Welcome to the weekly TV thread.
May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, so each week, I, an Asian American writer, am praising an Asian American performer’s work in a recent or current TV role.
The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is Murray Gold’s “Believe in Santa” from Doctor Who’s “Last Christmas” episode.
Like all other sketch comedy shows, I Think You Should Leave with Tim Robinson, the Netflix show where Robinson is the only regular, is hit-or-miss. But ITYSL sketches never go on too long, and any time Sam Richardson, Robinson’s co-star and fellow writer from the two-season Comedy Central cult favorite Detroiters, or stand-up comic Patti Harrison is the lead in a sketch, it always hits.
“I think a lot of what makes Tim brilliant is that the delivery or the tone is as much a part of the humor as any joke on paper,” said Harrison to New Yorker interviewer Rachel Syme (in a lengthy 2022 Q&A where she mentioned her adolescence as a half-Vietnamese kid in small-town Ohio with aspirations of becoming a marine biologist, as well as the Three Busy Debras stage show’s role in the beginning of her New York comedy career). “The first shoot we did, I was so anxious. Those sketches, a lot of them are formatted where it’s one person really going wild, and then everyone else is, like, ‘What the fuck’s going on?’ And to be that [one] person in the sketch, I was, like, Oh, God, people are waiting for me to get through this line. I was fucking up the lines a lot. Because I was just so scared and in my own head about how I didn’t want to drop the ball.”
Harrison—who famously got kicked out of Twitter for making fun of the surreal sight of the Oreo cookies Twitter account tweeting, “Trans people exist,” by tweeting pro-LGBTQ slogans as the Nilla Wafers Twitter account—fits right in with the surreal world of ITYSL. Her characters on ITYSL include an office worker who can’t let go of the fact that her joke about Santa’s delivery of the office’s new printer failed to land and a high-strung driver in a driver’s ed video whose confusing-looking errands keep distracting the driver’s ed students from paying attention to the instructor’s lessons. As the stressfulness or surrealism of a Harrison character’s situation escalates, Harrison’s line delivery gets stranger and funnier.
After the release of ITYSL’s second season, whose writers’ room included Harrison, she showed surprising range in Together Together, director Nikole Beckwith’s 2021 indie comedy, as a penniless barista who agrees to be a surrogate for a wealthy app developer who wants to be a single dad. In her first lead role, the trans comedian played a woman who isn’t trans, and all the comedic lines that were written for Harrison whenever she was the silly side character in other movies (or on Hulu’s Shrill) went instead to stand-up comic and future Problemista star/director Julio Torres as the Harrison character’s glum co-worker.
Harrison—one of the guest stars in Poker Face’s new season—deftly introduced a dramatic side in Together Together, but it’s highly unlikely that she’ll be stopped on the street by strangers for her work in Beckwith’s thankfully cliché-free movie. As she pointed out in a 2021 GQ interview, her performance in the new printer sketch—where she brilliantly did a thing where, while she beat the same joke into the ground, her accent changed from Ebenezer Scrooge to Dolores O’Riordan to a petulant American teen who wanted a skateboard for Christmas and received socks instead—is the performance she gets recognized for the most.
“People will scream ‘Santa brought it early’ to me in public,” said Harrison to GQ. “It’s pretty aggressive. It’s opened a new demographic of followers to me, which are these, like, comedy bro guys. Most of my fans or my followers are queer, delicate, kind teens, or artsy teens, or a lot of women and gay men. It is nice that like, people connect to it, just so interesting that it’s these guys that look like they’re going to hockey practice after, which is really hot. [laughs] I just feel warm that people have embraced it.”
Robinson has said that another season of ITYSL is in the works for Netflix. Today’s prompt is: Which of the hundreds of shows that were killed by Netflix do you wish some other streamer would bring back to life? Both GLOW and Astronomy Club: The Sketch Show deserved another season, and even though I’m satisfied with the second-season finale that ended up being the series finale for Star Trek: Prodigy (a show that was never actually a Netflix original, despite Netflix’s acquisition of every Prodigy episode), I would like to see a streamer that’s neither the beleaguered Paramount+ (the first of two streamers that canceled Prodigy) nor Netflix greenlight either a feature-length Prodigy movie or a Prodigy holiday special. Somewhere, Jankom Pog is saying, “Jankom doesn’t like streaming service limbo.”