Prestige TV is dead, long live Maniac TV
It's common knowledge now that in the age of streaming, TV has become a staid medium: genteel, polite, predictably fine. Everything's slick and proficiently produced, every network and streamer sets their base sights on 'prestige', which means everything's objectively good and nothing particularly stands out.
The New York Times famously labelled this as 'Mid TV'. What we need now is the antithesis of Mid TV. We need Maniac TV.
What is Maniac TV? It is TV at the edge of decency, possibly even competency, oftentimes legality. It is messy and overstuffed. It's the sort of TV that should probably get shut down, its creator blacklisted and pointed towards a mental institution. It is TV made by lunatics with a singular vision and a death drive. It is TV like Nathan Fielder's The Rehearsal and Everybody's Live with John Mulaney.
Both shows, which end their seasons this week – The Rehearsal aired its finale on Monday, and Everybody's Live airs its on Thursday – have spent the past few months casually taking TV to places it's rarely been, didn't even know it wanted to go.
For Fielder, that includes a demented commitment to a bit. The finale of The Rehearsal found the comedian – who has spent all season weirdly agitating for aviation safety – casually revealing he'd spent the past two years (since The Rehearsal 's previous season) secretly training as a pilot.
Revisiting a through-line that's been in his comedy since Nathan For You – that making reality TV can let you get away with anything, and that people will do anything in the presence of a camera crew, even override their natural instincts for self-preservation – he even got 150 naive actors to agree to take a flight on a Boeing-737 captained by himself, a comedian with barely 200-hours of flight experience. Seeing Fielder behind the controls of a commercial jumbo jet at 25,000 feet is surely the most ridiculous TV moment of the year.
Mulaney's Everybody's Live might function at the opposite end of ambition, but its results are no less extreme. On its finale this week – upping a mid-season stunt, so brilliant in its nonsensical absurdity, in which he lined up 24 men at each inch on the height chart between 5-feet and 7-feet as part of a campaign he christened 'Know Your H' (ie: Know Your Height) – he's organised to fist-fight three teenage boys.
And that's just the big closing number, the culmination of a live show that spends over half its time juggling viewer phone calls that meander awkwardly, go nowhere, are regularly unintelligible, while actual guests like David Letterman and Sigourney Weaver sit couchside barely utilised. A couple of weeks ago, Mulaney hosted an entire episode blindfolded. It went about as uncomfortably as you'd imagine, with writer Jeremy Levick (himself a maniac, as part of a viral comedy duo with Rajat Suresh) having to stand beside him the whole show lest Mulaney fall off the stage or deliver over half his monologue to the back wall (which he did).
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