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Show:		6.0
Picture:		7.0
Sound:		6.0
Extras:		6.0
Score:		6.0

Director(s):	Jesse Peretz • Scott Miller
Writer(s):	Demetri Martin, Michael Koman, H. John Benjamin, Tamara Federici, Dan Mintz, John Mulaney, Mark Rivers, Scott Sherman
Starring:	Amanda Peet • Demetri Martin • H. John Benjamin • John Oliver
Genre:	Comedy • Television
Website:	http://www.comedycentral.com/shows/important_things/index.jhtml
Release Date:	September 08, 2009

List Price:	DVD - $19.99
Amazon:

It’s entirely possible that I’m wrong about this, but hipsterism (that loose offshoot of emo and punk) has always struck me as being about the past. Despite the near constant obsession with deciding what’s new and where the next big thing is coming from; so much of the conversation seems dominated by the combination and recontextualization of things that have already happened (like 60s folk and punk) that the entire movement has never seemed like much more than a long-term national Halloween, where everyone is free to act like whoever they want (so long as that person is Bob Dylan). If any of that is true, then Important Things with Demetri Martin is the logical conclusion of this generation-wide identity crisis. The show contains elements clearly cribbed from any number of older television shows (most notably Mr. Show), with only the biggest hipster ever cleared for national consumption to provide the link between them. It’s not that the show isn’t funny, because it frequently is; I’d just be hard-pressed to say where its center is.

Each episode begins innocuously enough with Martin walking out before a studio audience and introducing that week’s topic, then presents a card with several options as to how to explore it. Without fail, the first option is ‘jokes’, and the show cuts to Martin performing his stand-up act before the audience. If you’ve never seen his act, it could be fairly accurately described as popsicle stick humor. It’s short, to the point, and usually based on some sort of odd non sequitur. Most of the time, it’s pretty funny, but it is exactly that: jokes that are merely a sentence long, the hold for applause, and then the next one. There’s no development of a rapport with the audience, no stories, and no real overarching personality to anything he does. True to form, the show then cuts schizophrenically from more stand-up to sketches (frequently starring actors H. Jon Benjamin and Daily Show correspondent John Oliver) to music to the most bizarre little interludes that you may have ever seen in a broadcast variety program. These include segments where an animated version of Martin (done in that recognizable hipster style featured so prominently in the advertisements for Napoleon Dynamite and Juno) says things that aren’t even supposed to be funny. It’s clearly a stylistic choice, but it’s one that undercuts the entire rest of the show, and sort of nakedly gives away just how desperately they want this show to appear cool.

As I mentioned before, this show cribs generously from Mr. Show, that David Cross/Bob Odenkirk comedy show on HBO in the mid-90s in which weird comedy sketches flowed freely into one another with very little regard for form or logic. The sketches here are about as long as those were, and much of the humor feels as if it was tapped from the same vein. Here, Important Things shows its biggest television influence (although his manner of hosting also owes something to Conan O’Brian, whose show Martin used to write for), but nowhere is creative intrusion more present than in Martin himself, a relative newcomer to the comedy scene (at least for the time that he might be a recognizable face). While much of his demeanor suggests that of a Wes Anderson protagonist, he’s clearly also trying to test the waters of being an edgier, more insult-based comic in the tradition of perhaps Denis Leary (he goes out of his way to make fun of nerds on several occasions in a way that comes dangerously close to above-it-all disdain). His use of an acoustic guitar also brings to mind Sandler and numerous others who have tried to make their way with the instrument, and a number of video interludes seem to have Andy Samberg's fingerprints all over them. Naturally, in the first season of any show, there’s a certain amount of fine-tuning to be done, even or especially with the act of the central performer. But here, Martin seems so unsure of what it is exactly that he’s good at (and his sources of inspiration so obvious) that it’s unclear of exactly what progress the show might make in the future because the bedrock on which it’s founded is so strangely formed. It could always get more obtuse and bizarre, and, hey, it worked for Martin’s old boss.

DVD Bonus Features

The disc features numerous deleted scenes, optional episode commentaries on four episodes, and ‘bonus things’-mainly sketches and drawings that didn’t make it into the final show. All in all, a reasonable start for the show, with ample room for improvement, but enough funny stuff to justify giving it another shot next season. Hopefully, that’ll give Martin enough time to decide what show it is he really wants to make, and which influence he wants to run with. This could be pretty funny if he does.