Monday, August 29, 2011

Robert - Wilfred

I'll be brief. Have you seen this show?


This show is like the Wire, except funnier, and not serious at all, and with a dog and Elijah Wood, and without any police.

Yeah, this guy.

Premise for those of you who haven't seen it yet, and if you aren't sold then you aren't a human being with jokes: Elijah Wood, a jobless former lawyer, is the only person who sees his neighbor's dog Wilfred as a human. To everyone else, Wilfred is a normal dog, but to Elijah's character, he's an unshaven man who smokes pot and motorboats random women, only to receive affection and giggles in return. Kind of like Calvin and Hobbes, if Hobbes were about 25, a dick, and actually exploited his stuffed disguise. The absurd costume that Jason Gann (dog) wears makes every joke exponentially hilarious, and that almost seems like cheating, but that's the way it is. It doesn't even matter that the plot and character development on the show is questionable and blatantly lacking, respectively. It's more than made up for, usually, for the humor. The obvious bizarreness of the scenario goes wholly unacknowledged throughout the series, as if all were totally normal, and the disparity between what Elijah sees and what others see when they look at Wilfred makes for some pretty great scenes.

One of the really cool parts of the writing is the way the script every once in a while offers possible reasons for why Elijah's character sees the dog as a man in a dirty Halloween costume. Each one is equally lame, and each time convinces you that they're actually going going to pull some awful cop-out, be it drug-induced hallucinations or a bad dream, and right when you're caught in their trap, they debunk the possibility entirely. 

Plus, they took our god damn "Cats" video. They did. I swear it. They do the exact same thing. With the laser pointer and everything. And it was funny. It was the maddest I've ever laughed.

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