Fleur De Los

So this may be a strange first real post, but it’s not like anyone’s reading this, so it’s rather fitting. No one is watching or seems to even like the new Michal Hurwitz sitcom, “Sit Down and Shut Up”, and I have no idea why.

Let’s put it simply: this show is fucking brilliant. I don’t want to sound like a pretentious fart (but who on the internet doesn’t?) but it’s like the only person who gets this show. I’ll be the first to admit that the first episode left me skeptical (and you can just imagine how the big boys at FOX felt when they saw the ratings), but the last two episodes have been dynamite.

I could sit here and recap every joke, but that’s only satisfying between people who have seen the show. Combine that with the number of people who will ever read this post, and that’s a very select few soul(s?) who would enjoy reading second-hand material. Do yourself a favor, go watch the show. If you’ve given it a try, do it again. I’d just ask to you to keep these next few things in mind.

Let’s start with the animation. I can see why this can be kind of jarring, but wasn’t the mockumentary, single-camera kind of jarring when we saw it on comedies like “The Office”, “30 Rock” and first done, probably not coincidentally, on Hurwitz’s “Arrested Development”? Just try not to think so much about whether or not it’s cheap or nice looking and take it for what it is: drawings on real life backgrounds. If you get that, you can get lost in this world where things aren’t quite real, but aren’t quite imaginary.

And that brings us to the writing. I don’t care what people say, the writing is brilliantly absurd. The jokes are completely un-coventional (I could write a dissertation on the transcendence achieved by Happy, the school janitor, and his English-language overdub/narrator in Episode 2 and don’t get me started on Ennis Hofftard (sarcastic) obeying his inner talking-cat’s urges to attack his microphone while giving a speech about being the world’s greatest teacher) and they’re not what you’d expect from a sitcom about a run-down Florida public school. What also separates this from other shows is the fact that it’s all about the teacher and their interactions with each other. I can’t recall a single student given a line to date and they’re just there to fill the setting. (After all, what would a school be with only teachers?)

And while we’re on it, the teachers, really the only characters, on this show are incredible. Everything from the names (Larry Littlejunk, Willard Deutchbog, and Principal Sue Sezno are my personal favorites) to the actors voicing them are top notch comedy (just look at the cast list). They’re predictable and not, and they’re all a bunch of self-serving idiots when it boils down to it. Being animated, these characters are also boxed into their roles in the life around them despite their desperate, and often hilarious, efforts to change what they are. In the end, it’s like the 90’s era episodes of “The Simpsons” fucked all three seasons of “Arrested Development” and this was their love child. Seriously.

In the end though, I can see why the show may be failing. It’s the opposite of everything you’d expect it to be. Hurwitz doing an animated sitcom? It should be big budget, cutting-edge animation, but it’s not. It’s gritty and cheap — just like most public schools in the U.S. School shows are supposed to be about the struggles of the teachers trying to get though to their kids or about the struggles of kids just trying to make friends and get through high school and this is neither. This show has no after-school message and isn’t trying to portray what schools are really like. This is just a ridiculous show about a ridiculous group of people doing and saying ridiculous things (epitomized by the School Board Director, who’s apparently Colonel Sanders’ twin brother, asking “What in the Hurricane Katrina is going on here?”).

Dammit, more people should watch this show. I love ridiculous things.