I’ve never actually seen “The Foot Fist Way,” the motion picture which really served to bring Danny McBride to prominence (he wrote and starred in the film), but when a review written by someone whose opinion you trust opens with the lines, “The first 30 minutes of ‘The Foot Fist Way’ are as intolerable as anything released in the last ten years,” it’s the kind of sentiment that keeps a movie from working its way up the hierarchy of your Netflix queue. I have, however, seen and loved “Tropic Thunder,” and I’ve heard a lot of good things about “Pineapple Express,” so I do still have a certain degree of respect for Mr. McBride. Therefore, when I heard that he was going to be starring in a new series for HBO that would be executive-produced by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, the duo who have brought us “Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy,” “Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby,” and “Stepbrothers,” there was every reason to believe that the combination would prove to be a successful one.
“Eastbound and Down” certainly starts promisingly, with a flashback laying out the career of Kenny Powers, a major-league baseball player who has seen the highest heights one can reach in the sport, including cover stories for every magazine from Highlights to Cat Fancy to American Woodworker. “Everyone wanted a piece of my shit,” says Powers, in a voiceover, describing himself as a man with “an arm like a fucking cannon.” Unfortunately, as with so many athletes who get a taste of glory and then dive headlong into the trough, Powers’ ego expands to a size far larger than his home state of North Carolina. He begins to blame his failures on his team, so he leaves Atlanta, becomes a free agent, and starts a career freefall which seems him moving from New York (“You mean Jew York?”), Baltimore and San Francisco (“I gotta tell ya, I thought the blacks in Baltimore were bad, but it turns out they’re nothing compared to these fags they got in San Francisco”), Boston, and Seattle.
Seattle, however, proved too much for the man, and after proving directly responsible for the team’s devastating loss against Los Angeles, things fade to black for Powers, and after a caption which reads, “Several shitty years later,” he find that he’s now out of baseball and has carried his remaining belongings back home to the state known as North Kakalaki to work as a middle-school substitute teacher…and it’s at this point that feelings about “Eastbound and Down” will begin to vary wildly.
It doesn’t have to be this way, you know. Wiig is still a fabulous impressionist, as she displayed last week with her spot-on Bjork imitation during Weekend Update. The problem is that the majority of her skits involve her playing the most annoying characters imaginable, as if she’s a female George Costanza with Multiple Personality Disorder. It all started innocently enough, with Target Lady (that’s pronounced “Terruget,” thank you very much) running off every time someone brought something she liked to the counter. Those skits aren’t great but they’re harmless enough, and in one case was redeemed by Justin Timberlake, who’s funnier than half the “SNL” cast, but that’s a post for another day.
From there, we got Amy Poehler’s Aunt Linda, a rubber-faced crank whose reviews consisted of making funny faces. Again, relatively harmless, though less amusing than Target Lady. Wiig still had Poehler to compete with for stage time then, and our guess is that since Wiig knew that Poehler was always going to play the cute girl or the clever girl, Wiig carved out a niche for herself as the oddball, the nut job. Since Poehler’s departure, Wiig has become the alpha female of the cast, but instead of dialing things back a touch, she seems to be trying even harder to irritate people. That has to be the explanation for why they keep bringing back a skit that I can’t fast-forward through quickly enough: Penelope, the passive-aggressive nervous nelly that cannot be topped.
Meanwhile, the one recurring skit of Wiig’s that I liked, the Two A-Holes, has mysteriously been shelved. What’s the matter, guys, they’re not annoying enough anymore? And what about those dead-perfect impressions of Judy Garland and Megan Mullally she used to do? I’m not saying that Wiig should completely abandon her gonzo tendencies – though if I’m being honest, I would be perfectly happy to never see any of the above recurring skits again – but would it kill her to take it down a notch? If she doesn’t watch it, she’s going to turn into Melanie Hutsell. Man, if that doesn’t put the fear of God in you, nothing will.
