Strangers
with Candy
airs Mondays at 10 pm on Comedy Central.
Episodes rerun 12:30 am Fridays.
You can get an
autographed picture of Jerri Blank at http://comedycentral.com/swc/jerri.shtml.
SWC is Comedy Central's first live-action, narrative
series ever.
There are people who plan to spend this summer doing admirably
constructive things: vacationing with family, enjoying the
sunshine, maybe even finally dusting off that unread Modern
Library edition of the beach-read potboiler Anna Karenina.
But what about those of us who dread having to spend a long,
hot season in that arid desert of no new Simpsons episodes?
Caught between Chandler's season-finale proposal to Monica
and what are sure to be zany Friends wedding preparations
in the fall, we lie awake at night, robbing ourselves of
the precious sleep one needs to maintain a full television
viewing schedule, fearing we may have to undergo a rerun
of the Will and Grace episode with all the Tuesdays
with Morrie references.
But not to fear! Sweet relief from the chills and shakes
of summertime new-episode withdrawal is to be found in three
little words: Strangers with Candy. (Obviously, Sex
and the City is four words, and we all know that
great show needs no further hype.)
Strangers with Candy has occupied the Monday night
10 o'clock slot on Comedy Central for about two years now;
it began its third season June 19. Though its popularity
lags behind that channel's more high-profile original programs
like South Park and The Daily Show, its better
episodes equal them for ingenuity and laughs.
SWC bills itself as "the after-hours after-school
special" and gleefully exploits that genre's conventions--the
maudlin music, the badly written, moralistic dialogue, the
ludicrously melodramatic portrayals of teenage sordidness--to
follow the ongoing misadventures of Jerri Blank, a 46-year-old
ex-junkie, ex-hooker, ex-con who returns home to the suburbs
in an attempt to reform. There, Jerri lives with her disdainful
family and attends Flatpoint High, where the pecking order
doesn't cut much slack for a 46-year-old who, with the harshness
of 30 years on the streets and in jail apparent in her every
physical attribute, "just wants to fit in."
Jerri is a sexually omnivorous tough cookie with no apparent
redeeming qualities whose outward trashiness, aggression
and hostility mask a deep-seated inner self-regard. She's
played by Amy Sedaris, sibling of famous author and NPR
commentator David Sedaris (with whom she has collaborated
as a writer and performer). Having advised the wardrobe
department that Jerri should "dress like someone who owns
snakes," Sedaris embodies this character perfectly with
an innately humorous Floridian/Valley-girl accent, teeth
that make Austin Powers look like Ricky Martin, and hair
that has the color and appeal of dishwater. The result is
hideous, hysterical, and nearly Chaplinesque (like Charlie,
Jerri is a hyper little oddball outsider struggling to get
what she needs and wants, although she's infinitely more
baleful than the little tramp ever was).
Sedaris' castmates--Paul Dinello and Stephen Colbert (as
two married, homophobic Flatpoint teachers carrying on an
indiscreet affair with each other) and Gregory Hollimon
(as Principal Blackman, a black man)--play equally awful,
self-absorbed people. Together, they're a more cutting,
even less PC version of the narcissistic Seinfeld
crew, but they somehow manage to make SWC's ruthlessly
offensive skewering of bourgeois hypocrisy seem fun and
even lighthearted.
The rule with SWC seems to be that the more unbelievably
wrong the premise is, the better the episode. Though always
well-written (cleverly parodying not only clichéd
after-school-special dialogue but also the banality of everyday
discourse), the series' funniest moments have occurred during
such episodes as the one in which Jerri's illiteracy is
discovered and she's shunned, or Principal Blackman attempts
to weed out an undesirable retarded girl, or the drama teacher
gives all the good roles to white students for the school
production of A Raisin in the Sun.
By that standard, what I've seen of the show's new season
seems a little tame, but subversive enough. In the first
episode of the two-part season opener, Jerri, who has become
so desperately lonely she's gone to the mall, is lured into
a "collective cooperative community service operation outreach
program project" called Safe Trap House, which she eagerly
joins "as long as they're not a cult." Meanwhile, Principal
Blackman shelters his students from the dangerous temptation
of cults by hanging giant portraits of himself throughout
the school, forcing the students to wear uniforms and employing
mind-control techniques. In the second part, Jerri is simultaneously
rescued and ejected from the cult; her bad behavior inspires
Safe Trap House's benevolent leader to observe, "I'm afraid
this is one little lamb we're going to have to let the wolves
pick off."
But this program is proof that people behaving badly can
be blessedly uproarious, at least on television. Those summertime
rerun doldrums provide the perfect opportunity to give this
brilliantly twisted, basic cable-dwelling satire a chance
to steal some of the networks' mostly undeserved thunder.
It's a long shot, but as Jerri Blank once wistfully said,
"It's nice to hope for the thing you wish to want."
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Willamette Week | originally
published April 26,
2000
|
