TV Tonight: Secret Girlfriend: Who Do You Think You Are?
Comedy Central, like any good targeted network with a young male audience, is constantly asking itself, What do guys like? Guys like comedy. Guys like the Internet. And guys like point-of-view porn and Girls Gone Wild videos. Ahem, so I'm told.
The channel has combined these great tastes together in a fascinatingly bad comedy debuting tonight after South Park. American dudes, meet your Secret Girlfriend.
The premise of Secret Girlfriend is that the protagonist is You. The lead character—a guy, somewhere in his twenties, with a couple of nutty friends—is played by the camera. (Oh, You: You are seriously making us re-think that 2006 TIME Person of the Year cover.)
As the action of the pilot plays out (dude goes to a party, makes a beer run, meets a new girl and has lots of makeup sex with his hot, crazy ex), the other characters speak to, are looked at and, in the case of the women, um, act upon the protagonist by addressing the camera. If the young Jay McInerney had worked at Maxim instead of the New Yorker, and shot a web video series, this is what he would have made. (The show is actually based on a series of web shorts from Atomic Wedgie TV.)
The creepiest aspect of the show, and yet the one that may be likeliest to keep it on the air, is that it uses the camera-eye gimmick to ogle the female characters and get You, the viewer, a ton of virtual nooky. Now you might think that a half-hour show [each installment is two 11-minute episodes] built around hot chicks partying with you, riding you, or gazing saucily at your virtual crotch is less a sitcom than a softcore ego stroke. Or, at least, like something is meant to be stroked while you watch it.
But that would be unsophisticated. You see, the show is actually making comedy out of guys' horniness! When You, through the camera, check out a bunch of girls' asses at a convenience store, or at a party, or at a lesbian bar, or underwater in a pool, you're not being cheaply titillated, you are participating in a sly comedy of manners. It's funny, because guys like to check out girls' asses! And also, you get to check out girls' asses! How droll! How metafictional! Look at the comic irony on those knockers!
OK, whatever: there's a long tradition of guy-oriented sex comedies—see Porky's and American Pie—and that doesn't mean they have to be The Benny Hill Show. Secret Girlfriend is just too clumsy, and not funny enough. Part of the problem is the format. Being addressed in a second-person monologue might work well in a 90-second web-video clip. But over a full TV comedy episode, it sucks the life out of the characters.
We're supposed to believe that You, the protagonist, are awesome: cool, funny, apparently irresistible. Why? You never say anything clever or charming. You never say anything. (Everything we learn about You comes from people talking to You, and a constant stream of text messages.) It makes all the interactions implausible (unless the viewer is an egomaniac), and it flattens out the supporting characters, since they rarely have a good conversation to define them.
The supporting characters are not terribly drawn, and actually you could build a pretty good sitcom around them. (The exception being the ex, Mandy, who is horribly overacted by Alexis Krause, and is basically just a delivery system for cleavage.) New girlfriend Jessica (Sara E.R. Fletcher) is sort of like Pam from The Office as re-imagined by a Bud Light commercial. (When You first meet her on a beer run—You are checking out her ass, of course—she fake-scolds You, "Excuse me! My tits are up here!") But Fletcher gives her some spark and personality, for which she should get extra credit, having to spend 90% of her screen time pretending to be hot for a video camera.
And best friends Sam (Michael Blaiklock) and Phil (Derek Miller)--two schlubs who dream of making hit viral videos--have a good comic rapport, even as they make you wonder how they and their camera friend are able to constantly score such rocking chicks. In the funniest storyline of the pilot second episode, they visit a strip club and become obsessed--by its surprisingly excellent buffet food, which they are determined to publicize to the world.
Secret Girlfriend is kind of like a bad strip club with an awesome buffet: the best parts are those that have little to do with the main premise. There are some laughs in Secret Girlfriend if You know where to look. But by the end of it, I was completely sick of Yourself.
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1
You, the protagonist, are awesome: cool, funny, apparently irresistible. Why? You never say anything clever or charming.
Am I Vincent Chase?
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2
[...] Review of Comedy Central's Secret Girlfriend – Tuned In – TIME.com [...]
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3
horrible show. If the 20's male audience wants boobs they will look at porn not a half baked tv show that is semi-porn with worse writing that most porn
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4
This show only perpetuates the modern trend in TV that ugly fat guys with no couth can get hot chicks. Are pretty girls that desperate or is Yourself just that fantastic? Trick question.
Thanks for watching this so I didn't have to!
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5
What happened to this blog??
People come to TV blogs for commentary, not newsy posts about shows no one cares about. This is Time magazine for pete's sake. Doesn't the fact that you have virtually no comments make you sit up and take notice? Your Mad Men post has 13 comments. Alan Sepinwall's Mad Men post is up to 266 comments.
It's a simple formula. Watch TV shows people care about and write about them. That's what your good at, but if you're going to stop doing that then I'll have to break up with this blog.
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5.1
Is this a newsy post? It's a review of a new series that helps us decide if we should care about it or not. And I don't think this blog has changed -- I think you've changed, austintx05.
Also, this:
http://tunedin.blogs.time.com/2007/04/09/imus_from_nonapology_apologies/
Call me when Sepinwall breaks four figures.
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5.2
austin apparently is unable to differentiate between a fansite and criticism.
_
I watched the first six minutes of the show --- a total waste. I'm glad someone else gets paid to watch the full 22 minutes.... -
5.3
I will actually defend Austin here and say he[?] has a point, even if I don't think it applies to this post. I don't think this blog has changed, but it's different from Sepinwall's, because I have different interests. I read his blog religiously--I just don't happen to want to write his blog. He does his thing, which is about 90% reviews/recaps of shows he's a big fan of. I do some of that (Lost, The Office, Big Love, etc.); I also analyze TV-business trends, pass along news and write about the news media, politics, etc. (Which Sepinwall and most other TV critic bloggers would rather avoid, for reasons I can totally understand.)
The way I see it, there are a lot of critics reviewing shows; there are a lot of them writing about media; there are a lot of them writing about larger American culture. There are not a lot of them (that I follow anyway), bringing them all together. I do that not to chase after traffic--which ultimately ends up seeming phony anyway--but because it's what interests me.
By the way, I don't know if this is true of other bloggers, but I find that the number of comments actually has little correlation to how many people are reading a particular post. To the contrary actually, if I wanted to simply get as much traffic as possible, I would be doing nothing but those "newsy" posts, which actually get far more traffic. (Also, I would be posting something about Jon & Kate every day, which, just kill me now, please.)
As for Secret Girlfriend--God help me if I ever pass up as target-rich a show as this one. This morning, I checked my traffic stats, and I was getting an inordinate amount of visitors searching on the term "Secret Girlfriend sucks." I am not making that up.
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6
2nd person commentary to a 1st person perspective...You obviously don't like being told what to like by a TV show - after all that's Your job, right? I personally appreciate your coverage of a target-rich show like Secret Girlfriend, but wow...feels a little mean spirited and snotty. Had the series premiered on HBO after Curb, cleared Tom Waits on the soundtrack, and dropped an "attached" name like Gondry or Ball, "sophisticated" TV viewers would be drooling over what's actually an extremely fresh format that truly does live in the tradition of McInerney - a man whose writing actually implies he'd rather have been working at Maxim.
Your tweet comparing CC to the masturbation channel made me laugh more than your review here - but let's be fair...porn would never work with as many fast cuts. Porn might be cheap, but it has an attention span.
There are other new sitcoms right now that are like sad echoes to what was on the air when some of us were actually 23 year old guys - pick on them! They're all so "safe" and dull. Secret Girlfriend doesn't for a moment pretend to be anything but the overstimulated mind of an ordinary American 23 year old guy in 2009. What's wrong with that? Sex and the City fragmented a woman into 4 women with expensive shoes in Manhattan (only to be awarded a movie) - it only makes sense to consolidate a teen guy into a single voyeuristic camera in L.A., a city and industry powered by Your gaze.
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7
Secret Girlfriend, with its 100% POV premise, is an obvious rip-off of the far superior Peep Show, a British show now entering its sixth season on Channel 4. The difference being that despite its porny name, Peep Show operates on pathos, not eros, along with a dash of burning disdain for the middle class. Americans interested in head-mounted camerawork would be much better served to buy the DVDs or use the various video sites after South Park is over.
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Officially sanctioned samples, for comparison:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mv27PKxDqY4
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8.1
"Obvious rip-off" - I kindly disagree. No so sure about the "superior" part either.
Peep Show has VO and your protagonist has a pretty distinct identity - in case you listened to James and didn't actually watch it, these are qualities totally absent from SG, because it politely chooses not to impose on your own identity - save for a few digital reflections like text messages. It's actually looks pretty well thought out.
I feel like you just feel like name dropping hip and globally aware white-boy tastes for similarly dynamic content that MUST be better because it's older and from father away. Save it for your Facebook "interests" dialog box to impress college girls.
**We've moved on from a modernity that pretends for a minute that anything is actually new or different.**
I'm sure you love Mad Men...in your water-cooler discussions about that ole' charlatan, Don Draper, I'm surprised you missed this tidbit of the generally media savvy.
It's like listening to hipster statements like, "I'm really only listening to Sweedish indietronic duos these days, and Jay-Z steals everything from what they were doing two years ago."
Is Parks and Recreation an "obvious rip-off" of The Office? THAT I could potentially see an argument for...but Peep Show is no closer to Secret Girlfriend than The Wonder Years or Herman's Head...or, my global TV watcher, even The Inbetweeners, which is narrated by a teen boy, so that is an "obvious rip-off" of the Wonder Years, right?
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[...] TV Tonight: Secret Girlfriend: Who Do You Think You Are? Comedy Central, like any good targeted network with a young male audience, is constantly asking itself, What do guys [...] [...]
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Your response confuses me, as you seem intent on defending this godawful show and not only get tremendously butthurt over a reference to another show famously shot in POV but already refer to this forgettable tripe with the disgustingly affectionate and familiar "SG".
Did you work on the show's production staff or something? Why does the mere mention of non-domestic television spur you into a mighty rage? Yeah, screw those goddamn hipsters! How dare they name drop a far superior show in reference to the fact that not only is 'SG' utterly awful in execution, but that its 'second person POV' conceit, praised as the only interesting or original thought in this pile of derivative tripe, is also not particularly original and has been better executed by a show that has arguably been under appreciated for years.
Yes, not having voiceovers or any real character attached to the POV is fairly unique to Secret Girlfriend among TV shows. At the same time, arguably "Second person" is just a lazy way to get viewer involvement and empathy. No need to write relatable characters or dialogue! No need for those icky voiceovers (Oh, sorry. I meant VOs.) Stories aren't when characters and their personalities interact with each other. It's when things happen to you! Honestly, this is the defensible point buried in your bilious, frothing, train-wreck of a post, though it is questionable whether this "polite" refusal to overtly impose personality is in fact to enable subltler storrytelling, self-insertion, or just to avoid the effort necessary to create a relatable main character.
Arguing the semantics of "rip-off" versus "influence" (for instance, Parks and Recreation was created by several members of the US The Office team, and some degree of stylistic influence is undeniable) is largely moot when you're talking about a show this terrible. It's not deserving of even that level of precision in discussion. It's a show so cheap, phony, and lacking in craftmanship that it's a rip-off of any TV show that has characters talking in it.
Obviously, the middle part of the post will be skipped. So let's just say I agree with you. HIPPPSSSTTEEERS!!!1 Kill all those post-modern Mad Men cryptofacist Don Draper twee Jay-Z LIE-BERAL global GLOBALIST elites, my good TV watcher sirs! Comedy Central USA love it or leave it!
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Hahaha...love your last paragraph
Point taken. And good call...rip-off, influence, derivative content, all branches of the same tree.
I saw this show and I was just waiting for it to get dumped on. Like comedies have to fill extraneous criteria like obligatory elements of drama in order to get away with some fun fart jokes. Secret Girlfriend just felt a little more honest - it doesn't seem afraid to fart for the sake of farting - because farts are funny. That's the fun of the internet. We share these quick viral videos that have no time or budget to waste on all the bells and whistles. They just get to the punch. And where TV has been trying to tap into that energy, they've been mostly failing for a few years. The Office wedding dance was pretty solid the other day though.
So I guess it's just one man's opinion, but Secret Girlfriend feels like a win for me. I mean, Reno 911 was really out there too when it premiered.
You've inspired me to check out more Peep Show now too. It also came highly recommended by some friends.
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[...] actually, a reviewer over at Time.com put it really well last week: When You, through the camera, check out a bunch of girls’ asses [...]
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13
I don't like this show. its always about a white guy referred to as "Yourself", which doesn't make a show like this appeal to viewers of different races. I'm not trying to be racist or anything, but this show is everyone refers to as white.
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