Cloudy drink kills frog: the Onion's "Sex House"

How dark can it go? And can Frank find redemption?

six sexy americans

Frank's only shot at redemption would be if he somehow is the key to their escape (note, not at all convinced they will ever escape).

Has there been much buzz/discussion about this elsewhere on the internet? The casting/editing is so spot-on I forgive occasional lapses in funniness.

i think the host is actually becoming the most intriguing character

The ominous speaker and mist really don't pull back the curtain any further, do they?

Has there been much buzz/discussion about this elsewhere on the internet?

recent episodes have between 100K and 200K views -- we should feel ashamed as a nation and as a culture that it's so low

this started out great but i feel like they really exhausted these characters by the third or fourth ep

It's not about the characters anymore, or at least not as much. It's about how weird the circumstances continue to get.

"to call this place 'evil' implies a clarity of purpose that i do not want to attribute to anyone involved"

I'm pretty convinced at this point that the humor is being used to deliver some seriously dark Sarah Kane-style nihilistic theater of the absurd and not vice versa.

xpost Yeah, Derek keeps getting all the best lines, still dying over "This definitely...isn't a house. I think we might be underground, or on a ship of some kind."

Kind of a grim irony that the smartest dude is also the only black guy and the only gay person in the home.

uh....what?

this should have been The Prisoner remake and not that amc thing.

Smart gay black men are almost a reality show trope at this point.

(btw, I AM AWARE THERE ARE PLENTY OF SMART GAY BLACK MEN IN REAL LIFE AND THEY EXIST EVERYWHERE)

Being a double-minority and being smart so you really understand your plight in this hellhole

yeah, haha re: nihilistic theatre of the absurd - seriously, it's verging on social experiment gone horribly wrong. and/or horror movie. let the darkness descend!

i have nothing against frogs, but i find all the gruesome, close-up frog death pretty hilarious

I just love the collision of generic reality-show tropes with really weirdly specific, arbitrary oddities, like the frogs and the mountain of bananas and the sealed-off mold-filled room, none of which are cliches of either the reality genre or nightmarish creeping horror theater. Nice to see a parody that actually stakes out some new ground.

mold room = best supporting actor

I thought maybe some of that stuff referenced fear factor and survivor and the like.

Hrm, probably right on Fear Factor, and there's definitely elements of both in the challenges and that kind of stuff but I dunno...still feels really out of the clear blue imagination of the Onion people somehow.

I thought the underlying gag w/the banana thing is just that whoever is producing the show is desperately mismanaging the budget and not buying food for the house so they found a sponsor who will supply free bananas as long as they are incorporated into the show as much as possible - seemed like a pretty general jab at reality show contests & sponsorship, not referencing any particular show

i'm with Doctor C, this has long since transcended being a parody of something and is now its own magnificently insane thing. it is no more a parody of reality shows than twin peaks was a parody of cop shows.

though I don't get tired of the reality show editing/music

Yes, that and the deliberately insipid descriptions of the videos on youtubeake it clear that this is a mighty complex piece of work.

reminds me of palahniuk's haunted, though the threat's external, not internal

Yeah, definitely a huge source of the humor/weirdness is that even though they're getting this increasingly creepy and awful footage, it keeps getting edited and tagged and pop-up-videoed as if everything were proceeding according to plan. The machine's left hand is oblivious to the warnings coming from the right. (Like, the host and the authority he represents are clearly not pleased with how things are going, but tell that to the musical cues!)

Cont: yep, I thought of Haunted and Kane's Cleansed.

aren't bananas and mold-filled rooms staples of reality tv though?

no, you're thinking of actual reality

i do know real-life people who own settlers of catan and bananas... maybe should warn them to check their rooms.

Can't remember, have they made any attempt to go out of the windows and/or found them to be fake?

yes (just watched ep 2 because of this thread)

(they were boarded up)

Ahhh yeah. Figured there was some moment like that but couldn't pull it out.

share a heated fruit cup with your lover tonight!

really brilliant show.

feel like this last episode jumped the shark, always happens when 'drugs' are introduced

would love for the whole thing to end in some sort of resident evil/silent hill opening FMV sequence (the makeup is already getting there)

that's what I'm totally thinking too

I do like how nebulous they make the production of the show. Like, are things designed poorly on purpose? Is that part of the show? Is the host in on it or just clueless? Did they pick such a mismatched bunch on purpose, are are they just incompetent? Are we on some Bunuel level can't leave "Exterminating Angel" plane, or is it supposed to be funny that they just don't try to get out? Will the show actually allow the pregnancy storyline to play out? How far is it willing to go?

w/ the exception of frank (part of what makes him hilarious) the mismatched bunch is standard reality show boilerplate

In the intro episode, it was just awkward that there was one gay man. After you figure out it's a sealed house, it just became... worse.

the heating/cooling system was the first point at which i realised I didn't have a handle on this at all.

wd not be surprised to see "a game of sexy russian roulette" at some point

The lone gay guy and locked doors/blocked windows in Ep. 1 were pretty good clues that the writer(s) were fans of Sartre's No Exit.

Don't know how long they can keep the descent into Hell funny.

finally watched this last night. yikes.

The lone gay guy and locked doors/blocked windows in Ep. 1 were pretty good clues that the writer(s) were fans of Sartre's No Exit.

yeah, figured it was a horror movie p much from the start. but i watch a lot of horror movies.

I mean, I wonder if it will develop that getting the cast to have sex is not really the premise of the show? Because lone gay guy, married with kids guy, virgin ... and the two cast to be most sexually compatible have yet to have sex, mostly due to the house or the producers. I def. am getting more of a Bunuel vibe than a Sartre vibe, though.

The major problem for reality TV is that real life is too dull to make for compelling television

Stopped reading at this point. GF stopped at the paragraph before when the writer tried bringing Tronti into it.

dunno if "america's best" is going to turn into something spectacular or not.

seems kinda weaksauce right now

is it more one-offs like lake dredge appraisal?

yeah it feels sort of tossed-off and directionless. but they're only three eps in, so i'll see where they take it.

This was a step up
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHmyRQnS9Gs

good way out i thought
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMiAi4Xx41I

(moved from other thread)

I just watched the pilot of Onion News Empire on Amazon Prime and thought it was pretty solid, didn't blow me away, but a lot of good laugh lines skewering both the news and the genre of the newsroom drama. Was hard not to think about the fact that the criticism of Big Corporate Media was being funded by a Big Corporate something else that is trying to compete with Big Corporate Media, and that took a little of the bite out of it for me.

― huun huurt 2 (Hurting 2), Saturday, April 27, 2013 9:27 PM Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

had sort of a 30 rock feel to the writing, although didn't seem likely to produce characters anywhere near as good as jack doneghy and liz lemon

so it's not on youtube?

it's free if you have amazon prime, don't know if it costs otherwise or what.

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

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

:)

never tell anyone your name, never

loved this. i know one of the writers from college and his stuff is generally not my thing but this was great.

i watched it twice in a row

had to keep pausing to catch all the text

http://i.imgur.com/tekAx0n.png

lol wut

hahahaha

v basic satire, k3v, done q well

hahah i took that same screenshot

so good

i posted it on facebook like 5 mins after you did

is there a newer link? looks like it's private now

http://i.huffpost.com/gen/1528825/thumbs/o-FOR-PROFIT-ONLINE-facebook.jpg

It's private, somebody tell me what it was, if it has to do with Sex House I must watch it

it doesnt really have to do with sex house its just like sex house

actually maybe it does have to do w sex house i guess the guys who wrote it used to work for the onion so idk

its called For Profit Online University and it was made by adult swim and appears to have gone off the nets

which is a shame because it's great
but i bet they're gonna do it with the same crew as a show so maybe not so much a shame

should we do a "actually good web series 2014" thread?

^i'm on board

in the former onion writers/adult swim category i really liked xhow last year (it's probably mentioned upthread but at least this is a newer one)

http://youtu.be/ojxvrirgACU

it seems like they're doing very similar things on the onion site recently too - http://www.theonion.com/video/the-onions-tips-for-last-minute-holiday-shopping,34837/

^ first vid is borderline nsfw

lol

joe sch ‏@on3ness Jan 7
@wildaggressive where did For Profit Online University go

Wild, Aggressive Dog ‏@wildaggressive 8m
@on3ness the video is back thank you for your patience a sandwich will be mailed to you shortly
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WmRxJEqgdWA

lol

A+

six sexy americans

not really a narrative series but lmao:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K5lgwopmKMw

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4NL9i-Fu15hYD2O2Ea0YkJA8b6b8ceMA

Hahahaha

EDGE is live
http://www.onionstudios.com/series/edge

just watched this again, holds up!

I did the same a few months ago and 100% concur.

I remember the last ep not working for me, but the rest...

I rewatched this last year, close to the start of lockdown, and I was pleasantly surprised by how much I still enjoyed it.

this series is pretty good
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OIoWVm2jkxM

six sexy americans

― ciderpress, Friday, August 24, 2012 12:09 PM (eight years ago) bookmarkflaglink

https://www.vulture.com/article/sex-house-jen-spyra-the-onion-interview.html

I hadn't seen this show since it came out, so ... almost ten years? But so brilliant, and soooooo dark.