Picture Tube Problems

I'm re-watching the last few episodes of Avenue 5 ahead of tonight's second season debut, and it's only reinforcing my creepy first impression.

This is a sci-fi spoof by the great Armando Iannucci, who created Veep and In the Loop and The Thick of It, classics all. It's dense with high quality humor product. Clusters of multi-spectrum jokes - fresh topical jokes and slightly cornier old-school jokes and snarky millennial jokes and...you get the idea. And it's got great actors like Hugh Laurie and Zach Woods (also, alas, irritating Josh Gad, which might be part of the problem).

So why "creepy" and "problem"? I can't quite tell you. The show just doesn't click at a fundamental level. The best diagnosis I can offer is that it takes a 1970s sitcom view of its erstwhile reality - you expect Dean Martin to show up as a boozy guest on the show's spacefaring cruiseship, making winking in-jokes about how "wild" all the science is - and layers it with anachronistically modernist humor. Modernism maybe demands real characters in real situations (ala Veep), not just joke-expelling mouthpieces in front of jokey backdrops. But that's a murky assessment. It doesn't explain how the show got so skewed.

There's some tectonic factor at work just beyond the viewer's, uh, view. A network suit made a giant clumsy demand which the show strains to work around. Or Iannucci is unhappily pandering, or otherwise forcing a result that doesn't jibe with his talents. Or scripts have been re-doctored to the point where there's no meat left, just clever decoration. Some Foundational Problem we can't reverse engineer from this side of the screen.

Unseen tectonic fuckery (UTF) crops up from time to time in any realm. And I have a name for it: a "Picture Tube Problem".

In the early 1970s, when my family got its first color TV, something was unsettlingly wrong with the picture, but we couldn't quite pin it down. Certain colors were over-emphasized, others under-emphasized. It was just nebulously off in some serious way. The repairman came, and explained that the TV produces its spectrum of colors from three basic hues: red, blue, and green. And we'd lost blue. That's all.

The cause was simple, even though the problem seemed vexingly murky/slippery. A clear-cut problem if you knew....or an unsettling miasma of wrongness if you didn't.

A "Picture Tube Problem"!