Month: August 2020

It’s interesting to note the television comedy’s long-standing goal of mimicking reality, and the ever-shifting conventions for doing so. In the early days of the television comedy, we needed live audiences and piped in laughter to put viewers — probably weaned on stage shows and vaudeville — at ease. A silent show? That’d just be weird.

Later generations came along and fairly rightly wondered what was up with all that disembodied laughter. Who is doing that? How weird! Thus the single-cam comedy came into vogue, alongside reality television that ditched the actors and scripts entirely (allegedly), which now occupy an uneasy space alongside YouTubers and influencers whose second-person address style (“What’s up, guys…”) makes even the God’s eye format of “reality television” seem quaint.

What, then, to make of DeMarcus Family Rules on Netflix?

The surprise release follows Jay DeMarcus, one of the three members of Rascal Flatts — who appear to be a kind of middle-aged boy band for pageant moms complete with frosted tips — and his ex-beauty queen wife, Allison, as they… well, mostly as they unconvincingly play the role of “people with a reality show.” Later we meet the kids, an archetypal Bart and Lisa (mischievous boy, brainy girl) for people who weren’t allowed to watch the Simpsons (with the son’s ‘Bama bangs replacing spikes). The show attempts to squeeze every dumb TV trope into just a few minutes of over-edited docucomedy. The effect is like staring into fame’s uncanny valley. I think if you make it more than ten minutes into this show, you wake up in the hellish place between universes from Event Horizon.

I spent the first few minutes of this new show wondering if I was watching a “reality” show, something scripted, or something else. The theatrically pudgy, tall-haired DeMarcus spends the show’s cold open doing a vacuous impression of his wife. Which, unless you were extremely into Rascal Flatts, you probably wouldn’t know, because without knowing Jay DeMarcus we’re left to assume that this is just his regular personality. That he’s doing a “bit” is also unclear, since everything about the situation already feels bitty, complete with sitcom wife, fake therapist, and everyone sort of half sneaking looks at the crew to see if anyone is actually buying this. The tone lands somewhere between Disney Channel sitcom and TLC reality show, intent on selling us this shitty sitcom of a life where dad is a lovable screw-up breadwinner and mom dutifully keeps the house from falling apart while opining about make-up and hair. Oh, and they’re rich!

The question here isn’t just “is this reality,” but rather, is this supposed to look like reality? Is this a reality show mimicking a sitcom, a sitcom mimicking a reality show, or are these peoples’ brains so atrophied from YouTube pranks and Disney sitcoms that this is how they really act? Jay and Allison DeMarcus are so transparently play-acting their expected roles (a kind of barely-updated fifties sitcom milieu spiced with early aughts wealth porn) that it’s hard to tell whether this is all for the camera or for their whole lives. Jay DeMarcus speaks with an exaggerated Nashville drawl (is there a better word for this accent? Tennessee accents sound much less languid, more buttoned-up than deep south drawls, like Alabaman with its t-shirt tucked into its shorts) despite subsequent research revealing that he was born and raised in Columbus, Ohio.

It occurs to me that this kind of unceasing performativeness may actually be what characterizes life in certain affluent suburbs; that DeMarcus Family Rules is just Real Housewives for people with Disneyland annual passholder car magnets. Yet the obvious draw of Real Housewives is to watch rich people behaving terribly. The draw of DeMarcus Family Rules, and by extension the draw of both pop country and Disney shows (a parallel made explicit in the case of Rascal Flatts, who spent much of their career on a Disney record label) is presumably to watch rich people behaving… wholesomely. It feels less like a show than a sales pitch for a lifestyle; at any moment you expect to be asked to buy a timeshare or join a multi-level marketing scheme. It’s not only nauseating but vaguely reactionary. See, y’all? Everything’s fine!

The result is an inescapable and overwhelming smarm. Just watching the DeMarcus family be (I mean, not really, it’s all fake as shit) feels like being smugly chided. In the course of researching this I kept looking up pictures of Rascal Flatts and getting angrier and angrier.

Would you believe this picture was taken in 2019? It looks like someone replaced the kids in a Mervyn’s ad with their dads as a joke. It looks like a convention of cool pastors. These men are walking pooka shell necklaces. DeMarcus Family Rules is like an animatic of this picture.

Applying the same styling the Disney Channel does to its tween stars to grown men makes explicit what’s so disturbing about it. What becomes plain is the sheer amount of artifice it takes to make people look this sexless; an army of stage children selling abstinence through bleached teeth and 10 pounds of makeup. The irony is that Disney’s studiously sex-free stars always end up looking a lot like porn actors. How far can you take fantasy before it becomes fetish?

But hey, maybe I’m reading too much into it?

Perhaps being incredibly skeeved out by well-coiffed youth pastors is more of a “me” thing. In any case, they say good art disturbs, and watching just half an episode of DeMarcus Family Rules sent me to a dark, dark emotional place from whence I still haven’t fully returned. In conclusion, solid B+.

‘DeMarcus Family Rules’ is available to stream on Netflix starting Wednesday, August 19th. Vince Mancini is on Twitter. You can access his archive of reviews here.

Arcade Fire’s Will Butler is readying a new solo album, Generations, which comes out next month. He previewed it in July with “Surrender,” and now he has returned with a video for “Close My Eyes.”

Merge Records describes the track as “a song that searches for comfort and almost finds it.” The label also notes that Butler shot the video himself in a rowboat that his grandfather built, and that the visual “highlights the song’s longing for escape.”

Butler says of the song, “I tried to make the lyrics a straightforward and honest description of an emotion I feel often–a drive for change coupled with despair: ‘I’m tired of waiting for a better day. But I’m scared and I’m lazy and nothing’s gonna change.’ Kind of a sad song. Trying to tap into some Smokey Robinson/Motown feeling — ‘I’ve got to dance to keep from crying.’”

He also previously spoke about Generations more broadly, saying, “My first record, Policy, was a book of short stories. Generations is more of a novel — despairing, funny, a little bit epic… A big chunk of this record is asking: What’s my place in American history? What’s my place in America’s present? Both in general — as a participant, as we all are, in the sh*t that’s going down — but, also extremely particularly: me as Will Butler, rich person, white person, Mormon, Yankee, parent, musician of some sort, I guess. What do I do? What can I do? The record asks that question over and over, even if it’s not much for answers.”

Watch the “Close My Eyes” video above.

Generations is out 9/25 via Merge. Pre-order it here.

With more and more rappers joining the Apple Music radio show trend, it’s likely to become harder and harder to truly stand out. Fortunately, Young MA, the latest to jump on the bandwagon, doesn’t have that problem. Her first guest pretty much ensures that plenty of rap fans will tune in to her debut episode as she interviews mutual admirer and fellow show host, Eminem. Em’s made no secret of his respect for Young MA’s bars, even admitting to missing the double meanings behind a few, so having him on was likely an easy call for her to make.

MA kicked off the first episode of her new show, Me Always Radio, by calling Em and reminiscing about the instance mentioned above as well as discussing MA’s new EP, Red Flu, released in May this year. Em gushes that he’s on his third listen through and “I’m still catching [bars]… When you get your punchlines or however your writing process is, you can always tell somebody who has studied the game and who is a student of it… Your punchlines don’t sound like setups. They sound like punchline after punchline after punchline. That requires a lot of skill and a lot of thought.”

Em signs off by telling MA, “Anything you need, I’m here.” MA also interviews Odell Beckham and Fivio Foreign in the first episode of Me Always Radio. Listen to the full episode above.

Perhaps the most notable speaker on day two of the 2020 Democratic National Convention was Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (sorry Bill Clinton), but her speech was limited to 60 seconds, and its purpose was merely to carry out one of the many arcane procedural processes that take place at a political convention. Essentially, AOC was tasked with seconding the nomination of Bernie Sanders as president. Sanders obviously ended his presidential bid last year and enthusiastically endorsed Biden, but he was in line for a formal nomination as part of the process of transferring his delegates to Biden.

Not surprisingly, with only 60 seconds to speak and tasked with delivering a very specific message, AOC did not mention Biden in her brief remarks, something a lot of folks found confusing. But you’d think one of America’s leading news organizations would have known better. Instead, NBC News stoked controversy by tweeting, “In one of the shortest speeches of the DNC, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez did not endorse Joe Biden.” The tweet remained live and uncorrected for a while into the night, something AOC was understandably livid about and took to Twitter to express her frustration over.

“This is completely unacceptable, disappointing, and appalling,” Ocasio-Cortez wrote. “The DNC shared the procedural purpose of my remarks to media WELL in advance. @NBC knew what was going to happen & that it was routine.” She added, “You waited several hours to correct your obvious and blatantly misleading tweet. It sparked an enormous amount of hatred and vitriol, & now the misinfo you created is circulating on other networks. All to generate hate-clicks from a pre-recorded, routine procedural motion. This is completely unacceptable, disappointing, and appalling.”

In further evidence that 2020 is one of the weirdest years in world history, having a beef with NBC means that AOC and Trump might finally have something in common. And you know you’ve messed up when you’re getting shade tossed at you by frozen sliced meat companies.

Wonder Woman 1984 is one of the more high-profile films to have its release date pushed back due to the ongoing pandemic, but fear not, if you need your Gal Gadot fix, October is going to be a great month. The Wonder Woman sequel comes out on October 2, followed three weeks later, on October 23, by Death on the Nile. The follow-up to 2017’s Murder on the Orient Express finds Kenneth Branagh returning as world-famous detective Hercule Poirot and Tom Bateman as Bouc, as well as newcomers Gadot, Armie Hammer, Letitia Wright, Annette Bening, Ali Fazal, Sophie Okonedo, Emma Mackey, Dawn French, Rose Leslie, Jennifer Saunders, and Russell Brand.

If the mystery Poirot has to solve is, “Where are the world’s most attractive people and also “feminist” “scholar” Russell Brand, for some reason?” I know the answer. (It’s Death on the Nile. Gadot, Hammer, Wright, Branagh’s mustache, etc. are very attractive.)

Here’s the official plot synopsis:

Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot’s Egyptian vacation aboard a glamorous river steamer turns into a terrifying search for a murderer when a picture-perfect couple’s idyllic honeymoon is tragically cut short. Set against an epic landscape of sweeping desert vistas and the majestic Giza pyramids, this tale of unbridled passion and incapacitating jealousy features a cosmopolitan group of impeccably dressed travelers, and enough wicked twists and turns to leave audiences guessing until the final, shocking denouement.

Death on the Nile opens on October 23.

Ozark will throw down with a super-sized season to launder all of the Byrde family’s messes and, most importantly, to allow Marty enough time to keep losing his sh*t on multiple occasions before the series concludes. Fortunately for viewers of this enormously popular show, Season 4 will begin filming this fall as planned, and there’s even better news: the show does not actually film at Lake of the Ozarks, where all sorts of pandemic foolishness has been going down, but rather, in Georgia near Lake Allatoona and Lake Lanier.

Sticking to the schedule is important for obvious reasons, including cost-effectiveness, which means that shutting down production when a Covid-19 case pops up is something to be avoided if possible. For that reason, star Jason Bateman has chosen to break an important tradition — he usually directs the first two episodes of each season — in order to keep himself in some semblance of a bubble. It’s a wise move, even if it’s “breaking his heart,” as he recently told Indiewire.

“[A]s we were looking through the protocols, the guidelines, all the complications with COVID, [and] the producer side of me made me think it’s just not responsible to have one of the actors direct the first two,” he reasoned. “Given that we’re still going to be getting our perimeter safe. Because if one of the actors gets sick, we all have to go home for weeks.”

Whereas if a crew member falls ill, Bateman points out, he can “[make] sure their salary is protected” while they stay home until the all clear is called. It remains to be seen whether he can pick up a few episodes to helm toward the end of the season, but that’s probably not in the cards. It’s definitely not the ideal way for him to end the Ozark run, but he knows exactly how much it matters to get things done as safely as possible, and he wants everyone to know that “I love directing the show.”

(Via IndieWire)

Last night was the second day of the 2020 Democratic National Convention, which is a virtual, online-only event this year due to the coronavirus pandemic. The political event is flush with musical talent, as the first night of the DNC saw performances from Maggie Rogers and Leon Bridges, while Billie Eilish and Jennifer Hudson are set to perform in the coming days. Yesterday had a music highlight as well, including a performance from John Legend, the night’s only musical performer.

After being introduced by Tracee Ellis Ross, the broadcast cut to a pre-shot performance of John Legend, who was joined in an empty room only by his piano to perform “Never Break.” That’s how it seemed as first, anyway, before the shot panned around to reveal that he had a choir of backing singers with him as well. The song was thematically appropriate given the state of the country and the world, as Legend sang optimistically, “We will never break / Built on a foundation / Strong enough to stay / We will never break / As the water rises / And the mountains shake / Our love will remain.”

Legend wrote on Twitter of his performance, “Thanks to the @DemConvention for asking me to close out a powerful night with my new song #NeverBreak. The song is about love, hope and resilience, and I think we could all use some of that right now.”

Watch Legend perform “Never Break” above.

When we hopped on the phone with Jake Johnson earlier this month to talk about his new Netflix animated comedy Hoops, we spent a surprising amount of time developing a drinking metaphor to sell the show’s signature brand of funny.

We won’t spoil it here, but it has a lot to do with bourbon, a no-nonsense, honest kind of spirit that a coal miner, or someone who works in a hole, would enjoy.

It’s a very Jake Johnson kind of drink, or at least, the kind of liquor his characters like New Girl’s Nick Miller and Stumptown’s Grey McConnell might prefer. You either like it, or you don’t. That goes for the whiskey and for Johnson’s new series, which follows a middle-aged basketball coach whose dreams of glory hinge on a team of talentless high-school athletes.

Created by Ben Hoffman, the show sports an all-star lineup of comedic voices including Rob Riggle, Natasha Leggero, Ron Funches, Cleo King, A.D. Miles, and New Girl alumni Max Greenfield and Hannah Simone. It earns every bit of its TV-MA rating and it might not be for everyone, but then again, that’s why Johnson likes it so much.

We chatted with him about getting back to work on Stumptown, New Girl’s quarantine fandom, and the Hamilton snub that keeps him up at night.

How are you holding up during quarantine?

I’m trying to figure out things to do. I’ve built a little office in my backyard. I’m trying to train my dogs, but the truth is, I’m dying to get back to work.

Have you heard anything about Stumptown and when you guys might start filming again?

Yeah. I just talked to Dave Rosemont, a line producer, and right now it’s with the unions and the studios to get everything signed off. But it sounds like it’s going to be a lot of testing and a lot of zones. So everybody is going to be very separate from one another.

Maybe, and hear me out, you just go full Jake Gyllenhaal in Bubble Boy? Just get everyone stuffed into a plastic bubble suit?

[Laughs] I actually texted Cobie Smulders about trying to get all the actors and the crew in a bubble, like the NBA. It’s super hard to do.

Speaking of quarantine, is it weird for you to see how many people are becoming New Girl fans now?

I’ll be honest with you, I’m not really on social media very much.

Good for you.

I’m not communicating with anybody, so the way that I found out New Girl was really having a resurgence was the last day and a half of press [for Hoops]. What I will say to the people who are finding the show, ‘I’m glad. I appreciate it.’ I wish they found it two years ago so we could still be making it.

Yeah, we could’ve really used those ratings in the last two seasons.

And that’s what it is. We were in a spot where we had established what the show was and how to make it. We all knew what it was at that point, and the network, in their defense, was really trying to be cool. They gave us eight episodes in season seven, but they really did that to show respect to the few fans we had. So you guys are about 24 months late.

Hoops is about as far from New Girl as you can get. Are you a big sports fan or did creator Ben Hoffman just rope you into working for him?

I used to be a pretty big fan but yeah, I got roped in by Ben. What really pulled [me] in on this one was Chris Miller and Phil Lord, who are also producing, and I liked the idea of doing an R rated animated show that, really, there was no message. It was just for the bits. That’s not something that ever comes my way, where it’s just a stupid comedy for the sake of being a stupid comedy.

So there’s no hidden meaning here.

No, it doesn’t mean anything. There’s no message to it. There’s no statement to it. If you don’t like the comedy of it from the first minute, you’re not going to like it later. It doesn’t grow. It doesn’t change. It reminds me of sitting like backstage at a comedy theater and doing bits and the bits never evolve. It’s just really meant to get funny people, trying to be funny.

It’s straight-forward. Like a shot of bourbon.

That’s right. And if you don’t like it, you’re not going to like it. So there’s no reason to keep watching it. But if you like that first shot of bourbon, you’re going to love your sixth shot of bourbon.

And you also might have a drinking problem.

You’re having a fun Tuesday, yeah.

Did you play any sports in high school?

You know, I played sports until two things happened at the same time that got me uninterested: puberty and marijuana.

A lethal combo.

Yeah, it kind of hit in high school for me. The idea of being on a sports team with a coach yelling at me during practice really lost a lot of value.

So the ranting this guy does on the show, you weren’t channeling any past trauma? You haven’t gotten yelled at like that before?

Well, I have, but it was always my bosses. [Laughs] No, honestly, I really wasn’t channeling much of anything for this. Ben Hoffman was always in the booth and trying to make him laugh is a fun thing to do. For New Girl, it was trying to make Liz Meriwether laugh, which was always fun. For this, it was trying to make Ben laugh. So those crazy rants would make him laugh and it was really fun to do.

This show was born from a presentation you guys gave to MTV years ago and it didn’t get picked up, partly because it was so graphic. Did you have to water anything down for Netflix?

So the opening scene of the pilot where he’s yelling at the ref and then the scene where he’s trying to get the high school kid a prostitute are directly from the presentation.

Were you worried it would be too raunchy, even for streaming?

Well, I kind of feel like because the cold open of this show was coaches screaming at all the players, it’s very clear what this show is. If we lived in a world where there were four channels and a limited number of shows, I would be very cautious because I would think there are a lot of people who aren’t going to like it. But when you have so many options, once you kind of set the standard for what this show is, you kind of have to stay at that level or you’re cheating the people who like it.

That was our train of thought, it was, ‘This is the tone of it.’ You don’t start with a shot of bourbon and then end with a margarita.

You did end up recruiting some New Girl cast members for this thing, though.

A lot of the casting was me. I tried to kind of use my producer muscle by bringing in people I really like to work with, from Max [Greenfield] to Hannah [Simone]. I like working with the same people over and over who I know are really funny. Honestly, a lot of the jobs that I do are for the actual day at work and for me, the actual day at work was recording with these people. And so I would much rather record with somebody who I felt was really fun to come and work with as opposed to somebody I don’t know.

So you guys were all in the booth together for this?

That was the best part. Sometimes we had multiple people in there at the same time. We tried to maximize the improv.

I’ve seen the virtual Comic-Con panel you guys did for this show. How do you keep everyone in line at work?

You don’t. You kind of go off the rails. I think that’s the point, though.

On a serious note, you played Aaron Burr in the first episode of Drunk History, which I recently rediscovered on YouTube. Does the success of Hamilton just absolutely eat away at you at night?

[Laughs] Man, that is a great question. Yes, yes it does.

I thought so.

Because I feel so deeply offended that I wasn’t included. And I just hope… I don’t want to say too much. I don’t want to get in any trouble here, but I just hope that one day my performance as Aaron Burr finally gets the credit that [Lin Manuel-Miranda’s] version of Hamilton has gotten. That’s all I’m going to say.

Up is down, flammable means inflammable, two plus two equals five, dogs cats mass hysteria, all because Fox News had some nice things to say about Michelle Obama.

Yes, that Michelle Obama, the former-First Lady who gave a virtual speech at the Democratic National Convention on Monday that included a powerful indictment of Donald Trump’s presidency: “It is what it is.” That usually riles the Fox News folks up, but anchor Chris Wallace praised Obama for the way she “flayed, sliced, and diced Donald Trump,” while Dana Perino, the former press secretary for George W. Bush, noted that it’s “difficult to try to connect with an audience without an actual audience there with you, but she has the ability to connect with people through the screen.” Wallace added, “This was a very effective speech.” Not everyone at Fox News agrees, however.

Speaking on Tuesday’s Tucker Carlson Tonight, host Tucker Carlson criticized Obama’s speech, calling it “a total lie, a calculated lie, a lie designed to make America more fearful, more angry, more divided, and thereby help her candidate win. That’s what Michelle Obama just did. But pretty much no one pointed it out last night. They were too afraid to because as Michelle Obama made very clear if you disagree with what she says, you are a bigot.” Hmm. Only someone who dabbles in “bigotry” would know.

Carlson later compared Obama to Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard. “You probably still think of the Left as secular, but not anymore. They are fervent religious fanatics,” he said. “Michelle Obama is their L. Ron Hubbard. Everything she does is good by definition. She’s the most beautiful, the smartest, the wisest. If Michelle Obama played golf, she would shoot an 18 every time.” At least she doesn’t “cheat like hell.”

You can watch the segment below (or don’t) beginning at 4:35.

(Via the Daily Beast)

“WAP” continues to dominate the world, so Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion are still trying to capitalize on their monster hit. Cardi did so in an absolutely perfect way yesterday, when she announced a new set of “WAP” merch.

The line features most of the usual merch suspects, like shirts and other articles of clothing, but a couple of items stand out. Given how focused on — ahem — wetness the song is, Cardi has included a couple of items to keep people dry for when situations get a bit moist: Raincoats and umbrellas. Available are black, pink, and white raincoats, as well as black and pink umbrellas, all with the song’s title emblazoned on them in big letters.

Earlier this week, the song officially (and unsurprisingly) made its debut at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, about which Cardi and Megan were understandably thrilled. Cardi didn’t love, however, when she saw that the song was used to promote a Republican boat party, so she fired back. Speaking of politics, Cardi also recently sat down to interview former Vice President and current presidential candidate Joe Biden.

Check out the “WAP” merch here.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.