This week’s runner up is a commercial for Durex condoms. Three words: Balloon Animal Sex. Enjoy!
The Most Awesome Thing We Saw This Week (January 13-19)
EJ
One of my great joys during the week is NBC’s Thursday lineup. Well, except for the part that is Kath & Kim, and even then John Michael Higgins is usually pretty funny. (Even if I have a tendency to cry out “Mindtaking!” whenever he enters a scene.) And while The Office featured the absolutely glorious duel between Dwight and Andy (“I’ll use my bare hands.” “That is stupid. I will use a sword and cut off your bare hands.”), this week I have to note the oft-overlooked member of the comedy trinity, My Name is Earl.
Earl has been cooking the season after going pretty seriously off-course last year. While I could have watched “Earl in prison” episodes for an entire season, the arc with Earl in a coma fell flat. It turns out, this show is much funnier when it sticks to its original premise: Earl trying to do make up for all the bad things he’s done. In last week’s episode, Earl tried to get Joy an audition on the new game show Estrada or Nada to make up for blowing her chance at appearing on Fear Factor years ago.
By the way, Estrada or Nada is the greatest idea for a TV show ever. Contestants attempt to beat Erik Estrada in an event of their choosing. Competitive eating, sushi making, geography, “violining”, you name it. I would totally watch this show.
As usual, Earl gets great mileage out of flashback montages. We get to see Joy’s steady stream of crushed dreams, dating back to her childhood. While she’s usually deeply unsympathetic, this scene makes her kind of likeable. What makes her even more likeable is the scene where she beats the living hell out of one-time American Idol co-host Brian Dunkelman.
Between seeing Estrada excel at various challenges and watching the bizarre contestants vying for a spot on the show (including a midget Ponch who starred in a stage revival called Micro CHiPS), there’s a lot of silly humor played weirdly straight. Earl casually flirts with surrealism in a way that’s reminiscent of the later seasons of NewsRadio, which is always a good thing.
And if Joy’s flashback attempts at getting on Fear Factor (eating bugs, licking a series of 9-volt batteries) weren’t enough, there are some very nice bits furthering some ongoing storylines. Darnell, who was long ago revealed to be in Witness Protection, is exposed on national television and has to disappear into the program again. The end has a good cliffhanger involving tranquilizer darts, a possible airlift, and an entire trailer wrapped in plastic. Plus, Mr. Turtle is still trying to get home!
This episode ranked a solid “Estrada”, as determined by a Hollywood stuntman, a former Olympian, and a Morning Zoo DJ.
Second place? (Spoiler Warning!) In the mid-season premiere of Battlestar Galactica, Starbuck found the remains of her own charred corpse on Earth. So she’s a Cylon, right? Well, at the end, we learned who the 12th Cylon is. And though that was anticlimactic, the fact that it wasn’t Starbuck leads me to ask “Just what the hell is she then?” Oh, also apparently Earth was populated entirely by Cylons, so we’ve apparently been sympathizing with the wrong species this whole time. That? Is pretty awesome.
Don
I hate to be all like, “there’s nothing good on TV, these days,” but when you’re watching TV, and TV is showing you commercials of something you’d rather be watching, you start to feel that way. Like eating plain oatmeal every day, three times a day, and someone keeps walking by you with steak. You know oatmeal is full of fibery goodness, but …oh, man. That steak. Are those grilled onions on top of that steak? And …do …do I smell garlic-mashed potatos? See what I’m saying? I watch quite a few programs on ABC and the Disney canon (“canon” …how friggin’ impressive is that?), so I’ve seen some badass Lost commercials and it makes me ever hungrier for this week’s premier.
It should be a sad fact that commercials are my Most Awesome Thing …but watch the ones I was able to find and tell me they aren’t the Most Awesome thing in this entire post. They aren’t the commercials I watched during all the college football bowl games, or even the commercial I saw last night during The Bachelor, but in many ways, they are even more …er …most awesomer.
