The Strange World of Thomas P. Coombe

The Emmys: Filled With Glee. (Tom: Somewhat Pleased)

  Some quick thoughts on the Emmy nominations:

•  I'm not at all surprised at Glee's 19 nominations. It's fairly well-liked by critics, brought something unique to TV, and is hugely popular. But one of the best comedies of the year? Actually, I'd put Glee on the list before The Office and 30 Rock, which had really, really weak years. A better list would've left them off and replaced them with Parks & Recreation and Community, so that the Best Comedy nominees would, you know, actually include the best comedies. (Incidentally, Modern Family is a close third to these shows, and I was happy to see so much of its ensemble nominated.)
•  I'll confess: I'm wayyyy behind on my Friday Night Lights viewing (read: I've seen one and a half seasons). But by all accounts, the show has only gotten better over time, and it would've been clear to anyone who saw only the first few handful of episodes how good Connie Britton and Kyle Chandler were in the lead roles. So it's nice to see them finally being honored for their work. 
• Nominations that made me happy: Aaron Paul for Breaking Bad, Terry O'Quinn, Michael Emerson and Matthew Fox for Lost; Amy Poehler for Parks & Recreation.
• Nomination that surprised me, and made me happy: Martin Short for Damages, a great performance in a little-seen show.
• Omissions which really bugged me: John Noble for Fringe, the fact that  no one Sons of Anarchy or Justified made the cut (thinking specifically of Katy Segal from the former and Walton Goggins from the latter.)
• Who I'm pulling for in the main categories: Breaking Bad, Modern Family, Matthew Fox (for making us like Jack again), Connie Britton, Aaron Paul, Christina Hendricks, Larry David, Amy Poehler, Ty Burrell and Sofia Vergara.

 Tom Coombe

Curb Your Enthusiasm Season Finale: The Revenge of Mocha Joe

Ever since switching to season-long story arcs a few years ago, Curb Your Enthusiasm has followed a rule: No matter how weak the season is overall, the finale will be satisfying.

 And Sunday night's finale maintained that tradition.

 Part of what made it satisfying was seeing the Seinfeld crew do what looked like a classic Seinfeld episode on HBO. (We only see a few minutes of it, but enough to know it felt more like a part of the show's universe more than the actual Seinfeld finale from 11 years ago.)

  Part of it was seeing Larry -- in the midst of professional and (later) personal triumph -- continue to carry out his petty crusades: dealing with vengeful coffee vendor Mocha Joe, bartering for the lives of Jason Alexander's vicious dogs, and attempting to prove his innocence in the "ring staining" of Julia Louis-Dreyfus' antique coffee table.

 

Curb Your Enthusiasm: No Cure for Groat's

 Some quick thoughts about the next-to-last Curb Your Enthusiasm of the year:

• I felt like this one really flourished when it was on the Seinfeld reunion set. So much to like here: Funkhouser's repulsive joke, Larry and Jason Alexander's continued, smiling-through-gritted teeth hatred of each other, and of course, seeing the Seinfeld cast do their stuff.
• None of that, however, was topped by the brilliant scene where an uncoached Leon tries to convince Michael Richards that he's a survivor of the fictional "Groat's Disease." I'm not sure what I found funnier: Leon's ignorance of how a bar mitzvah works or his made-up Groat's disease symptoms ("Everything I ate tasted like peaches...I forgot how to multiply.")
• Almost as funny: Funkhouser inadvertently blowing the whistle on Leon and Jerry's scam by introducing the widow of the real Groat's sufferer and confirming that the man Leon had been impersonating had in fact died "a long painful death."
• But like I said, once the episode got away from the set, it fell kind of flat. I'm not sure what kind of bad restaurant experiences Larry David has had between seasons 6 and 7, but something has caused him to make waiters/maitre d's into his foils this year. And it was obvious early on that Larry's continual and wayyyy-too-casual reference to the little girl's rash would come back to haunt him.
• Next week brings us the finale. The show has yet to put together a bad one.

 Tom Coombe

Curb Your Enthusiasm: Don't Get Your Panties in a Bunch

Once again, I wasn't crazy about this week's Curb Your Enthusiasm. It had maybe three moments that made me laugh out loud: Larry not wanting to hear the couple's "how we met" story, fighting with the kids at the lemonade stand, and his protracted argument with the Banana Republic guy. But I just didn't buy that Larry would pretend to be wearing women's underwear to help Jeff out of a jam (was Jeff always this promiscuous?), and his whole "there's only two ways to get a neck injury" theory was just goofy. Also: Larry's plan to win Cheryl back is to have her reenact the reason she left him, over and over again, before finally performing it for what would surely be an audience of millions?

 Tom Coombe

Mad Men Season Finale: If That's Moving Up Then I'm Moving Out

I'd have two double check about two seasons worth of notes, but I'm pretty sure I've never used the term "exhilarating" before in connection with Mad Men.

 I've tossed around a lot of other adjectives to sing the show's praises, but never that one...until last night's finale.

 Because it was: exhilarating and exciting and triumphant and heartbreaking and rewarding in a way I'm not sure it's even been before. Remember the "Whoo" moment last season when Don shut down Duck Phillips? Multiply that by 10.

Curb Your Enthusiasm: Past Away

  Maybe it was just because I watched it back-to-back with last night's funereal Mad Men, but this one was a little too bleak and ugly, even by Curb Your Enthusiasm standards.

 I really liked the foursome of Larry, Jeff, Funkhouser and Cousin Andy (Funkhouser is especially hilarious, and ranks next to Susie as my favorite Larry David foil). But once Larry whacked the swan, it felt too much like a goofball take on film noir, complete with blackmailing, pacts-of-silence and double-crosses.

 (Maybe I'm using the term "whacked" here because the image of Larry being stalked by a black swan was like something out of The Sopranos.)

 Larry says "next week" will be the read through for the Seinfeld reunion. I hope that means next week's episode, and that that one plays out better than this one did.

 Other thoughts:

• When Larry's mother died earlier in the series, his father didn't tell him right away because he "didn't want to bother" Larry. Once again, we see that his insane level of courtesy extends to beyond the grave, meaning that poor Adele David gets buried under a tombstone that says "Past Away."
• Laugh out loud moment (for me, anyway) number one: Jeff claiming that he tells his wife he's working when he plays golf and that "the only time I tell her I'm playing golf is when I'm with another woman."
• Moment number two: Andy's wife arguing that Larry -- who had previously offered to pay for their daughter's college tuition -- should instead give it to her to pay for cosmotology school. "She might not even go to college. She might be a drug addict."

 Tom Coombe

Curb Your Enthusiasm: Go With Your Gut

  "What's 'real' got to do with what we do?" Jerry Seinfeld to Larry David.

 What indeed? That line appears early on in "The Bare Midriff," one of the stranger Curb Your Enthusiasms I've seen, yet still something of an improvement over the last two episodes.

  It was an interesting mix. We spent a lot of time on Larry and Jerry's obsessions over social rules (Who should slide over in the restaurant booth when a third person arrives? How loudly should one honk at another driver?), but also saw some flat-out craziness (the flashback to 1963, the fake miracle, Larry getting arrested for stealing napkins, Lewis getting run over by Maureen's mom, Larry saving himself from a fatal fall by grabbing Maureen's belly).

 I said last week that I wanted to see more of the Seinfeld reunion plot, and we got that this week, sort of. It's clear now that Larry and Jerry are having as much trouble writing the reunion show as Jerry and George did with their pilot. (Although, judging by the white board in their office, it seems like maybe Jerry and Larry have too many ideas to work with, where Jerry and George had too few.)

 I'm looking forward to seeing the whole cast together again to actually rehearse this thing, which should go about as smoothly as Maureen's mother's honeymoon.

 Some other thoughts:

• This episode was pretty overstuffed with characters (Jerry, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Maureen, her mother, Richard Lewis), but it still would have been nice to see Jeff and Susie.
• I love how Larry David continues to push this idea that bald people are an oppressed minority.
• During the discussion with Jerry about honking, I'm surprised Larry didn't pitch his story about the Aamco commercial -- from waayyy back in season one -- as a plotline for the reunion.

 Tom Coombe

Curb Your Enthusiasm: "Everything I've Always Wanted in a Woman...

...except the walking."

That's a line from Seinfeld, spoken by Kramer, who was dating a disabled woman in "The Handicapped Spot," yet another episode from the show's glorious fourth season.

 Any TV show or movie that features someone dating a woman in a wheelchair  -- like the Seinfeld episode I just mentioned, or Sunday's Curb Your Enthusiasm -- hits home for me. My girlfriend of nealy eight years has spina bifida, which means she uses a wheelchair to get around.

 So I know what it's like to go to a restaurant and have everyone bend over backwards for you. Unlike Larry, I don't get that much of a charge from it. ("Oh, so that's the reason you're dating me," Megan teased me when I told her about this episode.)

 In fact, I spent much of this episode thinking about my own situation and how Megan would have responded to it. (I know she'd be more put off by everyone's pat-on-the-head attitude toward Denise and Larry's courtship than by Larry's shallowness. And what is it about Larry David being chased by people in wheelchairs? This is -- at least -- the third time it's happened.)

 Because really, there wasn't much to this one. There were a lot of funny ideas introduced -- Denise being disappointed by Larry's baldness, Ted Danson and the pie -- that didn't seem to go anywhere. More Seinfeld stuff, please.

 Tom Coombe

Curb Your Enthusiasm: What Are The Odds?

One of the little pleasures of any Curb Your Enthusiasm episode is watching Larry's interactions in the first two scenes of any episode and wondering how -- because it's rarely if ever a question of "if" -- they'll come back to haunt him at the end.

 In this case, Larry faces a sort of karmic payback for his disdain of any man who'd wear shorts in public. His ratting out Christian Slater for caviar abuse leads to -- presumably -- some sort of violent confrontation with Mary Jane Porter's boyfriend. And you know that when he asks his doctor "What are the odds" that he'll actually need to call him at home, the odds are quite good.

 And while I liked watching that all unfold, I found this one to be the weakest of all the episodes I've seen so far this season.  Some things just rubbed me the wrong way: Larry was way too off the mark with some of his petty crusades this week (the gift certificate, dealing with the doctor). And this may be the first time where I wasn't crazy about a Phillip Baker Hall appearance.

 Not to say I didn't laugh: Anytime Larry manages to piss of Susie Green or Ted Danson is golden, and I loved Larry having to perpetuate his "I can't stand the sound of the human voice" lie at the Italian restaurant. I'll never get tired of the Larry David overreaction to unpleasant sensations either (in this case, tasting the pie, and the hot towel).

 Tom Coombe

Curb Your Enthusiasm: In One Word -- "Nothing"

  To quote Flounder in Animal House: This is gonna be grreeat. 

 Here we are, 10 years after Seinfeld ended, watching Larry David more or less re-enact the show's best season -- the fourth, where Jerry and George try to make their own show about nothing -- with the original cast.

I never, ever get tired of the scene where they first pitch the show to NBC, and George hijacks the meeting by insisting on the show about nothing idea.

 Here, the dynamic is reversed. On Seinfeld, Jerry and George had to fight to get their show made. On Curb,NBC is more or less begging Larry to do a reunion show. Yet there's still an NBC exec for Larry to contend with, just like George had to spar with Russell Dalrymple every week.