Matt LeBlanc, Episodes, and Tamsin Creig

It's amazing how fickle success is. When Friends was on air, those six actors ruled the world. Look now, except for Aniston if you like romcoms, forgetting Friends you'd probably not have heard of any of them. Who'd have thunk.

I am pleased that Matt LeBlanc's Episodes is having a second season. I liked Joey a lot, but apparently it was a bit of a miracle that it got two seasons, it was not a hit at all. I thought it deserved to be and might have been. Problem was, probably, that people tuned into it and expected Friends II, and it just wasn't that, it was a very different show. Perhaps a more traditional sitcom, I dunno, but anyway, I liked it.

Au contraire, I didn't expect Episodes to be any hit. Not cuz I didn't like it, I did, but unlike Joey, it was a lot less traditional, and I thought maybe too brainy or "British" for the big audiences.

But here it is, second season, and I mention it mainly because I'm quite amazed that to me that the second season is even better than the first, maybe even considerably so. Sometimes it's just real damn funny. Particularly, it has several female actresses (not the least of which is Tamsin Creig from the outstanding Black Books) who are not only gorgeous, but first class comediennes. Hilarious.

Oh, she was also on Green Wing, which was an awesomely weird and also seriously funny show. (Sadly not released in region one format.)

By the way, I think it's a pity that a TV show has to have audiences in the millions to survive. Perhaps made-for-web productions will change that over time. The Long Tail and so on. Of course, good production values and many dozens of people paid full time will not get really cheap. But Hollywood productions is supporting a lot of expensive old real estate, and a lot of expensive old men.

But maybe Episodes is sort of an example of that. It's apparently non-Hollywood, and sadly it can be seen in episode 2.1. It seems that LeBlanc was not in the same place as the other actors for that episode, for it has a lot of gawd-awful green screen work. Really, the first time we saw him it was in the show-in-the-show, Pucks, and it was so bad I thought it was parody. Bit of a pity.

... Damn, Matt won a Golden Globe for this show? Didn't see that coming, although he is good and very ballsy playing himself as a philandering doodoohead (though of course as lovable as Joey was. He only really ever plays himself, I'd guess, though hopefully more promiscuous).  Dang. Oh, by the way, that's one way to tell this is no Hollyweird produ: occasionally, not often, but occasionally, they will have the most astoundingly filthy mouths you ever heard on a TV show. In a nicely relaxed way.