Stella Ep 1x01 Season 1 - The Pilot
It seems rather rare these days to be able to review a television show before it premieres - thanks to file sharing, networks keep their cards closer and closer to their faces; even Ain’t It Cool doesn’t get the scoops it once did, giving us massive Smallville spoilers days in advance. But those were the times of the Meteorite Freaks of the Week, those innocent days of 2002, when Stella was but a gleam in the eyes of three youngly lads from New York, the gleam being the stage of the Fez Theater and their eyes being the show they’d perform.
Why Comedy Central ever agreed to let Black, Showalter and Wain make Stella into a program is beyond me. As one of the most silly and alienating comedy performances I’ve ever seen, the Stella live show, along with the various clips on their DVD, are so nonsensical that they give me the comedy headache – my barometer for good humor. If you can twist reality so much that it hurts my head, you’re doing something right (See Father Ted, Look Around You, Wonder Showzen). Stella gets its grist by the three characters – Black, Showalter and Wain playing “Black”, “Showalter” and “Wain” – acting like idiots, the situations they are plunged into getting progressively stranger and stranger – for example, a short on the DVD begins normally with the three out playing whiffleball, and ends with “Wain” being raped by an angel.
That it’s on a network, even a basic cable network, I think is a boon to the guys, not only for the budget and the time they have to write and film – the show is beautiful, especially compared to the crappy one-chip DV-cam look of the shorts (which while endearing, definitely suffer from time and budget constraints) – but also for the fact that they are now constrained by what’s appropriate for a TV show on Comedy Central. What this does is force them to leave the puerile sex humor behind and to concentrate on just making the jokes and plot as bizarre and silly as possible. See, it’s really easy to make people laugh with weird sex jokes and swearing. Even with Stella’s tongue-in-cheek approach though, it often comes off as rather lazy – half the shorts end with some variation of odd fucking and the dildo count throughout is rather large. While I can’t argue that that stuff isn’t funny, even ironically used, it gets a bit wearisome. The pilot episode of the Stella series though is completely devoid of this, and instead is just silly and inconsistent and wonderful.
SPOILERS:
The plot of the show is rather basic: The guys get evicted from their apartment by their landlord for playing their music too loud, live as hobos, try to buy into a co-op, and then dress up in fake mustaches to fool their old landlord into renting the apartment to a trio of business tycoons. The mustaches fall off though, and the landlord, so fermished by the deception, has a heart attack. In order to save his life, they operate right there, but end up killing him because, of course, they’re idiots. Luckily though, they find out their landlord was really Josef Mengele, and the Lebenthal Foundation buys the apartment for them as a reward for killing the Nazi war criminal. Also, there’s a subplot where “Wain” and a real-estate agent fall in love instantly, only for “Wain” to eventually get his heart broken. How parallel!
This doesn’t even touch on how brilliant the actual mechanics of the show really are though. Jokes get set-up early on that pay off much later. Characters, such as their downstairs neighbors, have established personalities, only to lose them in the end. The entire format of the sitcom is deconstructed, not in a clinical or ironic way, but rather through complete absurdity. The whole show itself is lovingly constructed, and thanks to the narrative structure, is able to sustain itself over the entire 22 minutes, even though it’s utterly nuts through and through. Plus, there’s a grammar joke! With Look Around You series 2, Wonder Showzen and now Stella, the cable comedy being produced this year may in fact rival the days when Mr. Show, Strangers with Candy, and Upright Citizens Brigade were on the air.
Stella premieres on Comedy Central Wednesday, July 29th at 10:30 pm.
| Stella at Amazon |
