Posts Tagged ‘party down’
TV show to watch: “Party Down”
So there’s this show called “Party Down” which is really quite excellent. It’s a comedy about a team of Los Angeles cater-waiters who are all some form of entertainment-industry wannabe. The show chronicles their work as cater-waiters, a job at which they are all pretty terrible. Each episode focuses on one event that they work at, and usually manage to turn into a disaster.
It’s on Starz, which means two things: (1) lots of people don’t know about it because seriously who the hell pays for Starz, I mean come on it’s basically like baby HBO (2) there’s a lot of swearing. Network TV has shown there’s much you can do despite an upper bound on the severity of swearing, but Party Down is like a breath of fresh air in that it’s a TV show that actually depicts the way people talk sans bowdlerization or restraint.
There seem to have been an inordinate number of people involved in the conception and production of this show, but all I care about is that one of them is Rob Thomas, the creator of “Veronica Mars”, a show which I have recently become infatuated with. The two shows aren’t similar at all (except that they’re both GREAT) but their shared heritage shows through in the fact that five VM alumni have made guest appearances on Party Down, and Ryan Hansen is a main character. In the first episode, for example, Enrico Colantoni (Keith Mars) appears — completely butt-naked. (This is a downside of pay cable.) The good part is that the VM alumni mostly play completely different characters from their VM characters, with the surprising exception of Kristen Bell herself, who pretty much plays a Veronica Mars whose skills are more oriented towards organizing party-type events than private investigation.
It certainly does its job as a comedy. It made me laugh out loud more than any other show in recent memory. The scene from the pilot where Keith Mars is paddling around drunkenly in the pool yelling, “Maybe I’ll win an award for Best Cock”, and Lizzy Caplan’s episode-4 explanation of how she’s not the Pancake Lady, are things I will not soon forget.
Anyway, I blew through most of the first season (10 episodes of 30 minutes each) in a single day, because it’s that good. It’s been renewed for a second season which is starting in April. Highly recommended.
