Somewhere in the television universe George Costanza is still yelping about how he always wanted to be an architect. Well, Art Vandelay, meet Oswald Montecristo. For me to equate anything with Seinfeld should be taken as a sign of the highest respect. And no, Mr. Montecristo, I am not just kissing your butt.How amazing was that video? Just the fact that they used “Mr. Roboto” to seem cutting edge was evidence of how far off the mark they were, and the “Directed by Peter Jackson” at the end was the icing on the cake. How much you want to bet Louis added that part in? He strikes me as the only one of that bunch who would have seen Lord of the Rings.Oh, Louis “I am their bitch! They are physically superior to me!” Plunk, what a sad, sad intern you are. If you hate dogs (hi, Dad!) that scene was your worst nightmare. If you love dogs, that scene was possibly the greatest thing since Best in Show. Of course, Louis received two conflicting pieces of advice: ...
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It feels like I got shot in the ass. I spent my whole write-up last week talking about how I wished we could have had more of the ensemble. So what does this show do? They lock the six of them in a room together and give us almost a full 22 minutes of pure madness. I swear I knew nothing of this ahead of time.First of all, I loved that they opened the show with Squatch and Louis singing Whitney Houston’s “Didn’t We Almost Have It All?” As always, the song choice was completely appropriate considering they thought they had lost everything. Some shows go for subtle; this show doesn’t. Of course, then Rockefeller showed up with the news that was “so off the chain that the chain itself was nothing but a distant memory.” Speaking of distant memories, how many of you noticed that everything the Knights did in the apartment prior to locking themselves in the panic room was something Mick himself did in the first episode’s E!-type profile? Well, h...
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There are not many advantages to being single on Valentine’s Day. This year, however, I got to spend time with the people I love most in this world: the Knights. Bobby Cannavale was outrageous, but I’m thinking that because the episode was pretty much built around him, it didn’t leave as much time for our ensemble. Maybe that was the problem. I love the banter between the six of them, and we didn’t have nearly enough of it.I wish Enrico had taken Eugene’s advice to “have a nice time in the city. Make sure you get one of those Sex in the City tours. Those chicks had crazy sexy bad mouths, huh?” Of course, in true Sex and the City tradition, they did end up in a fabulous club, which allowed us to see the boys pull on even more new personalities. For me, the best was a toss-up between Louis inexplicably trying to sneak in with some Asian girls and Eugene’s bizarre Russian Viktor who must have been channeling Borat with his, “We are collabora...
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Is this show really about robbing Mick Jagger or is it about spoofing other shows? Last week we had the ubiquitous sappy date, and this week we had the reuniting of a long-lost father and son. And what a moment it was. What a lovely thing it was to finally hear those words every parent wants to hear upon seeing their child for the first time: “I assume you’re my millionaire father, but who are those other people?”The bonding scene was the “They aren’t really doing this. Oh, my god, they’re really doing this” kind of greatness that comes along every so often (more often than not with this show, but rarely outside of it). I don’t know who thought of having Gary sing “Cat’s in the Cradle” in Hindi, but it was a moment of pure nirvana for me. Of course, this was really an episode to showcase Maz Jobrani, what with that and his singing the ringtones that supposedly made his character a millionaire. He, Rockefeller and Squatch always ...
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Let’s start at the end — that final shot, specifically. Killed. Me. The hats, the shirts, the slo-mo, I’m dead. For the first half of the episode, I was thinking that this one was a little slower and calmer. But after the second commercial break, I was proven wrong. Not that the first half was without its own charms, namely the “Chutzpah” conversation (why do I have to talk about the Jewish jokes every time, you ask? Because with a name like Leah Friedman, they are obviously going to get to me every time), and “The man chewed my ass off! You see over here? No ass!”But, come on, was Ralph not a guy you’d love to go on a date with? Eugene certainly didn’t want to: “I’ve only had one rule in my entire life and it has always served me well: Never date anybody named Ralph.” But at least his friends were trying to be supportive. For instance, we had Rockefeller’s extended description of what the date could be like, concludi...
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You know, I probably would have voted with Squatch. I’m one of those who tends to believe that, “25 large in the hand is worth all the stuff in Mick Jagger’s apartment in the bush.” But that’s why I’m not the leader of the Knights and the reason that if it were up to me, not only would the show have ended after four episodes, but we would have been stuck with a case full of Donald Trump dollars. And then you all probably would have killed me.On Wednesdays, I also watch Friday Night Lights, which rips out my heart, slams it to the floor and then runs tackle drills over it. So this show is just the perfect recovery from that. The line that almost killed me with laughter (and that took me three deliriously happy rewinds because of that to get right) was supplied early on by Louis: “Question — should the vote to decide if it should be unanimous or a majority be unanimous or a majority?” I think we’ve all been in a similar situation, or m...
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Who here is not a fan of karaoke, Mick Jagger masks, training montages and Frank Sinatra Jr. jokes? Obviously, no person can deny that these things by themselves are powerful. And yet together, they combine their might to create a supershow so powerful that it is the only hope against the torpedo known as American Idol. Well, maybe that’s a slight exaggeration, but a girl can dream, can’t she? I had my own little musical moment when the theme song came on and I found myself belting “Scrubbin’ and flushin’!” along with the backup singers. Pathetic? Only if by pathetic you mean awesome.My absolute favorite moment came courtesy of Simone Cashwell’s return. Eugene’s “I’m Glickman, Yentl Glickman!” and “Why would you lie to such a beautiful young goil? More important, is she Jewish?” were just sublime. Not to be outdone, we got “Yo, there’s a big-ass thumb print in this shmeer” from Rockefeller. The way thes...
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There’s a great line in the movie High Fidelity about how, when making a mix tape, you have to start out strong, but then you have to kick it up a notch with the second song. That must be what goes into a great series, too. What the writers have done is commendable. With each line, we discover more about our, “equal opportunity criminal organization.” For instance, it seems that Squatch is very devoted to his family (even if it’s only because his wife can bench-press 160 pounds), Gary has slept with 73 women and impregnated many of them (umm, congrats?), and Rockefeller is a Fonz fan. It’s brilliant, really, though so quickly paced, I had to keep pausing to write down everything I could want to quote — which was pretty much the whole freakin’ thing.I want to know what kind of budget the Knights have for those t-shirts, which (according to the theme song) “ain’t no cotton-poly blend.” Let us count: We have the Knights of Prosperity ...
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"Dear God, we humbly ask that one of these keys be 18A, so that we may more easily rob Mick Jagger. Thanks for your time." And with that, I can say that I have an actual crush on a television show. I have the butterflies of anticipation, and the immediate laugh to every joke, no matter how infantile. In short, I’m in love. With five guys and a girl. And Mick Jagger. I have problems. But enough about me. I want to show this to everyone out there who says that the sitcom is dead, because who wouldn’t laugh at the image of a flower deliveryman repeatedly hitting himself over the head with his hand and the subsequent exchange of, "What's the matter with you?" "Bird flu."As we are all now aware, the premise of the show is that the Knights of Prosperity ("Issue 1, the name sucks," as Squatch so delicately put it) are attempting to rob Mick Jagger. Who among us cannot in some way identify with Eugene Gurkin, a man who sits in his tub, drinking and watching E! marathons? Or Squatc...
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