Lead Balloon

I was unfair to Lead Balloon. It’s not a Curb Your Enthusiasm adaptation at all; it’s actually a bit more like a retread on I’m Alan Partridge, but not a very good one. Season three is like one and two: the world doesn’t take Rick Spleen seriously enough for his liking, so he lies and hedges ineptly to puff himself up while Marty makes annoying comments in Americanese. Raquell Cassidy as Spleen’s wife is adorable and anodyne, like a queen of the universe where houseware ads are made. She’s half the problem with the show, but most of the cast are pretty tame too. Most of them agree that Spleen goes about everything the wrong way.

Lead Balloon has a humanist heart, so its nihilism toward Spleen comes across all awkward and wrong like Diet Vanilla Coke. The rest of the cast are satirized only reluctantly and mildly; the centerpiece is always Spleen’s massive, deceitful, bad-faith, total fucking incompetence. A lot of lulz are made at the expense of his mediocrity as a comic as well – but by the same token, Spleen has no sense of humor. Really, he’s made an antagonist by the jaundice-eyed venom with which he’s portrayed.

Extras and indeed Curb Your Enthusiasm played deep into antihero, but both allowed their subjects some small grace. Andy Millman is such a prick that his humiliation becomes fun – but Gervais leaves him tenuously redeemable, at least to the extent that the other fuck-up characters (Les Dennis, Ross Kemp) were. Larry David’s fictional self is a man-child with no manners who leaves a wake of infamy, but occasionally he does win petty moral victories over his social circle – who are in any case also awful. There is no such tension in Rick Spleen; he’s dubiously tolerable at all times. He hates everyone more successful than him when he’s not kissing their asses, tries to take credit for others’ ideas when he isn’t blaming them for his failures, and manipulates them casually with cutting remarks. If it weren’t all so petty he’d be a sociopath. 

George Costanza – in many ways, the prototype here – gets uncomfortable sympathy in juxtaposition to his world, a perpetual nightmare where he is frail and people are out to humiliate him. Rick Spleen’s only problem is being a comedian with a comfortable life who’s insecure in his middle age. There’s no reason to root for this mediocre asshole. Someone might argue that was the point, but if so it’s a stupid point. Why should I accept Kafkaesque bleakness in a universe as cuddlebear as Lead Balloon? 

More importantly: what’s funny about that? Simply that obnoxiously unpleasant people exist? There are a lot of potentially funnier ideas than this, and some aren’t even comedy. Turn it into horror; make season four about Rick Spleen stabbing a successful comic. Make mediocrity into melodrama, like Amadeus. Kill the wife and blame Spleen. Or write some real satire and have an actual comedy, not an ironic half-comedy about unfunny annoying people.