With just a cursory glance, the fantasy football premise of The League might alienate potentially interested viewers who don’t know much about NFL player stats and thus think they won’t get half the jokes – this isn’t true. In fact, that really couldn’t be further from the reality of the series. Fantasy football might be their obsession, but the show’s sense of humor centers on how friends really rag on one another. When five guys get together to hang around and drink beer, the conversation is rarely civil and no man’s dignity is safe. The League has one of the truest depictions of how guys behave on television and with each season it only seems to get better. The fantasy football might be what brings them together for daily drinks, but it’s the senseless bashing of one another’s stupidity that keeps the audience entertained and coming back for more.
At the end of the first season, Andre (Paul Scheer) had won the league’s Superbowl and went home with the coveted trophy, the Shiva (named after a girl they had a crush on in high school). The second season starts with the draft for the second season of their league inspiring Pete (Mark Duplass) to go to Vegas for the event and sees an opening in their league for a new member. They group has to choose between Kevin’s (Stephen Rannazzisi) wife Jenny (Katie Aselton), whose knowledge of football scares them all and ends up backing Ruxin (Nick Kroll) in the draft, and the obnoxious Rafi (Jason Mantzoukas) who has no concept of personal boundaries. Rafi wins out but only temporarily and soon enough Jenny gets his spot. With the league at full capacity again, the trash talk continues between wedding anniversaries, holidays, high school reunions, and many petty, shameless acts that are pretty much par for the course.
The dynamic of the group from the first season gets a nice kick from the increased presence of Jenny and Rafi as it helps to even the playing field with how often Ruxin or Andre end up as the brunt of the group’s jokes. Rafi becomes the low end of the totem pole giving way to the very rare moments when comedian Paul Scheer gets to give as good as he gets; it really doesn’t happen often. Jenny, however, is easily the most necessary addition because without her Pete and Kevin usually get by with very few jokes at their expense. Jenny changes that formula so that pretty much anyone can be the target of the group’s ridicule at any time, even her, though usually, when she ends up on the bottom, it has more to do with her being embarrassed or proven wrong and not so much ridiculed. She is, after all, the only character in the league who seems to have any idea what they’re doing.
The second season is an improvement over the first in comedy, length, and writing, but it does have one major fault: too many Taco (Jonathan Lajoie) musical numbers. The man may be something of an internet celebrity, but The League really went overboard in the amount of time they gave him for musical numbers. When the writers can work the songs in naturally to the episode’s context it’s fine, but half the time they go out of their way to give Lajoie a stage for songs that rarely reach the same level of comedy as the rest of the show. They held back with him more in the first season, but it seems like when they doubled the number of episodes for the second season they tripled the amount of Taco’s singing. Without the music, Taco had plenty of great moments aided by the fact that it’s never entirely clear if he’s not just stupid but also a little evil, they didn’t need to pad the season with extra Taco time.
Blu-ray Bonus Features
With so much of the comedy arising from improvisation, the extras have a few promising features for any fans of the series looking to prolong the comedy buzz from the season’s 13 episodes. The frontrunner of the extras is the 9-minute gag reel which should leave any viewer of the show in tears and then alternate takes on the jokes in yet another 9-minute reel. The latter isn’t nearly as funny as the former, but it’s still fun to watch the actors blurt out different obscenities for each take. The two featurettes of the set cover Andre’s ugly Kluneberg painting and how it was made and the other is about Taco’s alternate identity “El Notario”. Remember how I said the season was a bit too indulgent of Lajoie’s musical comedy? Well the final featurette is a collection of his songs and video moments from this season. Finally, the set includes extended versions of the season’s episodes and also included deleted scenes.
"The League: The Complete Season Two" is on sale October 4, 2011 and is not rated. Comedy. Directed by Jeff Schaffer. Written by Jackie Marcus Schaffer, Jeff Schaffer. Starring Mark Duplass, Jonathan Lajoie, Katie Aselton, Paul Scheer, Stephen Rannazzisi, Nick Kroll, Nadine Velazquez.
