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Is it wrong that my enjoyment of The Sarah Silverman Program is derived almost exclusively from the fact it happens to be really well art directed? Most comedies these days are either extremely lo-fi (It’s Always Sunny…, Curb, and to a lesser extent The Office), shot 3-camera, or generally just very boring looking. SSP, for reasons that are mostly Schrab related, looks fantastic — especially for Comedy Central. Is this a reason to watch week after week? Probably not, but it’s a start. More after the jump…

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I bought the first season of Upright Citizens Brigade back in the summer of 2003. Later this month the Comedy Central sketch show’s second season will be released some four years after the first set and nearly a decade since it was first shown television. So the question becomes: is it worth the wait? Well, having just finished watching the season’s 10 episodes it seems to me that the answer is a resounding, “sorta.”

If you fancy yourself a fan of sketch comedy you could probably do a lot worse. Like any series, the sketches are hit and miss, but at least in the case of UCB they always seem fairly inventive. Most rewarding, especially in DVD format, is the well use of the running gag. The second season not only has it’s own well-stocked series of runners (such as throwing star based entertainment, talking robot heads, “super-cool”) but is more than willing to dip into the vault from season one giving the die-hards a little extra reward for their attention. More after the jump…

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Last night I watched both The Daily Show and The Colbert Report for the first time in 2007. I had been watching Colbert pretty religiously into February before taking a break. TDS, on the other hand I had quit watching sometime last fall. Given that sweeps is in full bloom I figured I might as well see how things are sitting over there in Comedy Central’s late-night division.

As it turns out, both shows are more or less how they were when I last watched, which I suppose is as comforting as it should be. The Daily Show did get a new set. It seems like the program is single-handedly keeping New Yorks booming set-building-industry operating at full steam.

The good news is that the increasingly early political season should provide a much-needed jolt of humor in what had otherwise turned into a pretty dire half-hour of comedy. I mean how many times can you sit back and laugh at the non-joke of the United States’ one-time blissful ignorance. Luckily, presidential primary candidates know how to bring the funny (at least Kucinich).

At the bottom of the hour The Colbert Report is still comedy packed, but the character’s freshness seems dated. His dual-mug gracing the cover of GQ this month is probably a year late. This isn’t to say the show shouldn’t be watched. It clearly provides much more of a venue for creativity than TDS, simply based on the format. The thing is neither of these programs are really designed to be watched every night — well, they are and they aren’t. Obviously the programs themselves want you to tune in and want to reward those who tune in often (The Late Show is masterful at paying off long runners, but we’re not talking Letterman here), but anyone who insists on watching hundreds of episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report day in and day out is really no different from the person who watches Headline News all day or insists upon seeing Jeopardy before the night can really begin. I say this because I am that guy and I can spot our own.

I just finished reading an interesting article over at Blogcritics Magazine about a tech writer who was recently interviewed for a Daily Show correspondent segment. His name is John Bambenek and he was used in a piece about Daylight Savings Time. He details how it all went down…

The way The Daily Show operates is somewhat different than the news. For instance, they won’t really let you know where they are going until they’re running tape. They like getting “first reactions” for their segment. In this case, it wasn’t a big deal because I ended up being of the same mind that they were about the DST controversy… it was mostly media hype over little more than minor inconveniences for us IT guys.

Read Aclockalypse Now: My Appearance on The Daily Show

Baseball season starts on Sunday (thank God!). To celebrate, check out Three Strikes, the Jon Stewart/Ben Karlin produced pilot made for Comedy Central (the series didn’t get picked up). The show follows the wacky adventures of a minor league baseball team filled with former pros with questionable morals. It isn’t great, but did have enough bright spots to make me want to see another episode (really, it might just be my desire to see a show about baseball players doing things that baseball players used to do before their every move was scrutinized and all the fun was sucked from the game — A-Rod).

The full pilot is currently on YouTube (which means it soon won’t be) in three parts [Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3]

Is anyone else sick of improv comedy? I mean, I respect the art form, but there’s been so many “loosely outlined” shows the past couple years its starting to just look lazy. Take for example the exceptionally unfunny Halfway Home which premiered tonight on Comedy Central. Say what you will about The Sarah Silverman Program, but at least you can say it had really great art-direction. Halfway Home continues the troublesome trend of making comedies as ugly as possible in an attempt to “make it more verté” which doesn’t even make any sense. Fact: it’s possible to create a show that is funny, cheap, and visually interesting (this is television after all). If Yacht Rock can pull it off, surely a major television network can put something together.

Halfway Home, if you’re still willing to read on, is a series about a group of wacky criminals trying to sort out their issues at a halfway house with the help of their sponsor, but when you watch it all you can think about is how Oscar Nuñez left The Office for this.

The show will certainly appeal to some. Specifically people who subscribe to the long-held belief that everything is funnier when its being shouted.

Halfway Home at Comedy Central Dot Com

For me, Sarah Silverman’s stock has consistently declined since the release of The Aristocrats. By the time her new Comedy Central show premiered last week I was very much on the Okay-I-Get-It side of the fence, which might explain why it took me five days to get around to watching it. To my surprise I didn’t hate it, though Silverman herself left me pretty cold. The real reason to tune in is Rob Schrab who is significant to me because he penned on the of the greatest comic books ever, and who may be significant to you because he started Channel 101 and co-wrote Monster House. His influence on the series is what sells it. In one scene in particular a cop is arguing with an off-camera neighbor (Schrab) about noise. The exchange goes something like this:

COP: Look, I’m sorry!
NEIGHBOR: Yeah, you say that, but you don’t mean it.

That made me laugh really hard. Schrab wrote and directed four of the series six episodes and because of that, I’m going to stick around — even if when all is said and done, The Sarah Silverman Program ends up being little more than 2007’s Stella.

Remember back in the early 90s when Comedy Central was awesome. And when I say “awesome” I’m not so much talking about awesome shows, as I am talking about “an awesome way for a 12-year-old to spend an afternoon after school — even better an afternoon while staying home from school sick.” The network first appeared on my radar back in 1991 when its lineup was comprised mostly of clip shows (Short Attention Span Theater), stand-up comedy, stand-up comedy clip shows (Standup-Standup), Jean Doumanian era SNL, and Benny Hill. Benny Hill was a godsend for a 12-year-old boy because it presented the distinct possibility of seeing a boob, or part of a boob on basic cable.

It wasn’t until Stranger with Candy (and then South Park) South Park and The Daily Show that the network started to rely on its own programming (circa 1996). Before, it was nothing more than a funnier version of E!. It was perfect ‘on in the background’ television, especially during the standup comedy heyday of the mid-90s. No component was more important than once the network started rerunning hour-long versions of SNL from the late-80s/early-90s. They were always on, proving that SNL’s best asset has always been its ubiquity. Seen it once or seen it a million times, you know what you’re getting, which is precisely what day-time television is all about. In fact, Comedy Central’s loss of SNL a few years back (in lieu of the god-awful Mad TV) was really the final blow to “Old Comedy Central.”

As time went by more and more original programming made it air (as well as giving Kids In the Hall an American outlet): Exit 57 with a young Stephen Colbert, Viva Variety with a reformed cast of The State, Politically Incorrect’s first version, Mystery Science Theater 3000, etc. Good stuff. And you might notice that Carlos Mencia is nowhere to be found.

Watching those same programs now, as an adult, I’d probably want to gouge out my eyes with rubber chickens. I recently caught an old Benny Hill on BBC-America and was shocked at how much sped-up-tomfoolerly one had to sit through, and how few scantily clad women there actually were in a given episode. I’m glad the network was in place when I was at the age though, I’d hate to have relegated my time to something like Discovery or CNN.

I work for a local news station. We were live last night– election night– until midnight. This is, obviously, not unheard of in the world of television news. I didn’t get home from work until well after 2am. The first thing I did was watch The Daily Show and The Colbert Report’s special “Midterm Midtacular” on my DVR. The Daily Show side was mostly funny, but the Colbert Report half was nothing shy of brilliant.

After watching, I flipped around the cable-news channels a bit to see what was happening at 3:30 AM in the land of über-news. All three networks, FOX, MSNBC, and CNN, were live. This is not a surprise as there are still two senate races that are too close to call. What was interesting was that MSNBC still had the “A” team on the set. Chris Matthews, Pat Buchanan, Bob Shrum, etc, all sitting at a desk commenting on what I can only assume they had been commenting since yesterday morning (fact: I watched Buchanan and Shrum in the exact same positions talking with Joe Scarborough yesterday afternoon around 2). Keith Olberman had been on set as late as 2:30 AM. The obvious question: “Why?”

Sure, on the west coast, the time would be just after midnight, but who cares? There gets to be a point in these races where you reach a deadlock and simply need to give things a day or two to sort themselves out. There isn’t a reason to keep your top talent on the set for that long, especially if you’d like to use them the next morning, or at the very least the next day.

EXCEPT!

If you’re MSNBC and you’re the third ranked cable-news channel you can show up the competition by claiming that you delivered the most comprehensive coverage. One has to assume that the only person watching election results at three in the morning are the die-hards and television bloggers, and seeing familiar faces at such an ungodly hour would definitely keep you watching and might even win you over the next time you’re looking for information. It’s kind of an interesting political maneuver in their own right.

None of this answers the real quesiton of the night, “why do we need all of this coverage anyway?” Have we really learning anything that we couldn’t have just found out in the morning?

On a related plane, at what point does CNN’s election night set get its own AI, revolt and then reek havoc on greater Atlanta?

It seems like last week there there was so much television being watching by yours truly I barely had an opportunity to report back with my thoughts (and without thoughts, we really don’t have much of a website). So here are, more or less, my notes on a week’s worth of programming:

Friday Night Lights (Tuesdays 8pm NBC) - Inexplicably placed on a Tuesday, Friday Night Lights is being put into my regular rotation because its one of the few shows I’ve seen on network television that doesn’t shy away from the racial and economical issues affecting small cities in America. The pilot was a by-the-numbers local-boy-makes-good football story and yet the emphasis was never put on the game itself, but on the characters and how football is really the towns only shared experience. The shows realism seemed startling.

Help Me Help You (Tuesdays 9:30 ABC) - I liked seeing Tim Meadows as the rival therapist. Tim Meadows is the type of SNL alum who was so poorly used on the show it might have tainted an otherwise brilliant career. Otherwise, if it weren’t for the complete lack of comedies on television, I probably would quit watching this show. In classic Hollywood fashion, the series takes place in a New York City that reeks of Los Angeles (the LA subway may on one of the sets didn’t help).

The Nine (Wednesdays 10:00 ABC) - First and foremost, “Egan Foote” might be the greatest character name of the season. As for the character, well, we’ll just have to wait and see. As a whole, The Nine was both good and interesting, but like Studio 60… we won’t be able to get a real look at the show until the second or third week. What is interesting about the setup for The Nine (a group of people are held hostage in a bank for 52 hours, and throughout the shows run we’ll get to see what happened in there) is seeing if audiences will use the hostage-taking as a canvas in which to project their own personal tragedies. Perhaps the bigger question is wondering if people do happen to project themselves into the series, will they like what they see? The Nine asks viewers to dig a little deeper into their own psyche in order to start relating to the characters on screen. I’m curious to see if viewers will be willing to do that.

Freak Show (Wednesdays 10:30 Comedy Central) - The voice-talent alone is a force to be reckoned with. Frankly, I could listen to Jon Benjamin read XML manuals and find it hilarious, though the show still pales in comparison to The Venture Brothers, which might be the pinnacle of six years worth of Adult Swim programming. Aside from South Park, Comedy Central has never really had much authority in animation.

Peep Show (BBC, DVD) - I put down the TV remote for the DVD remote and checkout out the british series, Peep Show, which was recommended to me by a friend. It’s a fairly high concept show about two roommates who are a bit of an odd-couple (one’s a button down office worker, there other is a carefree musician). The twist is that the entire show is shot from the point-of-view of one of the characters. As in we, the audience, are constantly looking through someone’s eyes and are able to hear their thoughts. Its a cool-enough idea, and could certainly propel a series, but it also doesn’t hurt that the characters frequently make the worst decisions you could imagine. I’d basically equate the style of comedy to something of a British It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Definitely worth checking out.

Ugly Betty (Thursdays 8:00 ABC) - Nice to see “Dawn” from the British office show up here as the host of “Fashion TV.” That makes two network shows where she’s been spotted in a small role this season. LET’S MAKE IT THREE!

SNL (Saturdays 11:30 NBC) - The only redeeming parts of this episode were the “New York City Stories” shorts that were done with Fred Armisen and Amy Poehler. Specifically the first one where Armisen played Scorsese. That made me laugh.

South Park (Wednesdays 10:00 Comedy Central) - I don’t play “Worlds of Warcraft” but enjoyed this episode nonetheless. I’m curious how much support they had from Blizzard, as their logo was all over the episode.

Extras (Thursdays 9:00 BBC-2) - It’s not out in America yet (January), but let me be the first to tell you that the second season of Ricky Gervais’ Extras is leaps and bounds above the first (which is saying something since the first season was hardly shabby). This week’s episode featured Chris Martin from Coldplay pimping his new record “Coldplay’s Greatest Hits.” I know that doesn’t sound all that funny (”You’re gay because you like Coldplay”), but trust me… it is. There’s video available via the BBC.