Flight of the Concords -- 1/25

Flight of the Conchords
Season 2, Episode 2 - "The New Cup"

This episode was pretty hilarious and didn't feel at all stale in the way the first episode of the season sort of did. It had more of the bizarre nuances of Jermaine and Bret's apartment life, more band meetings at the consulate, more Mel/Doug weirdness, more of Eugene being creepy, and just about everything else that there was to love about the first season. Furthermore, both of the songs were instantly memorable with fantastic sequences to go along with them. The season premiere was certainly enjoyable, but this episode was clearly on a whole other level, maybe because it stuck much closer to the tried and true formula of the first season, which hopefully sticks around.

The plot of the episode is particularly preposterous, and involves Bret buying a new tea cup for $2.70, making their checking account $2.70 overdrawn, which leads to their power and water being shut off (evidently all of their utilities cost less than 2 dollars and 70 cents). Jermaine points out that they already have a "cup roster" to designate times for each of them to use their one shared tea cup, but alas, Bret is insistent on having his own. The wave of financial problems caused by the cup leads to Bret having to sell his guitar, and so Flight of the Concords goes on stage at a gig with only Jermaine actually playing and Bret air-guitaring and mimicking the sounds with his mouth. In probably the funniest scene of the episode, Murray trashes them in a review he writes for the New Zealand consulate newsletter, giving them 2 out of 100 stars, and saying that the song was barely audible with only the "dad guitar" playing (Murray doesn't know what a bass is).

After Bret tries unsuccessfully to raise money by selling super-straws,--big straws made by combining normal sized straws (for people who need to drink from really far away)--and a plan to get paid for giving Mel back massages ends equally unsuccessfully and far more creepily, Bret and Jermaine decide to become male prostitutes. Jermaine sells Bret on the idea with a musical sequence about how everyone's always checking out his junk, with lyrics such as "If you party with the party prince you get two complementary after dinner mints." The whole thing is done with this fast-motion effect that looks like something out of a Beastie Boys video, and is infinitely funnier than either of the two songs from the previous episode. Eugene realizes that Bret and Jermaine are "prostituting" in front of his building, and doesn't much care for it, but suggests that they could try the hotels down by the airport (something which he assures Jermaine he learned in a book--a normal book).

Jermaine heads down to the airport hotels, leaving Bret by himself with a band meeting with just him, Muarry, and Murray's new Nigerian friend that has let Murray in on his perfectly legitimate, and in no way a huge scam business investment. Murray and the Nigerian both agree that Jermaine prostituting himself is wrong, and so Bret rushes to save the day in another hilarious song in which Bret insists that Jermaine can "say no to being a man-ho." In what I think is a first for the series, Eugene is even included in on the music, as he has a little interlude on steel drums.

This episode was compltetely over the top and prepostorous, and I loved every minute of it. It showed me, much more than the season premiere did, that the show didn't run out of ideas in the first season. Jokes like the "cup roster" are much more in line with what the show was about in the early part of the first season, like in the first episode where Bret illustarates on the chalkboard when he's designated time to work on his secret project (his "hair helmet"). The two songs in the episode are both excellent, and are funny on their own merits, whereas, towards the end of the first season, it seemed like they were just sort of a way to be a bridge between scenes and weren't usually all that entertaining. I can't wait for next week now.

Flight of the Conchords -- New Season

Flight of the Conchords
Season 2, Episode 1 - "A Good Opportunity"

When I saw the first "Flight of the Concords" episode back when it debuted in the summer of 2007, I immediately loved it. The off-beat, deadpan humor was right up my alley, and the musical sequences were nothing short of brilliant. Over the course of the first season, though, the show seemed to have lost some steam. It was still enjoyable, but seemed to lack the panache that it had from the start. The musical sequences were fewer and farther between, and not nearly as satisfying which, in turn, further exposed the fact that the show's plot is usually very barebones and often times not that different from episode to episode.

As Bret and Jermaine--the two members of the real life group Flight of the Conchords, which has had a following for some time before they got their HBO gig--started doing interviews, it became apparent that the reason why the show seemed to fall apart towards the end of the first season was because they had pretty much exhausted their catalog of songs that they could fit into an episode. The truly memorable songs like "Business Time" and "The Humans are Dead" were song that they'd been perfecting for years and had a proven track record, having been performed at any number of live shows before the HBO show ever started. It was understandable then, when it was announced that "Flight of the Conchords" would end after its second season, which itself was pushed back from its originally planned start date and just began last night. The pressure of coming up with new songs for each episode is, understandably, exhausting for a band with only two members. With all of this stacked against it, I was only midly excited for the season 2 premiere last night, to the point where I actually forgot about it at first and had to catch on the West Coast HBO feed later (it was also available online, something I also forgot about). The episode felt more like the end of season 1 than it did the beginning, but it made me laugh, and I can plesently report that, for all its faults, I'm glad the show is back.

The basic purpose of the premiere is to retcon the finale of Season 1, in which, despite still being pretty much incompetant, success falls into Murray's lap as his new band the "Crazy Dogzz" becomes a worldwide hit. This is accomplished through a revelation that the Crazy Dogzz's hit song is actually exactly identical to a Polish song recorded 13 years earlier. This leads to one of the funnier bits in the episode, as Murray painstakingly tries to poll Bret and Jermaine as to whether its "bad" or "normal" for this to happen, even as the decision has apparently already been made for him and repo men come to start taking stuff out of his office. The demise of the Crazy Dogzz couldn't have come at a worse time for Murray, as it comes after his original band has decided that they're better off without him and decide to manage themselves.

Things start out well for Bret and Jermaine as they strike it out on their own as their discovered by an ad agency after a gig (where they've apparently moved on from playing nothing except "Who likes to rock the party? I like to rock the party!") that wants them to write a jingle for a "feminine toothpaste" ad. The ad agency people--one of which is Greg Proops, who I haven't seen in anything since "Whose Line is it Anyway" and a woman that I didn't recognize--like the jingle they write, in spite of the fact that it was 18 minutes in length with much of it, as Jermaine admits, not really having anything to do with toothpaste. They like it so much, in fact, that they want to include Flight of the Conchords in the ad, turned them into their feminie toothpaste spokesman. The ad agency characters are kind of weird, and these scenes were really only funny because of Bret and Jermaine themselves. At times it seemed like the ad people were supposed to be playing the "straight man" roles, but at other times they came across as just sort of creepy, and I wasn't sure if they were supposed to be creepy in a funny way and failing, or if they were just beeing creepy unintentionally. Maybe its just that Greg Proops looks kind of creepy in general. At any rate, trouble brews when it becomes clear that Bret and Jermaine don't have green cards (or know what they are), thus setting up an opportunity for redemption for Murray, who of course used to work at the New Zealand consulate.

The songs in the episode weren't all that memorable, but weren't horrible. I did like the very operatic sequence of Murray's "Rejected!" song out on the balcony of his office. As I described at the beginning of the post, it seems like they're still suffering from sort of a writer's block as far as coming up with new songs is concerned. But the episode still kept me entertained, mostly because the surreal "band meetings" were still as funny as they've always been: "Look at all these gold records they've won! Whereas you guys only have those two Grammys. And they're not even real! I had to make those myself!"