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Television for the week of September 6th.

WILFRED

There’s nothing new this week, now that the summer series are coming to an end and we’re still a couple weeks away from the start of the fall tv season, so I’m going to take this time to catch up on a show that I’ve heard a lot about and hadn’t seen. Do seasons get capitalized? Should I have written Summer and Fall? Do you guys care? These are the hard-hitting issues I’ll discuss in this article!

Wilfred is the American re-launch of a hit Australian show about a suicidal man who sees his neighbor’s dog as a smoking, swearing Australian bloke in a dog suit. Do Australians say bloke? So many questions!! The titular character of Wilfred is played by Jason Gann, one of the co-creators of the original and the original Wilred, so the Aussie charm is still heavily prevalent. Base on my past experiences with Australian humor (Summer Heights High and We Can Be Heroes: Search for the Australian of the Year) I’ve been looking forward to this show since I heard about it. Add to it that FX is the network running it and Elijah Wood is the suicidal bloke who is slowly losing his dreamy-eyes mind, I was double and triple stoked. Can I say bloke?

 

FX is the fucking network to be on- the rules are looser since it’s a step in between HBO and normal cable, and their creative director apparently is a genius who realized you can let people do their own weird quirky thing, not get involved as a network with generic notes, and the audiences will come. This is the amazing formula that has brought us Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Terriers (RIP), and best of all Louie. By best of all, I mean best of all things on television. Seriously, you should be watching Louie. I met several people this week who had never hear of him or his show before and parts of me died.

 

Back to Wilfred. In the pilot, we meet Ryan (Wood) writing a fourth draft of a suicide note. His cowardice of choice is a bunch of pills and Nyquil, which let’s be real is just a normal Monday night for most of us. He can’t fall asleep because of his one neighbor’s loud ass motorcycle (played by a very fit but balding Ethan Embree), and seeing his hottie new neighbor (Fiona Gubelmann, which is one of the goofiest names ever) moving in.

 

The next morning, Ryan wakes up (alive!…or is he?) late for his first day at a new job his over-bearing sister got for him at the hospital she works for. The new neighbor, Jenna (Gubes!) drops by and asks him to watch her dog for the day. Which is sort of a weird request for a neighbor you don’t know at all. One- it’s a huge imposition, his day is fucked. You can’t get shit done when watching a dog for someone. If it were your own you could just leave it in the car with the window crack, but god forbid it dies or something, and then they freak out at you for killing their dog, when you didn’t even want do that shit in the first place! Secondly-look at the bags under those baby blues! This guy is unhealthy with a capital UN. The moral of this short story is don’t ask your neighbors for shit. You don’t want to become involved in anyway in their lives, because it’s then literally impossible to ever become untangled, barring moving to a new town, and yes Janice, that IS why I disappeared with only a note last month. Cup of sugar my ass, turns into plant watering, and mail getting, and shoulder crying and… I digress. Ryan sees Wilfred as the dude in a suit, while Jenna obviously doesn’t see this at all. Wilfred very quickly shows himself to be rude, a smoker, a toker, and disdainful of Ryan’s weak willed ways. While manipulating said ways to get what he wants.

Bonding is accomplished, philosophies are waxed and wackiness ensues, leading up to both Wilfred and Ryan shitting in the boots of the loud neighbor and stealing his weed plants. When Ryan’s twat of a sister (Who will remind you loudly throughout the episode she delivers babies) confronts him about missing the job she hooked him up with, he is embiggened by his day with Wilfred and tells her off, the first step into sort of maybe becoming a new more self-assured man. Fade out to us thinking a beautiful friendship is starting, until the end reveals that Wilfred left Ryan’s wallet at the scene of the shitting and pot stealing, leading me to believe the dog is just a manipulative fuck, building people up just to tear them down farther. At least that’s what I hope. It’s always funny to watch pathetic people become even more pathetic. That’s what my boss told me when he cackingly fired me. Dick

The first episode of this show got a lot of points from me. Strong cast, absurdist humor, dumb humor, Australian humor, dark humor, philosophy and life lessons hidden amongst the humor, this is all shit I comedic-ally get off on. My biggest complaint of this episode is the sister. She’s shrill, and not funny. The constant baby delivery jokes grew more grating with each one, and there’s like a thousand in there. No joke, count them. A thousand. One with some zeroes after. How many zeroes are after the one? You guys need to help me solve all these riddles that have been posed in this article in the comment section.

I wouldn’t say it was laugh out loud funny the whole time, but there were some great moments, and I think it’s going to come into it’s own from the clips of more recent episodes. I’ll definitely catch up on the rest of the series, and then go back to watch the original from across the pond, and to the south some. How do you reference Australia? Got it- I’ll definitely go back to watch the rest of the original series from the prison island. There’s a bunch of episodes on Hulu, so go check it out! http://www.hulu.com/wilfred -MG