Strangers with Candy: The Complete Series (1999-2000) – DVD

Image A- Sound B+ Extras B
"Old Habits, New Beginnings," "A Burden's Burden," "Dreams on the Rocks," "Who Wants Cake?," "Bogie Nights," "Let Freedom Ring," "Feather in the Storm," "Jerri Is Only Skin Deep," "The Trip Back," "The Virgin Jerri," "Behind Blank Eyes," "Yes, You Can't," "The Goodbye Guy," "The Blank Page," "Hit and Run," "To Love, Honor & Pretend," "Blank Stare, Part 1," "Blank Stare, Part 2," "A Price Too High for Riches," "Jerri's Burning Issue," "Is Freedom Free?," "Trail of Tears," "Invisible Love," "Is My Daddy Crazy?," "Blank Relay," "Ask Jerri," "There Once Was a Blank from Nantucket," "Bully," "The Last Temptation of Blank"

by Travis Mackenzie Hoover "Strangers with Candy" is at once extremely clever and not quite clever enough. On the one hand, its gleeful shredding of After School Specials is fanatically faithful to its target, turning the form's mealy-mouthed platitudes into the kind of dispiriting cruelty that is part and parcel of actual high school. On the other hand, the show's total devotion to that bit of satire means it doesn't hit any other targets. Though its heroine–Jerri Blank (Amy Sedaris), a 46-year-old former "boozer, user and loser" attempting to turn her life around by going back to secondary school–receives a constant stream of parent/teacher figures and learns negative life lessons as a result of her own corruption, the whole thing is fanciful to the point where you can shrug it off as one more naughty bit of college humour. Authority here isn't based on any real-life examples: they're just cartoons dishing out arbitrary meanness; the show's spirited inhumanity often drew a blank face out of me.

To be sure, "Strangers with Candy" isn't lazy in its florid attack on its satirical target. Jerri Blank proves to be the most vicious naïf in the history of television: at once unworldly and jaded, she rampages across the student body in an attempt to sexually gratify herself and feed her ego/body image/gullet/what-have-you. Her criminal fashion sense and Frank Gehry hairstyles further underline her grotesque lack of social and moral guile–and she makes an excellent fit with the educators who couldn't care less about the student body. History teacher Chuck Noblet (Stephen Colbert) bastardizes the past and works at crushing Jerri's spirit ("You're only as attractive as we think you are") while art teacher Geoffrey Jellineck (Paul Dinello) acts kindly and considerate but always swings the conversation back to himself. Worst of all is Principal Onyx Blackman (Gregory Holliman), a childish man with grandiloquent expressions that only serve to accent his ridiculousness.

But you don't notice the true corruption of a genuine high-school experience. Official cruelty lies in what isn't said–in the possession of ulterior motives and the use of the moral high ground as tools for brinkmanship and mental game-playing. At Flatpoint, everything's out in the open, which has the effect of sucking out the tension. The insults Jerri absorbs (and redistributes) don't really have a referent–and though the lessons she learns glorify the kind of grave injustices that torment high schoolers (drugs, bulimia, racism, etc.), their applications lack edge because they're so clearly cartoons. Much as Principal Blackman delighted me with his pomposity ("Jerri, I'm an obtuse man, so I'll try to be oblique"), I would have preferred to see him connected to something genuine. Satirizing After School Specials is pointless if you don't reveal anything about their resonance.

In actuality, the parents and teachers act more like students–and are ridiculed like them. A running gag finds Noblet and Jellineck engaged in a furtive gay relationship, one that's complicated by the self-involvement of both parties; this is justification for much finger-pointing, although the source of the mockery is uncertain. (The satirical purpose of Blackman's immature power-tripping is similarly elusive.) And as excellent as Deborah Rush is in her stepmother role, she's simply the most popular girl in school putting down the weakest member of her household. This might have been a legitimate notion were it thought through more comprehensively, but conceptually the show feels like it was put together on the fly–potentially great ironies peter out into excuses for the writers to kick targets. The characters aren't high-schoolers so much as the writers are.

I suppose my biggest criticism is that "Strangers with Candy" becomes rather obvious in its joke-making. It's easy to predict that Noblet will destroy history in a bleak or authoritarian way, that Jellineck will turn encouragement for someone else into encouragement for himself, and that Jerri will say something sexually inappropriate at every turn of the screw. The lines change, but the structure stays the same–and it's impossible not to sense the monotony. Because the cast and writers are bright and energetic, occasional bits do kill, such as when Noblet notes of the fatal nature of syphilis, "Historically, [it's] right up there with Germans." Yet the scattered high notes are no compensation for the general flimsiness of the material. I can see how a cult formed around "Strangers with Candy", but to me, it's all attitude and no meaning–a show that uses satire as a pretext for random meanness and "political incorrectness." There's nothing wrong with either, but alone they just hang in space.

THE DVD
Paramount reissues "Strangers with Candy"'s 30-episode, three-season run on six discs packaged in a faux-Trapper Keeper. The full-frame, tape-based image is largely clear and bright, though a bit of video noise rears its head from time to time and the climax of "Ask Jerri" (3.7) suffers from strobing. The utilitarian Dolby 2.0 stereo audio betrays the show's cable-television roots. Extras begin with commentary on nine episodes–eight in season one (four per disc) and one for the series finale, each featuring Sedaris, Colbert, and Dinello. At first, they seem merely convivial, content to laugh at jokes and speak vaguely on the awesomeness of various cast members, but in spite of themselves they manage to reveal the origins of various jokes (many were created simply by cutting and pasting various lines together), the ways in which they kept costs down (e.g. borrowing crew members' cars for props), and the nature of the abandoned school they used, which came complete with a padded room. All told, some fairly decent yak-tracks. Moving on:

DISC ONE

Deleted Scenes (15 mins.)
14 in total, many of which simply extend a scene by one line or gesture. Exceptions include an encounter between Jerri and evil rocker Buddha Stalin (he advises her in her photo censorship fight) and Jellineck defacing a picture of Jerri for stealing his school-paper advice column job. Two elisions already restored to the director's cuts of "Trail of Tears" and "Is My Daddy Crazy?" resurface here to pad things out.

Rounding out the first platter are Comedy Central "Quickies" for "The Colbert Report" (2 mins.; "The Word" is "truthiness"), "Reno 911" (2 mins.–an ill-fated rub-and-tug raid), and "Drawn Together" (1 min.–X-ray vision in the shower), a trailer for the "Strangers with Candy" movie, plus previews for "Dr Katz: Professional Therapist" Season One, "Patton Oswalt: No Reason to Complain", and "South Park" Season Seven that begin on startup.

DISC TWO

Unaired Pilot (22 mins.)
"Who Wants Cake?" (1.4) originated as the series pilot. Other than a few cast changes (Colbert and Dinello in multiple roles; the stepmother is played by Sarah "Coach Wolf" Thyre) and a subplot introduced concerning Jerri's extra-curricular volunteering at a hospital, it follows the trajectory of the episode proper fairly closely.

"The Trip Back" (27 mins.)
A vintage PSA with the incomparable Florrie Fisher–the inspiration for Jerri Blank–as she lectures an auditorium full of teenagers and speaks many of Jerri's lines. Alas, she makes herself a target for smartasses by having zero polish and a commitment to bluntness in a thick Brooklyn accent. She's alternately hilarious and heartbreaking for her total lack of self-awareness–one almost feels sad for her use as a target for TV comedy.

DISC THREE

Interviews from the Set
The actors are interviewed in character: Jerri (2 mins.) types on a keyboard while expounding on her favourite foods and where she'd like to vacation; Principal Blackman (3 mins.) discusses his own vacation and his favourite animal (a porpoise); Noblet and Jellineck (6 mins.) reveal their lesson plans and the death of Jerri's father; and VILLAGE VOICE cartoonist Ward Sutton (3 mins.) expounds on his contribution to the opening animation (which began in Season 2) and his appearance in an episode. The first two are pretty much a bust, showing how the whole show hinges on good writing; the third is okay, nothing to write home about; and Sutton is genial enough.

DISC FOUR

Museum of Television and Radio Interview (44 mins.)
Sedaris, Colbert, Dinello, Hollimon, and executive producer Kent Alterman sit down with the Museum's TV curator and discuss the series. If it's nothing earth-shattering, at least they enjoy playing off each other–to the delight of the audience. Though Hollimon doesn't chime in very much, there's a good story about touring in his Second City days and frightening some all-white towns.

DISC FIVE

A Message from Bob Whitely (2 mins.)
Will Ferrell–guest star on "Trail of Tears" (3.3)–assumes his role as Indian cultural immersion camp director Bob Whitely; he explains how the poker chips are coloured like various ethnic groups to our stony silence.

Mr. Noblet and Mr. Jellineck Present Their Research Trip Scrapbook (3 mins.)
The two teachers present their "research trip" to Cabo San Fresco, which gets progressively gayer until Jerri ruins everything. Another unfunny, useless addendum.

DISC SIX

Dance Sequence Compilation (7 mins.)
The most memorable of the credit-sequence dance sequences are offered for your delectation, with an option to play them as a loop. Useful if you want to get to them without clawing through an episode.

Blooper Reel (24 mins.)
A horribly-distended feature that intersperses bloopers with repetitions of the various catchphrases (à la Jellineck's refrain of "Goddamnit!"). A needless bit of self-love.

Storyboard Animation (1 min.)
A blink-and-you'll-miss-it screen/storyboard comparison for the title animation. Again, who needs this?

22 mins./episodes; NR; 1.33:1; English DD 2.0 (Stereo); CC; 6 DVD-9s; Region One; Paramount