Childrens Hospital - Season 3

I feel like this year, Childrens Hospital really cemented itself as the best show on Adult Swim that isn't The Venture Bros. Maybe not the highest praise with some of the channel's best stuff no longer airing,but that doesn't mean Hospital isn't itself great. Television comedy is doing extremely well in general right now, but Hospital definitely holds its own against some of the better known shows that have the privilege of airing before midnight. The entire cast is great, the writing is sharp and unafraid to go anywhere, and they seem to be able to draw from a bottomless well of ideas, sending up medical dramas, the business of television, and pop culture in general. There seems to be nothing they won't try.

Plenty of episodes that would be wacky digressions on almost any other show feel pretty standard on Childrens. Kids being trapped in quicksand, a doctor's former police partner being trapped in a blocked off ward with insane patients, an episode all about a creepy, possibly nuts ambulance driver, all just seem like another day at the office for the staff. I loved the return to the news show that went over the history of the show last year and explores all of the cast members' various spinoffs, and stuff like the Our Town parody and the brief Party Down reunion was great as well. The latter is a good example of the show's fantastic casting, which can get pretty much everybody you've seen in alt comedy, and even guys like Jon Hamm, to show up and do something silly for a few minutes. Every episode is unique, and though they're only about 11 minutes long, most of them have more fresh gags than most episodes of sitcoms that are double the length. Season four is coming, and the wait won't be that bad with the way the show has caused an influx of solid comedies parodying various genres of hacky television.

The Other Guys

Will Ferrell and director Adam McKay continue their fruitful partnership of serviceable and occasionally brilliant but often flawed comedies with The Other Guys, a send up of buddy cop movies (which are themselves already pretty silly in nature) with an odd sense of humor and an even odder political stance against the seedy nature of big money in America. The bad guys in the story are basically using fraud to cover up losses, and the entire end credits of the film feature animated information about things like how Ponzi schemes work and the average salaries of CEOs in comparison to regular workers over time. This is probably the wrong movie to throw an issue like this into, though I appreciate the effort.

The movie starts out bombastically with a ridiculous car chase through New York City as Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson attempt to stop some drug dealers. It's one of the most wonderfully absurd action scenes played for laughs I've seen, and it's a great start for the movie. I would watch a whole film about Johnson and Jackson as these superhero cop characters. But it's not about them, it's about the other guys, played by Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg. Ferrell plays a number cruncher and paperwork doer who'd rather stay in the office than chase bad guys, and Wahlberg was a promising young cop who had his career derailed after he shot a famous athlete. They're mostly the subject of ridicule, but they see an opportunity to make a big case after they arrest a businessman played by Steve Coogan and he is then kidnapped by armed thugs. People with money don't like Ferrell and Wahlberg sniffing around their affairs, and they are harassed at every turn by their fellow cops and other things working against them.

The structure of the story could have pretty much just been a regular buddy cop movie, but it's the specific weirdness of the situations and dialogue that make it a Will Ferrell comedy. The film just comes up with a ton of running gags and lets them ride, and some of them end up being pretty funny. Some of the better ones include all the horrible things that happen to the interior of Ferrell's Prius, his dark past, and Wahlberg's habit of studying fine arts so he can make fun of people who enjoy them. Some bits are weirder; Ferrell's innate attraction to beautiful women is cute but offset by what's basically an emotionally abusive marriage that's played for laughs.

Ferrell's mix of low key and very loud methods of being funny are in full effect and enjoyable as usual, and while I would say Wahlberg definitely isn't a natural comic actor (or a natural actor at all, really), his hit rate on one liners is generally pretty decent. Michael Keaton is great as the police captain, and his role is another I'd love to see revisited in a Rock/Jackson prequel. The movie is overstuffed to the point of bursting with recognizable comedic talent, and most of the cameos usually have at least one decent joke attached instead of just being their for their own sake. Ice-T's narration in particular is memorable. Not every joke is a success and I would have preferred a less self-serious plot, but it was a pretty fun movie.

Childrens' Hospital - Season 2

I enjoyed the first season of this show, which crammed the ten original web episodes into five fifteen minute segments. But when they started actually making it for TV, it really came into its own. Malin Akerman and Henry Winkler are fine additions to the main cast, gelling well with the rest of the cast and the show's surreal sense of humor. Things like the six year old with advanced aging disease and a doctor discovering a cure for cancer in butterfly fluids are fun even when they aren't entirely clever, and luckily it is often pretty darn smart. It's a show that doesn't bother terribly with character development, and it really shouldn't, as it's the most fun when everyone's just bouncing off each other and the jokes are flying every five seconds. The guest actors are a lot of fun too, with Michael Cera returning to read the dispatches and the imminently recognizable Kurtwood Smith as the representative of a government agency that wants the cancer cure stopped at all costs.

Although it's not the most inspired subject matter, the show is actually often at its best when it acknowledges that it's a TV show, like the episode that's a cast reunion after the long running series is canceled and especially the completely amazing "live" season finale. It's funny that it aired so soon after 30 Rock's terrible live episode, but it's really a send up of all silly TV stunts, as everything that can go disastrously wrong does. Cameras get broken, actors quit or injure themselves in the middle of filming, and crew keep accidentally getting caught on screen. It's mostly a single take of absolute madcap brilliance, and just the epitome of what this show can do when it's on its game. It's a bit too silly and niche to be a comedy on a real network, but it embraces that and fits perfectly with the Adult Swim lineup despite the relative high profile of its cast. Season three is coming, and it should be fun.

Childrens' Hospital - Season 1

This is a bit of a unique situation, as Childrens' Hospital was originally created as a short web series before Adult Swim picked it up as a show for their late night lineup. So "season one" is the ten original episodes packaged together in pairs, with a bit of new content, a "commercial" between the two parodying overly dramatic shows like NCIS and humorous wrap ups by creator and star Rob Corddry. They'll begin airing brand new episodes in two weeks, and based on just what I've already seen, they're probably gonna be pretty damn funny. Childrens' Hospital is a parody of overwrought medical shows like Grey's Anatomy, with all of the doctors constantly getting together, breaking up, and basically doing everything except pay attention to their patients. Unless they want to sleep with them. Even if they're six year olds in the bodies of adults thanks to advanced aging disease. Yeah, it's that kind of show. A few of the jokes don't hit, but enough do that it's a pretty enjoyable, wacky watch. There are bit parts by some pretty good comedy actors like Nick Offerman and Ed Helms, and while I don't really know any of the regulars besides Corddry and Megan Mullally, they all do a solid job. I'm not sure how much the switch to writing for television will change it, but I suspect not much.