There's a lot to like in the premsie for this show: Marty Kaan (Don Cheadle) leads a team of management consultants, who each week deal with a different high-profit corporation in an attempt to land a contract with them and turn public perception in their favor. With a cast that includes Kristen Bell and Ben Schwartz as two of his co-workers (or possibly underlings, the pilot wasn't great in letting the hierarchy be known), and a subject matter that seems primed to tap into the current debates over our country's broken class system, House of Lies should be a smart, biting satire that would raise the overall quality of Showtime's comedy brand.
Of course I say “should be” because for all of the inherent potential, HoL commits every premium cable comedy sin in the book. Perhaps mostly concerned with giving the audience what it pays for, the show throws nudity (note: Kristen Bell does not get naked), foul language, and bawdy jokes at the audience as if there was no tomorrow, and unfortunately very few of them land. (And I say this as a fan of well-executed dirty humor.) The show is so concerned with feeling “edgy” that so much of the core of the show feels hollow. At one point, Kaan and his team go to a strip club on their clients dime in order to have a “business meeting”. Why do they do this? The show doesn't really say, it just throws a bunch of bare breasts as you and hopes that don't notice how pointless it all is.
I suppose that the “edgy” tone wouldn't be so bothersome if it existed in some sort of insular bubble, and if that was all that the show was trying to be. “Edgy” sitcoms might not be my fare, but at least when they aren't reaching to be anything else, I can rest assured that they remain mostly harmless in their proceedings. However, HoL like so many faux-quality comedies of this era, wants to make it seem like its reaching for more. In the closing minutes of the pilot episode, for instance, we see Kaan suddenly turn contemplative about his role in the world, something that comes without precedent from the 33 minutes that came before, but which we are supposed to buy as a SUPER SERIOUS MOMENT. Much like the scene at the strip club, there's no reason for it, but we're supposed to take it nonetheless.
And that logic flaw pales in comparison to the team itself, at least on a narrative level. Within the show's universe, the firm that Kaan and his team work for are positioned as the #2 management consultant firm in the business, right behind the one that Kaan's ex-wife works for. While this is obviously is meant to show us that this team is some sort of underdogs – because we all know how horrible it would be in the second position of a multi-million (billion?) dollar per year industry – but then the show has to double down on this angle by making the team members with a self-destructive-bordering-on-incompetent-yet-somehow-managing-to-get-the-job-done streak. While the beginning and the end of the pilot present them as cool and effective operators, the middle is sees them as a bunch of self involved fuck-ups, without explaining how they get from point A to point B to point C. But are we supposed to question this flawed logic? No, of course not.
In fact, the entire show treats its viewers as morons, right down to one of the main narrative devices. Whenever anything needs to be explained or cleared up, the action literally freezes on-screen while Kaan turns to the camera and literally tells us what we need to know. While it's bad enough for the show to be breaking the cardinal “show, don't tell” rule, what makes this all the worse is that the things Kaan is telling us wouldn't be all that hard to figure out in context. But there's the show holding our hand throughout the entire thing, even when we don't need it to.
Except of course for when it counts. While I said above that the show seems to be presenting two opposing sides, what with being an edgy comedy that wants to be taken seriously, and giving us character that are somehow professionally successful fuckwits, tn truth these are two dialectics that could exist within the same show, provided that said show gave us some sort of link between these two, a move which would also help the characters appear more nuanced. But it doesn't, which just leaves us with a show that insults our intelligence by asking us to accept thing that don't make any sense.
As for any hopes that the show might give some sort of show of moral support to the 99%, well that's out the window too. That Kaan and his team help the corporations of the 1% doesn't have to mean that the show sides with the upper crust, and I could see a version of this show where the satire is played up and the rich are endlessly mocked. But the problem is that the show asks us to care so much about the success of the team that ultimately the companies that they work for get rolled up into that quest for success because the two sides have to work together. Now, I will admit that the show does depict the 1% as lazy, greedy, and incompetent, and the team themselves get in some verbal barbs, but it all feels a little too easy, and thus not subversive as it thinks it is. Perhaps the show is going for a skewering of the 1%, but I don't think it goes far enough as to be effective.
So what does the show get right? Well, Don Cheadle and Kristen Bell are suitably and unsurprisingly fantastic in their roles, and even if the material they are given isn't the best, they make it work, even when it shouldn't. And Kaan's son is depicted as a gender-bending middle schooler, and the show gives a lot of nuance to both him and to the three-way relationship that exists between Kaan and the child and the former psychologist grandfather that lives with them. It's progressive enough to remain interesting, and it could develop into something truly engaging in later episodes.
But these are just window dressings on a highly dysfunctional show that can't seem to decide if it's main function is to titillate or intrigue, and so it goes with something down the middle of these two extremes, and none of it really works. While I commend Showtime for giving us a comedy that's actually comedic (even if the jokes aren't all that funny), I think House of Lies might have been more effective if it had stuck to the network's original formula and had been dryer, darker, and a bit more serious.
I gave this one a chance only (ONLY) for Kristen Bell.
ReplyDeleteI kinda hated it. The whole cross-dressing kid came off as trying way too hard to be quirky.
Also, like you said, it seems to be a very ill-timed show. Topical, yes. Sensitive, no way.