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« Not Clement? | Main | Justice John Roberts? » July 19, 2005From "Hey Buuuuuddy!" to Reality Winner?I like to watch Family Guy. Nightly at 10 on Cartoon Network, Sundays on FOX, Mondays on TBS, anytime with my Seasons 1-2 DVDs. Sometimes the station will stay on and I'll watch a minute or two of the next show, before inevitably turning to whatever baseball game or cooking show is on or just turning the TV off and reading a few pages of Harry Potter. This is my life. Last night, however, Family Guy was followed by a show that might be worth watching. Minding the Store on TBS. Yes, that Minding the Store. Here's the setup: Pauly Shore is washed-up and desperate to get his career on track (I hesitate to say BACK on track, because it never really was), and he accepts an assignment from his mother, who owns LA's famous Comedy Store nightclub. Pauly takes over the day-to-day operation of the Store. Hilarity ensues. Really, it does. Store is part of a sub-genre of reality TV that includes shows like Surreal Life, Dancing with the Stars, and Celebrity Rack-O. Nostalgia Reality is an easy sell to network, for the same reasons that yet another show starring Brian Dennehy or Geena Davis is an easy sell. The public already has some relationship with these people, and the show has a built-in audience of the actor's fans. It's easy to root for Shore; we already know him. His character develops quickly because he is familiar, and that is an asset on a show looking for an audience, regardless of how annoying Shore was in the good old days of 1993. The show is also well edited; if timing makes real-life comedy, editing makes TV comedy, because you can create artificial timing with a few smart edits. It works on Store just as well as it did in the early seasons of The Osbournes. Shore turns out to be a solid protagonist. He has an aging surfer/stoner vibe that wears well. He struggles with his career (obviously), his hairline (quietly), his sex addiction (blatantly), and his motley set of co-workers at the Comedy Store. His mother is meddlesome and annoying, and her yes-man, Tommy (who looks a lot like Tommy Shaw of Styx... weird), is the wet blanket for all of Shore's ideas but sometimes sounds scripted or uncomfortable on camera. Shore's other friends and employees are perfect bit players in that each has one or two characteristics for which they can be remembered easily and with some level of fondness, but none steal the show. You couldn't cast a better set of characters, which must be the point of this reality TV business. I think we can carve out a place for Minding the Store in the section of reality TV reserved for shows like Amazing Race, Season Two of Last Comic Standing, and, well, that's about it. It's the section labeled "watchable." Posted by Adam Packer at July 19, 2005 06:44 PM CommentsI'm sorry, I can't label anything that Pauly Shore is involved with as watchable. I spent almost 5 years as a stand up comic and I can tell you that Pauly Shore is everything that is wrong with comedy. His career is offtrack because he isn't funny. He's never been funny. Not only is he everything that is wrong with comedy, he represents one of the worst aspects of American popular culture - someone who is famous because of who they are rather than because they possess talent. If his mother didn't own the comedy store, none of us would ever have known who he is. If his mother didn't own the comedy store, Pauly would be working the midnight shift at a Venice Beach Jack-In-The-Box instead of invading our homes on television. He has no discernable talent whatsoever, yet everyone knows him. A perfect representative for a culture in which celebrity, rather than the reasons one should have it, is king. Posted by: Ed Brayton at July 19, 2005 06:57 PM | permalink Interesting, because the only real stand-up clips I saw in yesterday's two episodes were of Pauly's dad and the "hot chicks" who were drafted in for a theme night at the Store. One of the themes of the show is just how futile Pauly's attempts at getting his career on track are going to be. In the intro to the show, he shows clips of people like Jim Carrey and Chris Rock and not-so-subtly compares himself to them. It's part of the show's gimmick. "Desperate c-list star makes good." I've never made it all the way throught a Pauly Shore movie - but I smiled and chuckled my way through an hour of the show. Posted by: Adam Packer at July 19, 2005 10:29 PM | permalink Posted by: Eric Seymour at July 20, 2005 12:31 PM | permalink Post a comment |
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