Welcome to the weekly TV thread. There’s no prompt today.

The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Egyptian composer Hesham Nazih’s “I’ll Never Stop” from Moon Knight, a show I never watched.

Forrest MacNeil never stopped being a human disaster zone during Comedy Central’s Review, a show I did watch when it first aired. I loved the dark sense of humor of Review, creators Andy Daly, Jeffrey Blitz, and Charlie Siskel’s adaptation of the short-lived Australian mockumentary Review with Myles Barlow.

An educated critic who switched from reviewing films to reviewing life (“It’s literally all we have. But is it any good?”), the fictional host of Review with Forrest MacNeil—played by Daly—dressed all the time in the same colors as Brisco County, Jr: a light blue shirt under a tan jacket. But Brisco, a Harvard-educated bounty hunter/lawyer, looked cool in his light blue shirt and tan jacket and could think his way out of any jam, in addition to being one of the fastest guns in the West. In his light blue shirt and tan jacket, Forrest looked and sounded as cool as a Pat Boone version of “Squabble Up” by Kendrick Lamar, and he was often a danger to everyone around him.

Review has been on my mind lately because I realized that the Comedy Central that greenlit the mockumentary—a critics’ darling and a frequent pop-culture think piece subject during its run, but it was never a ratings success—wasn’t the Comedy Central that’s currently afraid to take any chances and is barely alive right now.

I cut the cord in 2020, so I don’t pay attention to what’s on the Comedy Central lineup anymore. A quick skim through both the A.V. Club’s comments section for a recent news item about Paramount’s deprioritization of Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, and BET—four of the many cable channels I watched while growing up—and the schedule on Comedy Central’s official site revealed that the channel Bill O’Reilly once unfunnily referred to as “Secular Central” during one of his always awkward Daily Show guest appearances airs nothing but reruns of NBC’s The Office, Parks and Recreation, and South Park these days.

It has seriously cut down on original programming. Only The Daily Show and South Park are still churning out new episodes, and the last couple of Comedy Central originals I heard about were an animated version of Everybody Hates Chris and Mike McMahan’s first post-Star Trek: Lower Decks animated project, an in-the-works adaptation of Sega’s Golden Axe video games.

Comedy Central is, like all other cable channels, knocking on death’s door. Its current anemic state made me say to myself, “If Comedy Central rejected Review back in the 2010s and Daly and Blitz had to shop around their series for 11 years, where would they take it to nowadays?” (Probably either Hulu, which happened to be the streamer where I first watched Review after I lost my DirecTV signal and was never able to get it back, or Tubi.)

If you never watched Review—a lot of people haven’t—it’s worth experiencing for the first time, and because of its short run, it’s a breeze to binge. (It has almost the same amount of episodes as another funny mockumentary Daly had a role in and Blitz directed episodes of: NBC’s Trial & Error, a two-season wonder from showrunner/co-creator Jeff Astrof, who parodied true-crime docuseries like The Staircase and The Jinx.) Comedy Central’s official YouTube channel posted almost all of Review’s segments, including the very last one from the series finale—the manner in which Comedy Central posted them makes Review look like it was a sketch show along the lines of Comedy Central’s much more popular Key & Peele (it wasn’t)—but I recommend watching every Review episode on Paramount+.

An episode like Review’s most discussed episode—the “Pancakes; Divorce; Pancakes” episode where one horrible thing leads to another, but despite their messiness, they were all elegantly piled like pancakes onto the genial and self-destructive Forrest by the show’s brilliant writers—works best in its original form (with an ad blocker on) rather than as a bunch of disconnected sketches you have to try to piece together on YouTube.

Someone posted on YouTube the first episode of Review with Myles Barlow in its entirety, but I never watched it or any other episodes of the Aussie version. (The first Myles Barlow episode has an interesting guest actor: Margot Robbie, who played a schoolgirl on Myles Barlow when she was a regular on the Aussie soap Neighbours.) For the American version, Daly took Myles, a fictional journalist played by Phil Lloyd in the original version, and turned him into a happily married SoCal suburbanite who hosts a reality show where he takes requests from viewers to review life experiences ranging from sailing on a rowboat (Forrest’s rating: half a star) to making a sex tape (four stars), but his intense dedication to the show and its viewer requests destroys his marriage, gets people killed, brings him close to death a few times, and lands him in either prison or rehab.

Forrest, who never gives anything zero stars on his show, mistakenly thinks he’s performing some sort of valuable service by throwing himself into these meaningless challenges. Every time someone tells Forrest, “You don’t have to do this,” he ignores them. Meanwhile, when Forrest’s beautiful co-host, A.J. Gibbs (nicely played by Megan Stevenson), was assigned to review the experience of slapping a stranger on the ass during her temporary hosting of Forrest’s show in the final season, she did something Forrest never did: She refused to smack a stranger’s ass simply because it’s rude.

Grant Grunderschmidt, Forrest’s producer, initially looked like the type of producer who looks out for the host’s well-being. But his pep talk to Forrest about never backing down from a challenge in “Pancakes; Divorce; Pancakes” immediately proved that, nope, he doesn’t give a shit about Forrest’s well-being and is one of the most sadistic fictional TV producers ever.

My least favorite thing about Modern Family and Abbott Elementary is how often the characters on those mockumentaries “Jim the camera.” It always takes me out of the show. Abed hates it, and so do I. But on Review, whenever A.J. or Grant Jimmed the camera, it wasn’t annoying and overdone, and James Urbaniak, who was great as the voices of Dr. Venture and Phantom Limb on The Venture Bros., intriguingly Jimmed the camera with the most evil expression right after his character’s pep talk to Forrest in the diner in “Pancakes; Divorce; Pancakes.”

The “viewers” in some of the show-within-the-show’s video requests were played by performers only the nerdiest of comedy nerds would recognize. The viewer who wanted Forrest to review the experience of eating 15 pancakes (half a star) was played by Kevin Kataoka, a former staff writer for MADtv (where Daly was briefly a cast member) and Totally Biased with W. Kamau Bell and an Asian American stand-up comic I look up to. Kataoka wrote and performed some of my favorite segments on Totally Biased. And in the very last segment in Review’s final episode, the viewer from Melbourne was played by Lloyd, a.k.a. Myles Barlow.

Daly imagined a backstory for Forrest’s strange choice to prioritize those viewer requests and his reviews of life experiences over everything else. It was never shared on the show and was only hinted at in the framed cutouts of Forrest’s film reviews on his office wall.

“He got to a certain age and could not stay awake for the length of films anymore, and therefore had to plagiarize his reviews,” said Daly to The Daily Beast in 2014. “So he failed at that big thing he thought he was good at. Now, instead of slinking down to something lower than where he was, he decided to shoot for the moon and do something more important than he used to do, which is review these life experiences. And he doesn’t want to fail again so [sic] goes for it with total commitment.”

I first learned about that secret backstory during Review’s first season. It made perfect sense to me, and I got a kick out of the idea that Forrest was a fraud when he was a film critic because I knew an actual critic who was a fraud. I witnessed him being a fraud many times.

I won’t name names, but back when I wrote film reviews for a personal website, which landed me a membership with the Online Film Critics Society, and was hired by a South Bay alt-weekly I grew up reading (the paper hired me because of my earlier work for a weekly college paper, not because of the reviews on my site), I went to a lot of press screenings at a local art-house theater chain. One of the regulars at these press screenings was a slim OFCS member who had a beard and always dressed in the same exact brown sweater vests and khakis Roger Ebert often wore. He looked like the guy whose head exploded in Scanners, but he spoke like Billy Bob Thornton.

After 9/11, the writing in the reviews the exploding head guy from Scanners posted on Usenet and IMDb became right-wing and Islamophobic, but before this Southern putz went far-right and frequently whined about “political correctness,” he was apolitical and rather drab as a writer in his reviews. He often said the most hackneyed things about the latest releases (one of his reviews contained the sentence “School of Rock rocks!”), and he sometimes inserted his preteen son’s opinions into his reviews. Throwing in his son’s two cents somehow made his dull reviews even more dull.

The guy whose noggin in Scanners turned into a can of Hunt’s Tomato Sauce that got shot at by Tony Montana was always harsh towards art-house directors like Pedro Almodóvar and Michel Gondry. He loved the fuck out of the interminable fucking Meet Joe Black (“The camera loves [Brad] Pitt. With his golden blonde [sic], perfectly unkempt hair, his deep blue eyes, and his bewitching smile, he mesmerizes the audience,” wrote Mr. Sweater Vest in one of his few reviews that are still online).

Patton Oswalt had a funny bit in his stand-up act about why, in 1982, Washington, D.C. entertainment reporter Arch Campbell’s negative review of The Road Warrior (“It’s the future, there’s no gasoline, but everyone’s driving around in cars. I don’t get it. No stars!”) was his cue to get out of the D.C. suburb of Sterling, Virginia. Oswalt would have hated Mr. Sweater Vest’s guts as well. He complained in his no-longer-online summary of himself about how it’s unfair for internet film critics like him to never get quoted by movie studios in their ads for their releases. In a no-longer-online think piece about film criticism, the late Andrew Johnston, a Time Out New York film critic who wrote my favorite article about Risky Business, awesomely mocked him for saying that.

Also in that no-longer-online summary of himself, the guy whose face turned into the Scooby and Scrappy-Doo Puppy Hour closing credits wallpaper in Scanners made a big deal about trying to land in The Guinness Book of World Records for writing the most film reviews ever. That goal of his amused me because every time he attended a press screening, he would leave in the middle of the movie to use the pay phone in the theater lobby to call his wife or his stockbroker and then return to the flick—10 or 15 minutes later.

On the rare occasions when I had to run over to the men’s room in the middle of the screening to answer nature’s call (I later realized that I shouldn’t drink anything before a press screening so that I wouldn’t miss a single minute of the movie), he was always glued to that fucking pay phone next to the men’s room. This putz was trying to get his name into Guinness, but he never watched any new movies in their entirety. I never pointed out to anybody that he was cheating while trying to reach his goal (which he never reached), and I kept it to myself—until now. I never took any of his reviews seriously because he never sat through the whole movie. One of the reasons why I left behind film criticism in the early ’00s was because I didn’t want to be around Mayonnaise Americans like him anymore.

At some point in the early 2010s, the guy whose keppie in Scanners turned into a bunch of Chicago deep-dish pizzas that were angrily smashed with a baseball bat by Jon Stewart completely stopped posting film reviews on Usenet and IMDb. His digital footprint was completely erased. He’s probably dead. Forrest is one of my favorite comedic characters because he resembles the real-life fraud that was this possibly deceased Meet Joe Black stan, and the actor who terrifically played him is a comic genius.

Review was heavily scripted, so there wasn’t much room for ad-libbing, but away from Review’s scripted mockumentary format and Forrest’s tan blazer, light blue shirt, and beige khakis, Daly has been one of America’s funniest improv comics who are obsessed with old TV. He co-hosts with Matt Gourley Bonanas for Bonanza, a Bonanza rewatch podcast that’s funnier than the average podcast about a very old TV show because he discusses the adventures of the Cartwrights and the showbiz careers of Bonanza’s guest stars not as himself but in character as one of his Comedy Bang! Bang! characters, vampire-hunting cowboy poet Dalton Wilcox. His vanity card at the end of each Review episode is an amusing parody of the late ’60s/early ’70s Paramount Television logo variant that became known around the internet as “the Closet Killer” because its strange Dominic Frontiere score cue was straight out of a ’60s slasher flick, and it often scared the shit out of little kids who watched The Brady Bunch.

Except for Dalton, I’m not familiar with any of Daly’s characters from Scott Aukerman’s podcast. But I enjoyed Daly’s completely unscripted performance as L. Ron Hubbard from Paul F. Tompkins’s The Dead Authors Podcast, and my favorite Daly character outside of Forrest is Reed Newport, an ’80s game show host who lives in a crate on the Warner Bros. lot—the same lot where he sometimes disrupted Conan O’Brien while he was hosting TBS’s Conan.

When I was in second grade, I went through a weird phase where I watched tons of game shows, and I wanted to become the first Filipino American game show host. Reed is every single game show host I saw during that period and a later period when I first watched Nickelodeon (my hometown didn’t receive Nick until 1988) and was briefly hooked on its afternoon programming. He has the glasses of Bill Cullen, the personality of Monty Hall, and the timbre of Marc Summers’s voice.

Reed shares with Forrest an inability to stop himself. I don’t think Daly should revive Review because he said all he had to say about a madman who unwisely goes for the task of reviewing life experiences with total commitment, but I would love to see him bring back Reed somewhere and shout one more time, “Pull that lever!”—or “If you’re on international waters, let it rip!”

Speaking of international waters where anything goes, I like a lot of dark comedies. I said a few weeks ago that one of my favorite movies is 2005’s The President’s Last Bang, a really dark historical comedy from South Korean director Im Sang-soo. Review was one of the best at dark comedy, and again, I recommend checking it out on Paramount+. Otherwise, I don’t have much interest in things that are dark but completely devoid of a sense of humor. I would rather light my boxers on fire than rewatch I Saw the Devil or Requiem for a Dream. (Lighting my boxers on fire: half a star.)

Review was the type of bleak comedy where its stubborn lead character never changes or grows and always wrecks his own life—Forrest was basically the cringe-comedy equivalent of Carmela Soprano never listening to her shrink’s advice to “Take only the children—what’s left of them” and get away from Tony—and that can make a lot of viewers uncomfortable or cause them to quit the show. It explains why Review is merely a cult favorite, while Friends and NBC’s The Office, a couple of examples of sitcoms where immature characters matured or adjusted well to major life changes, turned into two of Netflix’s most popular acquisitions long after their demises. Meanwhile, I loved how Daly stuck to his guns and never allowed his character to realize the mess he has made of his life.

The Ricky Gervais version of this would have ended with Forrest standing up to Grant and delivering a crowd-pleasing speech about how tired he is of reviewing life instead of actually living it before finally walking out on the show. The Mike Schur version would have ended with Forrest getting reacquainted with Allison Tolman’s corrupt nurse character, whom he dated after his divorce, and then leaving the show behind to run away with her, Josh (the unpaid college intern who idolizes Forrest and always assists him), and Josh’s girlfriend. [Spoiler in the next sentence.] Neither of those things happened in the final episode, which gave Forrest the perfect final scene.

That is all I will say about the final scene. It is the definition of what Curb Your Enthusiasm’s Susie Essman said in a 2008 interview for the PBS docuseries Make ’Em Laugh: The Funny Business of America.

“It’s not funny when you learn and grow,” said Essman. “It’s funny to keep making the same mistakes over and over.”