Anybody seen Party Down, new Starz comedy series?

I caught a few episodes of this last night and it wasn't all that bad. It's blend of low-brow humor, clever writing and often throw-away delivery kind of appealed to me.

Rob Thomas ('Veronica Mars') and Paul Rudd are amongst the producers and it stars Adam Scott ('Tell Me You Love Me'), Jane Lynch and Lizzy Caplan ('True Blood').

this is really good & funny. episode where jane lynch and ed begley get high is so good

Yeah it's pretty good. The guy who plays Ron is consistently great.

really want to see this, hope there's a dvd soon enough

If you have Netflix you can want online.

watch, sorry early.

i think we all want, online.

idk how i was so reserved abt my love 4 this srsly its really p. great!

gradually noticing like EVERY vmars actor ie., logan playing a young republican in ep. 3 i think, was awesome

still are 4 eps or so ive not watched yet

Finally started watching this on netflix, I think it might even be funnier than current season 30 rock.

saw ep 1 and didn't really laugh. maybe i try again.

this program's rad, loved the porno episode + the eastern european mobsters

didn't realize there was a thread, had thought about starting one. really good show -- kinda wish they'd ease up on the Ken Marino character, him saying "soup or crackers" every 5 mins and having some embarrassing breakdown at the end of almost every episode is getting pretty tired. but aside from that, solid.

what are y'alls favorite episodes -- i've really liked the run from "Sin Say Shun Awards After Party" to "Celebrate Ricky Sargulesh," felt like the show was hitting its stride w/ those.

planning on watching these this weekend!

haha xpost to justsayin

Really like this -- what surprised me about it is that it subtly ramps up into feeling ... somewhat dramatic, actually? There's just some point, a few episodes in, where I started caring what was going on character-wise, almost in an old sitcommy way, and then the show's pretty much maintained and worked with that. It's weird -- whatever earnestness works to accomplish that flies under the radar for a while.

(Maybe I'm just surprised in comparison to the other show Starz developed, Head Case, which is just screwball funny with no attachment to reality necessary.)

Maybe it's just a matter of good writing -- e.g., all the various deployments of the "Are we having fun yet?" thing so far have been really deft

yeah...i was kinda groaning at first when they introduced the relationship plot, but it's paid off in some good ways -- esp. w/ reactions from Martin Starr's character.

i keep seeing Head Case on the schedule next to it but haven't given it a look - should i?

yeah i was gonna say -- the way they've teased out "are we having fun yet?" w/o overdoing it has been really great, which is why it annoys me how much they did "super r crackers" to death

season final's on tonight i think?

yeah -- kristen bell guesting on this one too

Sure, watch Head Case if you have the time for it -- it's sort of antic and ridiculous and heavily improvised (with celebrity-guest therapy patients, in a sort of Dr. Katz-ish way), and funny, and mostly it's just entertaining to see how far Alexandra Wentworth(-Stephanopolous) will go in terms of humiliating her character or pushing herself into total goony awfulness ... early in the season she was covered with herpes sores, and last week she decided she wanted a child and then learned that "I don't have a uterus," which is maybe a good indicator of where that show sits

This is weird but I had this alarming intense dream last week where I was just hanging out with Kristen Bell, having a conversation, and she was the most awesome smart funny charming fun person on the planet and I wanted to hang out with her forever, and then it was sort of depressing to wake up and have all my excitement over having met the most wonderful person in the universe deflate, and basically now I am scared to see her in anything, or really face the fact that nothing in the world will ever be as great as my weird dream wherein the world was perfect -- also I am disturbed that my subconscious would create this idealized character and then give it the form of Kristen Bell, who I think is cool but really does not occupy much of my brainspace at all

<3 your crazy ass brain dude

I think I liked Taylor Stiltskin's Sweet Sixteen Party best, I think. Jane Lynch's "it's like a fairy tale" or whatever cracked me up.

Every bit with Martin Starr is great. He totally steals the Brandix Corporate Retreat ep. "Dude I told you there was a line", "This guys not a closer, I've been here twenty minutes." Jennifer Coolidge was great last ep. "You're NOT a dolphin scientist!"

The thing that gets me about Starr's character is how handily they keep in this frame of being realistically hard to like -- they resist the urge to make him a lovable loser/misanthrope/geek, and actually just let him be kinda awful. And yet he's awful in a way so familiar and true-to-life that I wind up liking the character anyway.

I mean, there is no sympathy for Roman

i would watch pretty much anything with this cast

Yeah that's why I started watching it. I was like wow look at who is this. B-b-b-but it's on Starz! Okay it's only thirty minutes long.

I don't know if anyone saw Ron's high-school reunion last week, but man, I was feeling genuine deep dramatic awfulness for the poor dude at the end

also BTW this show has finally made me sit up and pay some respect for the directorial skills of one Fred Savage

yeah absolutely. my favorite was when they set it up like they were gonna throw his character a bone (so to speak) w/ the one porn star and instead he got all haughty about the differences between fantasy and 'hard sci fi'

xpost

nabisco have you seen It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia? he directed a bunch of that too and it's been consistently fun.

I was feeling genuine deep dramatic awfulness for the poor dude at the end

My gf pointed out that they've gone Fawlty Towers on this character.

i would watch pretty much anything with this cast

Anybody seen Jane Lynch in 'Glee'?

Btw, the show got renewed.

nabisco have you seen It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia?

I watched half an episode of this and was just too insanely turned off to even finish -- yeah, sorry, I know loads of people like it a lot, but I guess it's just Not For Me

why do you guys have starz? does it come with another channel?

For some reason I just randomly get six Starz channels and Starz On Demand with my cable package. I don't get any other pay channels and none of my other friends who have packages w/ HBO or whatever get it. It's weird, but it's not an accident.

wth is "starz" anyway

i'm just gonna watch it on netflix (pretty awesome than it's on there right away)

Starz is, I believe, the movie channel for Showtime. The equivalent to Encore for HBO.

Starz has exactly three shows, right. Head Case, Party Down and uh Crash: The TV Show.

yea my cable company (comcast) just gave me a free year of starz cuz they thought they might lose the nfl network. although i have netflix too so perhaps would have discovered this anyway.

ditto on the v. strong dislike of sunny in philadelphia and i tried 3 eps or so

This is weird but I had this alarming intense dream last week where I was just hanging out with Kristen Bell, having a conversation, and she was the most awesome smart funny charming fun person on the planet and I wanted to hang out with her forever

i think this is what kristen bell is really like, fyi, so maybe your subconscious actually knows her or whatever

i had no idea this show existed but now i will watch it all on netflix online.

season finale was not really funny :(

I just watched all of these this week. The best bit was when the movie exec. was going mental calling everyone a fuck he's going to shit on and the rapper just walks out all calm and shit. <--- not a good way of describing it but ya know.

"season finale was not really funny :("

Wasn't meant to be though (although he ending sequence where Kristin gives her card to Henry was funny.)

Wasn't funny? I thought it was hilarious. Brave, unsettling, almost existential.

I am worried, however, that we'll lose too many of the cast, given the finale.

lol @ almost existential

i made my friend on demand some of these yesterday. the scene in the adult awards ep w/ ron being goaded into showing his wang to everyone is bordering on existential w/ it being so long and unbroken

also CROWJAR

watched the whole season this weekend. it was really great.

what happened to steven weber's eye?

I am worried, however, that we'll lose too many of the cast, given the finale.

― Le présent se dégrade, d'abord en histoire, puis en (Michael White), Saturday, May 23, 2009 11:32 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I think they kinda deliberately left it open-ended since some of them are pretty in demand and they can kinda decide when and how to pick up the story in a way that can keep or ditch whoever they need to next year. i read an interview where Jane Lynch seemed pretty confident that if PD and Glee both get picked up she'd be able to juggle them both, but then they threw her girlfriend from Best In Show in her place for the last couple episodes, so who knows with her.

official official

we're back in business. #PartyDown pic.twitter.com/iKPaW2OIYG

— Party Down (@partydownstarz) November 16, 2021

no Lizzy Kaplan :'-(

Huh. I guess they could just write her out, or bring her in for a cameo or something. It is a disappointment but it's not the end of the world. This show is so funny.

"You idiots! She was the most talented one"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ad3ELGjAG7c

Lizzie ;_;

The episode titles are up on Wikipedia but of course they could be spoilers. (Or equally not spoilers of anything. Immediately.)

i don't watch very much TV at all anymore but I will still say that Celebrate Ricky Sargulesh remains one of my favorite/most memorable episodes of television of the peak prestige era

I have no doubt this will be good-to-great but that trailer is the worst, most steaming pile of ordure I have sat through in recent memory. Exact opposite of what's funny about the show.

So you're saying you're ... not having fun yet?

I really want this trend of compressing the trailer into a few seconds that play before the trailer to stop.

Josh, someone worked very hard on the trailer's trailer, so you should respect that.

Imagine the person tasked with making a five second trailer that "pops."

we’re back, baby!

chekov’s van
roman calling people dolts!
“are you still doing mostly hard sci fi?”
that great ending twist

that convo between constance and lydia about casey and henry was amazing as commentary on fan speculation

First episode was great.

the first episode was definitely an r.d.d.

and looking forward to the next one!

Doesn't feel like it's been 14 years since the last season, the jokes and the rhythm of this episode are just like previous seasons (unlike, say... S4/S5 of Arrested Development). Seems likely we'll get a cameo from Lizzy Caplan at the end

Yeah, that was my feeling. She was brought up a lot.

This was so much better than I expected. Alt-indie bands I fully expect to form in the coming months: Lobster Smoke, Clam Mist, Guyote.

Another great episode. I lost it when Tandy realizes she's been a terrible person and Lucy fist-pumps

Not enough Roman so far. I am looking forward to finally meeting Escapade.

Ok I shelled out $9 to watch this, it's almost hilarious how trash the rest of the Starz catalog is. Not regretting it, first two eps are great. Love Tyrel Jackson Williams from Brockmire, hope Jennifer Coolidge makes an appearance at some point.

I could probably come up with a list of the handful of things on Starz that are worth it, but it's definitely not a multiple great shows per year network unless you're into the 50 Cent cinematic universe.

They had a "curated by Adam Scott" list, which was very short and still obviously stretching for good movies, lol.

For sure. The movie selection is random and often dire.

I am looking forward to finally meeting Escapade.

she was in season 2 and I believe was played by a very young Kaitlin Deaver.

I'll be the dissenting voice on season 3: having just rewatched 1&2, this is really lacking. Obviously it's Lizzie Caplan, but also I miss having Megan Mulally or Jane Lynch in the team on a regular basis. They both provided some balance that Saxon isn't (though I really like him too). the biggest problem is that Jennifer Garner isn't a very good comedic actress in this, at least to me.

I thought the last few have been kind of half-assed, tbh, especially the mushrooms one. The "everyone takes drugs" trope is a pretty lazy well to dip into.

I don't think it's bad so far but yeah, Garner is adding zilch to the show so far, it's not necessary for Henry to have a love interest at all

I dunno, she's not particularly well-written, but she and Scott have good chemistry. I could see them bringing back Kaplan at the end and forcing him to choose or something like that. Or maybe not, there are only two more episodes.

I'm enjoying it, it feels like Party Down, really too bad there are only 6 episodes after all this time though.

no Kristin Bell is kind of a downer. not that she was integral but she was amazing every time she was on

i guess what I'm saying is there aren't enough women in this.

Still hoping for Jennifer Coolidge and more Mullally. I do like the chef character though.

I’m glad we got more Roman this episode

This show has reached that comfort-show level for me where it's enjoyable just to see the characters even if the jokes are weak (and I agree the last two have been some of the weakest episodes). Sackson and Lucy are great additions

I feel like there’s almost a meta bit here where Jennifer Garner is trying to reintroduce herself or pivot into this role

Last episode was great you’re all nuts

I particularly enjoyed the reminder that mushrooms are not terrifying, they are fun.

there's a bush down there, it has a style all its own

I laughed at the confusion of John Krasinski and Ted Kaczynski.

ron and lucy’s “is this food?” but was hysterical

they have great chemistry. the part in the turning point usa episode where she smashes the plate was my fav gag of the year

mostly because of ken marino, who is a national treasure

Wonderful final episode.

haven't watched the final episode yet, but the food poisoning bit was another marino tour-de-force

in episode 5

so are we getting another season with Casey???

screamed when she appeared at the end

Just watched the finale.

Definitely felt like there could be another season.

overall i didnt ttly dig this reboot idk some ok moments but the dialogue thru out felt like too fast too forced not pleasant