TV: December 2005 Archives

Coupling has to be one of the best comedies ever made for television. Stephen Moffat, the creator and writer, has taken a tired premise about singles searching for sex and made it fresh. The freshening comes from a variety of storytelling devices (playing with time, multiple points of view) and having characters really behave like they do in real life. Don't confuse this with the awful American version that NBC tried a few years ago. The BBC version must be experienced with the original cast. One of my favorite episodes is "Inferno", where the main character, Steve, accidentally leaves a porn tape in the VCR. Susan, his hot new girlfriend, comes over to clean the house and sees the video. This all culminates in a hilarious dinner party, where Steve defends all mankind in a passionate speech about why men need to watch porn or look at other women, even though they are happy with their current partner.

My favorite character on Coupling is Jeff, played by Richard Coyle. Jeff is the ultimate spastic, nervous as hell around women and spouting out nonsense around them. He's essentially helpless when keywords like breasts or vagina are spoken aloud. My favorite episode, "The Man With Two Legs", has Jeff finally talking to the girl of his dreams on the train. Jeff is so nervous, talking about her fine legs, that he blurts out that he only has one leg. Rather than leading to disaster, it actually turns her on! "This is the curse of Jeff Murdock. I meet the woman of my dreams and I can't take my trousers off." There are so many classic Jeffisms throughout the series. His term for the Nudity Buffer ("When you first see an attractive woman, you've got a nudity buffer of maybe, 5 minutes before you've fully mapped out what she looks like naked") became the name for one of Fanboy Radio's Message Board ops.

Coupling fans will sympathize with my predicament: I had watched the first three seasons of Coupling on PBS. I watched up until the point when Steve and Susan discover they will have a baby. The other characters (Jeff, Jane, Sally, Patrick) all have dangling plotlines that need to be carried over. I didn't watch Coupling Season 4 until I popped in the DVD last night…and Jeff isn't in the first episode. Steve talks to him on the phone; Jeff is on a plane to the island of Lesbos (and yeah he probably thought it was like Paradise Island). There's a new character called Oliver, a geek who owns a comics\science fiction shop called Hellmouths. He's OK, but he's no Jeff. So I'm hoping, maybe Richard Coyle just took a vacation? Suffered the flu? Injured his leg? I watch episodes 2, 3, and 4, no Jeff at all. He's gone. What the fuck? It's like watching Seinfeld and suddenly Kramer is gone. After searching today on the Internet, I found out that Richard Coyle left the series because he was afraid of getting typecast as the Big Dummy. Which is what happened to Michael Richards, who played Kramer on Seinfeld, except that he made so much money from Seinfeld that he can afford not to work. Of course, the BBC doesn't pay Seinfeld type salaries and royalties, so Coyle took off without even doing a farewell episode.

The fourth season is still worth watching, even though it's not as good as the first three. Sally and Patrick get more screen time and provide the bulk of the laughs as Patrick finally gets tamed. (Another classic episode from the earlier seasons is "The Cupboard of Patrick's Love".) Steve (who is starting to look a bit old) and Susan's baby nervousness is a bit tiresome. It's surprising that Moffat didn't concentrate more on Jane, the crazy nympho bimbo who sleeps with just about anyone. Regardless of how it ends, I still think Coupling is one of the funniest shows ever made. It's still on PBS and BBC America infrequently, and you can rent the DVDs at NetFlix. Nuff said.

See also:

Stephen Moffat Interview on Season Four
Richard Coyle Interview on London Theater and Leaving Coupling

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Spoilers for Season 3 Finale ahead. In any given Nip/Tuck episode, there's a fare amount of blood and gore. It's gotten so bad that my wife, unable to stomach the realistic surgery scenes, gave up watching it a long time ago. In last night's finale (season three), Ryan Murphy outdid himself with scene after scene of mutilation. I thought the episode was scarier than the recent Texas Chainsaw Massacre remake. By the time it was over, we had: a finger cut off; a penis cut off; two bags of silicone removed from breasts without anesthesia; and about 11 people with their faces slashed.

The suspense for the two-part finale was built around the Slasher, the mime-like mutilator who went around destroying Dr. Troy and X handiwork for almost two years. I was surprised they kept the quest for the Slasher's identity running for so long. He first appeared midway through NT's second season, first attacking Sean and then Christian in the season ender. I assumed when Season 3 opened that this would quickly be resolved. NT's writers must have decided to prolong the story when they realized that the Slasher is the perfect anti-thesis to McNamara/Troy's practice. Everything that the doctors do to preserve or enhance physical beauty is undone by the Slasher. Every dramatic show needs a villain and in a show about plastic surgery, this is the one.

FX and Ryan Murphy milked this as much as possible. The Carver had his own blog on MySpace. People gossiped about who the Carver was. A lot of people thought it must be Dr. Quentin Costa, the new surgeon with plenty of problems and bad behavior. I never thought it was Costa for the following reasons: 1) He joined the cast in Season 3 and the Carver story started back in Season 2; 2) All the clues were being laid out for Costa like a trail of red herrings; 3) It just seemed way too simple if it was Costa. During the finale, I had jumped to the conclusion that the Carver was a woman: Dr. Liz Cruz, the anesthesiologist who put up with the bad boy doctors for far too long. Liz made perverted sense to me, because she had access to all the patient records and could order the drug the Carver used to incapacitate his victims.

But Murphy pulled a bait and switch. It was Costa all along. We saw his face, just before Costa went totally super-villain and bound McNamara/Troy to upright hospital gurneys (making them look a bit crucified). After a set of expository speeches, where Costa reveals his mad philosophy for destroying beauty, he sets upon torturing the doctors. Sean gets his pinkie chopped off. Before any more digits are clipped, Christian offers himself as a victim. You may think it shows us that Christian loves Sean, but I think it's because he loves money: he knows the practice can't survive without Sean's masterful hands! Carver/Costa agrees to Christian's offer, but only if he ups the ante by taking off an entire hand. The Carver tries to make Christian lop his own hand off (I remember Hannibal Lecter did the same thing) when Detective Kit (Rhona Mitra) shoots Costa in the back. I was a bit surprised there wasn't much blood from that bullet. Later, we find that Detective Tit-Kit is actually the Carver's sister. The shooting was faked. The Carver escaped from the morgue, and by the show's end he's in Spain with Kit sipping sangria and looking for his next victim.

By this point, Nip/Tuck is like a traffic accident. It's horrible but I can't stop watching. Even those scenes with Sean's stupid son, Matt, and his involvement with the racist blonde girl. Matt was forced at gunpoint to chop off the penis of a transsexual, which was terrible, but I had a feeling that Murphy came up with this to intercut with the Carver torturing the doctors. The plot holes are just so big that even a show like Buffy has more connection to reality. How can Kit shoot the Carver without having a team of forensic specialists come in and examine the body? How did the Florida police allow Kit to come in, take over the Carver investigation, and fuck all the suspects? How come McNamara/Troy uncover the Kit-Carver connection and not the Florida police? When I was watching this, it reminded me of that Denise Richards movie, Wild Things. The one where you get about five different revelations at the end and they are all so crazy.

The amazing shit is that by the final scene, everything is reset back to the beginning of episode one. Sean and Julia might be reunited thanks to the baby. Matt's tired of transsexuals and racists and wants a little normalcy at home. And Christian? He's the one I feel sorry for, he lost his masterpiece, Kimber. Even though he repaired Kimber's injuries, her mind is either better or worse because of the Carver (depending on your POV). I suppose I'll have to watch next year and see if she comes back. Nuff said.

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A lot of people are complaining that this year's Curb Your Enthusiasm just isn't as good as previous seasons. I think it's hard to compare against Season 4, which featured a number of ongoing plots that offered plenty of comedic situations: Larry getting a "free pass" from his wife Cheryl to have an affair on their tenth anniversary; Larry trying to fulfill this goal with a filthy mouthed Arabic woman hilariously portrayed by Gina Gershon; and playing the lead role in Mel Brooks' The Producers. The last episode took this joke further than I would have believed possible, as Larry David really did perform some musical numbers from the Broadway hit.

In the just concluded Season 5, Larry David doesn't have such monumental tasks to overcome. Instead he has a quest to find out if he was adopted, if his dog is a racist, and if he can figure out a way to avoid donating his kidney to Richard Lewis. Larry David's curmudgeonly persona on Curb is just as selfish as the fab four on Seinfeld. If this season was about anything, it was about Larry's undeniable selfishness. His best friend throughout the series, the comedian Richard Lewis, is experiencing kidney failure. At the bottom of the donor list, Lewis needs a new kidney pretty quickly. Larry and his manager Jeff get tested and sure enough, they are both viable donors. After a childish game, Larry is selected to make the sacrifice for his friend-but he just can't bear to give up his organ. One of the best episodes has Larry pretending to be an orthodox Jew so that he can buddy up to the doctor heading up the kidney donor program. Larry takes things to such an extreme, that he invites the doctor to Aspen (Larry hates to ski) and even swaps wives with Jeff (because Cheryl is a shiksa). The scene where Larry concocts a story about his life with Susie is funny, but it's even funnier when Larry tries to crawl into bed with her. I always thought there is a great deal of sexual tension between Larry and Susie.

The last episode resolves the Richard Lewis situation in an unexpected way. Larry's private investigator tells Larry that he is adopted. His real parents live in Arizona, and on their first meeting, Larry realizes that they are not Jewish. This revelation turns Larry's world upside down. He enters the world of Protestants with abandon, accompanying his newfound parents everywhere. When a church visit makes Larry revisit the meaning of friendship and self-sacrifice, he rushes back home to give his kidney to Lewis. Things go wrong, as they always do when Larry tries to do unselfish deeds. Richard Lewis winds up healthy on the beach in Hawaii (sipping drinks with a healthy babe) while Larry is on his deathbed. The Rabbi from Season 4's "The Survivor" shows up and asks Larry if he wants to be forgiven for anything he had done in the past. We see all the myriad ways that Larry has been mean to people throughout the past five seasons. And then Larry dies. He dies, and goes to heaven. Dustin Hoffman appears as Larry's guide to the afterlife. Heaven is a pretty good place: Ben Hogan wants to play golf with Larry and Marilyn Monroe is a big fan of Seinfeld. Larry even got a hall pass from Cheryl to fool around until she arrives. But Larry cannot even make Heaven work out properly; an argument with the Guide sends him back to the land of the living.

This episode gives us more insight to Larry's wife. I love Cheryl Hines-I think she's cute, sexy, and sweet. But I can't understand why this woman remains married to such a creep. Let's face it; Larry David's character on the show is somewhere just below Basil Fawlty in terms of meanness and cruelty. In one episode, Larry tells Cheryl that if he knew a nuclear bomb would be detonated in Los Angeles, he wouldn't wait to pick her up and get out of town. When they are re-writing their wedding vows, Larry doesn't like the clause that says they'll be together forever-he thinks they'll just be together on Earth, not Heaven. Larry makes big deals out of small things, like when Cheryl wants him to go to a bar for a drink before dinner. And the whole "free pass" thing is just too wild for a sweet girl like Cheryl. But now we know why Cheryl has endured all this cruelty for so long. When Larry's heart stops beating during "The End", the first thing that Cheryl does is ask the lawyer how much money Larry left her-and to make sure that Jeff repays Cheryl for a debt. OK, this makes more sense now: Cheryl married this mean old man for his Seinfeld money!

Is this The End of Curb Your Enthusiam? Larry David said in a Sept. 2005 interview that he wasn't sure. This sure feels like a farewell episode to me. I think this series has been consistently original, bold, and funny, but maybe it's time for CYE to disappear while it's on top. Nuff said.

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