TV on DVD: Tracey Takes on... (The Complete Final Seasons)

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Since Kay Clark-- the British bank teller who moved to California in order to become the caretaker of her invalid mother-- was acknowledged legally and due to copyright reasons as the only character wholeheartedly created by the show's star, it's Kay who made the lonely leap from FOX Network's The Tracey Ullman Show to HBO's eight time Emmy award winning smash Tracey Takes on...for its four season run.

Rounding out the rest of the series, the talented, diverse comical actress, singer, dancer, and chameleon-like force of nature that is Tracey Ullman-- along with her gifted writers-- crafted a roster comprised of eighteen primary and countless secondary main characters and this time without the limits of censorship and free from corporate sponsors, they relished in the freedom to go to the extreme in some truly daring sketches.

While E.R. was widely praised as the first narrative and solidly structured show that successfully juggled several plotlines in any given episode to make it suitable for those of the channel changer generation-- Tracey Takes On... essentially worked the same way.

However, unlike Saturday Night Live which kind of stayed current and then dumped a skit to run with whatever was next, Ullman revisited not just frumpy caregiver Kay Clark-- who teams up with Cheech Marin to experiment with marijuana to try and give her mom some pain relief only to test it out herself first-- but other characters' storylines that didn't always end with a comedic zing but an internal chuckle, picking up the narrative thread she dropped later on in the strangest of ways when her many characters found their lives colliding. Sometimes the humor is abandoned completely in favor of pathos or melancholy or getting a point across that she'll use later (for the sake of wit) down the road as the shows meander (mostly) in and around the two coasts of the United States.

Often inspired by those she's come into contact with working in La La Land like one of her early Hollywood agents blended together with the Menendez Brothers lawyer for the downright hideous character of attorney Sydney Kross who can bully death row inmates into doing what she wants or a real life cab driver named Chic-- Tracey Takes on... is loosely strung together by a given topic from "Loss," to "Agents" to "Dating," which she manages to skewer in the most intriguing of ways.

She does so by first opening with an interview styled confessional anecdote as Tracey Ullman herself-- in person and out of makeup, wigs, and fake teeth-- shares a story about each one before she tackles the subjects and all the possible meanings they could incorporate which definitely goes beyond what most of us would probably first come up with in an average game of Password, Scattergories or Taboo.

Although, watching this show just months after viewing the much more recent and vastly superior first season of Showtime's Tracey Ullman's State of the Union Season One (also released by Eagle Rock Entertainment) makes Tracey Takes on... seem noticeably dated and also far less vital than the comedy from State of the Union since in between her impressions of Dina Lohan and Helen Mirren on the latter, she managed to address some of the issues facing our globe but this aside, Tracey Takes on... is still impressive.

While unfortunately, I do have to admit that more than half of her characters were unlikable in this particular show and her impression of the Asian-American character Mrs. Noh Nang Ning struck me on the same cringe-worthy level as Mickey Rooney's in Breakfast at Tiffany's--and I do wonder if she would've made this decision today-- it's still a solid work of entertainment.

And this is mostly due to the extraordinary gifts of our leading lady for not just her incredible versatility but also the way she's able to move right into the demands of any given skit from portraying an Australian stunt woman whose dwarf husband had died, taking part in a rigorous Fosse like dance routine, singing her heart out, and then reenacting the finale of Titanic with Psych's Corbin Bernsen.

Although when it comes to Ullman, I'm still going to tune into her particular State of the Union far more often than Tracey Takes on... despite some great guest work and funny turns by a game Jennifer Jason Leigh and Helen Mirren just to name two-- it's enjoyable for fans of the comical actress who (much like this reviewer) have also relished her turns in the movies of Woody Allen and her willingness to take risks in offbeat projects like Nancy Savoca's Household Saints and Lawrence Kasdan's masterful I Love You to Death as well.

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TV on DVD: Tracey Ullman's State of the Union -- The Complete First Season

View Clips from the Series in Our Video Screening Room

By parodying a Daily Dose of Fear, Ullman forms a more perfect
Union built on a Daily Dose of Comedy.

In the first season of her Showtime original series, Tracey Ullman left no topic unexplored whether it was singing about the side effects of erectile dysfunction medication Bollywood-style as the Indian pharmacist Padma Perkesh to assuming the role of Dame Judi Dench being interviewed about her performance as an Alzheimer’s sufferer in Martin Scorsese’s film “Who the F*** Was I?”

In tackling “the country’s celebrity-obsessed, 24-hour news culture” in this epic yet surprisingly succinct five-episode run of shows clocking in at just under a half hour, Ullman goes in and out of characters and locations like Superman leaping tall buildings in a single bound. Using an instantly recognizable Google map approach, the show is comprised of YouTube-inspired sketches which run anywhere from roughly thirty seconds to three minutes.

While no doubt viewers new to Ullman’s comedic style will first find themselves taken in by her incisive and unflinchingly hilarious takes on celebrities including the “Stay-at-Club” mom Dina Lohan, Campbell Brown’s terrifying “daily dose of fear,” the perpetually injured Galaxy soccer player David Beckham, “chronic narcissistic squint” afflicted actress Renee Zellweger, and “blogs and kisses” scribe Arianna Huffington who sleeps with her laptop, quickly you’ll be just as taken in by the fictitious creations, some of which you can see here.

Although my personal favorite is the Bollywood singing pharmacist Perkesh who warns the customers at her friendly Tennessee drug store of the possible dangerous side effects of each and every drug they’re prescribed, Ullman also manages to touch a nerve. From tear-inducing laughter one moment suddenly we're drawn in by scenes that normally would cause tears, thus getting us to care during some melancholic yet painfully real anecdotes of the absurdity of our contemporary society as a female soldier continually returns from Iraq for a brief visit before shipping back out and an elderly couple are busted returning from Canada with inexpensive prescription medication.

Poking fun at the demands placed on women in the workplace and at home as well as our changing roles, she portrays a seventy-something expectant mother. Then, moving from pathos to irony, she boldly dons black makeup and evolves into the most famous actress from Malawi who comes to America to adopt a child (in reverse Madonna and Angelina Jolie fashion) and takes on a soap opera feel in her “minisodes” about a married woman engaging in a torrid affair with her equally married boss after hours. Going for broader laughs, we encounter Chanel Monticello, an airport security agent who x-rays passengers who don’t have health insurance and a woman who runs “Dignity Village,” an Arizona community for women over the age of thirty-five who never want “to be seen in public again.”

While on the surface some critics may accuse Ullman of having a left-wing agenda, Tracey Ullman’s State of the Union takes equal shots at those on the left as well as the right, hitting extremely hard in the direction of environmental activist Laurie David (ex-wife of Seinfeld creator Larry David) who she plays as egomaniacal and self-righteous as well as others. Yet while David hasn’t commented on the portrayal and Huffington and Brown have expressed their pleasure with Ullman and the show, Union encompasses all views and really paints a fascinatingly relatable if comically exaggerated portrait of where we are as a country.

Having become an American citizen herself as Ullman revealed in a Showtime promo, the British actress seems dead-set on not only making us laugh but also making us think with her witty, razor-sharp satire. Visiting dozens of characters in each episode as narrator Peter Strauss and the music of Dvorak’s Ninth Symphony weaves us from one sketch to the next, it seems custom built for our dwindling attention spans yet at the same time beneficial in assuring maximum hilarity by never overstaying its welcome in one particular situation for more than a few minutes.

And as promised by the Showtime network executive Robert Greenblatt, Ullman portrays ninety percent of the characters of both genders (including an uproarious send-up of David Beckham). Needless to say it comes as great news to fans that the Emmy nominated show has been greenlit for a second season which will run a total of seven episodes in 2009.

In Eagle Rock Entertainment’s release of the complete first season, thirty additional minutes of bonus footage are included such as extra series promos, bloopers, and outtakes, character screen tests (complete with commentary from Ullman as we realize how integral the makeup and wardrobe is to the show) along with deleted scenes.

While there’s no substitute for the episodes themselves, there’s no doubt that devotees and Ullman enthusiasts like myself without premium cable will want to hunt this one down as by jam-packing that many characters and jokes into every single episode, you’ll want to savor the humor and go back to witness your favorite impersonations again and again. Just try to stop yourself before bursting out in song next time you see a customer refilling his Viagra prescription at your local pharmacy if you can.

I Could Never Be Your Woman

Director:
Amy Heckerling

Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Clueless director Amy Heckerling has always had her finger on the pulse of what’s hip and timely with her funny and irreverent takes on contemporary life. While working on the television spinoff of Clueless for ABC and raising a daughter as a single parent, Heckerling became as Entertainment Weekly’s Missy Schwartz wrote, “increasingly ambivalent about working in an industry that promotes unrealistic standards of beauty for young girls and considers women over 40 to be prehistoric beasts,” (“Would You Dump This Woman?” 2/8/08). In response, she penned the clever and witty I Could Never Be Your Woman which first took shape in the late 1990’s before being retooled again a few years ago in a script that reunited Heckerling with her Clueless leading man Paul Rudd and garnered a commitment from talented actress Michelle Pfeiffer whose celebrity helped get the film made by the controversial production company Bauer Martinez Entertainment which arrived in Hollywood in 2005.

While fans and members of the industry and press awaited its release in theatres, the film kept getting pushed back due to an unbelievably complicated mess of contract, technicality and even legal issues that made the film one of the most challenging of Heckerling’s career before it was relegated to a recent DVD release after being rescued by The Weinstein Company. Although articles such as Schwartz’s in-depth Entertainment Weekly piece may help illuminate some of the difficulties surrounding its post-production, we may never really know why the film was sidelined by red tape and despite the fact that some of the references feel a few years old, it’s still a wonderfully funny film that as Paul Rudd notes is “deceptively layered, as Amy’s work tends to be,” (Entertainment Weekly).

Pfeiffer stars as sharp Heckerling-like television writer Rosie for the aptly named teen sitcom You Go Girl starring Brianna (Clueless star Stacey Dash) who struggles to find a balance in her professional life with her personal one as she raises a precocious daughter Izzie (Irish star Saoirse Ryan before her Oscar nominated breakthrough in Atonement). Izzie who spends her free time prank calling celebrities such as Matthew Perry and Henry Winkler from her mother’s phone book along with dropping her Ken doll in the vent because he has Alzheimer’s is not only starting to outgrow Barbies but actually wanting to find a love of her own as well. It’s romance times two when forty year old Rosie, constantly egged on by Mother Nature (a hilarious Tracey Ullman) about her aging body, finds herself caught off guard when she begins to fall for twenty-nine year old comic actor Adam (Paul Rudd) who manages to steal both Rosie’s hearts along with the viewers' when he signs onto You Go Girl. The charming Rudd who has some truly memorable scenes that can’t be missed brings out a far more carefree and wild side in Pfeiffer that’s refreshing to see and while it’s pretty safe to say that I Could Never Be Your Woman has lost its momentum with the absence of press and arriving instead in video stores, for those who take the time to check it out, it’s a pleasantly affable little sleeper.