right there because that’s enough to sell the show to people who are predisposed to refreshingly breezy comedy that’s absolutely soaked in pee jokes, but that would be too easy. There’s an audience for that kind of series, no doubt, but there’s also added value here. The show manages to surreptitiously delve into human relations and emerge with a fair amount of insight without getting preachy in the process.

It’s a strangely endearing show, but oh my god, there’s so much pee. I should probably reflect a little bit on why Brews Brothers brings more than lewd and bawdy jokes to the table, and it’s useful to say that the sweetness isn’t forced. A lot of the jokes are disgusting and verge on going overboard. Buckets full of bodily functions go down in public. There’s a straight-up masturbation obsession (although it’s a claimed non-obsession), a character referred to as the “Picasso of Dildos,” and something called “Taking A Growler” that prompts an extended gag that won’t quit. Chances are decent that you’re not fully prepared for the shenanigans that go down in these eight episodes.

Well, I take that back. If you’ve been mainlining late 1970s comedy movies during these self-isolating times, you won’t be shocked by what transpires. Brews Brothers reminds me, in some ways, of films like National Lampoon’s Animal House, but there’s a key difference: a lack of sexism and homophobia. It’s remarkable, really, how this Netflix show manages to gleefully dive into raunchy waters without coming off as racist or sexist (given that a lot of that ’70s-’80s comedy did not age well), but somehow, the show pulls off that feat. And the real kicker is that the show doesn’t even exude a politically correct aura — it simply crafts its jokes about other subjects.

Mainly, the humor revolves around the Rodman brothers as caricatures of personalities. The other characters, as banal as their actions might be (including a sexed-up couple of food-truck operators who don’t do sanitation practices), bounce off the brothers and reflect the Rodmans’ faults. As a result, the stakes of truly offending people are relatively low here — making this a stress-free comedy — and every party on this show knows how to hold their own. That includes the right-hand woman of the brewery’s operations, Sarah. She’s portrayed by Carmen Flood in an admiringly punchy way.

As far as the brothers go, Mike Castle is appropriately slimy as Greg, who’s gone through the conventionally accepted schooling that one can expect from someone making a career as a braumeister. Castle’s so convincing that he might actually struggle to shake this role off in the future, whereas Aisenberg’s return to comedy feels refreshing. Folks will remember him (even with a beard) as Orange Is The New Black‘s naive CO, Baxter Bailey, whose fate became hopelessly intertwined with the tragic outcome for Poussey. That was a tough arc for viewers to stomach, but this is where Aisenberg can cast away the Bailey vibes. He’s having a blast, and so will viewers.

Is the show authentic about inner-brewery workings? Well, it was crafted with on-set experts around every day during production. Whether or not that aspect succeeds, I’ll leave the judgment up to the true cicerones out there. What I can say is that I appreciate beer but didn’t have to feel silly about a lack of in-depth beer knowledge under my belt. Further, the show’s vulgar and heartwarming while also knowing its place. It never pretends to be serious, which is a welcome approach at any time but especially these days. There’s already too much stress in this world, so why add to it, right?

If you want to watch some booze-loving monks (who doesn’t?) and a story where a key obstacle is how to recreate an IPA that a distributor loved without knowing that someone peed in it (why not?), then you’re probably gonna dig Brews Brothers.

Netflix’s ‘Brews Brothers’ beings streaming on April 10.

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