Tonight’s Jezebel James: The First-Hand Account
Posted by Maggie
March 21st, 2008 at 11:05am
In All Things TV
Way back in September, Kyle, Friend of the Faux Katie, and I attended a taping of the Parker Posey/Lauren Ambrose/Amy Sherman-Palladino sitcom The Return of Jezebel James. I’m excited to say that the episode we saw is airing tonight! (Unless they cancel the show between now and 8:30. Which is… possible.)
This is our episode! That kid with the horns on the right is based on this kid.
Living in New York, and in the age of the single-camera sitcom, we don’t get a lot of opportunity to see scripted shows being taped. I’ve been to the Daily Show, which was awesome, but it was also remarkably similar to sitting at home watching the Daily Show (for example, it took almost exactly a half hour to tape). Seeing Jezebel James taping was completely different and fascinating. Watching the crew at work, manipulating these giant cameras at insane speeds and making instant decisions and changes and improvements, was like watching a whole other show in addition to the one being taped. I loved it. I could’ve stayed there all night just to watch them do their jobs.
… Which is good, because the taping went until after 1:00 AM! Keep in mind these numbers: Taping began at around 7:00. About 8-10 minutes of the show had been previously recorded. That means that we spent 6+ hours taping 12-14 minutes of actual show. Now, if this were a movie, that might not be so insane. But according to the audience’s cheesy host/comedian(?), who’s been a host/comedian(?) at dozens of tapings of many shows, in his experience, this was the latest a sitcom taping had ever gone. (Also, his family owns Town Shop. FYI.)
Like I said, I had no problem with this, because I was loving the whole experience. However, it did not bode well for the show. The problem seemed to be the house style of dialogue, those lovely convoluted twisty-turny sentences that tripped so lightly off of Lauren Graham’s tongue. Apparently, not everyone is so adept at turning the Palladino witticisms into natural speech. I adore Parker Posey, and she was delightful to watch, but it was not a natural fit for her — not the speeded-up rhythms of taping a TV show, not the mouthfuls of dialogue, not the increasingly late and exhausting night. Not any of it, really.
Her assistant was our favorite. Great timing. Get that guy his own show!
I’m very curious how it all turned out. Critics and audiences don’t seem to like it so far. For the crews doing overtime last September, that may turn out to be a relief. But for poor me who likes seeing TV being taped, that’s a shame.
So is anyone going to watch tonight? I’d recommend it, even though it’s not a slam dunk show. It’s worth taking a look, and not just because you may hear my laughter.
Ali and I watched about five minutes of the pilot last week before she turned it off (she couldn’t handle Parker Posey; I am not a devotee of the Sherman-Palladino way) and I was wondering if there was actual laughter from the audience, or if it was all laugh track. Because the jokes I heard seemed awfully canned.
I think that the pilot, unlike the episode we saw, was not filmed in front of a live studio audience, so all those laughs were added later. The show doesn’t have the same beat-beat-JOKE rhythm that most sitcoms have, but we definitely did laugh consistently. Of course, all of the laughs are “sweetened” to an annoying degree in editing.
Did anyone recognize Parker Posey’s apartment in the pilot? Unlike the swank pad she has in later episodes, in the pilot she lives in Lorelai’s house in Stars Hollow. (Or at least she did in the version of the pilot they showed us back in September.)
I noticed that it was enormous and hoped she lived in, like, Pennsylvania to afford that barn.