Mick Jagger as You’ve Never Seen Him

As a relative newcomer to the Rake family, I was reassured and gratified by fresh research asserting that you, the average Rake reader, are not much of a couch potato. Or if you are, your eyeballs are fixed to a book or magazine rather than a TV screen. The numbers say twenty-six percent of you are more likely to have “no exposure to TV on an average weekday” than the tubers next door.
This is good for you and me.
After fifteen years of neuron-shriveling exposure, covering what passes for prime time entertainment television for the St. Paul Pioneer Press, I can tell you I’m dangerously close to a cumulative toxic meltdown. I can’t take much more contact with the sprawling, roiling, highly profitable, knucklehead media universe around us. Like you, apparently, I would just as soon spend my media time absorbing what’s valuable—even, I dare say, artful and edifying—and ignoring the latest cross-pollinated fodder for the high-profile, lowbrow, Paris-and-Britney-go-prancing-with-the-stars, eighteen-to-thirty-four-year-old target demo.
When I do pull myself away from the work-related computer screen long enough to watch television, it no longer occurs to me to spend a half-hour with a sitcom. I mean, come on. There’s a playoff game on ESPN, an airliner crashing on National Geographic’s Seconds from Disaster, and a bunch of embalmed white guys sneering about Nancy Pelosi on Fox News. This stuff is real, I’ve decided, and to some extent unpredictable. (OK, not Fox News, but you catch my drift.)
Unfortunately, I have a hard time maintaining aesthetic purity. I thought Borat was genius. I’ll lose a half-hour watching some part of Dumb and Dumber every time it pops up on TBS, which is about three times a week. And I believe the Cohen brothers deserve a lifetime achievement award for The Big Lebowski alone.
Likewise, I have a thing for a certain kind of sitcom. The problem is the kinds of sitcoms I like never seem to last long. They get good reviews, and then, a few weeks later, a pink slip. WTF? Well, one reason is that people like me—and you—have lost the habit, probably forever, of making appointments with entertainment television.
Take for example The Knights of Prosperity, a new sitcom on ABC. It only caught my attention because I saw that David Letterman’s company, Worldwide Pants, was producing it, along with Mick Jagger, who also has a small, recurring role. “David Letterman,” I thought. “And Mick Jagger. How stupid could this be?”
Turns out it wasn’t stupid. In fact, it was pretty funny. The shtick here has actor Donal Logue, your classic fleshy, compulsively amusing Irishman, and his band of multi-cultural minimum-wage warriors deciding to make their grab for the brass ring by ripping off Jagger’s fifty-two-million-dollar Manhattan apartment.
The show worked. Or, I should say, the pilot worked, since I haven’t seen episode number two. Someone at Worldwide Pants obviously enjoyed the time he spent researching dialogue in blue-collar bars, and left feeling something for all the impossible, implausible dreams submerged there. I get Mick Jagger pimping himself and much lesser celebrities. I like the idea of sitcom characters that look and sound like the streets of New York.
But Knights of Prosperity is doomed, and here’s why: Because you and I, dear highbrow, literary-loving Rake reader, are the show’s best audience. The thing is toast because you’ve never heard of it, and I’ll probably never watch it again.
My theory is that uncommon sitcoms, sitcoms with some sense of artistic risk, daring, or refusal to conform to stale norms, appeal best to people—you and me—who have for the most part blocked sitcoms from our cultural radar. The only thing our experience with crap like According to Jim, Two and a Half Men, and King of Queens ever validated was that sitcom watching was a waste of time, time better spent shouting back at Bill O’Reilly, breaking down defenses with John Madden, or listening to some C-SPAN policy wonk explain the roots of the Sunni-Shia schism.