Scan and pan: Huff
Life. Sometimes you wake up in the middle of it. And sometimes, when you do, you feel like Russell in Huff.
I’m always giving my friends a hard time about not liking things and not being able to articulate why. And so I should probably explain why it is that I liked Huff so much, the “dark new comedy” starring Hank Azaria as psychiatrist Dr Craig “Huff” Huffstodt that’s just finished its first run on TV One. (Listening to the show’s characters, I’d always assumed that surname would be spelled Huffstadt. US pronunciation — go figure).
The appeal of this show, even from its trailers, was the prospect of seeing Hank Azaria in an extended role. He’s responsible for so many of the great voices on The Simpsons and I enjoyed him as Claude the English-mangling scuba instructor in the otherwise pedestrian 2004 Ben Stiller and Jennifer Aniston vehicle Along Came Polly.
I also have a soft-spot for the underdog and an irrational dislike of almost anything with mass-market appeal. Viewing figures for Huff in the States were disappointing. In spite of a massive marketing campaign, the show premiered to an audience of around 456,000 viewers. Only about five per cent of the posts on the Television Without Pity forum about the show are positive. (And, incidentally, some mighty strange conclusions are drawn there about the 13th episode’s climax, when Huff pushes his best friend Russell down the stairs for sleeping with his mother. These folks seem incapable of understanding why he was so riled. “He’s tolerated far more personal outrages with great equanimity,” reckons WasabiDog. “Yeah, like the guy who kept parking in his space,” says Toggle Switch. That about sums up the Americans: having your parking space stolen is worse than your best friend plooking your mother. Are they trying to be ironic?)
TV One could have given its own Huff viewing figures a temporary and artificial boost by flagging the final episode of this show a week in advance. But no, it finished abruptly in New Zealand, on Tuesday 19 July 2005, and the first we knew about it was when the tortuously good-humoured, standard TV One voice-over man boomed over the final credits: “That was the final episode of Huff on One, and so far there’s no word from the producers about a follow-up.”
Well, a great deal was made in the US media about the fact that Huff was granted a second season before the first show had even premiered. But don’t bother looking on the makers’ website for clarification. “Sorry,” says a message when you click on the link for Showtime Announcements at Google. “We at Showtime Online express our apologies; however, these pages are intended for access only from within the United States.” Well, thanks a lot. Why? Do they think they’re going to spoil it for the rest of us? Or is this the internet equivalent of DVD zoning?
It was never clear from TV One’s scheduling whether the 13 episodes we’ve now seen were the combined first and second seasons or just the first, but since most people didn’t even realise that the 13th was the last show, they’ll probably just wonder to themselves what happened to that odd American series that ran on Tuesday nights for a while. Some people I know had turned off or flicked to another channel before the end of that final show, and thus missed the most cumulatively exciting final scene to be seen on our screens in years.
Now, I say that, but I must confess I never watch The West Wing, The Sopranos, Scrubs, Cold Case, Third Watch, 24 or any of the other recent US dramas. And I doubt whether I’ll watch the Quentin Tarantino-directed season finale to CSI, either. I did enjoy the first couple of seasons of Six Feet Under, and would probably continue to watch it, but it became gradually less and less compelling as it progressed — with a few notable exceptions; the episode featuring David Fisher’s carjacking and abduction being one of them, along with any scene featuring Lauren Ambrose as the quirkily beautiful redhead, Claire. The Six Feet Under scripts didn’t so much deteriorate as become scrambled and over-complicated, as though the writers were trying too hard to be weird. Not like Twin Peaks, in which the weirdness was the central character.
And this is what I think the critics of Huff have missed in their analysis of the plots and characterisation. Perhaps American audiences (most of the online critics are from the US and there’s a notable lack of good Huff fan sites) are more sophisticated. After all, they see far more drama, they see all these shows before we do, and they seem to need that formulaic style of denouement American cinema has given the world — drama that conforms to a three-act, Joseph Campbell Hero’s Journey template.
But that’s not what I’m looking for in my TV viewing, my cinema, my reading or my fantasies. Story is just what happens to each of us, every day. It doesn’t question the human condition, doesn’t speak to the strangeness of existence, and so drama is the least interesting aspect of a drama. What is needed is atmosphere; I want an out-of-kilter, alienating, alienated view, because strange is what it is to be a human in this world. And a fucked-up world it is, too (channel hop to CNN and pick the first news story for proof).
So, in what way does Huff reflect my not-very-lofty requirements of drama? Somehow, it succeeds, in spite of characters interacting in an idealised Californian lifestyle few of us are ever likely to experience. But this is not an aspirational series. Few people would exchange their humdrum home life for Huff and his wife’s more glamorous one. The fantastical imaginings of Huff are less intrusive than they are in Six Feet Under, and there’s less of the supernatural (in a Twin Peaks sense) to annoy the sceptics. There is sex, drugs and almost every other kind of excess, but they are symbolic crutches, the landmarks in people’s screwed-up lives.
It seems that Russell Tupper, Huff’s lawyer, first emerged from the screenwriters’ imagination as “Russell Meeks”. Played with verve by Oliver Platt, Russell was far from meek as Huff’s best friend. Professionally brilliant and dangerous by turns, he was also socially destructive: Russell’s idea of a good time usually involved coke, booze and hookers in equal quantities by weight. Critics of Huff begged Platt to “tone down” his performance as Russell, but he was the classic larger than life oaf you both loved and hated in the same breath. Why would Platt waste his creative energy making Russell polite? He was believably unbelievable. And if I had a lawyer who was also my best friend, I’d like him to be like Russell. He’s a liability, but a fun one.
Russell struck me as the kind of guy who didn’t have to work too hard in law school but whose brilliance was gradually overshadowed by hedonism. But in real life, your socially wacky and dangerous friends remain just as unreliable and useless in a crisis. In TV show fantasy land, you know these idealised friends would be there for you when the going gets tough, and that you’d be there for them. Platt’s credits include The West Wing, for which he won the ‘Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series’ Emmy. And for me he was the true star of this show, too. He surely must have modelled the Russell character on Oscar Z. Acosta, the crazed attorney in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.
Azaria as Huff is likeable enough. He’s the sort of guy you might not mind opening up to, if you were in therapy yourself. But you do wonder how his brand of psychiatry could possibly work on the unwell. He just sits there, listening to his patients, occasionally repeating something or questioning what they say. Sheesh. You might just as well have a chat with your mother or the sideboard for all the real, usable advice he gives them. And ultimately, what the whole series is about, is the absurdity of any of these characters advising anyone else on how to live their lives — most of them are seriously sick themselves.
Perhaps Huff’s committed brother Teddy is the sanest of them all. Ostensibly, Teddy and the Homeless Hungarian were the most marginalised characters. Of the two, Teddy was too unpredictable and I preferred the Hungarian — a ghostly ancestor or a pricking conscience, who appears whenever Huff is required to “do the right thing”, a gatekeeper character in the Campbell tradition. These two may have been standing on the edges of normality but, as it turned out, normality was as fragile as they were. Reality was stretched taut like a roller blind that might at any moment lose its grip and go off flapping, clattering and spinning to reveal some crazy bitch standing on the other side of the glass.
The fact that Lara Flynn-Boyle of Twin Peaks had a wacko role in Huff helps me to like it, but Lara is famously but a bony shadow of her former self. She saved her best acting for the final episode, traumatised by a rape she was not yet even able to consider to be part of her own reality. Then there was Huff’s adolescent son Byrd, with that strange, squeaky, croak of a voice, and his secret girlfriend, Gail, with her strange, squeaky, croak of a voice. They’re underage, but the most mature characters in the entire series.
My positivity towards Huff runs deeper than an affinity for certain characters, though. It was a series built on a thin premise, but it worked; the frisson between the family members, Russell’s volatile personality defects — and his even more volatile clients — and above all, like a low-volume bass drone beneath everything, the atmosphere: there’s the faint smell of rotten meat in paradise, an occasional hint of insanity in a group of people putting up a front of normal, routine, organised lives.
So Huff wasn’t about perfect characterisation. It wasn’t about brilliant storytelling. It certainly wasn’t about plots too convoluted to be second-guessed, although there were some nice twists. Huff made for excellent, gripping, addictive television, nonetheless. And I’ll go out on a limb and bet there’s been no drama quite as good as this on the small screen since This Life (the British TV series about a group of young lawyers sharing a house and starring Daniela Nardini and Jack Davenport), and North Square (the British TV series about a group of young barristers sharing a practice and starring the brilliant Phil Davies).
Not even Six Feet Under.
I’m always giving my friends a hard time about not liking things and not being able to articulate why. And so I should probably explain why it is that I liked Huff so much, the “dark new comedy” starring Hank Azaria as psychiatrist Dr Craig “Huff” Huffstodt that’s just finished its first run on TV One. (Listening to the show’s characters, I’d always assumed that surname would be spelled Huffstadt. US pronunciation — go figure).
The appeal of this show, even from its trailers, was the prospect of seeing Hank Azaria in an extended role. He’s responsible for so many of the great voices on The Simpsons and I enjoyed him as Claude the English-mangling scuba instructor in the otherwise pedestrian 2004 Ben Stiller and Jennifer Aniston vehicle Along Came Polly.
I also have a soft-spot for the underdog and an irrational dislike of almost anything with mass-market appeal. Viewing figures for Huff in the States were disappointing. In spite of a massive marketing campaign, the show premiered to an audience of around 456,000 viewers. Only about five per cent of the posts on the Television Without Pity forum about the show are positive. (And, incidentally, some mighty strange conclusions are drawn there about the 13th episode’s climax, when Huff pushes his best friend Russell down the stairs for sleeping with his mother. These folks seem incapable of understanding why he was so riled. “He’s tolerated far more personal outrages with great equanimity,” reckons WasabiDog. “Yeah, like the guy who kept parking in his space,” says Toggle Switch. That about sums up the Americans: having your parking space stolen is worse than your best friend plooking your mother. Are they trying to be ironic?)
TV One could have given its own Huff viewing figures a temporary and artificial boost by flagging the final episode of this show a week in advance. But no, it finished abruptly in New Zealand, on Tuesday 19 July 2005, and the first we knew about it was when the tortuously good-humoured, standard TV One voice-over man boomed over the final credits: “That was the final episode of Huff on One, and so far there’s no word from the producers about a follow-up.”
Well, a great deal was made in the US media about the fact that Huff was granted a second season before the first show had even premiered. But don’t bother looking on the makers’ website for clarification. “Sorry,” says a message when you click on the link for Showtime Announcements at Google. “We at Showtime Online express our apologies; however, these pages are intended for access only from within the United States.” Well, thanks a lot. Why? Do they think they’re going to spoil it for the rest of us? Or is this the internet equivalent of DVD zoning?
It was never clear from TV One’s scheduling whether the 13 episodes we’ve now seen were the combined first and second seasons or just the first, but since most people didn’t even realise that the 13th was the last show, they’ll probably just wonder to themselves what happened to that odd American series that ran on Tuesday nights for a while. Some people I know had turned off or flicked to another channel before the end of that final show, and thus missed the most cumulatively exciting final scene to be seen on our screens in years.
Now, I say that, but I must confess I never watch The West Wing, The Sopranos, Scrubs, Cold Case, Third Watch, 24 or any of the other recent US dramas. And I doubt whether I’ll watch the Quentin Tarantino-directed season finale to CSI, either. I did enjoy the first couple of seasons of Six Feet Under, and would probably continue to watch it, but it became gradually less and less compelling as it progressed — with a few notable exceptions; the episode featuring David Fisher’s carjacking and abduction being one of them, along with any scene featuring Lauren Ambrose as the quirkily beautiful redhead, Claire. The Six Feet Under scripts didn’t so much deteriorate as become scrambled and over-complicated, as though the writers were trying too hard to be weird. Not like Twin Peaks, in which the weirdness was the central character.
And this is what I think the critics of Huff have missed in their analysis of the plots and characterisation. Perhaps American audiences (most of the online critics are from the US and there’s a notable lack of good Huff fan sites) are more sophisticated. After all, they see far more drama, they see all these shows before we do, and they seem to need that formulaic style of denouement American cinema has given the world — drama that conforms to a three-act, Joseph Campbell Hero’s Journey template.
But that’s not what I’m looking for in my TV viewing, my cinema, my reading or my fantasies. Story is just what happens to each of us, every day. It doesn’t question the human condition, doesn’t speak to the strangeness of existence, and so drama is the least interesting aspect of a drama. What is needed is atmosphere; I want an out-of-kilter, alienating, alienated view, because strange is what it is to be a human in this world. And a fucked-up world it is, too (channel hop to CNN and pick the first news story for proof).
So, in what way does Huff reflect my not-very-lofty requirements of drama? Somehow, it succeeds, in spite of characters interacting in an idealised Californian lifestyle few of us are ever likely to experience. But this is not an aspirational series. Few people would exchange their humdrum home life for Huff and his wife’s more glamorous one. The fantastical imaginings of Huff are less intrusive than they are in Six Feet Under, and there’s less of the supernatural (in a Twin Peaks sense) to annoy the sceptics. There is sex, drugs and almost every other kind of excess, but they are symbolic crutches, the landmarks in people’s screwed-up lives.
It seems that Russell Tupper, Huff’s lawyer, first emerged from the screenwriters’ imagination as “Russell Meeks”. Played with verve by Oliver Platt, Russell was far from meek as Huff’s best friend. Professionally brilliant and dangerous by turns, he was also socially destructive: Russell’s idea of a good time usually involved coke, booze and hookers in equal quantities by weight. Critics of Huff begged Platt to “tone down” his performance as Russell, but he was the classic larger than life oaf you both loved and hated in the same breath. Why would Platt waste his creative energy making Russell polite? He was believably unbelievable. And if I had a lawyer who was also my best friend, I’d like him to be like Russell. He’s a liability, but a fun one.
Russell struck me as the kind of guy who didn’t have to work too hard in law school but whose brilliance was gradually overshadowed by hedonism. But in real life, your socially wacky and dangerous friends remain just as unreliable and useless in a crisis. In TV show fantasy land, you know these idealised friends would be there for you when the going gets tough, and that you’d be there for them. Platt’s credits include The West Wing, for which he won the ‘Outstanding Guest Actor in a Drama Series’ Emmy. And for me he was the true star of this show, too. He surely must have modelled the Russell character on Oscar Z. Acosta, the crazed attorney in Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas.
Azaria as Huff is likeable enough. He’s the sort of guy you might not mind opening up to, if you were in therapy yourself. But you do wonder how his brand of psychiatry could possibly work on the unwell. He just sits there, listening to his patients, occasionally repeating something or questioning what they say. Sheesh. You might just as well have a chat with your mother or the sideboard for all the real, usable advice he gives them. And ultimately, what the whole series is about, is the absurdity of any of these characters advising anyone else on how to live their lives — most of them are seriously sick themselves.
Perhaps Huff’s committed brother Teddy is the sanest of them all. Ostensibly, Teddy and the Homeless Hungarian were the most marginalised characters. Of the two, Teddy was too unpredictable and I preferred the Hungarian — a ghostly ancestor or a pricking conscience, who appears whenever Huff is required to “do the right thing”, a gatekeeper character in the Campbell tradition. These two may have been standing on the edges of normality but, as it turned out, normality was as fragile as they were. Reality was stretched taut like a roller blind that might at any moment lose its grip and go off flapping, clattering and spinning to reveal some crazy bitch standing on the other side of the glass.
The fact that Lara Flynn-Boyle of Twin Peaks had a wacko role in Huff helps me to like it, but Lara is famously but a bony shadow of her former self. She saved her best acting for the final episode, traumatised by a rape she was not yet even able to consider to be part of her own reality. Then there was Huff’s adolescent son Byrd, with that strange, squeaky, croak of a voice, and his secret girlfriend, Gail, with her strange, squeaky, croak of a voice. They’re underage, but the most mature characters in the entire series.
My positivity towards Huff runs deeper than an affinity for certain characters, though. It was a series built on a thin premise, but it worked; the frisson between the family members, Russell’s volatile personality defects — and his even more volatile clients — and above all, like a low-volume bass drone beneath everything, the atmosphere: there’s the faint smell of rotten meat in paradise, an occasional hint of insanity in a group of people putting up a front of normal, routine, organised lives.
So Huff wasn’t about perfect characterisation. It wasn’t about brilliant storytelling. It certainly wasn’t about plots too convoluted to be second-guessed, although there were some nice twists. Huff made for excellent, gripping, addictive television, nonetheless. And I’ll go out on a limb and bet there’s been no drama quite as good as this on the small screen since This Life (the British TV series about a group of young lawyers sharing a house and starring Daniela Nardini and Jack Davenport), and North Square (the British TV series about a group of young barristers sharing a practice and starring the brilliant Phil Davies).
Not even Six Feet Under.
2 Comments:
two words about russell tupper... dwarf hookers. great writeup.
just had a look at that hidden page on Showtime's site, it's the announcement from 2004 of of a second season being picked up even before the frist season airs, based on the netwrok viewing roughcuts of the first five episodes.
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