A year or so ago, I caught an episode of the HBO sitcom Extras while in a hotel conferencing.
Since then, I've also watched some highlight reels from the show on Youtube (the Ian McKellen/Gandalf bit is one of the funniest clips you can find online). So when Isabel and I signed up for Netflix, we decided to add the first season to our cue.
We didn't even finish watching the first disk. I know pilot episodes are bad, but we have limited entertainment time and prefer to go for known quantities.
Besides, Isabel still has World Six of Yoshi's Island to beat.
The reasons for our complaint are two-fold with the first episode.
First, we might be getting more prudish in our old age. Maybe it's just that we don't have cable or view many modern comedies, but watching Kate Winslet mime oral sex as a joke just doesn't make us laugh.
Second, while Ricky Gervais is a master of awkward, nervous, Fawlty Towers-style humor, something about the first episode of Extras just doesn't click. It might be a similar dynamic as Christopher Guest movies. (I think Guest and Gervais have very similar senses of filmed humor.) When they are delivering their nervous humor in the context of a mockumentary, it works much better than when the same humor is applied to a non-mockumentary, straight narrative. Guest's Spinal Tap, Waiting for Guffman, Best in Show, and Mighty Wind were all hilarious. For Your Consideration fell flat. The Office was utterly compelling and also funny. Extras, not so much. And, of course, both Extras and For Your Consideration try to take you inside the world of B-Hollywood. One would think that people in entertainment would have a greater understanding of that subject than others, and yet in both Guest's and Gervais's cases, the viewer feels less a sense of the plausible reality -- or even believable cartoon reality. Perhaps this is a paradox of the old writer's adage to write what you know. Writing what is outside their immediate experience seems more digestible.
If you've seen the first episode of Extra you probably know where I'm going with this. The episode presents a cartoon caricature of Catholicism that is neither recognizable nor particularly believable. Gervais's character, an extra playing a Nazi soldier, romantically pursues another extra playing a nun. Metaphor becomes literal when she turns out to be a practicing Catholic whose sister has cerebral palsy. To really hit you over the head with it, she invites Gervais on what he thinks is a date, but then turns out to be some kind of moribund prayer service. Mostly everyone at the prayer service is a little odd (okay, maybe that's not so unbelievable), but the really weird part is when the priest starts grilling Gervais on whether or not he's Catholic. In full Basil Fawlty mode, Gervais tries to bluff his way out of the inquisition, but the priest looks suspicious. Finally, the priest flat out accuses Gervais of not being Catholic.
When Gervais fesses up that he's an atheist who just came as part of an attempt to seduce his lady friend (who uses the opportunity to make a public witness to her stance against premarital sex), everyone gives him a cold stare.
Really?
Maybe I move in unusual circles, but most people know wouldn't exactly confront this kind of thing head-on (unless, of course, they had suspicions and thought he was going to go to Mass and receive Communion). They might gossip after the fact. And if it did come out that someone at a prayer service wasn't Catholic, they'd either see it as an opportunity to educate or convert.
But maybe Catholicism has a different flavor in Britain.
Anyway, I know the show is less concerned with mimetic representations of faith groups than it is with the facility of comic narrative...but the depiction of Catholicism struck me as hollow. Whatever Gervais's own knowledge of religion might be, Gervais's script expressed as little understanding about the faith as his character did.
Looks like we are going to bump up Avatar: The Last Airbender, Book Three on our queue.
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