BY MICHAEL GOODPASTER
(FOUR) PARENTHOOD
There were surprisingly a lot of really good new shows last season. People love them some “Glee”, “Modern Family”, and the other trendy favs of the moment. For my list of four I wanted to go at some of the more unheralded shows that are returning for their sophomore season. Will their seasons fall victim to the “sophomore jinx”? Who knows? Never the less, these are four second year shows that I know I’m keeping an eye on. This is one of them. It’s super flashy. It doesn’t have guns, aliens, or anything other people acting out the lives of the characters. Basically that means it’s a “human nature” piece. The casting is awesome. We have Peter Krause(Six Feet Under), Lauren Graham(Gilmore Girls), Dax Shepard(nothing before this matters), Erika Christensen, Sam Jaeger, Mae Whitman, Craig T. Nelson, and about a half dozen more very qualified actors and actresses. It’s easy to fall for tricks and gimmicks on TV. For this show it’s all about the human nature. If you take one thing from this paragraph, know that this show is NOT as cheesy and hokey as it looks. It has good writing and great acting. I look forward to seeing this show get a full season to grow.
(THREE) BORED TO DEATH
This show made its debut one year ago today. It’s only about 24 minutes and there have only been 8 episodes to round out the first season. This doesn’t change the fact that this was one very enjoyable show. The show centers around Jonathan Ames, played by the awesome Jason Schwartzman, who is a slacker writer who on a whim gets into being a private investigator. He keeps his day job of covering random events for a magazine that’s owned by a surprisingly funny Ted Danson. His best friend and comic book artist is played by Zach Galifianakis. So yeah… Schwartzman, Danson, and Galifianakis. What more do you need to know? Well, how about the fact that this show was hilarious.
(TWO) COMMUNITY
Last fall, the show Community kind of snuck up on us all. In the midst of everyone loving The Office, 30 Rock getting mad trophy love, and the Amy Poehler love for Parks… this new show was better than all of them. I’m not exaggerating or being bias. I’m a fan of the other NBC Thursday shows, but Community is officially the funniest of the bunch. It’s about a group of misfits hanging out at community college. We have the glue of it all in Joel McHale playing Jeff Winger, Chevy Chase, Gillian Jacobs, Donald Glover, Danny Pudi, Yvette Nicole Brown, Ken Jeong, and the amazing Alison Brie. You might not know all of those names, but they were awesome in the first season and deserve the attention for it. The show plays like a sitcom variation of Breakfast Club meets The Office, but McHale is kind of like Ferris. Whatever it is, its good stuff. Unless the show goes through some drastic changes, you can expect this show to start getting more acclaim… that… or a lot of TV nerds will complain a lot. Shit. I think I’m doing that right now.
(ONE) EASTBOUND AND DOWN
Kenny Powers is my favorite fictional professional athlete of the past decade. I’m kind of convinced that the first season of this show was intended to be a movie, but they realized they have too much material so they’d cut it into six half hour chunks. At least, that’s how it feels. Whatever it was, it made me laugh tears of humor. Danny McBride holds nothing back in this character. For those who haven’t seen the first season of six episodes the show’s plot is pretty cut and dry. He’s burnt his MLB bridges and is now over the hill. So he returns to his home town and becomes a gym teacher. He is self centered, vile, vulgar, over the top, and hilarious to see in action. This show plays like a really good R-Rated comedy film, but it’s a TV show so we get MORE… This is funny at its funniest.
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