In Which We Start Things Up With Adam Brody Again

The FK

by DICK CHENEY

StartUp
creator Ben Ketai
Crackle

Adam Brody's girlfriend Taylor (Ashley Grace, Topher Grace's real-life wife) is the kind of woman who feels that because she loves someone it is okay to put down certain parts of him. During sex, she demands Adam Brody put on various Enya-sounding music while he fucks her. She asks, often, whether or not this or that is "OK" in the bedroom, and tells him that he doesn't have to go down on her, like it is some kind of imposition.

Adam Brody is the kind of man who enjoys sex with Topher Grace's wife at the end of a hard day. You can feel he has a general angst that he is exacting on her during intercourse. Adam Brody is focused on acting very mature during his new series StartUp because at the end of the day there is really no reason he could not be playing a high school student. His face and body have barely changed at all in ten years, whereas Jason Priestley looks like he was run over by a truck.

Adam Brody is a white man living in Miami. He is completely unhappy with his job at an investment firm. He meets Izzy (Otmara Marrero), a Cuban woman who went to Stanford. She has created a currency called GenCoin — maybe she was unaware BitCoin already existed? Everyone is like, haven't you heard of BitCoin...? but only Adam Brody is stupid enough to believe this is a new, revolutionary idea. He gives her two million dollars that his dad gave him.

Before her big break, Izzy was living in the Florida Keys with a man she described as a "key rat"; she had debatably consensual intercourse with him because he paid her electric bill. There is a lot of sex on StartUp, most of it completely cynical, because without these tiny little expressions of emotion there would be absolutely nothing exciting about this story.

I had to look up what a key rat was, because the only time I've ever been to South Florida was with my eyes closed. According to my internet sources, a key rat is "someone who lives anywhere on Key Biscayne except the Grand Bay or the Ocean Club, attended KBCS, smokes the chronic, is generally an undesirable character, likes Budweiser, and has spent excessive time at the skihole." This led me to look up what a skihole was. I never did find out, because I got distracted by Lynne asking me whether I thought Taylor Swift had breast enhancement surgery.

Substantially more interested in Adam Brody than his girlfriend is Phil Rask (Martin Freeman). Martin Freeman is doing an American accent that is top of the line. He is introduced on StartUp running on a treadmill, and Martin's new body is absolutely phenomenal. Phil Rask is a federal agent of some kind who has an ex-wife who looks like an underwear model and he goes around South Florida like every single person in his path is nothing more than a hurdle to be surmounted. I immediately loved this man.

When Phil Rask meets Adam Brody, he says, "Huh?" a lot and generally makes him feel uncomfortable. They talk about how much Adam Brody loves to fish, which is a strange topic of conversation, given that there is no way Adam Brody has ever caught a marlin in his entire life.

On the plus side, StartUp features a very ethnically diverse cast. On the negative side, none of these actors seem to be very comfortable with one another or share any emotional connection at all. StartUp is so derailed by Adam Brody stammering through various scenes that Martin Freeman's evil agent becomes a protagonist-in-waiting.

In order to cleanse the taste of this Crackle original series from my palate, I took a trip down memory lane this week and started watching some episodes of The O.C. For people who had never seen Beverly Hills 90210, The O.C. was somewhat watchable until Josh Schwartz' writing became painful. Adam Brody was a better actor in 2003 than he is now. Martin Freeman is the kind of versatile performer who can play anyone, Adam Brody should only play a self-effacing rabbi in a Coen Brothers movie if he wants to reinvent his career, because this is not it.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording.

In Which We Boomerang Across The Pond

Uncle Sleuth

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Sherlock
creators Steven Moffat & Mark Gatiss

The detective work of Sherlock Holmes in the BBC's version of the character is only impressive if you have never seen House or CSI, even once accidentally while waiting for something else to come on. "Noises can tell you everything," the sleuth opines, and somehow everyone around him resists vomiting in their tea. Cumberbatch's Sherlock Holmes treats women as if they were mentally disabled idiots incapable of understanding the logic (of noises). If Holmes treated people this way in America, he'd be qualified for the Republican presidential nomination. For christ's sake, the man smokes indoors.

Bringing this UK icon "into the 21st century" actually consists of bringing it into the late 1990s. This younger Sherlock Holmes (Benedict Cumberbatch) is barely aware of what a blog is, even though it is the major source of his notoriety. Holmes reads the newspaper every morning like a 60 year old retiree, wakes up in a bathrobe and has a servant, even though he lives in a shitty Baker Street apartment. When he is abducted to Buckingham Palace, Holmes refuses to put on clothes, but he is still super impressed: he becomes so giddy he steals an ashtray as a memento. This Sherlock is about as modern as the Queen's corgis.

There is a certain Luddite sensibility to Sherlock. Sure, Watson (Martin Freeman) uses a computer, but (1) he appears to be running Windows Vista and (2) he doesn't use much more than the thing's webcam and google search. In fact, Sherlock focuses on the insights that man can achieve without a computer, which is merely another tool in his psychic arsenal. While in a literary sense this assertion might be slightly plausible, in the real world detective work without forensics, computer science and DNA testing is about as likely as a grown man with an ex-military manservant.

To solve the crucial riddle of the show's second season premiere, Sherlock Holmes merely has to input a four character code into a mobile phone. Deciphering such a problem would merely be minutes in the life of any decent cryptographer or tattoed waif, but it takes Holmes the entire episode. Unless he is merely dragging it out to be dramatic, the display of his intuitive abilities is underwhelming at best, criminally negligent at worst.

The villain of this Sherlock is a black widow named Irene Adler. She is both a dominatrix and a lesbian, which I suppose incriminates her twice. Her lack of true interest in men is inevitably her fatal flaw. When Holmes and Watson first meet her, she shows up naked — the true villain is all woman. By the end, when he claims his final victory over her naked carapace, it is not simply enough that she begs for his indulgence, but she must also be reduced to tears like the simpering whore he believes her to be. As a final insult, he calls her, "The woman" and dresses her in a burqa.

As bad as the female gender is, Americans drive Sherlock absolutely bonkers. If a British person offends him, the ensuing Oscar Wilde-like dance constitutes an elaborate game he's going to win anyway. When Holmes encounters an American, he pepper sprays the poor guy and throws him out a window like some kind of reverse Captain America. I expect this kind of inferiority complex from Sarkozy, but threatening the people of the United States with a fractured skull just seems below the belt.

As it happens, the central plot of Sherlock's premiere (it's the show's fourth overall episode — a teleplay takes at least four times as long to write when the government is involved) concerns a grotesque caricature of 9/11. For shame. I had to watch this youtube over 40 times to get the bad taste out of my mouth and quietly sing "Neeeeen elevvvvvvven" to myself until I nodded off from patriotism overload.

Arthur Conan Doyle tried to kill the original Sherlock Holmes, but he was unsuccessful in this attempt. Such a move would be too original and creative for such a predictable character. Moffat's Sherlock is just as obvious — he is more focused on what would be the most suitable quip than ever engaging with the people around him. The most surprising move he ever makes is to not have sex, another affectation that seems decidedly anti-modern. "Are you really so obvious?" his brother Mycroft asks him, which I suppose is his attempt to explain the program's inadequacies as part of its charm.

Three things manage to save Sherlock from being an outright bomb. The first is that the show looks astonishing; the Fringe-esque twists, cuts, and special effects of the show manage to make it visually stimulating even when you can see the next plot "twist" a mile away. The show's sets are also magnificent and, from all evidence, insanely expensive.

The second saving grace of Sherlock is Moffat's talent for dialogue — it's what made his version of Doctor Who and his sex comedy Coupling more than a rehash of Quantum Leap and Friends. Bouncing back and forth, Freeman and Cumberbatch are both very entertaining in their roles, each containing more charisma in their fingertips than Jude Law has in his entire body. Essentially Sherlock is a delicious but not-so filling pastry. Perhaps the real problem is that Sherlock Holmes wasn't a very good character to begin with.

The idea of the know-it-all detective actually represented a regressive move in the mystery genre. Far more interesting than the detective who knows everything is the detective who drinks too much, or the detective who is employed in a more intriguing job like that of a businessman or priest. The ideal detective doesn't even know he is one, or better yet, isn't a he at all.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here and twitters here. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here. He last wrote in these pages about a new novel from Vernor Vinge.

"Either Nelson" - Guided by Voices (mp3)

"The Things That Never Need" - Guided by Voices (mp3)

"Cyclone Utilities" - Guided by Voices (mp3)