Review: The Grossmalerman! Show
Forced audience laughter at things that aren’t that funny, a bouncy theme song, a three-camera set-up: no, it’s not the latest Chuck Lorre sitcom mucking up the airwaves, it’s The Grossmalerman! Show, Guy Richard Smit’s witty series.
Applying the artificial tropes of the multi-camera sitcom familiar to audiences – particularly those of ABC’s TGIF line-up – to a novel setting, Smit uses the kitschy aesthetic of those shows to create a darkly comic social satire of the contemporary art world.
Staged and filmed in front of a live studio audience in New York’s Boiler Room Studios, The Grossmalerman! Show aims to establish its genre cred right from the start. Each episode begins with an insanely catchy song, a la Full House’s “Everywhere You Look,” written and performed by Smit and Mark Ephraim. The melody is upbeat and uplifting, but the lyrics are darker and sharply cynical: “don’t let your loved ones destroy your dreams/with all that nagging and boundless needs…they never did that to Rembrandt.”
The show’s premise is a simple one straight out of the familiar sitcom playbook: sudden parental responsibility forced upon an unlikely and irresponsible parent. After a deadly bout of IBS kills his ex-wife, an alcoholic washed-up artist (the titular Johnathan Grossmalerman, played by Smit) finds himself having to take care of the child he’s neglected for most of his life. In an actual network sitcom, this would be the impetus for personal growth and change. Things play out differently – and hilariously – in Smit’s version. For Grossmalerman finds himself tormented and challenged by another acquisition – a haunted unfinished painting of Basquiat.
The live audience’s reactions (laughter, ooooh-ing, awwww-ing) are deployed by Smit and director Joshua White to maximum comic affect by creating an ironic juxtaposition of a tragic situation being seen as hysterical or a disturbing one viewed as heartwarming. At one point in the series, the studio audience lovingly cheers on a romantic scene – only it’s a marriage proposal from a middle-aged man to an eleven-year-old girl.
Grossmalerman’s attempts at personal growth often ultimately prove futile, at best. After an epiphany, he decides to stop painting penises and vaginas fucking and start painting what’s really important in life, his friends. When the gallery owner who advised him to start tackling new subject matter visit, they discover that those friends include bloodthirsty dictators such as Muammar Gaddafi.
Filled with a hilarious supporting cast (Basquiat’s ghost is a delight, as well as the Scissor Sisters’ Ana Matronic as the gallery assistant), broad physical comedy and all the conventions of a multi-camera sitcom, The Grossmalerman! Show offers a fresh take on a familiar format. Take some time out from watching Fuller House (the show was never good to begin with, people! Stop the nostalgia madness!) or Lorre’s latest and enjoy Smit’s savage satire instead. At only five episodes, watching the first season won’t take up more than an afternoon binge and will whet the viewer’s appetite for Season Two.
Five episodes watched for review. Available online at http://www.grossmalerman.com/
Created/edited/starring/written by Guy Richards Smit
Directed by Joshua White
Hunter Grayson is a lover, a lush, an amateur writer and a professional raconteur. He can be found tweeting and musing about pop culture https://twitter.com/lethallyfab