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Underground > Film, TV & Theatre >

Huff

Disco is My Class War

12:08 / 26.04.06

So, some Australian channel has started showing Huff at 12.30am every Monday night, right after Arrested Development. I figure they picked it up after it did good at the Emmy's, but they can't stand the perverse sex, drug use etc and so desire to bury it in the early hours of the wee morn. Nonetheless, in my household we are always up that late, so we've been watching it. I'm getting to like it. It's very funny. It features some really great actors playing the line between comedic and heart-breakin'. Blythe Danner is really wonderful as the totally boundaryless, hardnosed asshole of a mother in law who really hurts. And one of the storylines features a gay kid who shoots himself, and the show's treatment of this is neither homophobic nor saccharine. I'm also a big fan of Oliver Platt, especially when he's coming out with lines like, "I want you to put your finger up my ass." There's also a teenager called Bird in the mix. What's not to like? Well, something. It gets a leeetel too weepy at moments. And it feels just a bit middle-class and 'safe' in terms of class; sometimes even smug. Usually I hate smug, but I'm finding the comedy mostly undercuts it. But mostly, competent, assured, diverting television.

Thoughts? Is anyone watching it? Enjoying? Hating? Also, I never saw Hank Azaria act before and I'm quite impressed. Maybe it's something about his haircut.

Mysterious Transfer Student

12:53 / 26.04.06

We have Huff here in the UK, on satellite channel FX. I enjoyed it at first but had to stop watching this show, amusing and well made though it is, when it reached the point where...

[GAP FOR SPOILERPHOBES]

... Huff and Beth's marriage is under pressure from all sides and he begins to get paranoid about her close friendship with a (black, sophisticated) male work colleague, thus justifying himself into a prolonged flirtation with a sexy and much younger female pharmaceutical company rep who at first was plainly trying to manipulate him into buying her company's products but soon develops (gulp) feeeelings for the decrepit lecher. It was a horrible storyline that positively reeked of a male scriptwriter/director engineering a plot designed to make his own extra-relationship meanderings seem harmless, replete with a self-sacrificing ending where good ol' Huff decides she's far too young for him (at the same time she realizes that he's too old for her) and returns to the bosom of his family, naturally without mentioning a thing about it to his wife or letting her off the hook over her entirely innocent relationship with the designer guy.

[END GAP FOR SPOILERPHOBES]

So it made me feel sick. Mea culpa. I recommend The Wire instead, which is on the same channel and is not remotely smug, safe or middle-class.

Disco is My Class War

14:22 / 26.04.06

Oh No.

I think here they took off The Wire. They take everything good off.

Mysterious Transfer Student

15:53 / 26.04.06

My commiserations. Did you even get to the end of season one?

Re Huff: I should probably qualify my snarky comments above by stating that it's been several months since I saw the show, and the aforementioned storyline may well have been resolved properly in a later episode - but my inbuilt dislike of self-justifying male mid-life-crisis-"inspired" writing (so sadly omnipresent in English-language mainstream fiction, which is just another good reason to read only SF - but's that's another argument) meant that I couldn't bring myself to continue with the wretched show, no matter how funny Oliver Platt and Blythe Danner are. And the comedy possibly-imaginary homeless Hungarian bandleader/Jiminy Cricket figure? Really annoying after a surprisingly short while.