Flight of the Conchords Series (?) Review

The Flight of the Conchords episode that aired this past Sunday night was the last of the second season, and possibly the last of the entire series, since no announcement has been made that the show will be returning. If you haven’t seen the episode, I’ll just tell you now: No, they did not do "Bus Driver Song."

Disappointing, I know. And although a lot of people may disagree with me on this, I always found the show as a whole a little disappointing.

Allow me to explain. Let me take you back to the fall of 2005, when I was a high school senior leaving a Stephen Lynch concert. My friends and I were all riding in one car, and I heard the guy in the passenger seat say that he liked Lynch, but that he thought Flight of the Conchords was better.

“Who’s Flight of the Concordes?” I asked, inaudibly misspelling the name in my mind.

My friends told me that Flight was a comedy band they had found a video of on OnDemand, promised to show me the video sometime soon, and then spent the rest of the ride discussing who was funnier, the longer-haired guy or the guy with the glasses. A few days later they showed me the video, and I, like them, was hooked.

The video my friends were talking about was the Conchords’ half-hour appearance on HBO’s stand-up showcase One Night Stand. If you haven’t seen it, it’s available in bits and pieces on this guy’s YouTube profile (between the obscene amounts of Season 1 clips and the obscene amounts of Season 2 clips). You really should check it out, because in terms of pitch-perfect, laugh-out-loud musical comedy, the One Night Stand special is utter perfection. My friends and I watched it over and over, scoured the internet for other Conchord tracks, taught ourselves the guitar chords to "Jenny," quoted the songs constantly, adopted "Business Time" as the motto of our swim team, and went to see the band play live in New York. Seriously, we were hooked, and I don’t think we were the only ones.

Utter perfection

So when the TV show premiered, a year and a half after that Stephen Lynch concert, we all gathered together to watch. And don’t get me wrong, we enjoyed the show. We watched all the rest of the episodes until we had to go back to our respective colleges, at which point I hunted down the episodes I missed online. But I never felt like the show quite fulfilled the potential shown in the One Night Stand special, and there were a few reasons why.

First, and most importantly, the central storyline was too mundane. The Conchords’ best songs rely on imagination, either in the form of goofily exaggerated fantasy worlds ("Bowie," "Albi the Racist Dragon") or almost-literary casts of awkward characters (“Business Time,” “Jenny,” “Bus Driver Song”). In short, the best Conchord songs tell fascinating stories. Yet, somehow, Flight of the Conchords The TV Show revolved around oddball roommates living in the city, possibly the most clichéd sitcom setup in existence. And beyond being dull, the setup made it nearly impossible to gracefully incorporate the band’s existing repertoire. The show’s writers had two choices: Shoehorn in pre-existing songs, plot be damned (think "Mermaids"), or quickly crank out new songs that fit the story. The latter technique became especially prevalent in Season 2, and sometimes it worked ("Carol Brown"), but a lot of times it didn’t ("We're Both In Love With a Sexy Lady," "Stay Cool," etc.).

This, on the other hand, is awesome

Second, while I might be alone on this, I always found the show to be overly self-deprecating. I suspect that executive producer James Bobin was partly responsible for this, since, as series director on Da Ali G Show, he would’ve been familiar with the painfully-awkward style of humor featured on Ali G, The Office, Curb Your Enthusiasm, and countless other sitcoms since the rise of Ricky Gervais. I have nothing against that style, but I felt like it clashed with that of the Conchords. I wanted to like the show’s characters, at least a little, and instead I felt like I was always having their pathetic-ness rubbed in my face.

Even given these issues, the show had plenty of great moments, and that’s pretty impressive. I’m glad the Conchords got the large-scale recognition they deserve, and I’ll admit that I don’t have any better ideas as to how their humor could’ve been translated to television. Still, if this does turn out to have been the final season, I don’t think I’ll be sorry. The band would be free to pursue other projects, and I, for one, am curious as to what those projects might be.

But I can’t believe they didn’t do “Bus Driver Song.”

They had a bus and everything! What the fuck!