The back half of this segment transitions into a daffy parody of the domestic status quo of the Mad Men era, with White Daddy, White Mommy, and Pint-Sized Michael Jackson forming a Looney Tunes version of the nuclear-family unit. The show briefly toys with a tricky metaphysical ethics puzzle, weighing one boy’s innocence against a sweeping legacy of music that changed countless lives, before it arrives at the troubling question: Is an artist’s suffering ultimately justified if their creative output is as groundbreaking, as essential, as classic as Michael Jackson’s? No, “The Middle” concludes, but it quickly hustles into weirder and more riotous territory. Their bad ideas ping-pong off of one another, becoming denser and more powerful, until this particular scheme culminates with them snatching the boy in a burlap sack and taking him to a motel. After sending their slave pals out of the frying pan and into the fire (“We win Vietnam, don’t we?”) Jeff and Sharee decide to intervene in the famously troubled childhood of the King of Pop himself, a pint-sized Michael Jackson. Jeff and Sharee’s pure intentions go awry in an inspired comic scenario that’s as surreal as this ludicrous premise can allow. Such as, oh, freeing a trio of slaves with no thought as to what they’d do once dropped off over 100 years later, then leading them straight into the arms of a Vietnam recruiter. Mortal follies create richer characters and riper comedic scenarios. This self-involvement is a vital character trait because, to put it simply, perfect people are not funny.
Jeff and Sharee can be self-centered people: She insists on extending their stay in the Cro-Magnon sex party as he is repeatedly raped by cavewomen, he hung her out to dry back in the Salem witch trials, and they agree to return Michael Jackson to his abusive father because raising a kid turned out to be a major drag. Their efforts to right some of history’s assorted travesties - slavery, Joe Jackson’s traumatic abuse of his son, Michael - always come from a Millennial-ish sense of social justice, but invariably backfire due to bad luck or, more frequently, their own shortsightedness and laziness. Through caveman times, the antebellum South, and Gary, Indiana, during the ’60s, Jeff and Sharee repeatedly follow an Ilana-and-Abbi-tested pattern: going out on a limb to do good, then crashing to the forest floor as that limb snaps beneath them. The insatiable sexual appetite, the contempt for personal body-care rituals, the penchant for toplessness - it all adds up to heaven on Earth for Sharee, and tension brews when Jeff yanks her out of it. This makes an eminent sort of sense, what with Glazer’s characters always having been defined by a streak of primal id. As they spell out the parallel when arguing amongst themselves, Sharee and Jeff hit a satisfying symmetry in this installment, placing him at the disadvantage while she finds a deranged version of paradise among the perpetually ’rect cave people. Sharee immediately takes to a group of prehistoric cave-dwellers, claiming her rightful throne as Sex Queen only moments after tumbling into the time period. There may be some truth to that dusty old dictum about half of acting being reacting, after all. “The Middle” randomly deposits Jeff and Sharee in three time periods, and the miniseries is never better than when it lets these two skilled comic actors find their place in a new setting.
(Glazer’s characters are virtually indistinguishable from one another, beyond the fact that Ilana would never step within a 100-foot radius of Sharee’s boyfriend and has probably had more orgasms than the entire population of the San Fernando Valley.) The main difference? Abbi’s usual role as co-conspirator is replaced with Jeff’s position as an objector. Broad City has found fabulous success by throwing a close-knit pair of characters with infinite comedic rapport into a variety of situations to see how they both react, and Time Traveling Bong follows the same basic formula. It’s near impossible to discuss Time Traveling Bong without mentioning Broad City, and not just because they share a creative team.
0 kommentar(er)
