Ordinary fucking people
Return to the complete Party Down index
First Airdate: March 20, 2009
Written by John Enbom, Dan Etheridge, & Paul Rudd
Directed by Fred Savage
It is the dawn of television here on Alternate Ending. Although movies will remain the main focus of the site, with the influx of exciting new writers around these parts, the scope of the entertainment that we're covering will be expanding along with our staff. However, lest you think the purview of the site will expand too far into things that mainstream audiences would want to read about, let me put your fears to bed by introducing you my new feature that is a spiritual successor to Tim's Arrested Development rewatch from back in the days of yore, aka 2013. Once again, we find ourselves faced with a new season of a long-retired cult comedy and a blogger with the passion and ineradicable completionist drive to do the honors of reintroducing everyone to it.
Party Down was originally created in 2009 for Starz by Veronica Mars' Rob Thomas, John Enbom, and Dan Etheridge along with Paul Rudd's Paul Rudd. Stop me if you've heard this one before, but while it was a critical darling, it had low ratings and was summarily canceled after two ten-episode seasons. Now that culture is dead and we're strip-mining its corpse, a six-episode third season of the series has been greenlit by Starz and is currently in production. En route to finding out if resurrecting this series over a decade later was indeed a good thing, we will be revisiting the original run of episodes every other Thursday, starting right here with the pilot.
Party Down is a comedy with a deceptively simple premise: A motley crew of people work at a catering company and attend a different event every episode. And yet each time, they craft an exquisite farce out of the clash of personalities at the center of the group. The ultimate construction of a farce revolves around an ensemble of characters with their own goals, overlapping or conflicting with one another whether or not the characters themselves realize it.
This pilot episode introduces us to the characters, so it’s less focused on the nitty-gritty of crafting a tight plot, instead prioritizing establishing the personalities of the group and setting up the myriad of ways that they will collide with one another in future. Rather than giving each character a goal within the course of the episode, it's delivering to us their big, overarching goals that will define their personality throughout the season, all of which are driven by one thing: a frustrated dream.
Ron Donald (Ken Marino), is the first character we're introduced to, in a gag that in one deft stroke introduces the medium of the show as well as the premise. He is describing Party Down Catering directly to the camera, though it's quickly revealed that he's speaking to one of his clients rather than a documentary crew à la The Office, the smash-hit sitcom that led to a glut of similar programming at the time (both Modern Family and Parks and Recreation premiered the same year as Party Down). This gag establishes within seconds the fact that the series uses docurealist techniques (especially when it comes to the outdoor lighting, creating a harsh, washed-out effect that visually highlights the discomfort of the characters) despite being a standard single-camera sitcom. It also underscores this by interspersing the goings-on with camcorder footage taken by one of the characters at the party.
Ron has risen through the ranks of Party Down, kicking his drug and alcohol addiction as well as his layabout ways and replacing them with an obsession for perfection in the hopes that one day he can franchise his very own all-you-can-eat soup and salad restaurant Soup R' Crackers. His crew is staffed by a group uniquely arranged to prevent him from ever meeting his goals. There's Constance Carmell (Jane Lynch), an overconfident former actress whose goal is to milk every drop from her B-level-at-best brush with Hollywood, Kyle Bradway (Ryan Hansen), a handsome blond actor-model-singer-but-mostly-caterer with aspirations to stardom, Roman DeBeers (Martin Starr), a misanthropic nerd who hopes to be a great sci-fi screenwriter, and Casey Klein (Lizzy Caplan), a struggling comedian who is currently trying to decide if her go-nowhere career is worth leaving behind after her terrible husband gets a job in Vermont.
Enter Henry Pollard (Adam Scott), who has no dream. Oh, he had one. He came to California to become a star, and he did. In commercials. Well, one beer commercial. That everyone has seen. Other than introducing the iconic line "Are we having fun yet?" to the popular lexicon, his career has gotten him nowhere and he has returned to Party Down after eight years with his tail between his legs and no real goal other than to pay his rent and prevent himself from moving back in with his parents. Of course he hits it off immediately with Casey, because it wouldn't be a sitcom if there weren't two straight people yearning for each other. But these straight people are also disaffected assholes, so that's fresh at least.
The entire cast is excellent, but they're still growing into their roles here. Jane Lynch is the only person who showed up to set with a complete character in her back pocket, using Constance's absurd overenthusiasm to perfectly introduce audiences to the "awkward comedy" vibe of the show, running rampant and getting in the faces of as many featured extras as possible. Ken Marino is probably the worst served by the script, which is trying too hard to force him into a Michael Scott mold, especially in the moment where he mixes up impressions of Kermit and Yoda. However, he nails two line deliveries that bely what is to come, my favorite being his instruction to Henry to cut a lime "nipple to nipple."
Indeed everybody but Ryan Hansen gets at least one standout line here, and the single funniest moment of the episode goes to Martin Starr, who doesn't get too much to do otherwise (he and Hansen will prove to be two of those characters in sitcoms that generally remain static because it's funnier that way, but sometimes this comes at the detriment of them getting anything meaty thrown their way). It would drag out the already distended word count to explain the context around this line, but let's just say it involves a squid. If you're watching along, you know what I'm talking about.
Plot-wise, this episode shows glimmers of the farcical mayhem that will come as characters dart into (and out of) each other's scenes. However, like most pilot episodes, the comedy is pleasant but too busy setting the table to really get the engine roaring properly. That said, the end credits stinger scene might just be one of my favorite of the entire series, involving a character who only speaks two lines in the episode proper and delivers one of the most unexpected, affectless-in-a-situation-where-there-should-absolutely-be-affect line readings I've ever heard. This is the scene that hooked me into the show in the first place many years ago, and proves that the episode is still worth its salt even if better things are to come.
Rating: B+
Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.
First Airdate: March 20, 2009
Written by John Enbom, Dan Etheridge, & Paul Rudd
Directed by Fred Savage
It is the dawn of television here on Alternate Ending. Although movies will remain the main focus of the site, with the influx of exciting new writers around these parts, the scope of the entertainment that we're covering will be expanding along with our staff. However, lest you think the purview of the site will expand too far into things that mainstream audiences would want to read about, let me put your fears to bed by introducing you my new feature that is a spiritual successor to Tim's Arrested Development rewatch from back in the days of yore, aka 2013. Once again, we find ourselves faced with a new season of a long-retired cult comedy and a blogger with the passion and ineradicable completionist drive to do the honors of reintroducing everyone to it.
Party Down was originally created in 2009 for Starz by Veronica Mars' Rob Thomas, John Enbom, and Dan Etheridge along with Paul Rudd's Paul Rudd. Stop me if you've heard this one before, but while it was a critical darling, it had low ratings and was summarily canceled after two ten-episode seasons. Now that culture is dead and we're strip-mining its corpse, a six-episode third season of the series has been greenlit by Starz and is currently in production. En route to finding out if resurrecting this series over a decade later was indeed a good thing, we will be revisiting the original run of episodes every other Thursday, starting right here with the pilot.
Party Down is a comedy with a deceptively simple premise: A motley crew of people work at a catering company and attend a different event every episode. And yet each time, they craft an exquisite farce out of the clash of personalities at the center of the group. The ultimate construction of a farce revolves around an ensemble of characters with their own goals, overlapping or conflicting with one another whether or not the characters themselves realize it.
This pilot episode introduces us to the characters, so it’s less focused on the nitty-gritty of crafting a tight plot, instead prioritizing establishing the personalities of the group and setting up the myriad of ways that they will collide with one another in future. Rather than giving each character a goal within the course of the episode, it's delivering to us their big, overarching goals that will define their personality throughout the season, all of which are driven by one thing: a frustrated dream.
Ron Donald (Ken Marino), is the first character we're introduced to, in a gag that in one deft stroke introduces the medium of the show as well as the premise. He is describing Party Down Catering directly to the camera, though it's quickly revealed that he's speaking to one of his clients rather than a documentary crew à la The Office, the smash-hit sitcom that led to a glut of similar programming at the time (both Modern Family and Parks and Recreation premiered the same year as Party Down). This gag establishes within seconds the fact that the series uses docurealist techniques (especially when it comes to the outdoor lighting, creating a harsh, washed-out effect that visually highlights the discomfort of the characters) despite being a standard single-camera sitcom. It also underscores this by interspersing the goings-on with camcorder footage taken by one of the characters at the party.
Ron has risen through the ranks of Party Down, kicking his drug and alcohol addiction as well as his layabout ways and replacing them with an obsession for perfection in the hopes that one day he can franchise his very own all-you-can-eat soup and salad restaurant Soup R' Crackers. His crew is staffed by a group uniquely arranged to prevent him from ever meeting his goals. There's Constance Carmell (Jane Lynch), an overconfident former actress whose goal is to milk every drop from her B-level-at-best brush with Hollywood, Kyle Bradway (Ryan Hansen), a handsome blond actor-model-singer-but-mostly-caterer with aspirations to stardom, Roman DeBeers (Martin Starr), a misanthropic nerd who hopes to be a great sci-fi screenwriter, and Casey Klein (Lizzy Caplan), a struggling comedian who is currently trying to decide if her go-nowhere career is worth leaving behind after her terrible husband gets a job in Vermont.
Enter Henry Pollard (Adam Scott), who has no dream. Oh, he had one. He came to California to become a star, and he did. In commercials. Well, one beer commercial. That everyone has seen. Other than introducing the iconic line "Are we having fun yet?" to the popular lexicon, his career has gotten him nowhere and he has returned to Party Down after eight years with his tail between his legs and no real goal other than to pay his rent and prevent himself from moving back in with his parents. Of course he hits it off immediately with Casey, because it wouldn't be a sitcom if there weren't two straight people yearning for each other. But these straight people are also disaffected assholes, so that's fresh at least.
The entire cast is excellent, but they're still growing into their roles here. Jane Lynch is the only person who showed up to set with a complete character in her back pocket, using Constance's absurd overenthusiasm to perfectly introduce audiences to the "awkward comedy" vibe of the show, running rampant and getting in the faces of as many featured extras as possible. Ken Marino is probably the worst served by the script, which is trying too hard to force him into a Michael Scott mold, especially in the moment where he mixes up impressions of Kermit and Yoda. However, he nails two line deliveries that bely what is to come, my favorite being his instruction to Henry to cut a lime "nipple to nipple."
Indeed everybody but Ryan Hansen gets at least one standout line here, and the single funniest moment of the episode goes to Martin Starr, who doesn't get too much to do otherwise (he and Hansen will prove to be two of those characters in sitcoms that generally remain static because it's funnier that way, but sometimes this comes at the detriment of them getting anything meaty thrown their way). It would drag out the already distended word count to explain the context around this line, but let's just say it involves a squid. If you're watching along, you know what I'm talking about.
Plot-wise, this episode shows glimmers of the farcical mayhem that will come as characters dart into (and out of) each other's scenes. However, like most pilot episodes, the comedy is pleasant but too busy setting the table to really get the engine roaring properly. That said, the end credits stinger scene might just be one of my favorite of the entire series, involving a character who only speaks two lines in the episode proper and delivers one of the most unexpected, affectless-in-a-situation-where-there-should-absolutely-be-affect line readings I've ever heard. This is the scene that hooked me into the show in the first place many years ago, and proves that the episode is still worth its salt even if better things are to come.
Rating: B+
Brennan Klein is a millennial who knows way more about 80's slasher movies than he has any right to. He's a former host of the Attack of the Queerwolf podcast and a current senior movie/TV news writer at Screen Rant. You can find his other reviews on his blog Popcorn Culture. Follow him on Twitter or Letterboxd, if you feel like it.
Categories: television
