Eastdown and Bound


"Eastbound and Down" is not yet the greatest show in the world, but it’s worth checking out. It’s got a weird tone – partly wacky redneck stuff; partly absurdest stuff that you’d expect from the FunnyOrDie and "Foot Fist Way" guys; partly dark, depressing Tennessee Williams Southern-Gothic drama; and "George Washington" realism mixed in with  drug humor and social satire. All packed into under 30 minutes.

It’s weird when someone like Will Ferrell shows up as a guest star on the show, because the character he plays is a totally hammy FunnyOrDie type (e.g., SNL-style Comedy Acting + Over-the-Top Vulgarity) that is at once both awesome and entirely not fitting within the context of half the other plotlines, which involve the main character having problems with drugs, alcohol, steroids, and an inability to emotionally connect to people, a flat-lined career, etc. One moment you see the lead guy getting crushed by life; and the next moment you see him doing wacky cracker shtick opposite other purposely over-the-top actor-comedians. The show bounces around like this constantly.

The one-sentence pitch: It's like “Rosanne” meets “The Glass Menagerie” meets FunnyOrDie’s “The Landlord” meets "North Dallas Forty" meets “My Name is Earl,” if “My Name is Earl” was an R-rated movie by Kevin Smith instead of a Scientology-karma network sitcom.

It makes it hard to judge whether or not the show is good or bad. After four or five episodes I’m still not even sure if I like, love, or hate it. But I’ve gotta admit: It’s different, and it sometimes zigs in a different direction when you expect it zag somewhere else; not just plot-wise, but on an emotional and thematic level. And that makes it exciting for a sitcom.

I’m curious to see whether or not the show gets better or worse. Seems like it could be improved upon (balancing the comedy/drama and reality/absurdity better, working on the pacing, expanding the cast), but the current Redneck Man-Child Learns to Become a Real Man and Regains His High School Sweetheart routines will wear thin pretty quick if the show doesn’t figure out what arc to take the characters on next.

That said, after “Lost,” “Fringe,” “Flight of the Conchords,” “30 Rock,” “Underbelly,” “Damages,” and “The Office,” I’d have to say that “Eastbound and Down" is one of the best shows currently on TV, at least until "Ashes to Ashes" and "Curb Your Enthusiasm" bring forth their new seasons.

Caffeinated Contents & Luscious Links

For years I'd been carefully organizing the best Celebrity Cola links into a slick CSS/Java/HTML-styled table-of-contents. On the front end, it was just a cool, fast, elegant-looking interface. On the backend, the code was based on the work of Nick Rigby, the Drupal "Nice Menu" project, and others, and I'd layered in some little Easter Eggs of my own.

The menu boiled down hundreds of external and internal links into a little 12-item box that didn't look like much until you hovered over one of the main categories -- at which point the little category arrow would bounce and a whole new list of sub-categories would zoom onto the screen, with sub-sub categories folding out from there. Alright, so maybe that sounds lame. But, no, seriously, it was pretty awesome, as far as text-heavy drop-down/pop-out menus go ;|)

However, it was a pain to update. So I'm finally switching over to the built-in organization and navigation options offered by Blogger (collapsible archive lists, labels/tags, link-lists, news-feeds, etc.).

As a memorandum, I figured I'd drop the latest, greatest, and final version of the old "nice menu" table of contents code into a blog post. However, it's playing absolute havoc with a few of the new Blogger widgets I just added, and various style sheet conflicts are popping up, so I'm throwing in the towel. Instead, here's a really craptacular ol' ol' skool version of the previous Celebrity Cola Table of Contents & Related Hyperlinks: