Content Critique: Icebox.com
Do you remember the art student who lived across the hall from you in the dorm -- the one with the gold chains and the scraggly beard, who hung paintings of dogs playing poker on his walls? "He’s pretending to like those paintings because they’re so bad," your breathlessly impressed friends told you. "Genius!"
The same kind of facile irony informs Icebox’s (
www.icebox.com) weekly animated series Poker Night, written by some of the writers who worked on Frasier and Mystery Science Theater 3000. In addition to pointing out how un-funny the dogs-playing-poker paintings are (as if anybody likely to stumble onto this series were a legitimate fan of those things), Poker Night also makes less-than-savage fun of situation comedy conventions by, um, well, imitating them exactly, in every way.
The Poker Night dogs are sitcom husbands, concerned about their weight, bad breath, and their unfaithful wives and ex-wives. Except for the fact that they’re dogs, there’s nothing here you haven’t seen before on The Drew Carey Show or Cheers (which is really the closest cousin to this particular show – losers around a poker table, losers around a bar). And like the vast majority of situation comedies, the "humor" here is formalized: One understands that something is a joke because the language takes a certain pattering rhythm and form – not because it’s funny. And, of course, there’s the obligatory pottymouth-as-humor strategy that one expects from television writers finally cut free from the FCC. For example:
Q: Is he eating his own shit again?A: No, I think he got help for that.
Genius, indeed.
Poker Night isn’t the worst irony-offender at Icebox, though. Heaven actually has a laugh track. I spent a great deal of time trying to figure out if the laugh track was there to point out the un-funniness of the jokes (the joke being that the jokes aren’t funny), or if the jokes, and the laugh track, were in earnest. I never got my head around that one.
I am fairly convinced, though, that Icebox’s The Elvis and Jack Nicklaus Mysteries is not in earnest. If, like me, your earliest television memories involve Phyllis Diller helping Scooby-Doo and the gang solve a case of real estate fraud, or The Jackson Five nabbing bank robbers while on tour, you’ll get the joke right away. "Many believe that these two towering figures [Elvis and Jack Nicklaus] … teamed up for a series of exciting adventures." That’s pretty much the entire point of this series.
To give the creators credit, the show does have that early-to-mid-seventies Saturday morning shtick down pat. For example, Elvis tries to make a putt. He doesn’t make it. Elvis says, "I think I’ll stick to singing." Both characters laugh. End of episode. This is supposed to remind the viewer of any number of Scooby-Doo and Superfriends endings, where a character tried to do something he/she couldn’t do, then said he/she wouldn’t do it anymore. Laughter. End of episode.
I can imagine The Elvis and Jack Nicklaus Mysteries working very well as a one-shot, perhaps as one of those short films they show before the commercials on Saturday Night Live. But the comedic possibilities wear thin very quickly in a weekly series. If Poker Night and Heaven attempt to create "funniness" out of the fact that their jokes aren’t funny, The Elvis and Jack Nicklaus Mysteries makes a joke out of the fact that the shows you watched 15 or 25 years ago, when you were a kid, weren’t funny.
But let’s go deeper into the Icebox. It gets worse before it gets better.
Icebox describes Mr. Wong as: "The touching and heart-warming story of a girl and her eighty-five-year-old Chinese houseboy." In this series, the humor never rises above the level of way-out-of-date Hollywood Chinaman jokes. "Elvis Aawon Pwesley, when I frew pissing on you grave I dig you up and f--- you up the a-- … like a wockabilly b-----," says Mr. Wong in the opening of episode two. The teaser warns that "This show is for mature audiences only." This makes me wonder about Icebox’s definition of maturity.
Perhaps I’ve been a bit unfair by picking on the very weakest offerings at the site. Zombie College isn’t so bad, Superhero Roommate (starring the voice of Dave Foley from Kids in the Hall) has some pretty good moments, and Garbage Island looks really cool, reminding me of some of the best work on the animated Batman series. And, of course, there’s the inane brilliance of John Kricfalusi, who has brought his George Liquor character over from Spumco (www.spumco.com).
None of these series, though – neither the acceptable nor the lame – seem ready to live up to Icebox’s business model. Here’s what Icebox CEO Steve Stanford had to say in a recent interview with streamingmedia.com:
"Icebox is an Internet entertainment site focusing upon animation created by the best writers in the entertainment industry. Those writers range from the creator of Seinfeld to the creators of Party of Five to the creator of The Critic to the creator of Ren and Stimpy to the creator of Dr. Katz, and lots of other executive producers from shows like The Simpsons, King of the Hill, The X-Files, and the top shows on television. So what we've really tried to do is bring high-quality storytelling to the Web."
High-quality storytelling and Mr. Wong just don’t seem to go together. Furthermore, Icebox claims to be a "test bed for TV pilots," hoping to sell its shows to television and cable networks for wider distribution. It is very difficult to believe that any network would pick up this stuff. It is true that Icebox recently sold a series to Showtime – but that series (called Starship Regulars, apparently) never actually appeared on the site until one day after this review was originally posted on the streamingmedia.com website, this past Wednesday.
Isn’t it ironic?