Friday, September 6, 2013

New Whose Line! Episode 10: Meat Maggie Q!

Starring Wayne Brady, Nyima Funk, Colin Mochrie, and Ryan Stiles!
Plus special guest Maggie Q, from Balls of Fury!


Not-Very-Good Director: Batman (Ryan) and Catwoman (Nyima) must use every gadget that they have to escape a room in which spiked walls are closing in on them, likely the handiwork of the nefarious Joker (Wayne), who arrives on his jetpack to taunt them, I assume. Colin directs, instructing them to replay the scene as high-energy game show hosts, like they’re in a hip-hop video, and as if they’re magnetically attracted to everything.

TAILSCOGITATION: Aaaand mark! It only took 10 episodes for them to make a Drew reference! This show is being much more timely than Drew’s version, which took about 200 episodes to make a reference to Clive Anderson. I really like the new girl so far, she’s quick, she’s clever, and she does a good Eartha Kitt. Ryan is obviously doing his best bland George Clooney Batman, and Wayne is doing… I’m not sure what Wayne was trying to achieve. But that’s usually the case in any game I see him in. Also, Gerbil Girl’s special power is fitting those monstrous water bottles inside her, apparently! That’s sort of impressive!

JESSICAWORDS: At last, I get to meet the final fourth-seater for this season! My first impression is also that Nyima’s Eartha Kittwoman impression is actually pretty good. Female impressionists are a rarity on Whose Line, so it’ll be interesting to have her around… assuming she’s not a one-trick pony like Jeff Davis. My more negative second impression, though, is that Nyima (no, spellcheck, I do NOT mean Maiman, what the fuck?) has an unfortunate knack for making things cringeworthily awkward, including the fatal mistake of making everybody think about Ryan’s old man penis. In fact, everyone seemed a little off here: somehow Wayne avoids having to do anything musical in the hip-hop video style, and Colin seems to be deliberately playing a version of his usual director without any catchphrases or people skills of any sort. That being said, I also appreciated the oblique reference to Drew. It’s reassuring to know that, even now that he’s at a healthy weight and somehow looks younger than he did when he hosted Whose Line, it’s still regarded as deeply insulting to be compared to him!


Thoughtdubbing: Maggie is a heavily armed assassin trying to seduce and kill Ryan, a womanizing senator, in a swanky hotel room, when Maggie’s former lover, Wayne, arrives with plans to kill them both. Colin translates Maggie’s mime routine for the benefit of the visually impaired.

TAILSCOGITATION: You know you have a star guest of the highest caliber when they start corpsing within the first joke. I think I might’ve misjudged the other stars or took their ability to keep straight faces for granted. True, they sometimes giggled or cracked a big grin, but that was just to show they were having a good time. They didn’t completely double over in laughter right out of the gate. Maggie clearly can’t be the greatest spy in the world; all we have to do is have Ryan bombard her with jokes until she agrees to tell us all her secrets! And she’s also one of the worst players we’ve had in this game! How hard can it be to just make sure your lips are moving when Colin is speaking? It’s a good thing we got the first Ryan and Wayne kiss ever or there’s no way this game would be in any way memorable.

JESSICAWORDS: Why does Maggie’s character even need to seduce Ryan in the first place? She’s already got him alone in a hotel room with no way to defend himself! If she was trying to extract information from him, sure, fuck the dude’s brains out, but if her only goal is to kill him, any assassin worth her salt should be able to get the job done in this scenario without having to consult her vagina. Ergo, the humping is solely for her enjoyment, not work. Wayne is perhaps justified in his jealousy, is what I’m saying, if rather misguided with the double murder thing. Then again, it’s clear that this character is just like Maggie Q herself: a heartless seductress who loves toying with the fragile hearts of men almost as much as she loves the color black. Her first target: Colin Mochrie. He’s not hurt for long, though, because he’s adorably irresistible to black people. But who will be her next target—and will they be as lucky?


Ewwwwsflash: Nyima and Ryan are lazy news people who are incapable of getting off of their stools, so they rely on Colin to go outside and report in front of footage of a snake eating a large white rat, and unrelated footage of a tarantula just chillin'.

TAILSCOGITATION: They might as well just change the name of this game to “Let’s Freak the Hell Out of the Audience”. They’re pretty much making this a cringe/gross out game and it’s making the game lose its appeal for me. What made this game good in the first place was putting something funny or wacky behind Colin, so the audience could be laughing and having a good time, and while they occasionally did freaky stuff (key word being occasionally) it was still quirky enough to get laughs. Now it’s just going for cheap shock value that doesn’t make you come away from it going, “That was a good game!” It’s more of a “thank god that’s over”, and we care less and less if Colin actually gets it right or not. Although I will say that Nyima is a good clue giver, so points to her for that.

JESSICAWORDS: I’m now fairly certain that the guy who picked the footage for Newsflash this season is a serial killer. I wonder what delightful footage they used for the playings they didn’t air! Grizzly bear attacks? Chainsaw juggling bloopers? Puppies who just caught their spouses cheating? I hope someone turns this dude in before he inevitably has Colin report in front of grainy footage of military executions! I mean holy shit this is getting dark for a lighthearted improv show! Even Ryan points out that this is a real downer compared to “the Wayne thing”, which makes you wonder why it was in the episode at all… so now I’m suspicious of every single one of the editing people I called out two weeks ago too! But, oh well, I guess we can all put this behind us. It’s not like there were any hardcore vegans in the studio who might find this to be especially cruel or anything. We really dodged a bullet there!


What’s in Dr. Bag, PhD?: Wayne is a teenager who wants to join the Army, but not before military doctors Colin and Ryan test his physical and mental fitness. The items in the bags included such exciting things as jackets, makeup, cotton swabs, perfume/mace, nuts, and wallets with MONEY and A DRIVER’S LICENSE.

TAILSCOGITATION: Oh wow! I wonder what kind of scene we’re going to be getting this time! I hope they’re doctors! Because y’know, doctors carry around bags! I know I’ve always seen my doctor carrying a bag! They’re just total bag people! It’s eponymous with the profession! *gasp* They ARE doctors?! And they’re treating someone?! And it’s Wayne AGAIN?! CALLOO CALLAY! Oh, wait! Wait! Colin and Ryan both do the same jokes that they did in the other games?! Be still my heart! If it weren’t for Ryan macing himself accidentally, this wouldn’t have gotten any reaction out of me at all.

JESSICAWORDS: First things first, I’m gonna have to call Colin out for not one but two recycled wallet-related jokes in a row! Not to overanalyze a bad joke or anything, but why is the “looks like dinner’s on me” gag even supposed to be funny? Because that audience member… has a lot of money on her personage? Take that, lady who manages her money well enough to have disposable income at this specific point in time! I’ll admit that I usually derive at least a little enjoyment from seeing Ryan writhe around in agony for laughs, though. And even a cynical bitch like me can appreciate the sheer joy that the audiencefolk seem to experience when Colin and Ryan riffle through their things. “Ohmigod, did you see that?? They ate one of my mixed nuts! MY mixed nuts!! On NATIONAL TELEVISION!!


Irish My Hands Would Be More Helpful: Ryan is an enthusiastic Irishman working for the Irish tourist board trying to persuade potential tourist Maggie to come to Ireland, by offering her a variety of unappealing Irish foods. Colin provides Ryan’s Irishmanly hands.

TAILSCOGITATION: Now, I would say that this game might be a bit culturally insensitive, but we all know that the Irish don’t count when you need an ethnicity for cheap laughs, so it’s okay. Something I didn’t know upon entering this game is that Maggie is a vegan, which would explain why she was somewhat disgusted by the things on the table. However, even the pea mush was too displeasing for her palate to handle! I will give her credit for actually trying it, though. It’s difficult to make a game where we only watch Ryan get drunk and make funny faces interesting, and… this was no different, really.

JESSICAWORDS: Everyone knew Ryan was gonna get hammered eventually, so why not just jam the bottle in his mouth literally as soon as the round begins! Because, y’know, Ireland. Okay, what next? Well, personally, I would’ve loved to see Ryan and Colin perform a jig with that violin, but I suppose that had to be edited out to fit in all the icky food jokes. As an avid pea lover, I don’t understand why both Ryan and Maggie act like they’re the most disgusting thing ever. Split peas are still peas, and peas kick ass! On the plus side, we were wrong last week: Maggie did, in fact, take a bite. She bravely gulped that pea down like it was an insignificant lab rat! Ryan came to realize that Maggie, against all odds, still had some small amount of goodwill left for the show, and so he sought to crush it forever by smothering his soda bread with the flesh of the noble cow, hellishly stewed in a murderous liquid stock with traitorous vegetables. (You can tell I’m officially sick of Helping Hands as a game, because I’m making up weird shit like this now.)


SUPREME TAILSCOGITATION: This episode didn’t really get a rise out of me, other than some rare giggles here and there. Whose Line is constantly dipping into the darker side of bland, as well as throwing some dark stuff in there to gross out and shock the audience. I didn’t enjoy the guest star (all guest stars are bad until proven competent on this show), I’m sick of the game choices, and I’m coming off of games uncomfortable more often than I should be. And if my thoughts sound similar to thoughts I’ve given on previous episodes, that’s because they are. I hope this show gets a massive overhaul for its second season, or I fear it’s doomed for good.

FAMOUS LAST JESSICAWORDS: This episode starts out well enough with an ably acted Hollywood Director, but the combination of Maggie’s sub-audience-member ability to keep her shit together and Satan’s Newsflash put a bad taste in my mouth from which even a brilliant episode couldn’t recover. And I can’t even judge Nyima yet, because she was treated in the same fashion that American Whose Line treats all female performers. And, as if this episode wasn’t already enough of a bummer, Aisha saw fit to wear her grandmother’s nicest shower curtain tonight. *sigh*


NEXT WEEK ON WHOSE LINE: Repeats, apparently. They were originally going to air Colin and Brad: Two Man Group as a special, but now they’re doing that in autumn I guess, and they didn’t move the last two episodes back a week, for whatever reason. So, yeah. Repeats. Because the one repeat a week wasn’t enough.

THE WEEK AFTER THAT ON WHOSE LINE: Sexually exciting football players for old men to objectify, with their penises!

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