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Bye-Bye Big Brother, But Must Strangers End, Too? By Melanie McFarland / Seattle Times staff columnist Wednesday, September 27, 2000, 12:00 a.m. Copyright © 2000 The Seattle Times Company URL: click here - - - - - - - - - - - - Comfort is king in the U.S. of A., which explains Big Brother's failure: the shut-ins were so relaxed with one another they were deadly dull to watch. Andif you'll allow me to go out on a limb hereour complacency may mean the demise of a far-better show, Comedy Central's Strangers With Candy, whose (possible) series finale airs Monday at 10 p.m. Ratings in both cases indicate that few people will mourn the loss of these shows, but unlike Big Brother, mercifully ending Friday, Strangers With Candy was no crime against the airwaves. The screwy take on after-school specials, dispensing moral advice no one in their right mind would heed, stars Amy Sedaris as Jerri Blank, a 47-year-old "user, boozer and loser." The show regularly took viewers outside their comfort zone, and ardent fans kept Strangers a secret, taking the show's existence for granted. After all, it had a faithful core viewership that seemed to grow as more turned their friends on to it. But Comedy Central has been spoiled by the success of South Park and The Daily Show; both rake in solid ratings by cable standards, where any program that regularly attracts nearly 2 million viewers is a hit. Hence, they've started cutting the fat, and the pear-shaped Jerri is one of the first characters on the chopping block. Here's the Cliff's Notes version of the series. Cursed with a criminal overbite and grating voice, Jerri spent years selling her body for smack. Upon her release from the pokey, she starts over as a freshman at the surreal Flatpoint High. During her high-school career, she learned to read via trying out for cheerleading, grew a beard from pumping steroids, and almost dated her long-lost son, the infant she traded for a guitar while she was strung out. You'll see homages to TV shows, movies and literature in each wickedly inspired half-hour of Strangers, cues that'll make you guffaw all the more. Jerri's misinformation-spreading history teacher, Chuck Noblet (Stephen Colbert), despises her. He and art teacher Geoffrey Jellineck (Paul Dinello) engage in an illicit affair with one another. School principal Onyx Blackmon (Greg Holliman), a dictatorial, lust-filled freak, lords over all of them. Delicious! Sedaris, sister to NPR darling David Sedaris, is an award-winning actress and playwright who draws upon numerous cultural cues for inspiration in writing the series with Colbert and Dinello. Even if Strangers doesn't return, we'll be hearing from Sedaris for years to comebut why wait? On Strangers, sexually swingin' Jerri learns valuable morality lessons every week about everything from illiteracy ("Reading and writing are deadly!") to drugs ("If you're gonna smoke pot, be prepared to spend a lot of time laughing with your friends. Think about it.") to ambition ("If you're going to reach for the stars, reach for the lowest one you can."). Rarely does the show fail to horrify us as Jerri is subjected to countless abuses, some recounted in vivid detail, others witnessed, like the time a fellow student tricks her into eating a scab. "Not again!" she whines mournfully. As you can tell, "Strangers With Candy" is probably one of the most deliciously non-P.C. shows out there and certainly deserves more attention on TV (and the Internet its site at comedycentral.com is one of the more entertaining ones you'll come across) than it's getting. Monday, Jerri gets a makeover. It may be billed as the series' last entry, but the great thing about cable is that it has a history of reviving the canceled. See the last episode or catch a repeat of this week's on Friday at 12:30 a.m. If you like it, write Comedy Central at 1775 Broadway, New York, NY, 10019 or by e-mail: mail@comedycentral.com. Or waste your time and vote off one of Big Brother's prisonersbut really, who cares? The only lesson that show has taught us is how dead TV can be. Besides, Jamie's probably going to bite it anyway. Delicious! |
Middle-Aged Wasteland A 46-year-old loser goes back to high school in Amy Sedaris' Comedy Central series Strangers With Candy By Joyce Millman salon.com > Entertainment April 5, 1999 URL: http://www.salon.com/ent/col/mill/1999/04/05/strangers - - - - - - - - - - - - In Comedy Central's twisted new series Strangers With Candy, celebrated New York playwright, comic and waitress Amy Sedaris plays Jerri Blank, a 46-year-old former teenage runaway, junkie, hooker and jailbird who returns home after 32 years determined to have the "normal" adolescence she never had. She enters high school (as a freshman), where she grapples with typical high school problems like unpopularity, bad grades and teachers who have it in for you for no reason. But Jerri is undaunted. Drawing on the valuable lessons she's learned from her life as a "user, boozer and loser," she finds that there's no problem that can't be solved by drugs, sex or a plausible alibi. If you're thinking that Strangers With Candy sounds like the unholy spawn of Get a Life and My So-Called Life, you're on the right track. Created and written by Sedaris, Stephen Colbert and Paul Dinello, who were all involved in Comedy Central's mid-'90s skit comedy series Exit 57, Strangers With Candy puts an absurdist spin on all the familiar crises of TV adolescence by having them experienced by a very weird adult. Like Chris Elliott in Get a Life, Sedaris makes her character sublimely oblivious to the ridiculousness of her situation -- Jerri's a freak, but she doesn't know it. And Sedaris and her collaborators parody some of the same '70s TV sources Elliott mined in Get a Life, especially ABC's "Afterschool Specials" (Strangers With Candy was originally going to be called "The Way After School Special"), those morality plays that sucked kids in with their topical teen issues and then either scared their pants off or confused them even further. In Strangers With Candy, Jerri copes with a different dilemma every week, spoofily portrayed in thuddingly obvious "Afterschool Special" fashion -- upcoming themes include eating disorders, drugs, racism, divorce, illiteracy and unwed motherhood. The giggly, dark premise is that Jerri gets terrible advice from the grown-ups she goes to for guidance and ends up learning all the wrong lessons -- which, in the skewed universe of Strangers With Candy, are the right lessons. In the first episode Wednesday, Jerri tries to get her classmates to come to a party she's throwing, but is cruelly rejected until the extremely sensitive art teacher, Mr. Jellineck (Dinello), tells her to "dig deep inside and see what makes you unique -- dig around like a badger in a trash can and go with what you know!" So Jerri mixes up a batch of crank for the homecoming queen, who promptly ODs, after which Jerri dedicates her party to the girl's memory and gets a full house. And the April 14 episode is a devilish spoof of those TV movies where high schoolers were forced to tote around sacks of flour or eggs as if they were babies as a lesson in the consequences of unprotected sex. In the Strangers With Candy version, the sex education teacher hands Jerri a real baby, which she can't give back until she learns the most valuable lesson a girl can learn about single motherhood. It's only after Jerri, sharing the baby with another girl, becomes jealous of her partner's focus on the kid and starts acting like an abusive boyfriend that she realizes what that lesson is. (Sorry, it's so cleverly sprung, it wouldn't be right to give it away.) Comedy Central's first live-action original non-skit series, Strangers With Candy is one of the most inventively bizarre shows in a long time (right up there with HBO's recent trial run of the mock-rock duo sitcom "Tenacious D"). Strangers With Candy manages to sustain the "Afterschool Special" joke with its smudged, '70s neo-realistic look, generic pseudo-pop background music and Jerri's throwback wardrobe, which is so hideous I suspect it came from somebody's actual closet, not a Hollywood costume shop. But while Jerri uses language that would make even Cartman blush, the humor of Strangers With Candy is so bone-dry that some South Park fans might end up staring at it in Beavis and Butt-headlike confusion. Strangers With Candy is not for kids, but that's not surprising, given Sedaris' impressive résumé of brainy-silly stagecraft. With her brother, author, playwright and National Public Radio commentator David Sedaris, Amy Sedaris wrote the Obie Award-winning 1996 play One Woman Shoe, which she also starred in. She also appeared off-Broadway in Paul Rudnick's The Most Fabulous Story Ever Told and is working on a Seattle staging of The Little Frieda Mysteries, which she wrote with her brother. (She is also famously employed as a waitress at Marion's in New York's Bowery.) Jerri Blank is an inspired creation, both childlike and haggard, and although Sedaris puts her face through buck-toothed contortions to play her and wears some of the most unflattering eye makeup this side of a Phyllis rerun, her all-too-human failings are oddly endearing. When Jerri seeks solace from the mean kids at school and her bitchy stepmother (Deborah Rush) and bratty, more popular half-brother (Larc Spies) at home by throwing herself across her bed and talking to the ashes of her late mother, she's every confused, lonely, misfit teenage girl on TV -- you can almost overlook the matronly curlers and cold cream. There's a semiserious message to Strangers With Candy -- you're never too old for a second chance. But Sedaris and her co-writers also know what most of us would use that second chance for. "This second time through high school, I'm a little bit wiser," Jerri states proudly into the camera. "I'm still doing the wrong things, but at least I'm doing them the right way!" salon.com | April 5, 1999 |
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Say It Ain't So September 27, 2000 |
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Strangers With Candy: Lessons in Laughing Monday, April 26, 1999 Jefferson City Missouri News Tribune URL: http://www.newstribune.com/stories/042699/ent_0426990002.html NEW YORK (AP) Jerri Blank has much to teach the nation's youth. Keep them away from her! Then sit back and share some twisted wisdom with this self-described "boozer, user and loser"and laugh helplessly. Jerri is the hard-knocks heroine of Strangers With Candy, a weekly morality play meant to echo, in all the worst ways, TV's youngster-targeted "After-School Specials." You remember the drill: A complex problem reduced to rite-of-passage melodrama and, at hour's end, a pat resolution. No wonder Strangers is on Comedy Central, where it airs Wednesday at 9:30 p.m. EDT. Jerri, our prototypical troubled teen, is actually 46 years old. A runaway for 32 years (some spent in the slammer), she is now picking up where she left off: as a freshman at Flatpoint High. "This time," declares Jerri, "when I make the wrong choices, I'm doing it for all the right reasons." Recent Strangers episodes have found her grappling with drug abuse, teen-age pregnancy and alcoholismand gaining from each experience clearly stated (if preposterous) life lessons. Her issue this week is prejudice. The shiny new braces on Jerri's teeth make her a social pariah at Flatpoint. She's shunned by everyone. Everyone, that is, but Jerri's loyal, lovely locker palwhom the principal, for no sane reason, suspects is mentally retarded. The principal pressures Jerri to expose the girl. "Why me?" asks Jerri, and the principal replies, "You've got those braces." Retarded people, he states absurdly, "tend to be drawn to shiny objects." Will Jerri, herself a victim of prejudice, betray her only defender? Or will she stand up to her principal's mindless, groundless bigotry? Jerri muses: "I thought she was dangerous and different. Then I found out, she's just like you and me." Never mind. Since permission for Jerri to go on a class trip hangs in the balance, her locker buddy plainly must be sacrificed. Jerri has learned a valuable lesson. "She completely lives in the moment," says Amy Sedaris, who, with a "fatty suit" supplementing her pixieish frame, plays Jerri. "For her, no choice is informed by anything but immediate need." Then, switching in and out of character as Jerri (complete with the overbite and plaintive look), Sedaris enacts a telling exchange: "Jerri, what do you hope to do with your life?" "Uh ... go to my locker." "No, no! I mean, what are you gonna do, wa-a-y down the line?" "Open it." Stephen Colbert, who plays the reptilian teacher Mr. Noblet, bursts out laughing. "For all the terrible things Jerri's been through, and all the terrible things she's done, she's actually very innocent," he says. "She's learned nothing from life. She has swum downstream, and not a single barnacle on her." If there's something discomfiting about Jerri (especially since she's meant to be a role model), that's where the humor originates. So says Paul Dinello, who plays art teacher Mr. Jellineck. "Uncomfortableness makes other people weep, but it makes us laugh," he explains. "If someone on a TV show said, 'I lost the baby,' we would probably start giggling." "That's why I like Lifetime movies," says Sedaris. A bit giddy from fatigue, she has joined the equally sleep-deprived Colbert and Dinello for an interview at their Greenwich Village office. Right now, the trio goes virtually around the clock. Not only do they star in Strangers With Candy, which they created, but they also write each episode. How do they keep up? "It helps that we have an improvisational background," Dinello observes. The three met a decade ago as members of Chicago's Second City improv troupe. Ever since, they have been close friends and eager collaborators, including a stretch as members of the Exit 57 sketch-comedy ensemble for its Comedy Central series. Along the way, they've done other projects individually. Dinello acted in several films. Colbert is a correspondent on Comedy Central's Daily Show. And besides winning awards for her stage work, Sedaris has held on to her gig as a waitress at an East Village diner, where currently she schedules other people to cover her shifts. On Strangers, meanwhile, it's collegial comic bliss. "We get to work together and say whatever we want," Dinello sums up. "You even forget this is actually gonna be on TV," says Sedaris. "'Omigod, people are gonna watch it this week!' I mean, you just forget." Forget that, maybe. But no one could forget the bracing moral of the story: You CAN have your cake and eat it, too and Amy will be happy to serve it. |
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