Cunk on Earth (TV Program)

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    Best TV Episodes of 2023

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    “Bob’s Burgers,” “Frontline,” “Killing It” and “A Spy Among Friends” were among the series that gave us some of the best episodes of television this year.Great TV series can run for dozens or hundreds of hours, but we still experience them a piece at a time. This list is dedicated to those pieces: a handful of the best episodes that Mike Hale, Margaret Lyons and I saw in a year of professional viewership.As usual, this list isn’t comprehensive — it wouldn’t be if it were 10 times as long. And as usual, I avoided repeating shows that were on my Best of 2023 list. So I could have, but didn’t, include standout installments from “The Last of Us” (“Long, Long Time”), “Succession” (“Connor’s Wedding”) and “The Bear” (for me, “Forks” not “Fishes,” nothing against the latter). Consider it a starting point, and feel free to add your own. JAMES PONIEWOZIK‘Australian Survivor’Season 8, Episode 7: ‘Return of the King’“Australian Survivor” has been outplaying the U.S. version for a while now, and nowhere was that more evident than in this jaw-dropping episode from the “Heroes vs. Villains” season. The episode’s final tribal council featured a masterstroke of psychological manipulation by George Mladenov, or “King George,” who emerged as one of the most telegenic antagonists of any version of the show. American “Survivor” is still a delight, but this iteration currently wears the crown. (Streaming on 10play.) PONIEWOZIK‘Bob’s Burgers’Season 14, Episode 2: ‘The Amazing Rudy’It’s a rare comedy that can maintain quality, and even improve, going into its 14th season. It’s an even rarer one that, this long into its run, can pull off a striking and effective departure from form like this side-character spotlight. Shunting the Belcher family to the wings for most of the episode, this half-hour dove into the family history of the anxious grade-schooler Regular-Sized Rudy (voiced by Brian Huskey) as he searched for a magic trick that could save an awkward dinner with his divorced parents. Funny, poignant and ultimately uplifting, “The Amazing Rudy” showed that this burger joint can pull off a distinctive special of the week. (Streaming on Hulu.) PONIEWOZIKA scene from the “Amelia” episode of “Bob’s Burgers,” where Louise takes a class assignment personally.Fox‘Bob’s Burgers’Season 13, Episode 22: ‘Amelia’You could fill this list with episodes of “Bob’s Burgers”; from the past 12 months, “The Plight Before Christmas” and “These Boots Are Made for Stalking” also come to mind. The Season 13 finale typified the Fox comedy’s embrace of eccentricity, individuality and generosity of spirit, as the compulsively competitive fourth-grader Louise (Kristen Schaal) agonized over a multimedia report on her hastily chosen hero, Amelia Earhart. Her eventual triumph was a satisfying and gently comic victory for all ambitious, difficult, undervalued girls and women. (Streaming on Hulu.) MIKE HALE’Carol & the End of the World’Season 1, Episode 4: ‘Sisters’To the burgeoning genre of big-hearted apocalypse stories (“Station Eleven,” “The Last of Us”) add this adult animated series, set in the months before a looming planetary collision, which arrived too late for my annual best-TV list. Through a series of home-video snippets, this episode follows the introverted Carol (Martha Kelly) on a hiking trip with her exuberant sister, Elena (Bridget Everett), as the mismatched siblings try to bond before doomsday. (Streaming on Netflix.) PONIEWOZIK‘Cunk on Earth’Season 1, Episode 3: ’The Renaissance Will not be Televised’I could probably have picked any of the five ridiculous episodes of this history mockumentary, but I’m partial to the Renaissance installment. In it, Philomena Cunk (Diane Morgan) walks us through some of the major events between 1440 and 1830 or so, with her dopey and bizarre questions. She and a da Vinci expert look at “The Vitruvian Man,” and she asks, “What’s it for?” In praising the artist’s Last Supper, she marvels, “You almost feel like you could crawl inside it and betray Jesus yourself.” As for the French Revolution, she explains that “The guillotine was specifically designed to be the most humane way to decapitate someone in front of a jeering crowd.” “Cunk” is dorky buffoonery at its best. (Streaming on Netflix.) MARGARET LYONSDave Burd, seated, as Dave, with child-actor versions of himself.Byron Cohen/FX‘Dave’Season 3, Episode 2: ‘Harrison Ave.’The fictional-autobiographical FXX comedy about the rapper Lil Dicky (Dave Burd) can be raunchy and scatological and outrageous. This third-season episode, however — well, it was still all that but also insightful and sweet. As the title character returns home to shoot a video about a childhood romance — cast with a slew of child-actor versions of himself as well as his actual young love, now grown up — the ensuing chaos becomes a reflection on celebrity, memory and the responsibilities of memoir. (Streaming on Hulu.) PONIEWOZIK‘Extraordinary’Season 1, Episode 8: ‘Surprise!’In “Extraordinary,” everyone on earth gets a superpower on their 18th birthday; Jen (Máiréad Tyers) is 25 and hasn’t gotten hers yet. While the humiliation and confusion she feels about this drives some of the show, it is secondary to the loving but bickering friendship with her roommate and bestie, her tense relationship with her mother and her budding romance with a shape-shifter who entered her life as a stray cat. This all comes to a head in the season finale, when a big, messy party pulls together all the show’s quirky characters and plot lines — and then just when things are feeling happy and resolved, it ends with a perfect record-scratch twist. Ah, the best kind of hurts so good. (Streaming on Hulu.) LYONSIn a scene from “Frontline,” the photographer Evgeniy Maloletka picks his way through the aftermath of a Russian attack in Mariupol, Ukraine, in 2022.Mstyslav Chernov/Associated Press‘Frontline’Season 42, Episode 5: ‘20 Days in Mariupol’This unaffectedly brutal documentary, filmed by the Associated Press video journalist Mstyslav Chernov, belongs on every list of the year’s best movies; through the good offices of “Frontline,” which was involved in its production, it can be included here. In backyards, on debris-strewn streets and in the ruins of a bombed-out maternity hospital, Chernov records the anger, despair and utter bewilderment of Ukrainian civilians during the early days of the Russian invasion. And as he and his team sprint across open areas and hunker down in flimsy stairwells, he narrates their desperate efforts to get the news to the world. (Streaming on PBS.org.) HALE’Killing It’Season 2, Episode 2: ‘Mallory’Claudia O’Doherty gave one of 2023’s best comedic performances in Peacock’s capitalism satire, as Jillian Glopp, a gig worker turned partner in a struggling saw palmetto farm. In the second season’s second episode, the theft of her beloved car — a budget Kia she’s named “Mallory” — cracks her sweet disposition, turning her into a raging vengeance seeker and unleashing the frustration of years scraping by in a dog-eat-dog economy. O’Doherty filters her character’s crackup through a blazing beam of Aussie sunshine. (Streaming on Peacock.) PONIEWOZIK‘A Spy Among Friends’Season 1, Episode 5: ‘Snow’Alexander Cary’s miniseries dramatizing the last days of friendship between the traitorous British spy Kim Philby (Guy Pearce) and his fellow agent Nicholas Elliott (Damian Lewis) emphasized subtle, complex psychology over spy craft (though it had that too). This may be why it didn’t receive the notice it should have. The penultimate episode, in which the full dimensions of Philby’s downfall became apparent, was — like the entire series — a clinic in naturalistic acting by Lewis, Pearce and their co-star Anna Maxwell Martin. (Streaming on MGM+.) HALEIn its attempts to understand some of the victims, Zachary Heinzerling’s thorough, judicious documentary series made the events more opaque.Hulu‘Stolen Youth: Inside the Cult at Sarah Lawrence’Season 1, Episode 3: ‘Larryland’Everything about the case of the middle-aged dad Lawrence V. Ray and the group of bright young college students he drew into a cultlike miasma of mind control, sexual exploitation and indentured servitude is hard to fathom. Zachary Heinzerling’s thorough, judicious documentary series made the events both more comprehensible and, in its attempts to understand some of the victims, more opaque and mysterious. The final episode, which came out during Ray’s trial (he is serving a 60-year sentence for sex trafficking and other crimes), was a heartbreaking, mesmerizing summation of the case’s contradictions. (Streaming on Hulu.) HALE‘Telemarketers’Part 1From its opening moments, HBO’s “Telemarketers” is all about shaggy veracity: When we meet our protagonists, Sam Lipman-Stern (also one of the show’s directors) is shirtless in bed, and Patrick J. Pespas is high in the front seat of a car. The two worked together at a telemarketing company, small cogs in a despicable grift, but the office itself is home to real camaraderie — and real chaos, thanks in part to pervasive drug use. Lipman-Stern’s grainy footage from his teenage years captures the outrageousness of his workplace but also Pespas’s intense, charismatic vitality. While the subsequent episodes expose more of the telemarketing industry’s shadiest work, the first installment is an instant, startling immersion into its subjects’ perspectives. (Streaming on Max.) LYONSHaley J in “Wrestlers,” a documentary series with a mother and daughter match that includes folding chairs. Netflix‘Wrestlers’Season 1, Episode 5: ‘Mother’There are dozens of poignant, personal moments in “Wrestlers,” a documentary series about a low-level professional wrestling league. Humor, passion, ambition — plenty of all of those, too. But one episode is a genuine jaw-dropper, and its climax is a death match between a mother and daughter. Marie was a young mom and went to jail while her daughter, Haley, was a child. They never really reconciled, but now they’re in the same wrestling league, where Marie is a doting veteran and Haley, now also a young mother herself, a fast-rising star. Marie says Haley is a “carbon copy” of her; Haley does not see it that way. But they both like turning one kind of pain into another kind of pain, and they bring all their anger and grief into the ring. They also bring folding chairs, a trash-can lid and thousands of thumbtacks, and by the end of the match, they’re both battered, and Marie’s face is covered in blood. It is perhaps the most visceral catharsis I have ever seen. (Streaming on Netflix.) LYONS More

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      How Many Comics Does It Take to Joke About a Dim Bulb?

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      Nate Bargatze, Chase O’Donnell and the star of “Cunk on Earth” find smart nuances in pretending that they aren’t the sharpest tools in the shed.If there’s one group of people who have been made fun of more than any other, it’s the stupid.From Homer Simpson to Zoolander to Rose from “The Golden Girls,” no satirical target has produced more laughs. Jokes about the dumb are ancient and show up in nearly every country. Certain kinds go out of fashion (you don’t hear Polish jokes much anymore), but the idiocy of others has proved universally funny.Why don’t we feel guilty about this? Sometimes, we do. But savvy comics have always found ways to mitigate the cruelty and condescension of mocking the moronic. And these days, when audiences can be particularly sensitive to the direction comedy is punching, the dumb joke often requires a lighter touch. Two deft new stand-up specials dig into stereotypes about the unintelligent, dust them off and renovate them for a new era, while a new mockumentary gets even bigger laughs through the stunt of placing a fool in a variety of intellectual arenas.Nate Bargatze — whose new special, “Hello World,” is his first hour for Prime Video after breaking out with two popular and well-crafted Netflix efforts — told The Daily Beast that he wanted his comedy to be “the right amount of dumb.” His brand of clueless Christian dad self-deprecation isn’t buffoonish. He presents himself as a little slow in a world that seems far too fast. He speaks with a hint of a drawl, and his delivery moseys as he settles into a gem of a story about the time he couldn’t figure out how to turn off the light in a hotel room.Nate Bargatze in his new special, “Hello World.” He presents himself as a little slow, not buffoonish.Amazon PrimeBargatze, 42, says he knows he utters  idiotic things, with a bit of bashfulness. “I try to keep it in front of large groups,” he explains in the special. “When you say something dumb one on one, it’s a lot for that person.”The moment is characteristic: thoughtful about his lack of thought. Bargatze, who has a gift for making something out of seemingly nothing, has emerged as one of the finest clean, family-friendly comics in America, firmly in the conversation with Jim Gaffigan, Jerry Seinfeld and Brian Regan. His last three specials begin with his adorable daughter introducing him. But he’s putting an updated spin on another comedy tradition, the Southern rube, poking fun at his own dimness but also at those who would look down on him.Bargatze draws attention to his roots (a previous special is called “The Tennessee Kid”), but unlike Larry the Cable Guy or Jim Varney, he doesn’t lean on exaggerated accents or dopey language. When he tells you Andrew Jackson is from his town, it’s to set up a scene in which a snotty interviewer informs him that Jackson was a bad man. “I stopped him and was like: We didn’t, like, know him or anything,” Bargatze says, the slightest touch of defensiveness mixed with minor annoyance. “We didn’t move there because we were fans.”There is a gentleness to his ignorance, one that taps into a fertile area for laughs: childhood anxieties. Even his joke about struggling to turn off the light is designed not to make you laugh at him but relate to him. He acts out a kind of helplessness that we all once had and often still do. It’s a dumb joke that makes you feel if not smart, then at least less alone in your stupidity.While perhaps not as old as punch lines about country folk, the dumb blond joke has been around as long as America. Scholars trace it to a 1775 French one-act satire, “Les Curiosités de la Foire.” The archetype boomed in the middle of the last century with the stardom of Marilyn Monroe in movies like “Gentleman Prefer Blondes.” As that title suggests, blonds have favorable stereotypes attached to them, which makes poking fun at their intelligence, as well as their superficiality, a little more palatable. Because we think blonds have more fun, people can have more fun with them. And yet this has been under some scrutiny lately, reconsidered in movies about objectified stars like Pamela Anderson, Britney Spears and Monroe herself. (The recent drama about her was titled “Blonde” as if her hair color was her Rosebud).The performer Chase O’Donnell plays more ditsy then dumb, but she leans into it. Years ago, she starred in a cabaret double act called “Too Blondes,” and her new special, “People Pleaser,” an enjoyable YouTube distraction, is full of self-deprecating jokes and precisely timed malapropisms. Her most faithful strategy is to begin a joke, pause, bug out her eyes in an innocent glare, then shift direction to upend expectations. When a date tells her to dye her hair, she acts offended. “I literally died,” she says, glaring. “My hair the next day.”Chase O’Donnell in “People Pleaser.” She specializes in precisely timed malapropisms.Steve NguyenThe quality of her joke-writing is not as assured as her persona. It’s a low-budget production with rough edges, but like Bargatze, O’Donnell finds laughs in being more innocent than those around her. There are some darker undercurrents if you want to look for them, which you probably won’t. A show about the consequences for a woman who can’t say no is not what this breezy act is going for. And credit where it’s due: It’s hard to stay this light. She performs obliviousness with enough savvy to make you not quite believe it.In the hilarious “Cunk on Earth” (now on Netflix) Diane Morgan performs imbecility in an entirely different way. She’s an actor, not a stand-up, and as the spectacularly ill-informed anchor Philomena Cunk, she doesn’t wink at the audience. She commits, brilliantly. Dressed stylishly in an overcoat and boots, speaking in the sober and dispassionate cadences of high-toned public television, she stands in the desert, musing pensively: “Looking at the pyramids tonight, it’s hard not to be struck by the thought they are just big triangles.”This five-episode series, produced by the “Black Mirror” creator Charlie Brooker, is based on a simple idea — place a dummy among posh, smart elites — but it’s exactingly executed. The show is beautifully shot and edited, impeccably deadpan and dense with jokes. In episodes that explore the history of civilization, our most popular religions or our greatest inventions, it captures a refined BBC aesthetic: staged in front of sweeping landscapes, inside museums or near ruins and featuring a collection of academics, authors and other intellectuals. How fully realized this world is only makes it funnier when Morgan, sitting across from a professor of Middle Eastern history, asks: “Were numbers worth less in ancient times?”As with so many artists in the growing documentary comedy genre, Morgan uses real people as foils for her scripted lines. But in this case, they belong to a single class of experts whose tasteful clothes and thick spectacles project intelligence better than any design department could muster. There’s cringe comedy in their fluster opposite her flamboyant imbecility. At no point does she break character. Her confidence is impenetrable, though sometimes she does use vulnerability strategically, as when she tells an academic she’s worried that her question will sound stupid before asking about Aristotle saying, “Dance like no one’s watching.” This is a cagey manipulation that extends the scene and shifts the dynamic into something more polite than it otherwise would be.It’s a reminder of a piece of wisdom from David St. Hubbins of Spinal Tap, the metal band at the center of the greatest mockumentary: “It’s such a fine line between stupid and clever.” More

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      ‘Cunk on Earth,’ a New Mockumentary on Netflix, Is Not Afraid to Get Silly

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      The new Netflix show “Cunk on Earth” looks like an ambitious BBC documentary. Until its fictional host, created by Charlie Brooker, starts to ask some deeply silly questions.On her BBC show investigating the history of humanity, Philomena Cunk interviews Martin Kemp, a professor at the University of Oxford, about the Renaissance period.“Which was more culturally significant, the Renaissance or ‘Single Ladies’ by Beyoncé?” she asks the academic with all seriousness.Kemp pauses before patiently answering. The Renaissance was trying to reform culture as a whole, he says, and “whatever Beyoncé does, I don’t think she’s quite got that ambition.”Cunk responds with bewilderment: “So what, the work of a few straight white men just blows Beyoncé out of the water?”The fictional Cunk, played by the actress Diane Morgan, is confident, impertinent and almost always wrong. At once too normal and too weird to be presenting real documentaries, Cunk has fronted satirical BBC programs and segments about topics as lofty as Britain, time and Shakespeare over the past decade.“I quite like the idea of her not being from any time or place,” Morgan said in a recent video interview. Charlie Brooker, who created the character, described Cunk as “otherworldly,” adding, “It’s like she’s off our plane by like 25 degrees or something.”In “Cunk on Earth,” a five-part mockumentary now streaming on Netflix, Cunk grapples with the herculean task of exploring the entirety of human civilization. (In Britain, the series aired on the BBC last year.)The show has all the hallmarks of a highbrow BBC documentary, with sweeping drone shots of the presenter standing amid vast landscapes and dramatic re-enactments. Morgan, 47, plays Cunk completely straight, never cracking a smile.“Cunk on Earth” is shot like a highbrow BBC documentary, including sweeping shots of Morgan standing amid vast landscapes.BBC“We don’t tend to do too many things that tell you it’s a comedy,” said Brooker, who executive produced the show. “If you were watching this with the sound off you’d be like, ‘That looks like a real show.’”But Cunk’s observations range from the absurd (“Was the invention of writing a significant development or more of a flash in the pan like rap metal?”) to the surprisingly insightful (is Jesus “the first celebrity victim of cancel culture?”). Her recollection of facts is also questionable — she refers to Christopher Columbus as Christopher Columbo, an “Italian sailor and detective.” In interviews, her questions often leave the real-life academics bewildered or reeling.Morgan is “not afraid to leave an extremely awkward pause in, or could say incredibly ridiculous things with a completely straight face,” Brooker said. “I would find that more terrifying than doing a bungee jump.”“Cunk on Earth” fits perfectly into Brooker’s satirical oeuvre, which is partly defined by commitment to a bit: The first episode of “Black Mirror,” the anthology show he produces and writes, is a thriller that opens with a British prime minister being blackmailed into having sex with a pig. Elsewhere, he masterminded “A Touch of Cloth,” a series that has dramatic actors parodying British police procedurals.Cunk began life on “Charlie Brooker’s Weekly Wipe,” a BBC satirical news show which premiered in Britain in 2013. She was originally conceived as upper-class and clueless, but the character’s trajectory changed after Morgan suggested in her audition that she should speak in her own northern British accent. Initially a bit part as a talking head, the character soon had longer segments on the show, which led to spinoffs and even a book, “Cunk on Everything,” released in 2019.For Morgan, while the character’s appeal has a lot to do with the writing and her own dry performance, Cunk also offers the audience some catharsis. “A lot of people fantasize about being able to say whatever they want and not care,” the actress said. “She just genuinely does not give a toss, and that’s almost like a superpower.”At a time when the mockumentary form is often imbued with resonance around real-life issues — in films like 2020’s “Borat Subsequent Moviefilm” or shows like “Abbott Elementary” — “Cunk on Earth” feels somewhat different. For its creators, the show isn’t necessarily trying to make a specific point about politics, academia or even the documentary form. Its first priority is silliness.“It’s funny to take something which should be awe inspiring and serious and grandiose, and doodling bums in the corner of it,” Brooker said. “It’s a childish urge.”Still, the script contains moments of biting commentary. In her appraisal of human history, Cunk makes comments about religious hypocrisy, genocide and whitewashing. Brooker and the writers have also made the Cunk of this most recent series more “post-truth” than in previous iterations of the character, he said.During a segment on math, Cunk tells an academic that she saw a video on YouTube saying numbers only go up to 700, after which they are just given different names so people think they’re still going up. “That’s something that frightens me in the real world,” Brooker said. “The confidence with which people will start asserting things that they’ve read.”Still, the show is a comedy vehicle first and foremost. “I just want to make something really funny,” Morgan said.“It doesn’t have to have any big meaning for me,” she added. “I’m not trying to change the world, I just want people to enjoy it.” More