Some of the people from The League try to bring us a story of two brothers making beer.
SUMMARY
Wilhelm “Will” Rodman (Alan Aisenberg) is the owner and brewmaster of Rodman’s Brewing Company in Van Nuys, staffed by two employees, former MMA fighter Sarah (Carmen Flood) and Chuy (Marques Ray). Will is losing money fast on his brewery, which suffers from poor management, poor distribution, and the fact that he accidentally gives his beers pornographic names. The only thing that it has going for it is Will’s beer-making skill, which he learned from monks in Belgium. Things become crazier when Adam (Mike Castle), Will’s brother who is also a brewmaster, shows up. The four work to turn the brewery around, helped by Foodtruck Couple Elvis and Becky (Zach Reino and Inanna Sarkis), alcoholics Matt and Jack (James Earl and Mike Mitchell), and Truffle (Flula Borg), a monk from Belgium.
END SUMMARY
So, I was a big fan of The League when it started out. I thought it was funny, the characters were interesting, and that it represented a fun group of people passionate about a common interest. However, over time the show started to devolve more and more into crude humor and heavily flanderized the characters. A big sign of this was the increased presence of Jason Mantzoukas’s character Rafi, who was frequently just used for whatever disgusting character trait the writers needed. He was incestuous, he defecatee when he vomited, he orgasmed when he defecated, and his best friend was a crack-dealing porno director named Dirty Randy (Seth Rogan). The show’s true low point was when they had an episode that was just dedicated to the two of them.
Unfortunately, this show starts its characters about 5 seasons into The League in terms of dimensions and the humor is even more crude. Every human bodily fluid is shown somewhere in the show (yes, even that one. Yes, that one too) and usually ingested as part of the beer. Adam, who is supposed to be the crazed uptight add-on, is so insufferable that you will legitimately wonder how he has survived this long. I don’t mean in terms of starving in the street from his own inability to work with people, I mean that no one has beaten him to death. Wilhelm is so incompetent at managing his own business that he would be more at home at Paddy’s Pub in It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, but he is not lovable enough that we are rooting for him to overcome it. Chuy alternates between “too stupid to live” and “too clever to be that stupid.” Sarah has the most potential as a character, but the exploration is never quite there.
Honestly, I just didn’t think too much of this show. It was a slog to even get through the season to see if it got better… it didn’t. If you’ve really been looking for a plotline about the flavor of human urine after horchata, then you will enjoy this. If not, maybe find something else.
If you want to check out some more by the Joker on the Sofa, check out the 100 Greatest TV Episodes of All Time, Collection of TV Episodes, Collection of Movie Reviews, or the Joker on the Sofa Reviews.
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