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 What's this all about? Uh, well, okay. A year ago I toxxed for something, failed the toxx, and had to do Deadpool's mod challenge, which meant I had to review Last Man Standing seasons two and three. That thread, where I did so, is now goldmined, and if you want to continue reading this thread I would strongly recommend you at least skim that. I'll wait. ... We're all caught up? Good. Anyways, I technically toxxed to review season four - although I got that particular toxx repealed on account of time served reviewing a far, far worse television show then LMS could ever hope to be. I've been rolling in my head, for actual fun, reviewing LMS Season 4 - partially out of a sense of obligation, partially out of a sense of morbid curiosity of how bad the show's gotten in the intervening months, but genuinely out of a sense of real interest and desire to watch the show. There's something there in LMS, buried in layers and layers of hacky writing, racism, general crotchety white man conservatise "values", and misogyny. Something makes me like it, whether it's the cast or its often-infrequent moments of heart, but something constantly draws me back to this dumb loving show. Anyways, I needed an excuse to not write about Doctor loving Who all the goddamn time and this is as good a reason as any, I guess. What is Last Man Standing? It's a multi-cam sitcom that airs on Fridays on ABC. It stars Tim Allen as Mike Baxter, the director of marketing for the "Outdoor Man" line of sporting goods stores. Mike has three daughters: Kristin, Mandy, and Eve. The general premise is a sort of gender-flipped version of Home Improvement combined with, like, an attempt at being a conservative version of All in the Family. Last Man Standing debuted in 2011, when ABC greenlit it and two other comedies dealing with the "mancession" - the really stupid idea that modern American men are losing their masculinity. LMS is the only show of the three - including Work It and Man Up! - to last greater than one season, and has made a relatively stable home for itself on Friday nights. Anyways, that's sort of the tone and language one can expect from Last Man Standing - it's a very bitter, deeply hard right conservative show that deals with the put-upon main character adrift in a sea of women and sissified men (hence, "Last Man Standing"), attempting to maintain hold of his masculinity in an uncaring, liberalism and feminism run amok world. That's the sort of show you can expect - a lot of the jokes are hacky, cheap, and unearned, mostly dealing with lovely politically one-liners, and when it's bad it's incredibly, offensively bad, obsessed with defeating liberal strawmen that it builds up only to knock down and mine every cheap and ugly laugh at left-leaning people's expense. It's often a nasty, brutish, bully of a show, meant to sort of only be funny to really vindictive, far-right assholes who enjoy mocking others. Sometimes, though, sometimes it's not that, and it'll often (and weirdly) find the heart or present a moral/political issue as nuanced and generally respectful, and that's why I keep on watching it. It's, infrequently, good enough to actually be worth watching and thinking about, and that's what keeps me coming back- I would say it's 80% a terrible piece of garbage and 20% a generally heartfelt examination of a modern American family in the Baxters. It helps, too, that the cast is actually incredibly good, with a genuine murderer's row of accomplished comic actors who are all likable and charismatic on the screen. Even when the script is terrible, as it oh-so-often is, the fact that the cast is good enough to make such bad material frequently land even despite itself is really interesting. THE CAST 
Anyways, I'll be reviewing season four of Last Man Standing approximately "whenever the gently caress I feel like it", but it should be at least once a week. Doctor Who takes priority - a sentence that should never be said by anyone - but I do need breaks and I do actually like watching this show for some godforsaken reason. I'll be covering an episode at a time, and if you read my reviews before I cover each episode Onion AV Club style. My review scale is A-B-C-D-F, no pluses or minuses. I'll note again, like I always do, that I'm a mid-twenties feminist male so expect my reviews to be written from that perspective. Review Archive: 401, "Here's The Kicker" NieR Occomata fucked around with this message at 07:00 on May 28, 2015 |
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May 28, 2015 06:55
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Last Man Standing "Here's The Kicker" Season 4, Episode 1 Kristin: "Eve, if women start moving to men's teams, that sends the message that women's sports aren't as good as men's." Mike: "Well you know what else sends that same message? The fact that they're not as good." Last Man Standing, summed up in two lines. It's harder to find a more damning and concise exchange than the one between Kristin and Mike here, that sums up the myriad number of philosophical issues the show has. Last Man Standing is a show that attempts to mine conflict by having two of the main characters argue about something, but does so in the cheapest, nastiest and ugliest way because so much of the show is based around insult humor. But it also illustrates a fundamental issue of construction present within LMS. The cardinal rule of writing is to write every character as if they are the hero of their own story; stories often fail when presenting a villain as flatly the villain as opposed to sympathetic, at least within their own head. The stakes here are lower but so much of LMS is based around exchanges and conflict from argument; the problem LMS has, and always had, is by being unable to present that argument as two opposing, equally valid (at least from the arguer's perspective) viewpoints. The slant is always present in the dialog and physical episode construction, where Mike is always right and just and whoever he's arguing against (usually a woman, usually his wife or his kids) is wrong. It gives a sort of mean-spirited, rude edge to everything everyone says, and is when LMS is at its toughest to stomach. Let's examine the above exchange. It sources from the A-plot, and in reality only plot, of "Here's The Kicker"; Eve's boyfriend Justin (Tye Sheridan) leaves his seat to get some food during a Broncos game, which gets called up to do one of those "kick a field goal to win blah blah blah" challenges. Eve hops into his seat anyways, sinks the FG, and gets subsequently called up as a kicker for the (boys) football team at her school. Cue that two-line argument. As anyone who watches LMS regularly well knows, Kristin is the liberal stand-in for most arguments (especially when Ryan isn't around), and Mike is the conservative stand-in. The problem is that both sides of that argument are both awful exaggerations of their stated stances- Kristin turns into a feminist.txt tumblrtard (arguing against feminist trendsetters in male-dominated fields because it "deflates the expectations for everyone else" is some tortured loving logic) and Mike into a Mallard Fillmore cartoon. The irony is that both arguments, however, are rooted in the same sort of ugly far-right conservatism. Not because they're written by the same person or group of people (depending on how room-driven this show is), but because "don't upset the apple cart, you'll make it tougher for everyone else" is the canard of "passionate" pro-establishment voices. It happened, constantly, with every social issue in the past century- Jim Crow, women's rights, feminism, sexual freedom, civil rights, even recent stuff like DADT or gay marriage were always argued against by "sympathetic" voices who said not to make a big deal about any of it, because it'll make things tougher for everyone else. The mere fact that Kristin is expressing that viewpoint is inherently disingenuous because it's not reflective of an actual liberal viewpoint, not even an exaggerated one; it's a different flavor of the same old-establishment, angry-white-man conservatism that Mike bathes in. And that's fine, because whatever. LMS is a sitcom. The problem is that is uses these sorts of arguments to express greater emotional honesty of its characters but doesn't end up respecting them, and the fact that everything is twisted through the lens of its own politics sells out the honesty of its cast. And it's not even funny, the arguments are just this bitter sort of cringepiece setpieces in the middle of what could be otherwise effective episodes, a moment for Mike to angrily hector and rail at both the women in his life and at the audience and it all comes across as this pointless dross. So much of LMS is soulless and hateful, so much of it venomous and bitter. Which is all the worse because the cast is actually good and has real chemistry; what's most surprising is that, even taking the bitter, bitter misogyny, rampant, ugly, hateful conservatism, racism, or all three (actual lines of actual dialog, in succession from "Here's The Kicker": Mike: "That 'free' Camaro is costing me like twenty grand in taxes." Eve: "For what? So Obama can buy more Happy Meals from illegal immigrants?"), the show still works. It was dishonest of LMS to make this episode into one centered around Eve, especially since she's by-far my favorite character on the show- and here we get Good Eve over the various flavors of Bad Eve - but even still her plot this episode works and is fairly progressive to her character. She eventually joins the team and notes that Justin has seemed really sullen ever since she joined - which leads everyone in her family to suspect her boyfriend is jealous of her star status, and encouraging her to disregard what he says or feels and focus on her own, personal success. By the third act, the reveal is that Justin was never upset for her success in a "men's" field, he was in fact happy - but justifiably pissed that she won a car from stealing his seat, without even giving him a chance. The whole plot ends up being, in practice, a progressive and pro-women arc, especially for LMS, which makes its own ugly turn to cheap and hack conservative "jokes" that wouldn't be out of place tumbling from a Fox News' commentator's craw so goddamn infuriating. There was a reason that I ended up liking this show, and it wasn't just because of Stockholm Syndrome; there's something there, a genuine heart it has, a cleverness and respect for its characters that it covers up with a metric ton of ugly base multicam hackery, that comes across as so poisoned and regressive that it kneecaps the grander messages or themes it tries to instill. If this episode didn't have that dumb two-line exchange or the various other misogynist poo poo it spewed, it would be a fairly good Eve episode. But instead it does so it comes across as a wash. LMS does as it always does, goes for the cheap laugh out of some weird systemic fear of showing the genuine heart and love it has for its characters, and it makes everything so tonally odd. Like, the episode works as a commentary on women succeeding in male-dominated fields, and does so in a way that still makes Eve human. Because, yeah, it was a dumb shithead thing for Eve to do, to screw over her boyfriend like that, and he was justified to be pissed. The sheer fact that she doesn't talk to him about why he's angry (because she's doesn't like all that, quote, "feelings and stuff") feels honest and like an honest character flaw. "Kicker" ends up treading the very specific line of being progressive while still being real and honest with characters that are flawed, which even for a far-right ABC sitcom deserves props for accomplishing. The fact that Kaitlyn Dever, a lights-out comic and dramatic actress is conveying all this is icing on the cake. But it's all pointless because it's all so negative and ugly for no reason - it ruins what little naked honesty and reflection the show has. The fourth act just calcifies this central problem. The fourth act shouldn't have existed in the first place- the three-act narrative of Eve coming to terms with, confronting, then understanding Justin had enough meat on its bones to sustain the episode. But having Vanessa turn from that into a meltdown insisting that Eve leave all organized sports and quit JROTC - out of some undefined sense of fear for Eve's safety - ends up turning into another sequence of Mike smugly and patronizingly explaining to a woman how dumb she is. It's this bitter little coda on the episode that sells out Vanessa's character (the one thing she always had over Mike was being a better and more understanding parent than he is, and having her turn into yet another Crazed Hysterics Mom that needs consoling is a central character violation) for nothing outside of Mike having to appear smug again. It wasn't helped that it was immediately preceded by yet another Mike Baxter vlog - this time even more incoherent than usual, in which Mike rails against pink camo (good) because it's stereotypical and blatantly manipulative (good) which is caused by men being insensitive (uh, okay...) which is also an insensitive stereotype (oh, boy, reverse sexism), but some stereotypes are true (huh?), but he doesn't want to say which ones because he doesn't want female viewers to be all "yap yap yap yap yap!" complete with hand motions (huh?!) and then he said something about pygmies in Africa that have women as dominant and the leaders, which must mean the men stay at home and complain that the hut is too cold (huh?!). It's like Mike wants to rail against female stereotypes but does so in the most misogynistic way possible so it makes the whole argument make no sense. The vlog could've been a blatant metaphor for the themes the episode as a whole espoused, and been a nice gate from the third act to the fourth and made Vanessa's fears for Eve's safety make tonal sense and been justified, but it's so diluted and variously, contradictorily offensive that none of it makes any real sense. "Here's The Kicker" is a mess, but a mess that's still funny. The performances of the cast members still works and the central plot of the episode still lands. I still, for some goddamned reason, like watching the Baxters and their trials and there's something there in Last Man Standing that makes me want to like it - it's just choked under so many loving layers of bullshit. It's a decent enough start to season four, I guess. I mean, I've seen worse starts to fourth seasons of shows, is what I'm saying. Grade: C Random Thoughts:
NieR Occomata fucked around with this message at 07:01 on May 28, 2015 |
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May 28, 2015 06:56
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There's no reason at all for you to do two review threads at once, and the last time you tried to do this show it failed to launch.
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May 28, 2015 08:40
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