CHOZEN

** (out of ****)

From the moment you hear the pitch for Chozen, FX’s new FX-like show, it’s impossible not to come up with preconceived notions and serious doubts. Chozen, voiced by the incredibly underrated Bobby Moynihan, is a white, gay rapper just released from prison. Yeesh. It’s not just that you can feel that it will be controversial, but you can almost smell exactly how it will try to be controversial. It’s a premise that is designed not for success, but instead for fear of failure, jamming in as much as possible so it will always have some sort of target. It’s this plan that leads to (in part) its almost entire lack of success.

The first episode gives us the back story: in the 90’s, Chozen is a member of rap group called Phresh Phriends, that also features a very evil villain, a generic black guy, and a generic hispanic guy (voiced by Hannibal Burress and Michael Pena, disrespectively. Say what you want about the show, but it’s got a hell of a cast). Villain frames Chozen for doing coke and killing hookers, and Chozen is thrown in jail for over a decade. He gets out, and gone is the sweet, fat kid he used to be. Thanks to his time in prison, he’s a little bit harder, and a lot more open about how gay he is. I suppose this is where the jokes are supposed to come from, but most of the one-liners are eye-roll-inducing, as opposed to laugh inducing. You see what the show wants to be, but also have to watch it fail to get there. ‘

All of this means that Chozen has no desire to say something new about any of the hundreds of “scandalous” topics it attempts to tackle. I’d like to think that we, as a nation, were done with being gay being the sole source of comedy at about the same time as Phresh Phriends would have been popular. By this point, we need a little more substance than that. It isn’t 100 percent clear that Chozen is gay until about halfway through the pilot. This isn’t done so the show can subtly inform us he’s gay as the plot or character calls for. Instead, it’s as if the show needs to race through all of the backstory first just so it can focus on making fun of how gay Chozen is. The fact that he’s white, trying to make it big in an industry dominated by black people, is barely touched on. There’s no time. It’s GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY GAY instead.

The show is co-created by the Archer people and the Eastbound and Down people, which does nothing but shine a light on how bad Chozen is, and the fact that we could be watching much higher quality television. Both Archer and Eastbound and Down are extremely original shows, who busted right out of the gate with a defined voice. This allowed them to be offensive cleverly and organically. The fact that Chozen’s voice isn’t defined yet isn’t the big deal. It’s a pilot. We have to give it time. The problem is that it’s trying so hard to make up for its lack of voice with being offensive, and it instead makes all of the problems more glaringly obvious.

-Ryan Haley