And by the way, "Drive" is so ridiculously awful that it's fucking brilliant.
By the way, I caught an episode of "Drive" last night, the new high-concept action show on FOX that is replacing "Prison Break" over the summer. And I haven't said this about a television show in a long time, because it hasn't been true in a long time -- but "Drive" is one of those shows that is just so goddamn ridiculous and over the top, it spins around and ironically becomes a sincerely huge delight.
See, it's about this group of random everyday schmucks who have all been forced to participate in this illegal cross-country road race, by having various family members kidnapped or framed for crimes they didn't commit, all of it done by this shadowy organization for reasons we don't know yet. And that, frankly, is a pretty ridiculous concept to begin with; but then the producers pack the show with all these scenes that make absolutely no dramatic or rational sense whatsoever, but did cost a lot of money and look all fuckin' cool when you're watching them.
Like, take this extended riff from last night's episode, where one of the characters thought he had been kidnapped by a rogue cop, who had mistakenly identified him as a cop-killer from Nebraska from a decade ago, and who had him locked in an interrogation room and kept beating him all hour long. That's not my point; turns out the entire thing was a ruse, orchestrated by The Shadowy Organization as a way to get this guy more motivated, and that the fake interrogation room was actually inside this warehouse with the guy's car right next to it. But when the time came to reveal all this, did they just open the door of the interrogation room and tell him? Of course not, idiot! First the fake cop had to give some corny line of dialogue, and then he picked up his chair and hurled it through the room's one-way mirror, revealing the guy's just-washed car gleaming under the lights of a dozen man-sized Klieg lamps set up around it in this giant empty warehouse, with of course corporate hard rock blasting in the background the entire time.
Dude, that is FUCKING EXTREME! But seriously, why go to all that trouble and spend all that money, just to briefly impress someone they've already kidnapped in the first place, and who is completely under their control? The show is full of moments like these -- like the end of that episode, for another example, where the finish line for that leg turned out to be this abandoned drive-in theatre in rural Georgia, which The Shadowy Organization had completely retrofitted with a new screen, projector and speakers, in order to give all the drivers the info on the next leg of the race. And again, you find yourself asking why -- fucking why are they going to all this trouble to impress a bunch of people they've kidnapped? And the answer of course is that they aren't -- they did it instead because it's an easy way to blow half a million dollars and ensure that a three-minute clip of it online will get linked to a million times at MySpace.
Now, it's different when a crew are aware of how god-awful their show might be, and sorta wink with one eye the entire length of the episode; that's not nearly as fun, and is why I claim that a show like this hasn't been on TV in years. It's obvious, though, that the producers of "Drive" suffer no such reality; that they sincerely see themselves as a bunch of maverick creative fuckin' geniuses, like another "Lost" staff or the like. And that, frankly, is what makes it such a delight; is that when they're making these complete and utter leaps in logic a dozen times each episode, they think they're actually making sense and are clever, which then pushes them so completely over the top and into such absurdist territory that you can't help but to be fascinated and impressed.
So yeah, I'm completely ashamed of myself, but I'll probably end up watching at least a couple of more episodes of "Drive," and maybe even the entire summer season. It's been a long time since I legitimately enjoyed a fucking awful television show; maybe I'll finally do so again this year.
UPDATE: You know what would make a great black comedy, though? A show about The Shadowy Organization's construction crew, and all the ridiculous lengths they have to go through for these three-minute experiences. Like take the scene I mentioned above, at the end of the episode; to actually pull that off, their crew would need to locate an abandoned drive-in theatre in the middle of nowhere that hasn't gotten torn down yet, buy it, retrofit it with new speakers, projector and screen, and do it all without attracting any attention from the nearby small-town communities, all to convey three minutes' worth of information that frankly could be much more easily communicated via email. ("You're driving to Oregon next. No, we're not really evil, but we can't explain it to you yet. Please forward this to your friends!") I'd love to see a half-hour comedy about the people in charge of pulling these things off; you know, a workplace comedy, like an even more surreal version of "The Office" or "The IT Crowd." Maybe the BBC could pull it off.
