HOT PACKAGE

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

Here’s a sweet little number that, for me at least, came out of nowhere. Hot Package goes past being just an Entertainment Tonight parody to looking and feeling exactly like it. It has the cheesedick hosts (including the almost dead Pat O’Brien as the barely alive Pat O’Brien), the awkward banter, the feigned interest in the lives of horrible people, the cutaways to graphics there to do nothing but fill up time. The key to most Adult Swim shows is to appear on the surface as if you could be on any channel, but then sprinkle in that fucked-up, trademarked fairy dust they always have on stock. This keeps things from being simply weird, and takes them closer to disturbing. The problem is it doesn’t always take them closer to funny.

Instead of real stories about real celebrities, because no one cares, or even fake stories about real celebrities, which seems tired at this point, we have fake stories about fake celebrities. Instead of footage of these fake celebrities, the show cuts to old footage of very weird, very terrible movies and TV shows. I’m going to be honest; they did a good job finding some bonkers shit. But we no longer live in a world where the only way to find dated, low-budget garbage is in a box of VHS tapes in your uncle’s garage. The internet has that stuff, because the internet has everything. It’s just not impressive on it’s own, and if Hot Package is going to stick around, it’s going to need to be a little more clever in how it uses what it finds, and rely a little less on the fact that they found it.

– Ryan Haley