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The Loop Season 2: OUR DANTE'S INFERNO
by Doom, the Red Fox, Generalissimo Furioso and Nixon
guest appearance by Rudy Giuliani
Cancelled in record time!
Bah, they didn't try to try.
The Loop. It's a show I assumed had quietly perished in the great FOX culling during the early season sweeps, but apparently, I was wrong. The show has returned to wreak its terrible vengeance on all of us that enjoy good comedy. You know, the shows where things made sense and didn't always involve a guy who was out of place yet always gets the girl in the end (I'm sick of happy endings for people who can't comprehend that sometimes its funnier when people get hurt or maimed). For those of you lucky enough to be out of the country when this show first assaulted America through the airwaves, it's the story of a nice guy who works at an airline where everyone else is CRAZY!!!!!!!!!!! (Get it! He's not like them, so COMEDY ensues when they don't get along!) It's essentially like every sitcom FOX has ever put on since 1992, only it's contemporary since it's at an airline company. Because air travel is sooooo 2007!
For your reading pleasure, may I present to you the summary for this episode of The Loop. May it forever burn in the fiery pits of hell. So Sam, our main doofy character, goes into his office and begins to fall all over the new busty office girl at the airline he works for. The company is trying to get access to some airport in the company of Iceland. When I say company, I am directly referencing the show, not my own stupid beliefs. Now Sam has to get a gift for the Icelanders and manage to get a date with Chesty McGee, so he buys some sort of sacred ancient Icelandian dildo from a crackhead. Yeah, it sounds funnier when I wrote it than in the actual show. Due to him having to take one of the Icelanders on a night on the town, while wearing a woman's suit jacket, the two bond, for some reason. Sam goes on the date and invades Iraq, if you know what I mean (OBVIOUS INNUENDO!).
One of the main plot lines of the show is Sam trying to get into the pants of his new busty coworker and I found, for the brow level of this show being considerably low, that there would be much more jokes about her more than satisfactory bosom. C'mon, it looked as if her breasts were concealing Scud missiles or something, so why didn't they play up all of the ha ha on this point. Why not play it up at least a little bit? Show all of the male characters staring at her walking down the hall, random men hooting when she was at the bar, making her wear a bikini and do jumping jac...sorry, I got a little carried away there, but my point remains valid. I honestly don't think that boob jokes are above this show; it could really use the laughs and it is on FOX, after all. Not to mention, sex appeal creates ratings, which could have saved The Loop from cancellation had the premiere been 22 minutes of closeup shots to breasts. And even if it did get cancelled anyway, FOX would be able to recut the premiere into the pilot for Large Breasts: The Show.
Foreigners are different because they come from strange lands like Iceland, a nation mankind nearly forgot. I think that's the gist of what the show's writers thought when they made this episode of The Loop. I never thought of Iceland as some kind of backwards Land Before Time place of mystery and wonder, but then again, I'm not on FOX's pay roll, now am I? Even though the episode eventually has the whole "hey I'm not that different from you" bit between the lead Sam and his Icelandic counterpart, the episode is still rife with bizarre customs bullshit and other such jokes. There's the whole gag with the Norse Artifact that looks like a dildo thing. Norse religion was cool and all (THOR!), but I think it kind of died, oh, a millennium ago, and I'm pretty sure Iceland isn't so far behind the times. Only the French are (GET IT, I MADE FUN OF FRANCE! THEY DIDN'T SUPPORT OUR GREAT WAR IN IRAQ AND WARNED SUCH A MOVE WOULD LEAD TO FAILURE AND REGION DESTABILIZATION! FAGS! LAUGH). Plus, the usual mass of translation jokes (though all shoved into one scene) that boil down to "words mean different things than they sound like in them devil's speak" show up throughout the episode. God, so much xenophobia and cultural assassination. ...I express shock at The Loop not being picked up!
The rest of the comedy, other than the 'main theme' as described above, comprises a large variety of entirely bad and pointless jokery - sexual innuendo, uncomfortable sitcom situations, physical gags and references. Now, on their own, these styles work if done well. However, when combined into a Satanic merger of bad writing, well, it makes one question the existence of the very universe we live in. None of the characters stand out (excepting one, which I'll get to later), making character-based humor hard if not impossible. The situations, as mentioned, fall loosely into bad sitcom territory. I keep expecting Sam to invite Mr. Bookman over for dinner and Sully totally fucking up the roasssssssst. This is the kind of vaguely offensive sitcom for people who think "I have nothing to differentiate me from other idiots. I need a cause to champion. I know...a critically derided, low rated shitty cookie cutter comedy!" and then take action in the form of posting "LOL" in any message board thread discussing The Loop. Sad, sad people.
Ian Reed Kesler plays the worst television show character ever created, Derek Tricolli. I try not to throw around "worst X ever" lines because you never know when something will turn up and make you realize you didn't even begin to know what the meaning of worst was. Not in this case, though. No, there will never be a character worse than Derek. FOX can let Seth MacFarlane do their entire Sunday lineup, Jesus can have his bloated return sequel, Earth can be a barren apocalypse ruled by Fred Thompson on a throne of skulls, and nothing will ever top how terrible the character Derek is. How does one describe Derek's 'character'? Well, he is the embodiment of everything evil with pointless reference humor. His bit for the first half of the show consists of the pointless reference machine, a kind of broken Dennis Millar with no fake sense of class, who rattles off bullshit at the drop of a hat simply to sound like he knows a lot of wacky pop culture. I'm sorta reminded of the Dennis Miller-like character from Sealab's "Butchslap" episode. The second, even more terrifying aspect to him, is the ladies man stereotype from Hell. He hits on the main character's date, thinks he is a god in the sack, and makes a ton of obvious sexual innuendo jokes that come off as just sad. The writers seem to have thought he was a laugh riot, though, as he just keeps popping up in the episode, like some kind of bad rash, until finally the audience gets a whole scene of him in all his unholy glory as both bad reference and ladies man combined. If there was television that actually caused the eyes to bleed, this would have been it.
I think this is a first. Never before has the Daily Raider reviewed a show airing on broadcast television that has already been cancelled before the premiere of its season. Season 1 of the series aired last summer as filler, so apparently the executives thought to renew it...and decided not to try it out at all. It goes to show what kind of shit networks burn off during the summer: shit they greenlit and then thought "Dear God, no, there's no way anyone will watch this". The Loop must've tested really poorly among the executives for them to not even give it a shot before canceling. Despite this, I don't understand the logic of putting it on in the summer. It may have used to be true that people went outside in the summer months and didn't watch TV, but let's face it; now, every fucking American sits on the couch for 10 hours watching Larry the Cable Guy's Fart and COPS: Nigger Edition. As a result, I bet America will find The Loop hee-larious and demand a third season from FOX. For how can the nation survive without knowing the fates of fleshed-out characters like guy, guy's brother, old guy, woman, annoying guy, and secretary with ample bosom? Now if they had put it on Friday night, that would have been a different story.
And now, for his opinion on what transpired on the show, Presidential candidate in the running Rudy Giuliani!
I'm sorry, I'm just not feeling it. Sure, I had high hopes for it when I heard of the premise, but the execution left me sorely disappointed. How can you do a show about an airline and completely miss the following elements: airborne terrorism, Rudy Giuliani's decisive action, 9/11, the War on Terror, 9/11 and 9/11? It's simply impossible, unless you're low quality like The Loop. I expected at least ONE reference to how I saved America. But I saw none, and in its place was formulaic comedy about Iceland being different. Iceland is an ally on THE WAR ON TERROR, Mister. Don't you forget it. Now that I have established the poorness of The Loop, I am now announcing my intention to run for President of The Loop. Here is what The Loop would be like under my administration. The opening would feature clips of famous plane crashes that I helped speechify the recovery of. The main character Sam would be changed into a combination of Jack Bauer and me. There'd be a scene of main character Sam beating down an Arab character who looks suspicious as a display of how racial profiling at airports DOES work. The end credits are seen over a montage of 9/11 clips set to Iced Earth's "When The Eagle Cries". Beautiful. God. Oh God. OH GOD. I must go now. Nature calls. Remember, vote for 9/11, er, me!
Thanks, Rudy! Moving on. If you look here, you will find a petition to save The Loop. This proves two things simultaneously: one, yes, some people did enjoy it. And two, not many people enjoyed it, as evidenced by the hilarious lack of signatures. At the time of this writing, there are 75 signatures. 75. More people signed the "Save Youngblood" petition! Ah, the hilarity of the lack of support makes me feel happy inside.