Television Roundup: “Flaked” on Netflix, plus “Rick and Morty”
“I could be a million miles away/and still mean what I say.”
That’s a lyric taken from Kurt Vile’s breezy folk-pop number “Pretty Pimpin’,” but it could just as easily describe the comedic appeal of actor Will Arnett. Arnett has forged a nice career for himself playing characters who are equal parts insincere and insensitive: think of his spectacular boob Gob Bluth on Mitch Hurwitz’s “Arrested Development,” or the namesake hard-drinking colt of Netflix’s instant classic “Bojack Horseman”. Arnett’s comic weapon is the sort of slickness we usually associate with used car salesmen and pornographers, but the truth is he’s also a subtly gifted dramatic actor. In his most memorable roles, Arnett hints at a kind of crippling psychological disorder that goes far beyond self-loathing and into a more unclassifiable realm; for whatever reason, it’s something that his sitcom roles tend to only look glancingly at. In the parlance of the aforementioned song, all he wants is to “just have fun”, and live his life like a son of a gun.” The question of whether or not something troubling is brewing beneath the actor’s agreeable surface is what keeps us watching.
Arnett is far and away the best thing about “Flaked,” a soggy new sort-of comedic series from Netflix in which the actor stars as Chip, another one of his now-familiar silver-tongued schmucks. Chip is a recovering alcoholic who killed someone during a drunk-driving accident and is now crashing in a spacious Venice Beach loft while his all-too-obliging friend Dennis (“Primer’s” David Sullivan) stays in the guesthouse. Longtime Venice residents will probably be horrified at how their neighborhood is portrayed here — though, to be fair, there’s some truth to the show’s depiction of the Westside beach community as a ruthlessly gentrified wasteland of vanilla bean banality that’s practically become unofficial settling grounds for hordes of tech bros. The superficially similar West coast environs of tonally analogous low-key comedy-dramas like “Togetherness” (which takes place in Eagle Rock) and “Transparent” (which takes place in Hancock Park) doesn’t do much to disguise the fact that “Flaked” is a largely flavorless affair, all too content to dawdle in its own sealed-off world of paddle ball and third wave coffee and first-world non-problems (shades of Judd Apatow’s “This is 40,” maybe?) without much of a purpose beyond the occasional half-hearted crack. The entire enterprise suggests if someone stretched out the already shaggy narrative of Noah Baumbach’s “Greenberg” to fit the demands of a ten-part T.V. series, while relocating the action from Los Feliz to Venice Beach and draining Baumbach’s great comedy of its biting dialogue as well as its devastating insight into middle-aged rootlessness.
Astute readers will note that I haven’t really described the plot of “Flaked,” just the principal traits of its protagonist and a bit of the backdrop. That’s because “Flaked” proudly boasts no plot to speak of. Even by the standards of fellow Netlflix imports like “Master of None” and the recent “Love” — shows that were goofy and melancholic in equal measure, and ones that took their sweet time in letting the overall stories of their seasons unfold — “Flaked” is slow, and not necessarily in a way that makes us want to watch more. It’s also shapeless and fatally pleased with itself and just barely saved by the cutting vulnerability of Arnett’s performance, which does occasionally rise above the leaden material. But even the usually more manic Arnett seems weirdly muted here, as if he and co-creator Mark Chappell were afraid to commit to the irony and absurdity of Chip’s caring-mentor façade (as one of his friends tells him, dude has “a serious platitude problem”). The result is watchable, yes, but also tedious and familiar: a heavy-lidded slouch through shopworn material.
Alas, there are a few bright spots. Bobby Munson, er, Mark Boone Junior from “Sons of Anarchy” is weirdly memorable as Chip’s vaguely menacing landlord, and the show has its occasional flourishes of bluntly poetic dialogue (sample: when Chip tells his movie star ex-wife, played by Heather Graham, “I could help you run lines. I think that was when we were at our best”). Any time a character talks about Venice “changing” or “going through a transition,” you can bet that, yup, they’re actually talking about Chip. But unless hearing self-pitying white men talk endlessly about waitresses they’d like to sleep with and stale jokes about how a place called Free Coffee doesn’t actually, y’know, serve free coffee is your idea of great T.V., “Flaked” might be a tough sell. Arnett is a magnetic presence, as always, and his relationship with a few of the show’s ancillary characters — his former sponsor who’s now a cop, played by “The Wire’s” Robert Wisdom, and a pot-smoking aspiring comic/beach bum named Cooler — draw some minor, fleeting sparks. And yet “Flaked,” like its main character, is ultimately too content to take long walks on the beach without a particular destination in mind. This is all another way of saying I don’t know if I’ll ultimately be joining Chip in Season Two, should there be a Season Two.
One of the problems with “Flaked” is that it feels confused as to what kind of show it wants to be. In other words, it’s a show without an overarching comic vision. Most successful T.V. comedies — think the cloistered L.A. interiors and casual pettiness of of “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” the warped Bakersfield carnival that is FX’s brilliant “Baskets” or the giddy blue-collar nihilism of “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” — at least have a perspective, some unique and humorous and maybe occasionally aggravating way of seeing the world. “Flaked” does not, but in any case, this is not a complaint you can direct towards Adult Swim’s “Rick and Morty,” which might just be the craziest fucking thing on T.V. right now. It’s about a million miles away from safe and digestible, but as someone with a noted aversion towards stoney late-night animated program, I was hooked. Even those wary of this kind of bizarro cartoon insanity may have their faith restored on the sheer promise of “Rick and Morty’s” astounding degree of originality and its cracked view of our maddeningly inane human species.
I know I’m late to the party on this one. For months, friends and acquaintances alike have been raving about this weird animated show about a socially awkward kid named Morty and his cynical, reckless and hard-drinking scientist grandfather Rick, who has a habit of dragging his hapless grandson into his time-bending, dimension-altering schemes with him. To be honest, most of the time, I find these shows very off-putting, and I think a lot of it has to do with the WTF nature of the programming itself. A lot of this stuff is geared towards a demographic that may not necessarily care if what they’re watching is quote-unquote “good” in traditional terms; they’re just looking for some nutty, weird shit to take them into another world for a half hour at a time. “Rick and Morty” accomplishes this last feat with flying colors: you could devote a significant amount of time to parsing the knotty but empirically sound logic of the show’s many alternate realities. The difference is that “Rick and Morty” is also good — very good in fact, and maybe even great. It’s a trippy gonzo adventure that somehow manages to sneak in unobtrusive commentary about unplanned pregnancies and the pains of puberty into the same episode where a plague of oversized, homicidal praying mantises take over small town. If that’s not the golden age of television, then I don’t know what is.
The crazed free-for-all that is “Rick and Morty” often plays like a grab bag of geek culture, cribbing from the uncanny freak-outs of “The Twilight Zone,” the detailed world building of “Futurama,” the smart-ass blitzkrieg of Edgar Wright and the time-travel hooey and rip-roaring adventure of something like Robert Zemeckis’ “Back to the Future”. As a protagonist, Morty is a bit of a wet noodle — timid, given to stammering and fits of sweating and attracted to pretty much every girl in sight. His family at home includes his father Jerry, (Chris Parnell) a desperately inadequate grown-up manchild, and Rick’s daughter Beth, (Sarah Chalke) a former horse surgeon who put a pause on her dreams to live a life in the suburbs that she’s not so sure she wants anymore (you know, another one of those). Rick, on the other hand, is a real piece of work. He’s is hardly a likeable character by traditional standards: in fact, were “Rick and Morty” a more conventional show, he might play the villain. He’s a psychotic, wildly amoral nutjob who’s given to the fiendish yammering of an alcoholic street prophet, and he frequently puts his family members in grave danger to preserve the supposed ‘integrity’ of his wingnut experiments, like when he accidentally equips Morty’s dog with sentience and turns it into a robotically enhanced killing machine. We like him, though, because he riles Morty out of his stupor and without him, there wouldn’t be much of a show. Their punchy back-and-forth has an acidic bite that plays beautifully: they’re like the wigged-out, morally questionable duplicate version of Sherman and Mr. Peabody.
I haven’t seen an animated show in some time that takes narrative conceits to their wildest, weirdest extremes in quite the same way that “Rick and Morty” does. An episode where Morty has trouble meeting a girl turns into a fusion of Cronenbergian body horror and Polanski-esque mounting-paranoia fantasy when Rick concocts an love potion designed to make Morty irresistible to women that ends up having quite the opposite effect. There’s also a show-stoppingly brilliant installment, “Rixty Minutes,” where Rick and Morty spend the episode’s entire 30-minute runtime browsing through T.V. channels from another dimension, where there are infomercials for “Ants In My Eyes Johnson’s Electronic Store,” (“everything’s black, I can’t see a thing!”) while Jerry, Beth and Rick’s sister funnel through a rotary of their alternate futures in the kitchen (oddly enough, the normally milquetoast Jerry’s fantasies including doing a shit-ton of cocaine with Johnny Depp and banging Kristen Stewart on Leonardo Dicaprio’s yacht. Go figure). This could be because one of the co-creators of “Rick and Morty” is Dan Harmon, who proceeded to revolutionize the language of the traditional network sitcom with his radical show “Community,” where the showrunner bent outmoded T.V. tropes to his own hilariously twisted whim. There’s a lot of that same go-for-broke inventiveness in “Rick and Morty,” which has a loving, nerdy spirit to go along with its demented animated carnage. If this show had come out when I was a 13 year old who loved heavy metal and naughty cartoons, it probably would have been my favorite thing ever.
Grades: “Flaked,” C-. “Rick and Morty,” A-.
