it's like...what the fuck?! About six weeks ago I began hearing about this new TV show that’s supposed to be just great. Witty. Irreverent. Self-referencing. Ironic. Wry. Words I generally like in my comedy. And what’s more, it’s about how peculiar Los Angeles is. Oh, I thought, this could be good. It’s about four friends, and one has just moved out from New York. And the so wry Chris Eigeman from Wilt Stillman’s increasingly annoying but always watchable young Gotham bourgeois films is playing the New Yorker. OK, I thought, interesting. And, get this, Jennifer Grey, who you’ve spent 8 years, ever since Wind came out, making fun of for getting a nose job that made her bland and totally unrecognizable is playing… Jennifer Grey. And, she talks about how she got a nose job 8 years ago that made her bland and totally unrecognizable. Well, OK. That’s cool I guess. And, they said, it’s by the creator of Seinfeld. Uh Oh. "Witty" said the New York Times. "Wry" said the LA Times. "Irreverent" said the Chicago Tribune. But I watched. Yes, I did. "Oh no. Oh, god no." The episode ended and I sat, gripping my empty Budweiser tall boy in one hand and the remote in the other hand. What did I just see? I wasn’t sure. Really. It’s like, you know… when you run a bath and the water is so ungodly hot that it feels cold for a minute. So the next week I tuned in. It ended. I was confused. For the next 4 weeks I was obsessed with cracking the code of It’s Like You Know… "OK fucker," I said on the third week, charting the placement of each joke on a huge multi-colored graph. "I’m starting to get it." By the fifth week, my chart had produced no results, but I was still as confused as ever. Then last Sunday morning I was at Mayfair buying a pound of coffee that I desperately needed due to It’s Like You Know…-induced sleep depravation. And I saw him. The big guy who’s house they’re always at. He was standing in the line just to the right of me. Should I go ask him? Does he even know? Has he been indoctrinated or his he just another vaguely recognizable actor finally getting a regular paycheck? I pretended to be engrossed in a People article on Cindy Crawford’s pregnancy, but he wasn’t fooled. The minute he got his change, he left the store, holding the bag of whateveritwas he bought, and throwing a concerned look back at me. I imagined him clutching his cell phone in one hand, a cigarette in the other, doing 60 up Beachwood Canyon, "I just saw a strange guy staring at me in Mayfair. Yeah, the stare. He was wearing flooding sweatpants, a House of Pain t-shirt, and flip-flops. I think he’s onto us. Add another one to the list." This week has been a very difficult week, I’m in a play opening on Friday. Another play I wrote is in the same production. My comedy group has a show opening the week after. I’m shooting a film in 2 weeks. So, tonight when the show came on, I just watched, purely, passively. Oh. OK. I was wrong. There is no inner logic. There is no twisted, subversive thing going on. It’s just a bad sitcom. What was I thinking. It’s just another show centered around a good idea, but featuring bad writing and worse acting. I feel much better. But don’t tell me Zoe, Duncan, etc. isn’t operating on many levels at once. Something really evil is going on there… This is where I let Larry King take over my body for a few minutes. Has anyone else ever noticed the gay Darth Vader moment. It’s on his second entrance in Star Wars…why do my jeans rip consistently, but only at the knees and butt…compressed air, the best thing ever made…why is Eddie Vedder so disgruntled…why is it that the US government can put men on the moon, cover up alien landings, and introduce crack into the inner city, but they can’t send some deep undercover special-ops to kill Milosavich?
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