April 7-13, 2005

tv party!

You Can't Do That On Television

by Joey Sweeney

But then again, why would you want to?

On one hand, it is nice to know that some things never change: Television networks are just as clueless about what it's okay to show as ever. On the other, it's distressing: After all this time — and all this TV — networks small and large are painted into a corner by an increasingly puritanical-yet-conflicted zeitgeist, a populace that will cry foul at the slightest sexualization at the same time that it consumes gunplay and plastic surgery disasters whole.

God help that audience if they ever happen upon Wonder Showzen. Their brains will be broken forever. And no amount of letter-writing or pissing and moaning on Hannity & Colmes will put them back together.

Wonder Showzen rests squarely at the bottom of MTV2's roster, literally. On the Web site, you have to scroll to the end of the list of shows; to find it at all presumes that your attention won't first be grabbed by Team Sanchez (I kid you not, Jackass with Welsh dudes) or Video Mods, in which characters from Grand Theft Auto and Tekken sing pop songs. The gloves are off over at MTV2; this is some of the most aggro-yet-idealess content this side of Fox News. In today's TV climate, this is what a search for a young network's identity looks like.

Essentially, Wonder Showzen is a dirty puppet show. And like most dirty puppet shows — from Sifl & Olly on down to Crank Yankers — it's not dirty as in titillating, it's dirty as in iconoclastic, not so much funny as disarming. And since the disarming-puppets gambit is now an established thing, Wonder Showzen seems to define itself by acting out against the current social and political climate in the foulest ways it can: denigrating organized religion, playing havoc with the limits on language proposed by political correctness and generally lambasting our current culture of fear.

All of this done, of course, with a cast of characters that look like they were plucked straight out of any one of Sid & Marty Krofft's Saturday-morning hallucinations. If that weren't enough, Wonder Showzen also perfectly mimics the placid tones of Sesame Street and National Film Board of Canada animation films from the early '70s: kids' voices, primary colors, and rudimentary line drawings juxtaposed against all the blood and snark of the modern world. I imagine that subletting Michael Jackson's psyche would grant a similar result.

Classic Wonder Showzen moment: Blue puppet — half-Kermit, half-Elmo — accosts a jogger in Central Park:

Puppet: What are you running from? What are you running away from?!

Jogger: Nothing!

Puppet: I should call the cops! You look like this rape suspect! You run away from a lot of things in life, don't you? You know where you're gonna spend eternity? You're gonna spend it with ME — talking about Jesus!

OK, that's kind of funny. But on the whole, Wonder Showzen isn't. If you believe we're a nation of overweight hypocrites who think that one brain-dead American's life is worth 300 times the attention of thousands of Iraqi or Southeast Asian women's and children's, then consider Wonder Showzen your TV id. It's obnoxious, it's fucked, but on some level, it's right.

Wonder Showzen airs Fridays at 9:30 and 11 p.m., Saturdays and Sundays at midnight on MTV2, and Sundays at 10 p.m. on MTV

TV/TiVo Tips!

April 7-20

The Starlet

Thu., April 7, 9 p.m., WB

This is a repeat, but if, like me, you have just discovered this show as if it were a previously undocumented circle of hell, there's lots of catching up to do.

VH1's Saturday Night Metallica Tribute

Sat., April 9, 4 p.m., VH1

Somewhere along the line, VH1 decided it liked Metallica. A lot. So tonight starts off with 100 Most Metal Moments, ends with the bizarro biopic Metallica: Some Kind Of Monster (itself perhaps the least metal moment in all of metal history, but whatever), and features in the middle something called When Metallica Ruled the World. Paleontologists, take note.

Countdown to Draft Day

Sun., April 10, 9 p.m., CN8

Yeah, I got scared, too. But don't freak out. It's about football.

Miss USA 2005

Mon., April 11, 9 p.m., NBC

Because everyone has a little JonBenet Ramsey in them, just dying to get out. Plus, people from the South: Hoo-boy! Weeee!