The Bishop on Extras: season two, episode one

If the first episode is anything to go by, the new season of Ricky Gervais and Steven Merchant’s Extras augers faintly darker than what has come before. The sets, once relatively varied, here consist largely of the sets of the shows-within-the-show themselves; the shadowy, thrown together, do-it-yourself backstage of filmic artifice. The characters, by and large, are either nastier or even more hopeless—not only have they failed to grow, they’ve regressed. The mood is grimmer, the script less cheeky and more matter-of-fact. And if the Andy Millman of season one was David Brent on valium, this is season one’s Andy on more of the same—or maybe coming down: even less congenial, never suffering fools gladly and finding everyone, even himself, a fool. It is as if Gervais and Merchant are saying—ironically, given their own rapid rise to prominence—that failure doesn’t simply end with success.

In fact, this new season of Extras shows that an ending doesn’t always end with an ending, either. The arc, and the gimmick, of the show appeared to burn out—a little too quickly* for the Bishop’s liking—last year: Andy finding his way out of the shadows into the spotlight, Maggie (Ashley Jensen) getting her life together, the two consolidating their friendship and affirming their not-so-bad-after-all dependence on each other. But what Gervais and Merchant have done, cleverly, is fall back on an old idea—in a sense, Extras has now become The Office. Andy’s sitcom is being made, and he discovers that creating art is just as subject to bureaucracy and human failing as pushing paper at Wernham Hogg.

There are not many outward laughs here, but that doesn’t seem to matter. One or two friends of the Bishop found the pair’s first collaboration, The Office, too cringe-inducing to be funny. This is both fair enough and, of course, a matter of taste. But while Extra’s is—in tone—The Office–lite, it is important to come to both programs aware that they were never really meant to be funny; they are—if The Bishop may reclaim a related word made almost useless by those TV Guide–style critics—poignant. They are dramas of their time, because it is only now that we have made enough mistakes in pursuit of dramatic verity that we can build narrative out of not just small victories, but small losses and small draws as well. Few programs stand up to repeated viewings; both these shows demand it. This is not to say there are laughs missed the first time ’round; rather, contrariwise, there are nuances that warrant attention once one has gotten past the broader edge of the comedy.**

If observational sitcom humour entered the baroque phase with Seinfeld, Gervais has taken it into its classical period. Larry David, doing something very similar to this in his Seinfeld follow-up Curb Your Enthusiasm, never quite hits the same chimes of verity, because one is always wanting pull him aside and tell him to shut the hell up. Gervais’s Millman, by contrast, is a man who can’t be shut up, because, like most of us, he has, metaphorically speaking, already stepped in the dog turd and can now only wipe it off or pretend it isn’t there. Gervais is also a much better actor than David. His petulant shrug of the shoulders after being dressed down by his boss is so human you could shake hands with it; and when he walks off behind the ‘set’ in the last minute of this story, head slumped, unhappy with what his sitcom project has become, he is like the anti-Olivier, suggesting not that less is more, or more is less, but just-so is just-so.

If The Office was near enough the best there is at what it did, Extras is not quite so tightly wrought. There is, as with all British TV, a good cast (particular credit to Martin Savage, who plays the BBC Head of Comedy with the calm authority that comes from needing nothing but that calm—and the threat that it might, at any second, break), but Maggie seems as lost as-character as she is in character. Her hapless offsiding is in some sense integral, but became flabbier as last season progressed: neither foil nor counterpoint to Andy, or even mirror, but largely repetition. Here she has little to do apart from serve as psychic punching bag and make Orlando Bloom look a fool—though the latter is probably not such a bad thing to have to do.

There are also implausabilities. Despite its humourous potential, it is hard to see Maggie as the cible d'amour of a desperate Bloom; likewise Shaun ‘Barry’ Williamson’s catering table theft was well timed and amusing, but the stuff of early Simpsons and out of place here. Nonetheless, the Bishop was pleased to discover that Extras has found somewhere to go after so neatly—if hurriedly—wrapping up last year.

*And conveniently: your Lutheran locutor never really bought Andy’s sudden ability to sell his script, the excitement with which it was rushed forward by the BBC, or the idea that they’d cast a patently uncharismatic unknown in the lead. This may be similar to what happened in the creation of The Office, but that was real life, and doesn’t have to make sense. Drama—and even comedy—does.

**Gervais, in the guise of Millman, rails against ‘broad comedy’ in this story—a familiar trope if one has seen Gervais and Merchant speak on the subject. Yet there is broad comedy in both Extras and The Office—indeed, this is the source of most of the actual laughs. Merchant, in particular, with his sym-pathetic goggle eyes and abnormal height, cannot seem to help being broadly hilarious, and would not be out of place in Little Britain or The League of Gentlemen, shows with a style the duo are actively trying to eschew.

The Bishop on Curb Your Enthusiasm

The Bishop would be doing little more than observing the obvious if he were to note that Larry David can’t act. And yet the very idea of Larry David acting, or not acting, is at the heart your humble heuristicator’s gentle enjoyment of Curb Your Enthusiasm.

The Bishop says David can’t act, which is not the same as saying he is not the right actor for this show. Acting (an overrated art in any case) would, in this case, simply allow our man the freedom to trek beyond his natural territories of piqued, bemused and nonplussed. But Curb Your Enthusiasm knows what it is and is what it is; and, like Ricky Gervais and Steven Merchant’s The Office, is not so much interested in freedom as restraint. Kenneth Tynan once wrote of Samuel Beckett that he showed us how much drama could afford to leave it out; David, if the comparison does not seem a conceit, is—perhaps unconsciously, perhaps not—doing much the same thing. Beckett’s problem was that his actors didn’t—and still don’t—know how to handle him. And, while one struggles to imagine the likes of David finding his way onto the serious stage, the Bishop can’t help feeling that in David’s reticent style—he never quite seems to be in the same scene with his fellow performers, never quite shedding the persona of the harried writer wandering, unwanted script advice in hand, onto the set—a suitable partner in crime. At least, one suspects, Beckett would have enjoyed David’s inability to get through most of his funnier scenes without breaking into a self-conscious smile.

It’s no overstatement to say that David has taken the dictum to write (and perform) what you know about as far as it will go. Apart from a not terribly successful stint on Saturday Night Live, David has written about almost no-one and nothing that isn’t, literally, himself (Seinfeld fans will notice elements not just of its four main characters, but even minor roles and walk-on parts in David’s various moods). Even more specifically, with Curb Your Enthusiasm we have, almost literally, a show about what David would do if he were making a show about what he would do if he were making a show about himself. The Bishop would hardly be surprised to see David’s next project open on David, sitting at his desk writing the opening scene of a series which opens on David, sitting at his desk . . .

In any case, David knows his subject matter backwards; the viewer’s amusement, then, rests solely in whether that viewer finds David a matter worthy of being subjected to. The Bishop does. And while the series’ other recurring characters are not so much—as written—characters as they are shticks, the series’ improvisational format (David writes a seven-odd page outline and the cast ad libs from there) allows them to find comic pathologies writers rarely do. In particular, the Bishop has been impressed by Cheryl Hines as Cheryl David, providing a foil not just for David-the-character’s quasi-misanthropic antics but David-the-actor’s rudimentary range; always grounding the couple in reality. With a face that would not have been out of place in Knots Landing (invitingly attractive, even pert, despite a certain duckishness), she seems neither naturally funny nor psycho-veristic; and that, perhaps—paradoxically—is why she works so well here.

A comment must also be made about the direction, which goes some way to showing that writing is not the only craft in which the cinema has been eclipsed by the TV. In episode two of season two, ‘Trick or Treat’, Larry Charles, who has worked previously on Seinfeld, makes a virtue of movement, duelling with David’s face and finding the nervous energy in his laconic physicality. In fact this episode is a treat all ’round, David human rather than obliquely acerbic (as he is for far too much of that season)—and reminding us—or the Bishop, anyway—that, outside the laborious, declamatory world of Arthur Miller, what we like to see is the loser win every now and again.

The Bishop on spin

The Bishop has always had a bit of a soft spot for Al Gore. A two-time presidential hopeful, he is often derided by his critics as charm-free—and perhaps he is—but for those intellectually sufficient to follow what he says, his arguments take on a certain unprepossessing charm of their own. An Inconvenient Truth, then—Gore’s documentary-cum-PowerPoint presentation on global warming—could be seen as a wrestling match between who Gore is and what he says. The result is something of a draw.

There is no point in pretending, even for a second, that this is a documentary, or any other sort of film. Whether or not Gore chooses to run in 2008 (your pontificating pontiff suspects that he is tired, and won’t), this is campaign commercial, an advertisement for the issue and the man himself. There is nothing cinematic about An Inconvenient Truth, nothing that could make the experience of seeing it in-theatre different from watching it on TV; or even—but for a few charts and a moment of communion between Gore and a cherry picker—hearing it, perhaps in the car on the way to work, on CD.

As political piece, as with all forms of advertising, the only way to judge An Inconvenient Truth’s efficacy is in hindsight, via public opinion—and the reports have been, for the most part, and perhaps surprisingly, superb. (The website Rotten Tomatoes, which compiles the opinions of various mainstream and Internet critics in a yeh-or-nay (‘fresh’ or ‘rotten’) fashion, gives it a remarkable 92%.) The Bishop imagines left-wing liberals will (or, rather, have) adore(d) it, while for liberal centrists, the environment may, while the film is still warm, now take its place among more personally relevant Democratic issues: health care, education, employment and such. Pure centrists, or non-conservative sceptics (such as your ecologically-uncertain evangelical himself*), may be inclined to give the topic a second look. But for conservatives of all shapes and sizes, sitting up straight and paying attention will be a little like being cornered by one’s parents for a talk on the birds and the bees—only aged twenty-five, instead of the usual twelve.

Watching An Inconvenient Truth, the Bishop was reminded of a comment by Australian comedian John Safran: ‘You’re too stupid to be an atheist’. Unequipped with first-hand knowledge of the facts, and unable to make much of them even if we were, most of us can only take—or not take—what Gore tells us about the future of hurricanes, polar ice caps and the like on faith. And while, as philosophy, the scientific method can fall back on its rigorous standards (and certainly in opposition to non-naturalistic worldviews), we have only individual scientists' word that they have followed those standards—and that they have been successful in doing so. But this is matter of meta-heuristics, not one of politics, and in Gore’s favour he has the demeanour of one who is, as much as anyone can be, incapable of falsehood.

Indeed it seems, on face value, that Gore would make as good a presidential candidate as anyone likely to run for that office. He is a Southern Democrat, which means he can expect to give his party one red state.** He is religious. He is, in presentation, modest and self-effacing (though the Bishop can clearly see the necessary haughter of a man who believes he knows best. Many times throughout An Inconvenient Truth, he makes reference to this or that eminent ‘friend’, and the Bishop cannot be sure whether this is because he ever-so-slightly smarmy, or in order to assure us that he actually has friends). At almost six-foot-two and square-built, he has perhaps the ideal physiology of a president, and can add to his masculinity resume both high school football and voluntary service in Vietnam. He has immense experience in Washington, but grew up on a farm. And his intellect has never been in doubt. Why, then, has he struggled?

The Bishop suspects it might be that Gore—with all the self-awareness of a high-school hall monitor—has no conception of how to entertain. He knows what entertainment is—he’s seen as much of it as Tipper will allow—and yet, as any parrot owner knows, even a bird can be taught to speak without knowing how to talk. And faced with conclusive evidence that he is neither engaging nor funny, he stoops to compensate; but hearing Gore joke about his absent sense of humour, one can do no more than swallow hard and try to laugh, in much the same way one would if a terminal bowel cancer patient made a quip about feeling a little shit.

What Gore needs is Nick Naylor (Arron Eckhart), the tobacco lobbyist and spin doctor of Thank You For Smoking. Intelligently cast, Ekhart is just self-effacing enough—and surrounded by just enough other hustlers (he often approaches his contemporaries with the expression of a doe caught in headlights)—to come across as sympathetic as he is smooth.

Katie Holmes, by contrast, is ridiculously miscast; as a journalist who goes down to get the low-down on her subjects, Holmes brings neither the savvy nor the sex appeal to liberate anyone from their most guarded secrets—let alone the wily Nick. Even her physical details are wrong—twice it is noted that her stand-out bodily characteristic is ‘great tits’. (What the hell, the Bishop wonders, was the costume designer thinking, putting her in nothing but those loose, oversize shirts?) And it is disappointing that in a film which does such a snappy job of spelling out the secrets of spin, we get no insight—besides her insides—on how this bravura reporter plies her (rough) trade.

This film is one of scenes rather than story—like his father, Jason Reitman is too light—and prone to schmaltz—to fully sustain this high concept. But there are here and there laughs—and commentary—of a semi-original kind. One scene stands out. Nick is sent by one of his various bosses to pay off Lorne Lutch (Sam Elliot, useful), the ‘original’ Marlboro Man. Now dying of lung cancer, it is intended that such ‘generosity’ will see Lorne take his vengeance, and vehemence, out of the public eye. Clearly aware that Nick is full of tricks, he first refutes the offer, but when Nick, circumlocutorially, explains the consequences of not keeping the cash, Lorne—as though he had been punched drunk by Nick’s sure-fisted verbiage—changes his tune. How many such dextrous rhetorical inversions as this are Reitman’s, and how many come from the novel by Christopher Buckley, is a matter for those who have read it; but whichever one of them it is, he has perhaps a future in spin doctoring himself.

*For instance: Gore notes that the one constant global-warming relationship over the past forty years has been between atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and heat. While this is almost certainly incontrovertible, the climate is a frankly fickle (scientifically: chaotic) thing, and there is no reason not to speculate that, upon reaching what could be called a critical mass, carbon dioxide levels might have a different effect.

**Though failed to take his home state during his 2000 run.