NY <3 Bret and Jemaine. *SPOILERS!*

hellomyfriend wrote:

drunkagain wrote:[size=133:hq5frzfm]... their manager, Murray, falls victim to a Nigerian email scam...

I'm just happy to see Nigeria being mentioned. " title="" border="0"/>

As soon as that episode airs, I'm going to request audio clips of every single sentence that includes the words "
Nigerian"
or "
Nigeria."



ALSO: On the bbc show, it was Ivory Coast instead of Nigeria. I'll just go ahead and assume they changed it because they're secretly in love with me.

drunkagain wrote:

[size=100:omtd9mr5][size=100:omtd9mr5][size=100:omtd9mr5][size=100:omtd9mr5][size=100:omtd9mr5][size=100:omtd9mr5]The first episode has been available for viewing at Funnyordie.com for a few weeks now, so let's jump into the second one. After Bret bankrupts the band by buying a cup for $2.49, the guys are forced to turn to prostitution to make ends meet. This venture, as usual, is less than successful. Along the way, their manager, Murray, falls victim to a Nigerian email scam, further depleting their funds and forcing them to perform shows armed only with air guitars.

The episode contains two seriously composed but entirely ludicrous songs. The first is a Timbaland-style production about how sexy Bret and Jemaine's dangling "
sugar lumps"
are, and the second is a reggae riff on 'Roxanne' with reaffirming lyrics like, "
You don't have to be a prostitute/You can say no to being a man ho."

source:

gezyka wrote:Tweets from this morning:

[size=100:xhclw638]AudioJT: Go time... Fox lot... Doing an interview for a movie called Romona? Never heard of it... Later it's Flight of the Concords.. Yeah!.

mattsingley: @AudioJT what are you doing with Flight of the Conchords toay? An interview?

AudioJT: @MattSingley Yeah I think it's a Behind the Scenes shoot this afternoon in a recording studio... I'll know more later

yay!!!

hellomyfriend wrote:

drunkagain wrote:[size=133:ujl0hivb]... their manager, Murray, falls victim to a Nigerian email scam...

I'm just happy to see Nigeria being mentioned. " title="" border="0"/>

As soon as that episode airs, I'm going to request audio clips of every single sentence that includes the words "
Nigerian"
or "
Nigeria."



ALSO: On the bbc show, it was Ivory Coast instead of Nigeria. I'll just go ahead and assume they changed it because they're secretly in love with me.

tanfastic wrote:Bret and Jemaine's dangling "
sugar lumps"


good grief. !!

[size=100:u6ws8fo8]Shooting a funny behind the scenes bit for iTunes Buzz in the recording studio with Flight of the Concords... singing new song "
Friends."

[size=100:60n45zhd]"
Flight of the Conchords,"
in case you've missed the cult sensation of it all, really is a band with McKenzie and Clement, better known to their adoring fans as simply Bret and Jemaine. HBO took their musical parody schtick and turned the songs into narrative bits in a sublime comedy, which was one of the great finds of 2007. The duo - always just themselves, no pretense or much of that rock god nonsense - put out an acclaimed album and toured to sold-out shows, building their fan base and hopefully increasing the ratings on their fledgling slice of genius over at HBO.

Season 2 finds them still scrambling for gigs. They're playing libraries but are always getting shushed. Their manager, Murray (Rhys Darby), is enjoying the tail end of managing a far more successful but cheesier band, and Bret and Jemaine are forced to fire him.

In the first three episodes, it's pretty clear that fame and fortune are eluding our cherished duo in a series of unfortunate events:

-- They are reduced to making a jingle about toothpaste for women only.

-- Bret sends their lives even further below the poverty line by buying a second cup for the apartment (total cost: $2.97), which temporarily forces them into prostitution (and an homage to "
Midnight Cowboy"
) and, worse, forces them to give Mel (Kristin Schaal), their only and lonely married fan, a massage.

-- Bret's impromptu (and not very creative) rap song dissing other rappers sparks fears of a turf war, stoked by their friend Dave (Arj Barker), which prompts Bret to create his own gang and, eventually - as you knew it would - an homage to "
West Side Story"
happens.

The level of cleverness of "
Flight of the Conchords"
is off the charts. There are the actual song parodies (keep an ear out for Jemaine's claim that the ladies love his sugar lumps). And there are the droll situations (Murray reviewing the band in print and giving it two stars. "
Two out of five stars?"
Bret asks, incredulously. "
Well, I wish it was,"
Murray says. "
But it's out of 100."
). More laughs have never come from such a lack of effort. "
Flight of the Conchords"
remains one of the funniest series on television.

[size=100:a7wmf20t]Looking forward to season two of Flight Of The Conchords, which starts this Sunday, Jan 18th. I hit a preview screening party last night, and saw one of the new episodes in which Bret and Jemaine decide to moonlight as male prostitutes to fund their dreams of folk-rock stardom. Judging by this sample episode, there seems to be more laughs-per-minute packed into the new shows. However, it seems Kristen Schaal was being more than a little coy about her character Mel's relationship with the objects of her dreams when I interviewed her recently. There was definitely a bit of more-then-platonic contact with the FOTC boys in one of the scenes, but you'll have to watch the series to see how it plays out. ...

[size=133:1tgs2i2n]A promising second season begins
Written by Marcus Kellis - Argonaut
Thursday, 15 January 2009

[size=100:1tgs2i2n]Not since “Chappelle’s Show” ended has there been so perfect a comedy program for college students as “Flight of the Conchords,” exploring the adventures of a folk duo in New York City.
At the conclusion of the show’s first season, the titular band was in crisis.

First, two once-supplementary members had split to form their own band, the Crazy Dogggz (spelled, regrettably, just like that). The same Crazy Dogggz had a chart-topping success with “Doggy Bounce,” far and away overshadowing any success the Conchords had
ever enjoyed.
Consequent of the Crazy Dogggz’s success, the lovably inept manager Murray Hewitt (Rhys Darby) had effectively abandoned the Flight of the Conchords, leaving Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie’s tied fate in question. Their sole fan, Mel (Kristen Schaal), had even left them, worshipping at the same doggy altar as Hewitt.

“Flight of the Conchords” is as artistically successful and fulfilling a comedy as “The Wire” or “The Sopranos” were dramas. Its first season began in June 2007, concluding three months later and leaving fans of the show on the hook for 15 months.
In the meantime, the New Zealand duo released both a full-length album and an EP on Sub Pop, self-titled and named “The Distant Future,” respectively, almost exclusively of songs from the show.
Expectations for the second season, then, are justifiably high. The first episode, currently streaming for free at HBO.com/conchords, begins with Bret and Jemaine firing their manager during a meeting thusly: “Dear Murray, we want to fire you as our manager,” which Bret reads aloud from a slip of paper from his pocket.

The episode then features a surprisingly well-sung operatic song from Hewitt, just before he has to face allegations that the Crazy Dogggz have plagiarized an earlier Eastern European hit. Meanwhile, Bret and Jemaine seem to manage themselves fine, commissioned to write a jingle for a women’s toothpaste.
As foreigners, the Conchords run into problems with work permits and Hewitt’s success is in jeopardy too. While seeking counsel from his former band on whether a cover version of “Doggy Bounce” recorded years before the Crazy Dogggz’s hit is either bad or normal, Hewitt’s office is visited by the repo man.
With Hewitt’s song about loneliness, the toothpaste ad and a song about angels concluding the episode, there are three new pieces in the first episode alone after the first season demolished the band’s balance of songs to that point.

New to this season will be next-day availability on iTunes of extended versions of the songs featured in the episodes, a welcome change from the agony of waiting for the album or seeking dubious Internet rips during
season one.
The show’s got a strong start, and reports are it won’t be as long as the first season’s 12 episodes. It may not return for a third, for even if the ratings and reviews are strong, the band may be exhausted. For the next few months, however, it’s ours to enjoy.

Flight of the Conchords: B+

[size=100:gnk7hl98]...AVC: The first season was already pretty fully formed, but are there things you wanted to do differently this time around?

RD: They unfortunately ran out of songs, and they had to write 20 new ones. So therefore they could write the songs to fit in the episodes, and not the other way around. That gave them the advantage of coming up with any story they wanted to. The first series, in a way, was difficult because of that. That's why all the episodes are quite similar: getting with girls, blah blah blah. The songs were about getting with girls, so they had to fit it in. This time around, they're able to go off on slightly different tangents and just put songs in. So that's been simple—it's been easier. Certainly not simple, writing 20 new songs and keeping it the same caliber as the others has certainly been difficult.

AVC: They're going through an album's worth of songs in three to four episodes.

RD: Absolutely. You've got your difficult-second-album syndrome along with your difficult-second-season syndrome. So you've got to work on your things that obviously work, which are the band meetings and the getting lost, being confused, fish-out-of-water scenarios. People don't want anything too different. I think what they really want is 20 brilliant new songs, and then stuff in between them that's similar to what happened last time, but maybe in different settings. You've got the apartment, you've got the office, you've got Dave's shop, and then you've got out on the streets of Manhattan or whatever. And Mel and Doug popping up. And as soon as you go, "
Right, let's take it out of this and go to Hawaii,"
you start to go into one of those TV shows where you go "
Now look at them, they've gone to London for the weekend."
Those episodes of shows never seem to work as well. This is all about absolutely absurd situations that fit in a weird world, so it almost looks normal, and we just act it out very realistically, so there's no punchline. We play it out like "
This is real."
I guess people can believe it because we're from New Zealand, and they assume that's how we really are, that's how we act and what our country's like. ...

AVC: Have you gotten to do anything particularly noteworthy in the new season?

RD: I've done some dancing. I was quite impressed with being able to learn choreographed dance moves. A little more singing. Last season, Murray was always behind a desk or in a car, never moving around and not very physical. This year, I run at one point. There's a slapstick scene I do. Murray's not so much stuck behind a desk this year—although many of the best scenes are him just stuck behind a desk, talking bollocks.

AVC: Are those largely improvised?

RD: There's a scripted version of what we want for the band meetings, so we do one like that and then let it roll, and just improvise. It's kind of an organic process. But most of it is improvised, yes.

AVC: So is there more improvisation in those scenes than with other one-episode guest actors?

RD: We try to get actors that are okay with improvisation. A lot of the comic ones enjoy it. We let them know, "
This is the scene, and if you want to add more, go ahead."


AVC: One big thing that makes the musical sequences work is that there's a delicate semi-competence to them. They seem like they're meant to look like they're made for $1.50.

RD: That first season, we had a very limited budget, and there's a homemade feel to a lot of the music videos. It fits in with the lowbrow look of the show, and it fits in with the musician scenario and the boring government job Murray holds and the horrible autumn colors he wears. This time around, we got a lot more money, and we put a lot of that into the music videos. I think they'll still have a similar look, but we can put more money toward props.

gezyka wrote:From Rhys' interview with the A.V. Club (full story posted in his section):

[size=100:eiflm11r]...AVC: The first season was already pretty fully formed, but are there things you wanted to do differently this time around?

RD: They unfortunately ran out of songs, and they had to write 20 new ones. So therefore they could write the songs to fit in the episodes, and not the other way around. That gave them the advantage of coming up with any story they wanted to. The first series, in a way, was difficult because of that. That's why all the episodes are quite similar: getting with girls, blah blah blah. The songs were about getting with girls, so they had to fit it in. This time around, they're able to go off on slightly different tangents and just put songs in. So that's been simple—it's been easier. Certainly not simple, writing 20 new songs and keeping it the same caliber as the others has certainly been difficult.

AVC: They're going through an album's worth of songs in three to four episodes.

RD: Absolutely. You've got your difficult-second-album syndrome along with your difficult-second-season syndrome. So you've got to work on your things that obviously work, which are the band meetings and the getting lost, being confused, fish-out-of-water scenarios. People don't want anything too different. I think what they really want is 20 brilliant new songs, and then stuff in between them that's similar to what happened last time, but maybe in different settings. You've got the apartment, you've got the office, you've got Dave's shop, and then you've got out on the streets of Manhattan or whatever. And Mel and Doug popping up. And as soon as you go, "
Right, let's take it out of this and go to Hawaii,"
you start to go into one of those TV shows where you go "
Now look at them, they've gone to London for the weekend."
Those episodes of shows never seem to work as well. This is all about absolutely absurd situations that fit in a weird world, so it almost looks normal, and we just act it out very realistically, so there's no punchline. We play it out like "
This is real."
I guess people can believe it because we're from New Zealand, and they assume that's how we really are, that's how we act and what our country's like. ...

AVC: Have you gotten to do anything particularly noteworthy in the new season?

RD: I've done some dancing. I was quite impressed with being able to learn choreographed dance moves. A little more singing. Last season, Murray was always behind a desk or in a car, never moving around and not very physical. This year, I run at one point. There's a slapstick scene I do. Murray's not so much stuck behind a desk this year—although many of the best scenes are him just stuck behind a desk, talking bollocks.

AVC: Are those largely improvised?

RD: There's a scripted version of what we want for the band meetings, so we do one like that and then let it roll, and just improvise. It's kind of an organic process. But most of it is improvised, yes.

AVC: So is there more improvisation in those scenes than with other one-episode guest actors?

RD: We try to get actors that are okay with improvisation. A lot of the comic ones enjoy it. We let them know, "
This is the scene, and if you want to add more, go ahead."


AVC: One big thing that makes the musical sequences work is that there's a delicate semi-competence to them. They seem like they're meant to look like they're made for $1.50.

RD: That first season, we had a very limited budget, and there's a homemade feel to a lot of the music videos. It fits in with the lowbrow look of the show, and it fits in with the musician scenario and the boring government job Murray holds and the horrible autumn colors he wears. This time around, we got a lot more money, and we put a lot of that into the music videos. I think they'll still have a similar look, but we can put more money toward props.

Source:

aom192 wrote:Some episode news:

Episode 203, "
The Australian"
:

• NEW 12/18/2008 - Roles cast:

-Keitha - 20's-30's. Female. Authentic Australian Preferred. An Australian girl who steals Jemaineis heart. She is attractive and sexy yet also loud, raunchy, foul-mouthed and impulsive. Not very ladylike, she is shameless and inappropriate. Guest Star.

-Keli - 20's-30's. Female. Australian. Authentic Australian Preferred. Keitha's Australian roommate. She is mean and judgmental of Jemaine. Several scenes.

-Shan-Anne - 20's-30's. Female. Australian. Authentic Australian Preferred. Keitha's roommate. Teases Keitha for being with Jemaine. Several scenes.

-Carriage Driver - 30's-60's. Male. Any ethnicity. 1 scene.

-Cool Kid - 20's. Male. Any ethnicity. He makes a sarcastic remark on his way in to a funky new club. 1 line.


Episode unknown, "
Prime Minister"
:

• Writers: James Bobin & Jemaine Clement & Bret McKenzie. Director: James Bobin.

• NEW 12/18/2008 - The New Zealand Prime Minister pays a visit to Murray while Jemaine and Bret find themselves working in the celebrity impersonator circuit.

• NEW 12/18/2008 - Roles cast:

-Nobo - Late 30's-50. Male. A Bono impersonator, he is slightly heavier than the real Bono. 2 scenes.

Source:

aom192 wrote:
-Keitha - 20's-30's. Female. Authentic Australian Preferred. An Australian girl who steals Jemaineis heart. She is attractive and sexy yet also loud, raunchy, foul-mouthed and impulsive. Not very ladylike, she is shameless and inappropriate. Guest Star.

[size=100:f4g9qmhm]Nothing's less funny than a comedy that tries too hard. But "
Flight of the Conchords"
(9 p.m. Sunday, HBO;
three stars) pulls off the neat trick of being amusing without appearing to try at all.

Many of the jokes in the first three episodes of this comedy’s second season are throwaways that I didn’t get until I watched the episodes a second time.

For example, in the second episode, Murray (Rhys Darby), the hapless manager of the even more hapless musical duo Flight of the Conchords, is shocked to learn that Jemaine (Jemaine Clement) is starting a new career as a prostitute.

“Male prostitute?” he asks Jemaine’s musical partner, Bret (Bret McKenzie).

Bret’s eyes dart around. “Think so,” he mutters.

The prostitution gig doesn’t work out so well, and later Bret ends up letting their slightly unhinged superfan Mel (Kristen Schaal) pay him for a massage. Mel is married, and Bret’s decidedly uninterested in her. But nobody comments on how awkward the situation is. That’s not the “Conchords” way, where polite avoidance leads to all kinds of comical complications.

Where this show lets itself go is in the songs that break up each episode. But even there, a sense of gentle daffiness and self-mockery rules: When Jemaine performs a rap song about everyone wanting his “sugar lumps,” the admiring ladies who surround him brandish not bikinis and bling but soup and vouchers for books.

One fact is clear in the second season of “Conchords”: The words “band meeting” usually lead to comedy gold. One of the funnier gags of the opening episode has Bret and Jemaine calling an impromptu band meeting without Murray present, yet they faithfully follow their prissy manager’s habit of taking attendance first.

Darby is really the unsung hero of the show;
he manages to make the nitpicky Murray both a figure of fun and a basically good-hearted guy. Murray’s the kind of guy who thinks that his Nigerian email correspondent picked him, out of all the people on the Internet, for an exciting new business opportunity.

As is the case with Bret and Jemaine, Murray is a well-calibrated mixture of innocence and incompetence. It’s actually a little sad when Murray, the cultural attache for the New Zealand consulate, is relentlessly picked on by the bullies from the Australian embassy.

When its unique mixture of deadpan humor and surreal music comes together the right way, “Flight of the Conchords” is just delightful. But that’s actually the problem this season;
Clement and McKenzie, who write all the show’s musical material, appear to be suffering from second-album syndrome.

Some Season 2 songs, including an operatic tune from Murray, don’t achieve liftoff. Others neatly fit into the plot of individual episodes (especially the “West Side Story” homage in Episode 3), but they won’t be hummable and quotable weeks or months from now, as Season 1’s classic songs were.

Maybe Murray should bring that up at the next band meeting.

[size=100:vsv5d79g] When Jemaine performs a rap song about everyone wanting his “sugar lumps,” the admiring ladies who surround him brandish not bikinis and bling but soup and vouchers for books.

aom192 wrote: -Nobo - Late 30's-50. Male. A Bono impersonator, he is slightly heavier than the real Bono. 2 scenes.

drunkagain wrote:From the Chicago Tribune:

[size=100:hvnewun7]The prostitution gig doesn’t work out so well, and later Bret ends up letting their slightly unhinged superfan Mel (Kristen Schaal) pay him for a massage.

[size=133:ggyh71oq] NYC on the Small Screen: Why Its Best Portrayal Has Nary a Cosmo, Pink Stiletto or "
Central Perk"
In Sight
Friday, January 16, 2009 2:30 PM
By Andrew Romano

[size=100:ggyh71oq]It’s no secret that America’s attitude toward New York City is somewhat schizophrenic. Nor is it particularly perceptive to note that pop culture has long reflected our mixed feelings about the metropolis. On one hand there’s the Big Apple: a fizzy, fashionable escape from suburbia. On the other there’s dark and dangerous Gotham: the city as a source of schadenfreude for small-town residents eager to see immoral urbanites suffer for their sins -- preferably with lots of explosions.

In moments of relative calm -- like, say, the pleasant, prosperous 1990s, when the TV version of New York was filled with "
Friends"
who rarely saw the need to, you know, go to work -- the whole love-hate dynamic can be sort of muted. (See also: Sex and the City, Seinfeld.) But real-world meltdowns always seem to revive our glam-or-grit ambivalence toward the city. During the Depression, public enemies like James Cagney rubbed elbows with screwball sophisticates like Cary Grant;
the 1970s welcomed the "
Mean Streets"
of Martin Scorsese to Woody Allen’s urbane "
Manhattan."
In times of trouble, it seems, we search for a place to fantasize about and a place to pity. And then cast New York in both roles.

Which brings us to our current crisis. The ongoing evisceration of New York’s iconic industries -- finance and media -- has provided hordes of jobless bankers and journalists with plenty of time to blog about the possibility of economic apocalypse. Sales of imported ham, ironic sunglasses and designer doorknobs have plummeted. Even Del Posto, Mario Batali’s flagship restaurant, has slashed its nine-course “grand tasting” menu from $175 to $125. But amid such agony, popular culture has broken with tradition and given us a New York that’s all glamour, no grit. The bitchy Upper East Siders of “Gossip Girl.” The leggy mannequins of “The City.” The preposterous waterfront housing of “The Real World: Brooklyn.”

Until, perhaps, now. This Sunday marks the premiere of the second season of a show -- the only show, in fact--that realistically represents how the other half of recession-era New York lives. Its name: “Flight of the Conchords.”

At this point, readers familiar with "
FotC"
are probably spitting out their Starbucks. We here at Pop Vox headquarters understand the skepticism. After all, HBO’s first season followed an impossibly naïve New Zealand musical duo, Bret McKenzie and Jemaine Clement, as they mumbled deadpan zingers and burst into surreal songs about mermaids, robots, David Bowie and a racist dragon named Albi. More like Tenacious D, said critics, than cinéma vérité.

But we contend that "
FotC"
was merely ahead of its time -- and underappreciated as a result. Consider the evidence. Most New York shows situate their subjects in spacious apartments on spotless, tree-lined streets. Bret and Jemaine share a single bedroom in a dingy walk-up on the outskirts of Chinatown -- an arrangement familiar to anyone who’s actually dared to navigate New York’s deadly real-estate market. To film their first music video, the Conchords use a camera phone -- the most advanced technology available to artists on their budget. Soon, the cash-strapped roommates apply to be human billboards (only Bret gets the job). They consider eating food they find on the street. They hang out at a pawn shop. They wear the same sweatshirts -- many of which feature embossed images of animals -- for days on end. They get mugged. And they rarely attract more than a single, sociopathic fan, Mel, to their gigs.

"
FotC,"
in other words, is a funny show about a not-so-funny subject: failure -- albeit of a peculiarly “New York 2009” variety. During Season One, which aired in 2007, this wasn’t a particularly resonant theme;
New York was still on the upswing. But now that thousands of out-of-work yuppies are turning to New York magazine for tips on how to “Live Well and Spend Less,” the show’s aura of modest (if relentless) defeat is pretty much impossible to ignore. Take the Season Two premiere. Murray, the Conchords’ clueless manager, is booted from his marbled penthouse office after lawyers accuse his top act, the Crazy Dogggz, of plagiarism. He moves into his car. The Conchords themselves -- “slightly poorer” and still with “no gigs” -- refuse to write a toothpaste jingle (“we don’t use our music to sell products”), but instantly reverse course when told they’ll be “sh**ting money” if they do.

As usual, the deal falls through -- and yet the band soldiers on. Which may ultimately be the most realistic part of "
FotC."
The current economic climate will probably ensure that members of New York’s aspirational class wind up more like Bret and Jemaine than, say, Whitney Port -- that is, unappreciated, unproductive and unfulfilled. But really, winding up like Bret and Jemaine isn’t all that bad. They’re reasonably hip, reasonably happy -- and not living in Milwaukee. Given the city’s post-Giuliani gentrification, that may be as gritty as New York gets.

Or as the Conchords themselves sang in Season One’s “Inner City Pressure,” a searing, Pet-Shop-Boys-inspired exploration of contemporary urban life:

You don’t measure up to the expectation / When you’re unemployed, there’s no vacation / No one cares, no one sympathizes / You just stay home and play synthesizers.

It’s funny because it’s true.

[size=133:97v0zqln]FotC Exclusive: The Only Living Boys in New Zealand?
by Staff | 01.16.2009

[size=100:97v0zqln]In a recent FILTER interview with Mary Lynn Rajskub (24, Little Miss Sunshine) promoting her new film, Sunshine Cleaning, the comedic actress informed us that she is going to be featured in an upcoming episode of Flight of the Conchords and gave us the plot rundown.

Mary Lynn Rajskub: I’m also going to be on Flight of the Conchords. I went onto FILTER’s site a couple minutes ago before I called you and I saw [url=that really funny picture where the article says, "
they're going into an exclusive club][/url]."
That was funny.

FILTER: It's funny because it's true. What are you going to be doing on Flight of the Conchords?

Mary Lynn Rajskub: Those guys are playing in a Simon & Garfunkel tribute band and Jemaine is Art Garfunkel. I play a girl who is obsessed with Art Garfunkel so we go to bed together and I make him wear the Art Garfunkel wig. I make it really dark. So, that was really fun. It comes out sometime in February.

This news made us so excited we spent about three and a half minutes coming up with S&G/B&J headline puns:

"
Jemaine In Troubled Water"

"
It Took Me Four Days to Hitchhike from Wellington"

"
Murray's Song"

"
I Am A Formerly New Zealand's Fourth Most Popular Guitar-Based
Digi-Bongo Acapella-Rap-Funk-Comedy Folk Rock (Duo)"



And yes, HBO, we will come write for the show. Just call us (Al).

[size=100:rer7b4rh]Of the three episodes I've seen, the first two are very good;
the third is a bit off. They're very good as sitcoms, that is: tightly written and funny. As others have said, the songs so far are weaker, probably a result of the accelerated writing schedule. The first song in the first episode features Murray singing operatically—once you get that one gag, there's not much left to it. Of all the songs in the episodes, only one stuck in my head afterward: "
Sugar Lumps,"
from the second episode, a raunchy brag-rap about a certain part of the male anatomy. FOTC songs tend to get praised for the funny lines, but "
Sugar Lumps"
reminded me that their best songs work because they're really good songs—well-written examples of the genre. "
The Most Beautiful Girl (in the Room)"
or "
Business Time"
are funny on the page, but they wouldn't work so well if they weren't also simply catchy.

I'm hoping the songs improve in later episodes, but I also find—for better or worse—that the scripts are good enough that I wouldn't mind fewer songs down the road.

[size=133:tc6urjgc]HBO's 'Big Love' and 'Flight of the Conchords' return to enchant viewers
By Ted Cox | Daily Herald Columnist
Published: 1/16/2009 12:03 AM

[size=100:tc6urjgc]Who woulda thunk that shows about Utah polygamists and displaced New Zealand musicians would provide two of the high points of this or any TV season?

And what network besides HBO could have made those shows work?

No need to answer those questions. HBO subscribers can simply watch and marvel when "
Big Love"
and "
Flight of the Conchords"
return with new seasons starting at 8 p.m. Sunday on the premium-cable channel.

HBO catches a lot of flak for its boast that "
it's not TV, it's HBO,"
and sometimes rightfully so. Even granted Jeremy Piven's snarkily obsequious agent, the comedy "
Entourage"
isn't half as clever as it thinks it is, and dramas like "
Carnivale"
are little more than just plain weird, HBO doing things simply because it can.

Yet "
Big Love"
and "
Flight of the Conchords"
find HBO showing off to good effect. If anyone pitched these premises to a major broadcast network, they'd be shown the door and most likely never be invited to a free Hollywood lunch again. In the hands of HBO, however, they not only work but excel, although permit me to insist that "
Conchords"
excels more.

This wry and wacky comedy returns for its second season at 9 p.m. Sunday. It stars Jemaine Clement and Bret McKenzie as two Kiwi musos transplanted to New York City, where they're trying to make a splash as their real-life two-piece band, Flight of the Conchords.

The season premiere, "
A Good Opportunity,"
pretty much takes the series from its quasi-cliffhanger ending of last season and sets it back in place to continue on.

As fans will remember, a brief third member of the band went off and formed his own group, the Crazy Dogs, which instantly enjoyed a vogue to rival the Baha Men. Along the way, their clueless manager Murray, played by Rhys Darby, started spending most of his time and effort on the successful offshoot. He can't help inadvertently rubbing it in to the Conchords.

"
R. Kelly wants to sing on your next song,"
he says. "
Shall I find out who he is?"
But, oops, that's an offer for the Crazy Dogs.

Through one thing and another, the Crazy Dogs go south, Murray gets his comeuppance (and his own video song along the way) and all is set as it was, just as at the end of any episode of "
The Simpsons."
Yet along the way there are also more laughs than in any network sitcom with the possible exception of "
The Big Bang Theory,"
as well as comical musical videos such as an ad jingle for Femident, an organic toothpaste being marketed to women.

Truth be told, the second season of "
Conchords"
has the feel of a rock group's sophomore-slump second album: It's not quite as inventive or inspired as the first time around. Yet it's still funnier than almost anything on the broadcast networks, and I know it will make for appointment viewing in my household.

If "
Big Love"
isn't quite as successful, it's twice as daring. Bill Paxton stars as Bill Henrickson, a Salt Lake City hardware-store owner who is trying to juggle a shift into the gaming industry and, not coincidentally, three wives, played by Jeanne Tripplehorn, Chloe Sevigny and Ginnifer Goodwin. In fact, there might even be a fourth on the way, as he's once again wooing Branka Katic's waitress Ana, even as she confides in Goodwin's Margene that she's simply more comfortable as "
the other woman,"
even to three other wives.

What's amazing about "
Big Love"
is the way it takes this completely foreign milieu - that is, foreign to most of us - and makes it the stuff of a TV soap-opera satire that puts "
Desperate Housewives"
to shame. The new third season finds it getting even more ambitious, piling on the plot lines involving a tribal casino, Bill's troubled teenage half-brother (yes, his father, played by the cantankerous Bruce Dern, has multiple wives as well) and, last but not least, Harry Dean Stanton's disgraced "
prophet"
Roman Grant and his scheming, conflicted son Alby, played by Matt Ross.

Its persistent theme of what's bubbling under the surface of seemingly calm and simple lives gets perfect expression in the season premiere, "
Block Party."
It serves as a perfect place for a viewer to jump in, even if one hasn't seen the show before, just as "
Big Love"
and "
Conchords"
make this a perfect time to pick up HBO. Yes, these are two shows worth paying for, whether now on cable or satellite TV or later at the video store.

[size=133:cnnln9n7]Review: 'Flight of the Conchords' on HBO
[size=100:cnnln9n7]Bret and Jemaine are back to rock the party, even without their instruments.
By ROBERT LLOYD, Television Critic
January 17, 2009
[size=100:cnnln9n7]
A bigger hit, in its small but world-spanning way, than I am sure anyone connected with the show expected it to be, “ Flight of the Conchords” is finally back for a second season on HBO.

The series, which spent 2008 replenishing its tanks, tells the story of Bret ( Bret McKenzie) and Jemaine ( Jemaine Clement), a New Zealand folk-rock-pop-rap-soul duo seeking fame, or at least a paying gig, in the city of New York, New York. If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere;
but they can't make it there, or anywhere.

Mixing the ironic whimsicality of "
Curb Your Enthusiasm"
with the premise and structure of "
The Monkees,"
filtered through a downtown New York sensibility, "
Conchords"
was twice as delightful when it landed for being so completely unexpected and unpredictable. It ended its first season with a sort of cliffhanger -- which would have worked as well as an ending -- in which Bret and Jemaine split the band into two, each with a new partner, who then quit them to form their own group, the Crazy Dogggz, which became internationally famous. The Flight of the Conchords, meanwhile, are all but abandoned by their manager Murray (Rhys Darby) and their single obsessed fan, Mel (Kristen Schaal).

In the season opener, the duo visit Murray, who has quit his job as a deputy cultural attaché in the unprepossessing New Zealand consulate, in his splendid new, gold-album-bedecked pop-manager office, in order to fire him.

"
Before you came to me you were poor and you had no gigs,"
Murray protests. "
Now look at you."


"
We're poor and we have no gigs,"
says Bret, who is down to one shoe.

"
We're slightly poorer,"
says Jemaine.

In next week's episode, Bret spends $2.79 on a teacup, so that they might each have one -- "
I just need a second to calm down,"
says Jemaine when informed of this mad purchase -- precipitating a financial crisis that ends with their having to sell their instruments to pay their utilities, though they continue to perform without them.

That the two men are in their 30s makes their perseverance more poignant -- to somewhat overstate the case -- and that they have no money places them in a long and honorable line of comedians who cannot put two cents together to buy a glass of seltzer.

Fundamentally good-natured, if never what you'd call cheerful -- except during musical fantasy interludes, their pans are as dead as pans -- they continually betray each other, in small and large ways, because they are easily misled and distracted and because they are so ill-informed about the workings of the world. Although it makes excellent use of real locations, mostly in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn, this is a show with a most tenuous connection to reality.