Welcome to the weekly TV thread. There’s no prompt today.
The Original TV Score Selection of the Week is the late Bob Cobert’s theme from both The $25,000 Pyramid and The $100,000 Pyramid.
On NBC’s hilarious new mockumentary series Stumble, the cheerleaders under Coach Courteney Potter are frequently seen trying to build pyramids. Many of those pyramids end in disaster.
A 14-time national champion coach, Courteney coaches the Buttons Cheer Team at the underfunded Headltston State Junior College in fictional Headltston, Oklahoma. She’s trying to atone for getting drunk at Sammy Davis Sr. Junior College with the previous team she coached, an incident that cost her that coaching job with—I love to write out this team name—the Sammy Davis Sr. Junior Red Foxes.
Stumble—which has been asininely scheduled to Friday nights, where NBC shows go to die—combines the forces of siblings Liz and Jeff Astrof. The Astrof sister comes from the writers’ room of 2 Broke Girls, a racist sitcom I disliked. (She also comes from the writers’ room of Becker, which was surprisingly funny—I remember how often the critics dunked on it when it first aired on CBS—even though I could not fucking stand Ted Danson’s grumpy doctor character whenever he complained at Reggie’s Diner about the latest thing to piss him off because his daily rants at the diner sounded too much like if Denis Leary got Cronenberged with a male Austin stand-up who whines about “woke.” That’s why many of the most satisfying Becker episodes were ones where Becker got his comeuppance.) The Astrof brother co-created and showran Trial & Error, a not-racist sitcom I loved.
Trial & Error pretended to be a documentary about an idealistic defense attorney from New York who wound up representing murder suspects in fictional East Peck, South Carolina. Played by Nicholas D’Agosto, a.k.a. Harvey Dent on Gotham, Josh Segal looked so young that I wanted to come up to him and say, “Where was your last case? Nickelodeon’s Kids’ Court?”
Created by Astrof and Lethal Weapon showrunner Matt Miller, Trial & Error was designed to parody a different true-crime docuseries each season. But it lasted only two seasons, so it only got as far as The Suitcase in the first season and The Jinx in the second. I never watched The Suitcase and The Jinx—true crime is as interesting to me as counting ceiling tiles in a courtroom—yet I found both Trial & Error and its official companion podcast (an S-Town parody called MTowne: Where Murder Happens, which I, sadly, can’t find on the internet anymore) to be hysterically funny.
The Astrof siblings’ creation—loosely based on Netflix’s Cheer, another docuseries I never watched, and it even recruited Cheer coach Monica Aldama to be its cheer consultant—has a lot of the kookiness and farcical pace of Trial & Error. But it’s a warmer show than the slightly macabre show that made a catchphrase out of “Murder board! Murder board!” every week.
Trial & Error was Green Acres meets Arrested Development. Stumble is more like Green Acres meets the East Dillon High/Michael B. Jordan era of Friday Night Lights. It has a great lead in Claws alum Jenn Lyon. As Courteney, she combines the comical steeliness of prosecutor Carol Anne Keene from Trial & Error (I often wonder if Lyon’s role was originally written for Jayma Mays, who was amusing as Carol Anne) with the quiet compassion of Coach Taylor from FNL. Both Lyon and Taran Killam skillfully alternate between farce and mild poignancy. Killam plays Boone, Courteney’s super-supportive husband, as well as a college football coach and a former quarterback who had one too many head injuries during his high-school football days. (If CTE-related humor turns you off, stay away from this show.)
But where Stumble really soars is in the physical comedy skills of the younger actors who play the junior college misfits Courteney hopes to mold into a team of contenders who will be tough to beat at the Daytona Cheerleading Championships (Georgie Murphy as Sally, a clumsy flyer who has mastered the art of living in her car, and Jarrett Austin Brown as Dimarcus, a cocky ex-football jock who’s trying to hide his not-so-macho tap dancing background, are among my favorites), as well as its use of the mockumentary format to insert the funniest fake archive footage or to counterpoint what the interviewees say in the talking heads. A good mockumentary is a show that actually looks like a documentary and often cuts away to still shots (or fake security camera footage) like most docs do, whether it’s What We Do in the Shadows or several of the shows Jeffrey Blitz (who began his career as the director of an actual doc, 2002’s Spellbound) directed episodes of, particularly Review, Trial & Error, and now, Stumble.
A bad mockumentary is a show that never does the still shots/fake archive footage thing or overrelies on characters Jimming the camera to punctuate a scene. Examples include Modern Family and Abbott Elementary. It doesn’t mean that Abbott is a bad show. It’s just kind of bad at mockumentarying. As Abbott gets older, I’m starting to feel like it didn’t need to be a mockumentary in the first place.
I still find Abbott to be entertaining. The talking heads are sometimes the best part of the show (Janine’s funny impression of the James Harden exit GIF took place at the end of a talking head), and they remind me of the talking heads from the short-lived Miss Guided, a charming ABC quasi-mockumentary that starred Judy Greer as a high-school guidance counselor. But I get annoyed whenever someone, whether it’s a teacher or a student, Jims the camera in every other scene so that Abbott can point out to ABC viewers that they’re supposed to laugh here.
Anyway, one of my favorite moments in Stumble’s second episode is Lyon’s stern and rapid-fire delivery of “We can. We will. We must.” in her Southern twang. She makes three short sentences sound like one whole new word. Stumble, another winner from Jeff Astrof, canitwillitmust.