Cult of the Poison Dart Frog

Happy Halloween

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The tyranny of "Friends"

In my household, the surest way to get a free hour or two to myself is to wait for Thursday night television. I cannot stand NBC's lineup, while my 12-year old (who seems to be the intended demographic) loves "Friends". I tolerate "Scrubs", he loves it. My wife insists on watching "ER", even though it jumped the shark long ago.

Let's face it--the genres of both TV sitcoms and hospital/cop/fireman dramas are spent. It's time to put them down humanely and start over.

Maybe now that John Wells is occupying himself more with "The West Wing" (previously kept in the air solely by the will of Aaron Sorkin), "ER" will get better. Or not. Doesn't matter. I don't watch it.

"Friends" has sucked for a long time. But, then again, ALL situational comedy has. The reason--it's all trapped in the "I Love Lucy"-"Honeymooners"-"Car 54, Where Are You?" triangle. Every situational comedy on TV today is a derived work, with plotlines directly borrowed from those shows or created through some horrific recombinant DNA experiments gone bad. Even the best comedy shows on television today--"The Simpsons" and, at least until last season, "Malcom in the Middle" (which I believe is on the verge of becoming the next "Diff'rent Strokes" in its descent into cliche)--are derived from the same Trinity of Television Comedy (though they owe just as much to "The Flintstones" as the others).

I have to admit that "Friends" makes me less physically uncomfortable while watching it than, say, "Will and Grace" (which is essentially "I Love Lucy" with a gay Ricky Ricardo and Fred Mertz).But most situational comedy makes me vaguely anxious; I've usually decoded the situation 5 minutes into the show and spend the next 25 minutes (if I last that long) watching it unspool like a slow-motion train wreck. (I like "Yes, Dear" for reasons I can't fathom. But that's for a future post.) I blame a childhood of watching "Lucy" and "Mr. Ed" reruns before going to the bus stop for this.

My sitcom discomfort meter, on a scale of 1 to 100 (100 being "I must destroy the television before it kills again"):

Will & Grace : 99
Everybody Loves Raymond: 97
King of Queens: 75
8 Simple Rules: I shut it off five minutes into the first episode, and have never gone back; so "100" for the first five minutes of the first season
Frasier: Once was a 15; now it's a 90.
Friends: 45
Sex & The City: 82
According to Jim: 100

Same with hospital/cop/fireman dramas. Here, the plots are either ripped from the headlines or ripped off from Dragnet, Emergency! or Adam-12 (or, god forbid, CHiPs). The Law & Order franchise succeeds mostly because of the salacious way it apes real world events, but it's still Dragnet's "The story you are about to see is real; the names have been changed to protect the innocent" schtick.

Yet, every season we're offered more of the same. Why? It's the tyranny of Friends--when everything on sucks, the things that suck in a way that appeals to as wide an audience as possible rule the roost. And when they're profitable, everybody tries to copy them.

So do what I do: just say no to network television. Get the Sopranos on DVD. Read a book. But for God's sake, don't watch.

Bait and Switch Bands

Ever go see a band live, love 'em, then buy their albums at the back table and take them home...only to discover that all the energy of the live performance is absent from them? Or worse, the album is almost suicide-inducingly depressing?

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Frog Holler....

This alt.country band from Pennsylvania kicks in person. Paula, Zoë and I went to see them at Roots Cafe, Baltimore's roots music concert series at the former St. John's Methodist Church in Charles Village. We picked up their two most recent CDs at the merch table and didn't open them until the next day when...

We found we had been hornswoggled. The music was still beautiful and well-performed, but almost everything on their newest CD, "Railings", was gloom-despair-and-agony-on-me.

This is the sort of album that should come with a warning label: "May induce desire to crawl under a rock."

Their earlier album, "Idiots", is somewhat more balanced (apparently, their songwriting team was on its meds when they were in the studio with that one).

Ironically, one of the more "upbeat" tracks on "Railings" is called Idiots, which makes me think it was supposed to be the title track on their last album, but somehow escaped and couldn't be recaptured until they were cutting their next disc.

And compare that track to this live cut, Choose A Path, or this one, Berks County Boy (which is downtemp, but at least has energy), from the release party for "Railings". Notice a difference?

The answer must be that these guys need a beer or two in them before they can cut loose--and the studio must be dry. Or maybe it's the other way around.