Bajillion Dollar Propertie$
If you see the names Adam Scott, Nick Kroll, Paul F. Tompkins, Gillian Jacobs, Patton Oswalt, Jason Mantzoukas, and Scott Auckerman all grouped together and instantly think “Oh, the podcast Comedy Bang! Bang!” then Seeso’s new parody series Bajillion Dollar Propertie$ is probably something you’ll enjoy. To be clear, other than Tompkins none of those actors will actually be anything more than guest stars on Propertie$, but the presence of so many Bang! Bang! alums in any capacity is a good indication of what kind of show this will be.
Created by Bang! Bang! host Scott Auckerman’s wife/fellow comedian Kulap Vilaysack (Who Charted?), Propertie$ will detail the shenanigans of employees at a Los Angeles real estate firm owned by Tompkins’ character and staffed by Dan Ahdoot, Tim Baltz, Ryan Gaul, Mandell Maughan, Tawny Newsome, and Drew Tarver. It follows in the tradition of Yahoo’s Bachelor parody series Burning Love and Hulu’s various Real Housewives of… parody shows in that it’ll use various players in the L.A. comedy scene to send-up one particular sub-genre of reality TV at a remarkably cheap cost. The first trailer feels like it’s a little short on laughs though.
Bajillion Dollar Propertie$ premieres on Seeso, March 17. The first episode will be made available for free on Feb. 21.
Follow-up question: WTF is Seeso? It’s NBCUniversal’s streaming service which caters exclusively to comedy programming, both original (e.g., The UCB Show, Dave & Ethan’s Lovemakers, Before The Morning After, Sammy J & Randy) and rerun (e.g., Saturday Night Live, Monty Python, Kids in the Hall, 30 Rock, The Office).
Flaked
Shortly after the cancellation of The Millers and simultaneous success of BoJack Horseman, Will Arnett landed a deal with Netflix to develop an original sitcom with the help of The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret writer Mark Chappell. They called it Flaked, and its first 8-episode season arrives March 11. I so want to be more excited about it than I actually am.
Arnett plays Chip, a Venice, California transplant with some kind of addiction (alcohol?) he talks about as the moderator of a local self-help group. His best friend (David Sullivan) calls dibs on the hot new girl (Ruth Kearney), but when Chip dares to defy the sacred oath of dibs … ah, I don’t even care enough to get through a basic plot synopsis.
Arnett, who has actually lived off and on Venice for years, told EW that Flaked is his attempt to break away from Arrested Development typecasting, “For a long time, for whatever reason, [Gob-like roles] were a lot of the parts that came my way. It wasn’t until a few years ago that I started to shy away from doing things that I felt that were just derivative of that same thing. This show is probably a lot more in the line with the stuff that I always wanted to do. Ultimately, I realized that if I wanted to do this that I was going to have to create it myself.”
However, by the looks of the trailer what he’s come up with is a whole lot of mumble-core navel-gazing and mainpain with a central male character who just can’t quite get out of his own way, like a Zach Braff movie stretched across 8 episodes. Arnett is certainly capable of playing more than variations of Gob Bluth, but I might just wait for the next season of the awesomely dense and relentlessly bleak BoJack Horseman than check in on poor Chip and his tortured past/love-life in Flaked. What do you think?
Roadies
Cameron Crowe made Almost Famous. Roadies, his first TV show, is about the lives of a road crew working with a touring band. This feels like a world Crowe knows fairly well, from his own career as a rock journalist, the various music documentaries he’s directed (Pearl Jam Twenty) and his 27 year marriage Heart’s Nancy Wilson. Ergo, Roadies should be amazing.
It very well could be, but this first teaser doesn’t really give us a whole lot other than a basic montage of roadies-be-crazy images set to Eddie Vedder’s cover of “Hard Sun” for the Into the Wild soundtrack. The cast includes Luke Wilson, Carla Gugino, Imogen Poots, Rafe Spall, Keshia Castle-Hughes and Luis Guzman. Behind the scenes, J.J. Abrams and Winnie Holzman are among the attached producers. Showtime has set Sunday, June 26th as the premiere date. It has between now and then to help people understand that this Cameron Crowe rock ‘n’ roll show is different than that Martin Scorsese rock ‘n’ roll show (Vinyl) or the Denis Leary rock ‘n’ roll show (Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll)
