Undeclared
Just finished this series the other night.
Well, it's no Freaks and Geeks, but then few shows are. I think the half-hour format was a bad call. Geeks had the time to take familiar story ideas and make them its own, but Undeclared's weakest episodes regularly gives in to normal "Well, it's the 20-minute make, so everything's fine now" conventions. As a result, several of the characters come off as pretty thin.
But the series is worth seeing, and there are some episodes that just knock it clean out of the park. The "Truth or Dare" episode alone makes up for all the sub-par episodes combined. And the series has a couple of aces up its sleeve. The first one is Perry, whose deadpan delivery cuts wide swaths through most of the main characters' dithering ("This might cheer you up: YOU'RE HOTTER THAN MOST CHICKS!"). The second is Eric, played by Jason Segal from Freaks and Geeks, who manages to take a conceivably one-dimensional character and not only make him sympathetic, but the funniest character on the show. Plus, his sidekicks are David Krumholtz and Kyle Gass, so that's just gold (watch for their reunion in the Tenacious D movie). Eric's speech about starting his own internet? One of the classics. "Oh, I'm sorry! I didn't know you knew so much about the INTERNET!" Oh, man. That's the good stuff.
Well, it's no Freaks and Geeks, but then few shows are. I think the half-hour format was a bad call. Geeks had the time to take familiar story ideas and make them its own, but Undeclared's weakest episodes regularly gives in to normal "Well, it's the 20-minute make, so everything's fine now" conventions. As a result, several of the characters come off as pretty thin.
But the series is worth seeing, and there are some episodes that just knock it clean out of the park. The "Truth or Dare" episode alone makes up for all the sub-par episodes combined. And the series has a couple of aces up its sleeve. The first one is Perry, whose deadpan delivery cuts wide swaths through most of the main characters' dithering ("This might cheer you up: YOU'RE HOTTER THAN MOST CHICKS!"). The second is Eric, played by Jason Segal from Freaks and Geeks, who manages to take a conceivably one-dimensional character and not only make him sympathetic, but the funniest character on the show. Plus, his sidekicks are David Krumholtz and Kyle Gass, so that's just gold (watch for their reunion in the Tenacious D movie). Eric's speech about starting his own internet? One of the classics. "Oh, I'm sorry! I didn't know you knew so much about the INTERNET!" Oh, man. That's the good stuff.
posted by Jeff at 2:45 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home