MAY TV EXTRAVAGANZA

 

MARON

 

**1/2 (out of ****)

 

 

As a favor to Marc, and the entire crew of Maron, this will be the first, last, and only time that Louie will be mentioned in this review.

 

Shit. Now what do I talk about?

 

Towards the end of the first episode of Maron, Marc tells one of his fans, while petting that fan’s mean cat, that “I’m not for everybody, and the things I do attract are usually the same as me.” This line of dialogue threw me for a loop, mostly because it’s hard to know exactly why it’s in there. If it’s on purpose — that is, the writers thought it was necessary to sum up the premise of the “character” Marc plays, if not the entire show, it’s a little on the nose…a little too little on the nose. If it’s just a throwaway line, for instance, if Marc ad-libbed it, he may have accidentally let everyone know why a show like Maron was probably never going to work in the first place.

 

I should explain to the uninitiated what the hell is going on here, but that’s part of the problem. What uninitiated people have any interest in this show? The other part of the problem is what does this show have to offer the already initiated? We’ll start with the Un’s: Marc Maron was an almost-mainstream comic in the nineties. As his contemporaries, like Seinfeld and Romano, shot past him into super-stardom, he saw his opportunities dry up, thanks in no small part to an enduring need to let people know exactly all of the negative things that he was thinking about them at any given time. Bridges were burned, the phone stopped ringing, and Maron was left with no other option than to throw up a couple mikes in his garage and get whatever friends he still had left to come over and talk to him. It was back before every single person on the planet had their own podcast, and Maron is one of the reasons that they now do. He made it seem easy to sit down with someone, and through honesty and reflection, get them to spill their guts about their process, their hopes, and their dreams. He had no idea that the blossoming niche of podcast listeners were so interested in what made comedians tick, but it was a pretty safe bet that if you get two quasi-celebrities to hash out their indifferences in front of the world, people will listen. Fast forward half a decade letter, and the BBC has turned Chris Hardwick’s Nerdist podcast into a talk show. Scott Aukerman has re-formatted his Comedy Bang Bang podcast in to a parody of a talk show. And Marc Maron has turned his talk show podcast…into a sitcom.

 

Maybe this is where everything went wrong. Maybe all this should have ever been is two chairs, Marc Maron, and a comedian, hashing it out and making each other laugh. Maybe the only difference here should be a camera recording it, instead of just microphones. Maron marks an important time in Maron’s life, or at least begs an important question: what is Marc Maron actually capable of? If you conquer the podcast world, is it now time to conquer the next step up? My issues with the podcast aside, Marc is pretty good at keeping a conversation going, and holding a person’s hand as they venture into the darkness that is their psyche. But in the meantime, Maron wants to be a star. He wants his bits to be heard. He wants to appeal to the widest audience possible. These are all understandable wants, and I don’t blame him for any of them, but just because you can do one thing, doesn’t mean you can do them all.

On a recent episode of Comedy Bang Bang the podcast (we’re going to have to put ‘the podcast’ after more and more things, aren’t we?), Scott Aukerman changed the entire format of his show, because Maron was on. Typically, Aukerman “interviews” two comedians, one as themselves and the other as a character. The tone of Bang Bang, including its “open door policy”, usually makes for an anything-can-happen sort of chaos. With Maron on, Aukerman invited no other guests, and essentially Marc Maron-ed Marc Maron. It wasn’t a bad episode, but it showed that Aukerman’s usual show wouldn’t work with Maron. It would be weird to have Maron sit down and talk alongside Paul F. Tompkin’s Cake Boss, or Nick Kroll’s El Chupacabra. That’s not what Maron does, and that’s totally fine. What if sitcom acting isn’t what Maron does either. Just because I can still draw a pretty sweet sketch of Bart Simpson skateboarding doesn’t mean I should come over and paint your family portrait.

There’s essentially two sections to Maron, and they flow back and forth almost well enough for you to not notice. There’s Maron’s bits, where he is talking at someone (sometimes himself), and there’s the plot, a barely-there adventure that doesn’t take up too much time so as not to get in the way of the bits. The rants don’t always work, usually because they seemed forced in there, but, in a weird way, the rants are the only time the show comes close to working. Telling a story is hard, and not something Maron has ever really been asked to do, as far as I know. Even a story as simple as tracking down an internet troll, or getting a dead possum out from under your house, need all of the basic elements that any story needs. Conflict and drama and the rise and fall of action and blah blah blah. There just seems to be a very limited amount of interest here in what happens. It reminds me of watching Beavis and Butthead, wishing they would stop doing whatever they were doing and go back to watching videos. The gimmick of Beavis and Butthead was upfront, however; there was no sense of subtlety necessary. Here, everything is put together as if it’s trying to be a real show.

 

Getting back to that line of dialogue I mentioned, Maron the comedian and Maron the television show aren’t for everybody. It’s not that he’s whiny or self-obsessed. He’s just off-balance right now. This is smoothed a little in the second episode, although this might just be because he has more chemistry with Denis Leary and his new assistant than he does with Dave Foley. Attracting the people that are like him isn’t necessarily a good thing either. There are no revelations here. There aren’t any conclusions that Marc comes to that could make anybody rethink anything. These are thoughts that everyone has. They recognize them, internalize them, and then move about their day. Too often, Maron thinks he’s fucking Confucious, and can’t wait to explain to the world all of the “breakthroughs” he makes. Good job, dude. That’s similar to one I made in seventh grade.

There’s another lane that Maron needs to realize, and then stay in. He’s a funny guy, but I don’t know if his brand of comedy can be put on paper. That Comedy Bang Bang episode had some laugh out loud moments, but they come when Maron is relaxed, when he realizes that there’s no one left in the room to impress. Most importantly, it’s never big. There’s a scene in the first episode where he confronts the room full of trolls who had been talking shit on him on Twitter. These kids make the guys from The Big Bang Theory look like Don Draper and Roger Sterling. This is the “big” I’m talking about, these set-up set pieces that do not gel with Maron, but do gel with a room full of writers not sure of what they’re supposed to be doing.

 

The reason why this show was, and will probably remain, watchable is because every episode will feature two or three moments of the Maron I want. It will for you too, they might just be different moments than mine. Big Maron, Preachy Maron, Serious Maron. These are all things that seemed forced, as if there’s some sort of one-camera sitcom checklist. But every once in a while Maron will relax, and realize that he’s not relaxed at all, and then maybe we can all have a breakthrough together.

-Ryan Haley