Saturday, August 17, 2013

New Whose Line! Episode 7: Lisa Leslie's Improvketball: A Laughebration!

Starring Wayne Brady, Heather Anne Campbell, Colin Mochrie, and Ryan Stiles!
Plus Special Famous-Type Guest Lisa Leslie, from Backyard Basketball!
(Watch it here!)


Stupid and/or Slutty Newscasters: Colin anchors. Co-anchor Heather is a ditzy beautician taking the opportunity to promote her waxing salon. Sportscaster Wayne is appearing on Girls Gone Wild and becoming increasingly outrageous (or “going wild”, one could say). Weatherman Ryan is moonlighting as a phone sex operator and keeps taking calls during his report.

TAILSMUSINGS: This is swiftly becoming the go-to quirk game and I hope they start introducing more of them soon! The repetition of it all is making Colin desperate enough to trust a ditzy woman like Heather with the application of hot wax and ripping follicles out by the roots! If anything, she’s more outrageous than Wayne pretending he’s being modest about showing us his tracts of land. But perhaps he just doesn’t want anyone to know that he’s wearing a wire to investigate Heather’s obviously under-the-table beautician dealings. Ryan must be a damn good phone sex operator if he can put the same person on hold when he’s charging $4.95 a minute! Maybe said person has a fetish for muzak and bad puns. And I’m sure Ryan’s “Small Craft Warning” will be the perfect thing they need to signal a Flash Flood Warning all over the tri-state area. Oh yeah, baby.

JESSTHOUGHTS: Yeah, was that one round of Let’s Make a Date a fluke? Maybe that was supposed to be Weird Newscasters too, but there were too many stools and nobody could bear to confront the emotionally fragile props department. This was...about standard, I’d say. Heather’s bit gets cut short, but she manages to show off one of her most useful assets: when she actually has a character to play, she commits to it HARD. Here, as per her character, she commits hard to staring off into space for three minutes straight. Meanwhile, they gave Wayne a slutty girl quirk in the fruitless hope that he might take the hint and realize that his shirt is really tight and kinda thin and you can totally see his nipples, fully erect from the studio air conditioning. And it’s appropriate that Ryan gets a quirk about moonlighting at a second job, because he listlessly sleepwalks through this game yet again. He’s so out of it that he thinks TV weatherman talk about sunrises days ahead of time! By extension, he must also be talking about sex acts he won’t perform until several days from now. (Other severe weather terminology Ryan could’ve sexualized: Inland Hurricane Warning, Heavy Freezing Spray Watch, Urban and Small Stream Flood Advisory, and of course, Evacuation Immediate.)


Leslie Shut Up and Jam: Wayne sings to Lisa Leslie, who is a “WNBA legend”, in the style of Justin Timberlake, who is somehow a multiple Grammy-winning recording artist.

TAILSMUSINGS: Obviously the greatest fashion choice one can choose when they’re already abnormally tall is boots with heels! Because what’s the point of being tall if you can’t make puny non-athletic mortals tremble in fear? Even Wayne decided he needed her to stay benched! I will say that Lisa was more talkative and interactive than the other athletes. No matter what Wayne bounced her way, she kept on dribbling! And we all know Wayne obviously wanted to get into her free shot zone, but Lisa knew that she’d only be a rebound.

JESSTHOUGHTS: Haha, terrible basketball puns. Someone had to do them, because Wayne really didn’t! Most of the song was just about how goddamn tall she is, which means that Wayne could’ve also serenaded Ryan with the this song, with only minimal alterations. And this song sounds lovely, don’t get me wrong, but it didn’t really make me laugh, or really feel anything other than “this song songs lovely”. Plus, I can’t really say I approve of the way Wayne goes out of his way to specify that he “want[s] to climb up a stepladder” to her. You need to stop judging things based on closed-minded cultural assumptions, Wayne!


Chewsflash: Heather and Ryan are in the studio, as Colin reports on some surprisingly graphic footage of assorted dental procedures, with blood.

TAILSMUSINGS: Gross-outs have never really been out of the norm for this game, what with the maggots, the Fear Factor montage, and the infamous “stupid human tricks” montage. However, instead of merely showing the grossness of an extreme close-up of someone’s mouth, they decided to make sure that everyone aside from Colin was cringing in pain. I could forgive the examining, the scraping, the drilling and the extracting. But did we really need Orin Scrivello’s money shot at the end? Seeing genuine blood on the TV is very unsettling!

JESSTHOUGHTS: I actually didn’t find this all that disgusting. Maybe it helps that I’ve actually had dental surgery of my own - my wisdom teeth were removed, as my body already contained excessive wisdom levels - as I understood even at the time more or less what they’d be doing in my mouth. This didn’t really surprise me, is what I’m saying. And if you’re one of the few people who weren’t outright horrified by this, then you’ve surely realized that it’s SO BORING OH MY GOD IS IT BORING. Colin doesn’t even give a funny explanation for how this madness started! However, for the first three to four seconds of the game, before the appearance of the telltale dental mirror, I actually thought this might be footage of food being chewed and swallowed, from inside the mouth. In retrospect, I don’t even know how that would work. But would that have been more or less disgusting? Share your thoughts in the comments! (Also, if you watched this on TV, would you mind telling me if this got a content descriptor for “violence”, on account of the bloody sockets?)


The Hangbags of the Christ: Wayne is biking through a forest when he crashes painfully, and paramedics Colin and Ryan rush to his aid. The items in the bags included such exciting things as clothes, makeup, headphones, implied condoms, and a notebook belonging to JESUS HIMSELF.

TAILSMUSINGS: It’s nice to see that Aisha is preparing for her guest role on the cult hit show “Hannibal”! She’s so excited about sinking her teeth into a meatier role on a bigger network! This at least went a little better in the second try, in that they didn’t just haphazardly toss everything out on the floor. I figured that they at least made sure to inspect the bags before choosing them, anyway. Colin, however, is less excited about the fact that he can’t open up the newfangled contraptions in those purses. Not to mention the fact that he found a perfectly good tin of breath mints but couldn’t reveal them because of the brand name. Alas!

JESSTHOUGHTS: Aisha calls this game What Is in the Bag tonight, which sounds a bit stilted in a Mark Trail sort of way, but ultimately it’s not too objectionable. However, if she ever introduces an exciting round of Let Us Make a Date, I’d have to write a strongly worded letter to the CW calling for her immediate dismissal. Do not make it come to that, Aisha. Do. Not.
...anyway, I’ve commented previously about how Wayne plays the antagonist (or “rival”) in most scenes this season. Well, on the rare occasions that he doesn’t, it seems the only other option open to him is to play a man who crashes into a tree and is badly injured. This is probably a more amusing accident than the skiboarding one in Forward/Rewind, if only because it involves Wayne with squirrels in his pants. The fact that Colin and Ryan nearly slice the fucker in two solely using reflected sunlight, like Bond villains, was just icing on the cake.


Crash-Landing Scenery: Ryan and Colin are a honeymooning couple making the most of their first-class flight when their plane hits a big storm and is forced to make an emergency landing in the ocean. Heather and Lisa get to be things.

TAILSMUSINGS: Now that we don’t have the robot Mormon guest stars, Colin can finally go straight for the dials on the radio! Putting Heather in there as well removed some of the tediousness of Colin and Ryan’s ‘don’t touch the guest stars suggestively’ rule. I would’ve preferred to see Helping Hands or another such game, since we’ve been seeing this one so much there’s really not a lot to talk about! But it was somewhat amusing to watch Lisa give her best approximation of a coconut tree – which are fashion models, apparently. Ryan seemed thrilled to have someone as freakishly tall as he is, and he certainly doesn’t make short of this opportunity!

JESSTHOUGHTS: This game features one of my favorite Aisha Reaction Shots of the season! She initially seems to be fairly amused by Ryan’s ‘Virgin’ joke and then in an instant her expression COMPLETELY changes, as she clearly realizes it doesn’t make sense. “If anything, wouldn’t Virgin be the name of an especially chaste airline that wouldn’t involve any seductive rubbing at all?” she ponders, correctly. If you ask me, though, the weirdest thing Ryan says is the joke singling out Heather for being flat-chested, as though Lisa is somehow not. I’m assuming he was just fooled by all the excess fabric hanging off her chest in a way that evokes....a certain sagginess, shall we say. Well, either way, Ryan is a dick and THEY’RE FINE THE WAY THEY ARE. Lisa, having been spared Ryan’s dickishness there, seems to love this game. She especially seems to love being a tree. Judging by the shifting poses she assumes in the guise of a tree, I think she may actually be a Sudowoodo. The giant green pea rocks fell off her fingers at some point, but she’s totally Sudowoodo.


Team Roster: Lisa is a basketball coach giving a pre-game pep talk to her team, which rather unwisely seems to consist of Wayne, Heather, Colin, and Ryan.

TAILSMUSINGS: Lisa surprisingly seems to be the most talkative in this game. Also, while there could’ve been a delay on what was on their monitor and what was displayed on the screen, she seemed to know Dan Patterson and Mark Leveson’s names right off the bat. Do we have another guest star here who has actually seen the show before? She did seem very into things and like she was trying, at least. See, swimmers? Congeniality goes a long way toward winning medals!

JESSTHOUGHTS: “You’re sensational to a person”? Is that really something that people say? You’ve gone a long way towards proving yourself to be Whose Line’s most insane host yet, Aisha. As for the actual “game”, um... I dunno. Ryan’s joke about Mark Leveson being “injured” and “not in the game”. Intentional reference to the fact that he’s not as involved as Dan Patterson? Maybe? Probably not. Credits suck.


HINDMOST TAILSMUSINGS: I had a feeling that it would be difficult to live up to Wilson Bethel, and I was correct. While there were various parts in this episode that did give me laughs, it was dimmed by the repetition of some stale games. My main complaints are that Heather wasn’t given an opportunity to do much of anything, and the showing of the blood in Newsflash still squicks me out. Be careful what you wish for with less censorship, I suppose!

ULTIMATE JESSTHOUGHTS: Yeah, we’re back to pretty middling territory. Serenades have gotten old, Living Scenery was old the second time it was played, there’s two news-themed games for some reason... I could go on and on complaining. You know I could! But I’d also like to say that tonight’s What’s in the Bag has really grown on me - Ryan and Colin seem really awkward with it, but maybe Whose Line needs a few more games that actually force these guys out of their comfort zone. With any luck, in season two they’ll stop adhering so closely to the late-period Drew’s Line aesthetic and try a lot more new stuff. (oh and less special guests please)


NEXT WEEK ON NEW WHOSE LINE: It’s the first episode of the season without a special celebrity guest! Really! The absence of a fifth person hogging the stage will, of course, give fourth-seater Keegan Michael Key even more leeway to be wacky wacky WACKY! All this, plus offensive Mexican stereotypes!

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