"Joey" - The Fight Against Ignorance Has Been Lost

Ok, given the hype, I tuned in last week. I noticed a few problems in the plot:

Joey is going to try out for the role of Richard III.

This is Joey… dumb as a sock of gumballs. With a heavy New York accent (now in LA). Who has never been classically trained. Who has never done Shakespeare before. Who doesn’t understand one syllable of it (and he tried, but failed to understand the text). Who can’t even remember more than one line of the text at a time. God bless him, he’ll at least try.

You’re aware that Keanu Reeves has done Shakespeare, right?

I’m not going to defend Joey, but anything’s possible in show business.

[The Critic]

Hath not a dude eyes?
If you prick us, do we not get bummed?
If you poison us, do we not blow chunks?

[/The Critic]

I know I post this everytime Keanu Reeves and Shakespeare come up (how often is that, anyway?), but I think it’s one of the funniest bits to ever come out of that show.

Struggling actors never turn down auditions. If they’re wrong for the role it’s the casting director’s problem, not theirs.

{oops. accidentally posted to soon. to continue…}

Well, he gets the part as the understudy!

!!!

Yes, Joey is the understudy for the lead role in Richard III. He doesn’t know the lines, and when he does ‘perform’ them… they come out without meaning, since he doesn’t know what they mean. But he got the job as understudy somehow, someway. (I’m thinking the casting couch.)

But he doesn’t know the lines. They haven’t even rehearsed it. You see, apparently, understudies never get to rehearse with the cast. An understudy, without showing knowledge of being able to do the whole play from start to finish will get the job as understudy and just go home and stay home and wait for that phone call to tell them they’re on. No rehearsals for understudies. Ever.

Well, guess what happens. Joey gets the call that next day. (Yes, next day.) He’s on. You see, putting on a Shakespearean play goes like this: Day one is casting call. Day two is opening night. Joey is now expected to go on. At least he’s smart enough to realize that he’ll embarrass himself if doesn’t get around to memorizing the entire play in a few hours.

Wait… there’s more…

Joey gets two more calls. You see, he’s taken on the job of understudy in three plays, and they all suddenly want him the same day. What a coincidence. (Even for sitcoms.) And since understudies never rehearse, he really doesn’t know the lines or dances and songs of those other plays.

And so, he realizes he’s really screwed. But he figures out a solution: He convinces one sick actor to go on anyway; and he thinks he can do the one play that starts earlier and rush over to the other play to catch the second act, in which he appears. [This is LA and he’s going to ‘rush’ from one theater to the next? Can he fly?]

And so we see Joey in the wings of theater dressed up as Richard III, his family arrives in the audience to see him, and he walks on stage. The spotlight finds him, and he begins the famous siloloquy: “Now is the winter of discontent made glorious summer by this Son of York…”

Yay. He remembered his lines. Unfortunately, the curtain goes up to singing cowboys. He’s at the wrong theater!

Simple mistake anyone could have made. I’m sure the director and stage manager and all the cast and theater workers didn’t think it strange that the guy who was supposed to go on in the second act was standing around dressed up as Richard III. I’m sure the spotlight operator thought it was a last minute change that the play begins this night with a Shakespearean soliloquy. I’m sure his family didn’t think it odd showing up at the box office and buying tickets to a singing cowboy play when Joey was supposed to be doing Richard III.

Nah, these things happen all the time.
And so my dear friends of the SDMB, I give you “Joey” as the evidence that we have lost the fight against ignorance. A hunky dumb guy doing impossibly stupid things in a world that is improbably dumber. This is our entertainment.

We’ve gone beyond suspending disbelief. We’ve hung disbelief at the gallows and drawn and quatered it for good measure.

I wouldn’t say this show insulted my intelligence…I’d say it abducted my intelligence and repeatedly beat and raped it.

We have lost. Woe is our species.

OK, now that I’ve seen your full description. …YEEEESSSSHHHHH!!!

Are you seriously expecting great writing from a sitcom spinoff?

It’s pretty easy to assume that the people who are responsible for putting Joey on the air have themselves never been close to the acting profession before. They probably didn’t realize they were doing anything wrong. :smack:

Sigh… My wife is a stage manager on Broadway, so I figure her head would explode after watching something like that. After relaying this plot, she mentioned that she HAS worked with a couple of shows brought over from California. In her considered opinion, that’s probably the way California theater works. :wink:

We did from Fraiser, but this bowl of pus did spin off from Friends, so I see your point.

If you’re wondering how he eats and breathes, and other science facts: just repeat to yourself, “It’s just a show, I should really just relax.”

Hey now…don’t go ragging on So. Calif theater…quite a few shows have gone from La Jolla Playhouse to Broadway!

"The Playhouse’s brilliant and innovative productions of classics and new plays and musicals, including 41 world premieres, 24 West Coast premieres and seven American premieres, have merited over 300 major honors including the 1993 Tony® Award as America’s Outstanding Regional Theatre.
From Broadway to Moscow, a long list of the Playhouse’s productions have gone on to stages around the world. These include Roger Miller and William Hauptman’s Big River, The Who’s Tommy, Lee Blessing’s A Walk in the Woods, Matthew Broderick in How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, Tony Kushner’s Slavs!, Lifegame, Lisa Kron’s 2.5 Minute Ride, Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters, Randy Newman’s Faust, the West Coast premiere of Rent, the American premiere of Jane Eyre and the world premiere Thoroughly Modern Millie. "

Enough with the history lesson.

I thought that episode of Joey was OK…but I did enjoy the final scene with him finally getting the opening speech, only to find himself on the wrong stage…stupid, but funny visual.

You’d think that the actors of the sitcom, upon receipt of this script, would have said something…maybe LeBlanc is a dumb as Joey.

The show’s writers… is there not one who majored in English or Theater? <be right back>

Just got back from IMDB checking on the writers. We have: lack of experience; nepotism; connection with a few Friends episodes; and a resume of schlock (“Veronica’s Closet” and “Dream On”).

That explains it.
Peace.

[Forgot to include in my screed: That not only did the entire cast and crew of the singing cowboy play not give the Richard III outfit a single question; but somehow, someway, Joey got to the wings of the stage without seeing anyone dressed up as cowboys – which would have been a tipoff that he was in the wrong place.]

Oh yeah? You just wait till you post one of your ‘my eyes are bleeding’ posts, missy, and see what sympathy you get from me. Harumph. <flicks scarf over shoulder and walks out in a… well, in a harumph>

Just a friendly jab… One of the shows the wife worked on, Six Dance Lessons in Six Weeks, came through La Jolla on the way to B’way. Unfortunately, the team working on it didn’t really seem to have their act together and it closed in about six weeks. It was sort of funny to hear her complain about the “damn west coast TV people”.

While I wouldn’t watch Joey on a bet, the point of the show is not to be realistic. The point is to be funny.

The show went for funny, assuming (probably rightly) that most of the audience would understand that this was a comedy and that it’s better to get people to laugh than to worry about the nits.

While I can see the plot was contrived and predictable, not even Joey himself is dumb enough to complain that it wasn’t any good because it really couldn’t happen that way. :rolleyes:

Maybe it was an understudy writer, who got the call to produce a script the day before they started shooting the show? :slight_smile:

Seriously folks - network sitcom. Stupid. What’s so shocking? It’s why I don’t bother with them any more.

But humor relies on some elements of realism. If the story is so unrealistic that you can’t buy into it, it will not be funny.

Maybe for you, but I have found that to certainly not be the case. Toy Story, Wayne’s World, Fraiser, Ace Ventura, Finding Nemo, Father of the Pride, Shrek and even the very episode of Joey that you cite are all items that I found to be hilarious (and I’m certainly not the only one). Every one of those premises stretches the realms of plausibility to such extents, as to make that very episode of Joey seem like a documentary.

^ I just realized that I provided Joey as an example, and then compared it to itself. You all know what I meant :wink: