Quarantine Control #52: April Fools
The story with the COVID-19 pandemic hasn’t changed much since the time of last week’s post, outside of — surprise, surprise — cases rising again. The cause, yet again, is thanks to a combination of the narrative that suggested this whole living hell was almost over thanks to people being vaccinated, and restrictions on crowds and indoor gathering being loosened. And don’t think this is only happening in the United States. What’s most depressing here is how this is being called the fourth COVID wave, proof that we as a people will never learn any necessary lessons as long as this pandemic keeps going. Given the different variants now wandering around, CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky’s warning about “impending doom” sounds accurate. This may be April Fools’ Day, but the people who will continue to underestimate the virus are the true April Fools.
Joseph Daniels
Holy shit, we’ve made it a full year with this stupid column! We originally thought we’d make a few recommendations for our readers to pass the time while self-quarantining and then things would be better. Intellectually, I was well aware of the two year shelf life the last major pandemic had, but I think I was hoping that things would get better sooner, or that the world would change into something a lot more favourable to little people like us.
Instead, a year is gone and the world has slid back to how it was before we’d ever heard of Covid-19. People are utterly selfish and full of themselves, corporations are allergic to the economy pausing for even a little while and politics will be politics. Remind me, the people of the United States voted Donald Trump out… right? How is it I’m still hearing about him, about his supporters, about conspiracy theories that he’s going to somehow appear back in the White House as if nothing happened? Get over yourselves, the Trump administration is done. I certainly don’t remember the left coming up with months of conspiracy theories about how Hillary Clinton was going to suddenly appear in the White House.
It’s weird. Back when the pandemic was still new news, it felt very scary and it seemed like anyone could be ordered not to work at any time. One year later, and I’ve been expected to keep going to work despite the danger and despite that I’ve had no formal training on how to handle pandemics. I’m just expected to keep vigilant and keep clean, in a business where we’re understaffed and wow, there’s no time to clean, not if we’re supposed to get anything else done. The other day, a customer told me the entire store looked like a dollar store and not like a professionally run grocery business. When it takes me an hour to clean one stack of shopping baskets for reuse because I’m also the only one on the register helping customers, how in the world am I supposed to make sure the store looks nice?
Meanwhile, I have friends who have gone a year without any real concrete answers regarding their own work and whether or not they’re even going to be able to find anything, now that a lot of jobs have just gone poof. Big corporations might be fine because they forced the economy open, but the little businesses couldn’t afford the downtime, nor can they afford the Covid regulations.
One year later and the world is still fucked. What else is new? No, I’m not drunk! You’re drunk!
So this week, I watched some Matt LeBlanc stuff.
Episodes (2011)
Source: Crave (Canada); not sure where it’s currently available in the United States
Episodes: 41
Sooner or later, comedic actors do one of two things. They either star in a few dramas and show off their acting chops (sometimes to great success, like Robin Williams, Jim Carrey and Adam Sandler, no really), or they play a fictionalized version of themselves in an even more over the top comedic role than they’re usually known for (like Bruce Campbell in My Name Is Bruce). Matt LeBlanc parodies himself in a series called Episodes.
Sometimes I wonder if Episodes is based on the real lives of show creators David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik, because the sheer ridiculousness of Hollywood and how it fucks with the British writers at the heart of the show… you know the phrase “too good to be true”? This feels too bad to be false.
Despite billing Matt LeBlanc first, the show is actually about married couple Sean and Beverly Lincoln, a pair of TV producers who created a successful show in the United Kingdom called Lyman’s Boys. An American TV producer who is pretty full of shit manages to get them to pitch it for an American network and once it’s picked up, the network starts changing things until Lyman’s Boys becomes a very different television show called Pucks!. With the exclamation mark in the title. It’s like how there’s punctuation in the titles of shows like Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, Jeopardy!, and anything else that’s either asking a question or exclaiming itself excitedly. Unfortunately, no one’s very excited about Pucks! and it eventually goes down the drain, ending with a whimper and not a bang.
Later on in the series, Sean and Beverly manage to sell another show, one that everyone agrees is so good that all the major networks fight over it and at first it sounds like the network doesn’t want to mess with it. They’ve managed to at least get that, since the network ruined the American version of Lyman’s Boys by turning it into Pucks!. But as with everything else that happens in Hollywood, network politics gets in the way and the fifth and final season is a case study in how even a sure thing like a network promising not to mess with a new show is never a sure thing, and Hollywood will still find a way to ruin something amazing.
Where does Matt LeBlanc come into this? Where doesn’t he? The dude sleeps around, every chance he gets! Approximately once a season or so, he’ll ruin a marriage with his antics and in the final season, he almost ruins his game show, but apparently the American public likes seeing him having inappropriate relations with one of the contestants and ratings skyrocket.
The first time we see him, he’s being cast in the lead role of Lyman’s Boys after the network rejects the original Lyman reprising his role in an American setting. The network instead decides that it’s a very good idea to get Joey from Friends and that other show he was in. What was it? I can’t remember, it was a spin-off of Friends and didn’t last as long. I have a feeling the title’s right there, I just can’t quite put my finger on it. Anyway, he’s cast in the lead role and the changes begin. Not only does he turn from the headmaster of a boarding school into a hockey coach, but the librarian co-star is turned straight, since apparently the American audience always wants sexual tension between co-stars and you can’t have that with a man and a woman if the woman is a lesbian. So the series is pretty much straightwashed by Matt’s suggestions, and the network goes along with it.
I can’t help but wonder if Sean and Beverly’s personal assistant Wendy is based on someone real. She’s got the work ethic of a goldfish and seems to refuse to do her job at all. She reminds me of some kid who used to work at the A&W back in Revelstoke when I was there and who actually refused to pick up a broom and help sweep when he was just standing around and doing nothing. I think he might’ve been related to the boss, so yeah. That’s probably why he was never fired.
One day, he was being particularly lazy and Gloria got sick and tired of it and told him off for it, then went around to the rest of us and apologized to us each individually for making a scene. She was our hero and she was the one apologizing to us? Hah, the kid should’ve been the one apologizing.
Anyway, once Pucks! is pretty much destroyed, Sean and Beverly try to go back to England, but the series is unexpectedly picked up for “six more”. Episodes, I guess. The network basically only did that in order to screw Matt out of a better, juicier role he was about to land at NBC. I wonder how many times that happens in Hollywood. Anyway, instead of the role of a lifetime, Matt ends up doing a few more episodes of Pucks! and then is strong-armed into doing a game show since he’s the victim of embezzlement and isn’t worth as much as he thought he was.
The series is down on game shows, but I really like them. The game show presented on Episodes, though, sounds like a really dumb stunt that I wouldn’t be all that interested in. That said, the asshole TV executive that originally bought the American rights to Lyman’s Boys gets some ironic punishment on the set of that game show in “Episode Nine”. Um… that’s the “Episode Nine” in season four, not the one in season three or season two. Yeah, there’s a reason I don’t list the episode titles when talking about the show.
There’s so much more I could say about Episodes, but I think I’ve gone on long enough. Let’s just say, if you can find somewhere in the US that’s streaming it and you can get over just how much of an asshole Matt LeBlanc plays, you might like the show. Just do a Google search for Episodes, I’m sure you’ll find it!
Happy April 1st, everyone!
Geoffrey Barnes
I wish I hadn’t realized until a couple of days ago that this week’s Quarantine Control would be posted right on April Fools’ Day, because I might have thought of something clever to post here to celebrate the occasion. Not that this blog didn’t celebrate the occasion. I did watch something, though.
Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood (2009)
Source: HBO Max
Episodes: 32-64 (the rest of the series)
I came away more impressed than I expected after watching the first half of Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood for last week’s Quarantine Control post. My expectations were moderately high after watching the loose 2003 adaptation, which ended abruptly after heavily diverting from the manga’s story despite the creators getting two chances to conclude it. I wasn’t ready for just how good Brotherhood would be, and just how much it would differ from the 2003 version’s story even early on thanks to the quicker pacing. The storytelling is remarkably better, which is even more true for the second half.
Edward and Alphonse Elric’s quest for a Philosopher’s Stone, to no surprise, doesn’t go according to plan. The brothers lost their limbs and body, respectively, after a failed effort to bring their mother back from the dead using alchemy. The law of Equivalent Exchange that exists in the universe means a brutal price must be paid for using alchemy for drastic measures, but the Philosopher’s Stone, they eventually learn, comes with a hefty price itself. The stakes for what the Elric brothers will need to do to reverse their original wrong, and whether they’re willing to go through with them, were entertaining enough to keep my attention all the way through. Not to mention their constant fights against those who seek to use the Philosopher’s Stone for their own nefarious means.
The synopsis above gives a good impression of how intricate the plot becomes in a short time, and the high number of characters eventually introduced — far higher than the 2003 series, which didn’t contain enough anime-original characters to make up for the sheer number the manga and this adaptation has. The biggest faces are given ample opportunity for character development and plenty to do in the overall story. The second half includes a bunch of new characters, the biggest of which is Olivier Mira Armstrong, the stern and tough older sister of the previously-introduced Alex Louis Armstrong. The second Greed is also a fun character to have around, who proves to be as complicated as the first one. It can’t be easy to involve such a large cast in the story of a 64-episode series and find at least one significant event for all of them to contribute to, because few series are capable of doing it. This one largely managed to, however.
The pacing also keeps the series going at a good place. I’ve been watching anime on and off for years, and my mind still wanders to the likes of Dragon Ball, Rurouni Kenshin, and Naruto whenever I hear that an anime is a shonen manga adaptation. (This is very much a “back in my day” anecdote, but that’s fine. I’m old now.) The pacing of Brotherhood was a breath of fresh air comparatively, no doubt thanks to this adaptation happening just as the manga was on its way to a conclusion. It shows how there’s no need for anime adaptations to expound upon their source material or add filler to further develop a large cast of characters or help the audience to engage with them. I’m aware this largely the norm for manga adaptations these days, outside those that started several years ago like One Piece, but this is new and mind-blowing stuff to me — in a good way.
Only had a few small issues with Brotherhood. There are characters who can take a little too much damage after sustaining several blows from enemies they’re fighting or obstacles they’re thrown or kicked into, some of which aren’t mended by medic-related alchemy. In cases where they’d otherwise be severe, the characters stay alive long enough for an alchemist with medical abilities to heal them. It never stops finding convenient ways to keep most of the cast alive. I know this can be applied to nearly every shonen series that involves fighting, but it sticks out in a series that’s more grounded than others in the anime and manga subgenre. But it’s not so big of a problem that it derails the series in any way.
If it wasn’t already clear: I enjoyed the 2003 adaptation of Fullmetal Alchemist, and was surprised to hear that Brotherhood was that much better after watching it. Sometimes, the internet doesn’t lie. Now that I’ve actually watched Brotherhood, the 2003 one looks like an amateurish effort by comparison. It just makes me gladder that I was pedantic enough to watch the first series before delving into this one, because I couldn’t have done the opposite.
There have been signs that this pandemic could actually end for several weeks now. But we’ve been in this hell for so long that it’s tough to believe that, even when medical experts say it. Saying that we could soon get back to “normal,” whatever that is, also sounds naïve. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t work towards that, and it would be nice if everyone realized that all the time instead of when they happen to get infected. You never think the leopards will eat your face.
About The Author
dcstaff
The collective will of the Damage Control staff combined into a single article.
