Flat And Red And Shiny Inside: Jack of All Trades Disc One(2000)

Yeah. I know I said I was going to the second Undergrads disc, but the last two episodes--the so-called 'tighter continuity' ones--so pissed me off I decided to go on to the next stop on the 'Tom looks at television he vaguely remembers liking' train. Because it's so much better.

Besides, this disc ties in with the unintentional theme of this week, namely, 'Bruce Campbell Is Way Cool.'

This is one of two half-hour shows that replaced Hercules: The Legendary Journeys on Sam Raimi's Action Pack syndicated package (I didn't care so much for the other one, Cleopatra 2525 in spite of the wicked hotness of Gina Torres and Victoria Pratt), and the premise...well, the theme song explains it in the most general strokes:

To fill in the specifics: Bruce Campbell is Jack Styles, the post-Revolutionary War era's answer to James West. Concerned with French expansionism under Napoleon (Not to mention Jack's, ummmm, expansion into his niece) President Jefferson re-assigns Jack to Pullau Pullau, an island in the West Indies under French rule. Jack is teamed with 'mildly disgruntled' scientist (Artemis Gordon to Jack's James West) Emilia Rothschild (Angela Dotschin), and uses the local folk legend of The Daring Dragoon to aid in his campaign of desception and espionage against Pullau Pullau's governer, Croque (Stuart Devine), and Croque's right hand man, Captain Brogard (Stephen Papps).

Now let's get this out of the way right now: Jack of All Trades is a Renaissance Pictures/Tappart and Raimi series, and is done in that style--namely, that it's a mixture of broad comedy and adventure where the characters use anachronistic modern dialogue. If you're familiar with the style from Hercules and Xena, you'll know if its for you.

If you can stand that style, then there's a lot to like in here. Obviously, a lot of that lot rests on the shoulders of Campbell himself, who plays his role of Jack to the hilt. This is Bruce cranking it to eleven, reveling in his 'Ugly American' role while also presenting to us a character who is as good as people say, and isn't afraid to say so. And he does work well with Dotschin, who tends too much toward the broad, especially when she tries to express exasperation. But then, Dotschin is responsible for a lot of the steampunkish tech that surfaces throughout the series, so she can be forgiven her mugging.

Since this is the first disc of a Renaissance Pictures series, a lot of the episodes seem designed to set up satellite characters who would drift in and out of the series every once in a while. None of them really took except for Napoleon, played by Verne Troyer. It's obvious that Troyer was meant to be a joke casting, but the man does strive to give Napoleon a sinister second side to him. Some of the others--rival spies Martin and Rupert Smythe, pirate Blackbeard, and Jack's ex-partner and lover Kentucky Sue--don't aren't as effective. None of them really have the appeal that the satellite characters that were introduced during Hercules, so it's fortunate none of them seem to have returned.

However, the truly amazing thing about Jack of All Trades is that the series presents done-in-one comedy adventures that were all roughly twenty minutes long.

I'll repeat that last bit. Each episode was twenty minutes long.

Nothing, but nothing is wasted. The show runs at a quick pace which manages to break out the jokes while keeping the viewer focused on the story at hand. Granted, the stories are sometimes quite simple: Jack and Emilia have to rescue Ben Franklin from Blackbeard; Jack and Emilia have to destroy a super-cannon, etc.--but it works, and works well. And even though the series ended up not being converted to an hour-long format much like Cleopatra 2525 did, I'm sort of grateful it stayed true to its original precept. It knew what it wanted to do and stuck to its gun.

Provided you know what you're getting into, and if your tolerance for the Renaissance style and/or love of Bruce Campbell is high, you might enjoy this loads. Although it might leave you like me, wondering yet again why no one seems able to capture Campbell's unique style and charisma on television for any length of time.

　

Flat And Red And Shiny Inside: Welcome To Bizzaro-Sunnydale!

(Note: This is one of ten essays I did for my old LiveJournal prior to my adopting the 10 Statements format. Since most of them are pretty funny, and many of them have some interesting insights still, I'm going to be posting them here. If you want to say it's for 'historical significance,' that's cool.)

Once more, my Netflix queue works in mysterious ways. As I'm working my way through the complete Buffy The Vampire Slayer series, I receive the second of three discs covering the first season of...Hex. Why I didn't get the first disc first I will never know.

What is Hex? Hex is a British series co-produced by Sony which represents the peculiar obsession British television has with finding every possible way to rip off Buffy, something they've been doing since Russell T. Davies patterned the revival of Doctor Who after the Whedon-verse.

(According to Paul O'Brien of If Destroyed, Still True, this isn't the most baldfaced rip-off of Buffy the Brits have produced. That honor goes to ITV's Demons which, among other things, features a mentor figure named...Rupert.)

I would seriously, seriously like to listen in to the pitch meeting for this series. "Well, you know, everyone loves that Vampire Slayer show, right? Well, what if we do something like that and set it in a boarding school 'cause, you know, that would make it exotic to the Yanks, right? We can make the girl a...a WITCH, that's it! Not only a witch, but the latest in a long line of witches, you know, like the Slayers only with magical powers. Besides, they've got a witch on that show, and everyone loves that series with the three hot girls who are witches, what do they call it? That's right...Cursed. And her best friend...well, she can't be a witch anymore, so--I know! We'll have the mysterious boyfriend type kill her so she can be a...a ghost, and the great thing is we can still make her a lesbian like the best friend on that show, and give her a crush on the heroine, and a girlfriend who's also a ghost! And that boyfriend type, we should show how edgy we are by making him the chase villain...and he can be...I know! Everyone liked Angel, right? So we can make him a....a fallen angel! That's different from a vampire, right? And since we're going to be making it for you, we can put in more violence, and have our heroine swear and all, 'cause that'd make our show more edgy, you know?"

Jeez-us.

Watching Hex is like watching what Buffy would be like if it was being produced by Dan DiDio. We're talking a series that lasted two seasons that piles on the sex, violence and curse words (I actually had to rewind one segment of the show to confirm I heard Cassie, the main character, utter the word 'fuck') since the producers felt it would make Hex more adult, not realizing that the characterization and plotline of the show is...

No, we're not trying to be Buffy..why you ask?

Well, there is not much in the way of characterization and plotlines. Our Buffy analogue, Cassie (played by vacuous blonde Christina Cole), spend far more time having things done to her than doing things. In the three stories on this disc, she is possessed by some sort of bitch-creature so she can have sex with the boyfriend/chase villian Azazael (played by the thoroughly bland Michael Fassbinder) so she can become pregnant with his child so she can have said child aborted so it can be claimed by Azazael and raised as his son Malachi.... Given that the series ascribes telepathic and telekinetic abilities to Cassie, she does absolutely nothing with them, preferring apparently to be terrorized and traumatized by what happens around her. She does so little, in fact, that the third of the episodes on the disc drags in a Faith analogue in Ella (Laura Pyper, who looks uncomfortably like Shannon Doherty...who was in Cursed, come to think of it) to do all the bad-assery stuff.

The thing that is at turns the funniest and the most risible thing about Hex is watching the segments that obviously were inspired by similar scenes in Buffy. The episodes are rife with scenes of Cassie and her best-friend-turned-ghost Thelma (the rather...healthily endowed Jemima Rooper) walking the grounds of the school talking and joking. Unfortunately, those scenes show that while the series was meant to be Sky One's answer to Buffy, they didn't understand the question in the least. And the break-up scene between Cassie and normal boyfriend Troy (Joseph Morgan, who looks uncomfortably like William Katt), it's obvious its meant to resonate with a similar scene between Buffy and Riley in Scene Five--only we know so little about both characters that it doesn't work at all. Even the opening credit sequence is a much, much too uncomfortable for my tastes emulation of the one for Charmed, with Garbage's "#1 Crush" swapped in for Love Spit Love's version of "How Soon Is Now?"

I'm of two minds here about continuing. The episodes are so uniformly dreadful that I'm tempted to remove the other two discs from my queue. And yet, there's a certain train wreck fascination to the series, as you wonder if they can get anything more wrong than they already have. It's like Hex is the mildly retarded cousin of its inspiration, and she's trying her best to fit it; you just can't help but forgive her ineptness.