Pergament: 'The League' on FX is stuck at 'sophomoric'
Are you ready for some fantasy football? Cable's FX is taking advantage of the ESPN-driven craze with a new half-hour comedy, "The League," that is cruder than anything heard in the locker rooms of most professional football teams.
It premieres at 10:30 tonight, after "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia."
Created by Jeff Schaffer ("Curb Your Enthusiasm," "Seinfeld") and his wife, Jackie Marcus Schaffer ("Disturbia"), "The League" has a "Sunny" feel. In other words, it is rated TV-MA — for Mature Audiences, TV's equivalent of an R rating — and spends much more time discussing sex than whether it is wise to draft Adrian Peterson before Tom Brady.
It is often crude, tasteless and sophomoric. But "The League" is funny enough to appeal to the younger viewers who have made "Sunny" a hit on FX, a basic cable channel that carries programs with content more suitable to HBO or Showtime, networks that have subscribers who are paying extra to get the channels and know what they are getting.
The technology-savvy pilot of "League" sets an unofficial record for inappropriate jokes about private parts and pornography. It also seems determined to set another record for stereotypical jokes about thirtysomething male and female behavior.
The League
10:30 tonight on FX
Rating: 2 and a half stars (out of 4)
Friday Night Lights
9 p.m. Wednesday on DirecTV
3 stars out of 4
Most of the childish men in the fantasy football league are ordinary-looking but somehow have attracted women who could be Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders. The likable actors playing the guys — Mark Duplass, Nick Kroll, Jon Lajoie, Stephen Rannazzisi and Paul Scheer — are hardly household names. However, some of them have faces as recognizable as the traits their characters exhibit.
They play mostly castrated friends and relatives who think about sex even more than they think about football — and that's saying a lot.
Duplass plays Pete, the defending league champ who is increasingly cool to his hot wife, Meegan. Kroll is Ruxin, who desperately wants to win the league and is more desperate to have sex with his wife, Sofia. Lajoie is Taco, a handsome bachelor who is more interested in scoring with the ladies and writing crude songs than he is in winning the league. Rannazzisi is his older brother, Kevin, the league commissioner who takes draft advice from his controlling wife, Jenny. Scheer is a rich clueless bachelor, a plastic surgeon who constantly picks retired players.
The actresses playing the wives — Katie Aselton (Jenny), Nadine Velazquez (Sofia) and Leslie Bibb (Meegan) — have the looks that men may fantasize about. They play controlling women who worry about having babies, are determined to keep their bodies in shape and use the threat of withholding sex as a weapon.
The crude quotient in the pilot, "The Draft," reaches unexpected heights when Taco performs a song for a 5-year-old replete with offensively funny sexual lyrics. In the second episode, "The Bounce Test," Taco outdoes himself by performing a music video with explicit lyrics that highlights the confidence one of the wives has for her private parts. The video is as offensive as it is funny.
Loaded with bathroom humor, sophomoric humor, absurd legal humor and genital humor, "The League" is bound to create a generational divide in which younger viewers howl and older viewers scowl.
Sadly, the Schaffers didn't have to go to such absurd lengths to make "The League" a winner. If they cut down on the offensiveness and wrote something closer to the more lovable "My Boys" on TBS, they might have had something worth rooting for. Instead, they have made a comedy that may make some viewers hate themselves for laughing.
Of course, anyone expecting that an FX comedy will practice restraint is living in a fantasy world.
'Lights' back on
Now onto the fourth season of "Friday Night Lights," which premiered Wednesday night on DirecTV and will premiere new episodes weekly at 9 p.m. Wednesday. The same episodes will be carried on NBC in either late spring or early summer 2010.
The solid premiere picked up where "Lights" left off last year with Coach Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler) having lost his job at Dillon High in a power play with the quarterback's rich father in the small Texas town.
Coach Taylor has moved over to run the program at East Dillon, a school that hasn't the facilities or the players to initially compete with West Dillon even if Bill Belichick were coaching. Eric's supportive wife, Tami (Connie Britton), was in charge of the redistricting that determined which students and players attended which school, which doesn't exactly make her the most popular figure in town.
Taylor Kitsch (Tim Riggins), Jesse Plemons (Landry Clark), Zach Gifford (Matt Saracen) and Aimee Teegarden (Julie, the coach's daughter) are back. Minka Kelly (Lyla Garrity) wasn't in the premiere, but will return at some point this season to finish her story.
The new characters this season include Michael B. Jordan as a gifted newcomer, Vince, to East High; Matt Lauria as a new East Dillon star; Jurnee Smolett as the daughter of a former NFL hopeful; and Madison Burge as a 15-year-old beauty queen.
The return of Riggins, Clark and Saracen was explained in the well-played opening episode, which was by necessity heavy on plot. It sets the stage for some promising dialogue about the conflict between Coach Taylor's belief in improvement and teaching values and the win-at-all-costs philosophy of his replacement coach at West Dillon.
Unfortunately, the emotional level of "Lights" in the premiere wasn't as high initially as viewers have come to expect. However, "Lights" plays out like a good novel.
So viewers can expect some great things from the coming battle between heroes and villains, in which some teenagers don't realize that football could be the highlight of their lives if they don't grow from their high school experiences.
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