By Scott Buckner
I have this theory about how TV shows which aren’t spinoffs of something else are developed. It goes something like this: A guy comes up with a brilliant idea and spends a year or three (even longer if he has a day job or a relationship) developing and refining the concept, the characters, the treatments, an actual script, and whatever-else have you for the pilot show. It’s hilarious, the network suits love it, so they all sign a deal and tell him to go home and come up with a dozen more scripts.
Soon enough, it dawns on him what has just happened. So he sits back, stares blankly at his shoes and says, “Oh, shit. Now what?”
I think that’s what happened with The Knights of Prosperity, the show about a bumbling crew of people so sick of their stations in life that they dream up a plan to rob Mick Jagger and/or his apartment. They’re not yet entirely clear which, so neither am I. I missed the show last week, so I thought maybe Natasha Julius was woozy from her two-week juice fast to comment so harshly about Knights in the Beachwood’s mid-season review, but you clearly don’t need animal protein to see that this show has quickly turned into a disappointingly unfunny show just like everything else that passes for comedy on ABC.
Last night, things went downhill for me fast, starting immediately with the really stupid opening theme song, which the pilot didn’t have.
In this episode, Eugene believes the crew needs an official theme song to go with their official T-shirts, so he settles on Rush’s “Tom Sawyer.” I’m a little slow on the uptake at times, so I’m still trying to figure out whether Geddy Lee pissed off Donal Logue or ABC enough for them to specifically pick one of his songs to butcher all karaoke-like, or whether someone’s running with the idea that there just ain’t enough abstract expressionism in sitcoms today, doggone it.
Either way, if I were Geddy Lee, I’d just sue the show on principle alone.
Also in Wednesday’s episode, the crew needs to overpower the guards stationed outside Mick’s high-security apartment, so they hire a B-grade security consultant from a Learning Annex class whose biggest professional accomplishment is that Elayne Boosler and Weird Al Yankovic haven’t been raped or killed so far, and Eugene walks across a bed of hot coals to “mentally prepare” for the heist because he saw it done once on Survivor. Since the crew does all its planning in Glickman’s Jewish Supply warehouse, Eugene gets to use a coffee filter for a yarmulke, and ABC spoils the top-secret location of the giant blue dreidel someone’s planning to use atop a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float.
We also know that Mick Jagger isn’t finding the show very funny either, since his role was played rather halfheartedly by a thumbprint in a container of cream cheese and a very bad rubber mask of himself.
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Meanwhile, on VH1’s “Movies That Rock,” Ferris Bueller was threatening to sit down in the middle of Wrigley Field and light himself on fire unless cable TV quits showing his damn movie already.
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Scott Buckner is the Beachwood’s official TV watcher. The rest of us do it unofficially.
Posted on January 18, 2007