It is plain to see that there 

are not a lot of people rooting 
for network television’s return 
to glory. The discourse around 
network television has become 
as stale as they claim the shows 
to be: We all know it’s become 
safe and is no longer breaking 
new ground. It’s currently cool 
to hate network TV. I am not 
denying that there are things to 
hate, as evidenced by anything 
that Chuck Lorre releases and 
the perpetual green-lighting 
of more “The Goldbergs” rip-
offs, rather, I am arguing that 
in the competition to see who 
can hate network TV the most, 
we 
overlook 
gems. 
“Single 

Parents” is one of those gems.

“Single Parents” is pretty 

self-explanatory. Four single 
parents struggle to balance 
adulthood 
and 
parenthood 

while clashing with their kids’ 

new 
classroom 
coordinator, 

Will (Taran Killam, “Saturday 
Night Live”), a mushy helicopter 
dad. Will is as overbearing 
as he is positive, announcing 
to the class on the first day 
all of the new 
(and 
pointless) 

initiatives he has 
imagined. 
The 

singles 
vow 
to 

get him out of 
his shell with the 
sole 
motivation 

of 
shirking 

off 
any 
extra 

responsibilities 
that may come their way. From 
there, hilarity ensues, and the 
show takes off.

The diverse cast of “Single 

Parents” is one of the primary 
reasons 
it 
works 
so 
well. 

Without feeling forced, it does 
great work to show that there is 
no one “type” of single parent 
and also highlights the bond 
their situation has created 
for them. It makes for great 
comedy to see the interactions 

between these people who, 
if not for their kids, would 
probably never have contact. 
In what other universe would 
ultra-feminist 
mom 
Poppy 

(Kimrie 
Lewis, 
“Scandal) 

and chauvinistic 
father 
Douglas 

(Brad 
Garrett, 

“Christopher 
Robin”) ever have 
contact, let alone 
be 
comfortable 

enough 
with 

each other that 
Poppy can barge 
in on Douglas’s 

steak dinner of “pasty, old 
white guys” (Poppy’s words, 
not mine)? While the writing 
feels authentic and the jokes 
land with consistency, a great 
debt is owed to the fantastic 
cast rounded out by Leighton 
Meester (“Gossip Girl”) and 
Jake Choi (“Lethal Weapon”) 
for elevating what could have 
been a forgettable one-episode 
wonder into something worth 
watching on a weekly basis.

The show is doing what 

other network shows should 
have been doing for years. 
Rather than giving us neutered 
versions of what we expect to 
see on premium cable, it takes 
the familiar tropes that we 
have come to associate with 
network television and gives 
them a fresh twist.

“Single Parents” does an 

exemplary 
job 
of 
blending 

together 
two 
of 
the 
most 

familiar formulas in network 
television history (the young 
singles show and the family 
show) and coming out with 
something timely and realistic 
for 
viewing 
audiences 
in 

2018. “Single Parents” treats 
viewers to the best of both 
worlds: all of the wacky, fun 
dating plotlines of a “Happy 
Endings” or a “Don’t Trust 
the B in Apartment 23” while 
still being able to provide the 
warmth of a family-centric 
show like “Modern Family” or 
“Black-ish.” 
Thus, 
watching 

feels like meeting someone 
new, yet having that strange 
sensation you’ve known them 
forever. So, please, even in the 
contemporary climate of hating 
anything 
and 
everything 

network, direct those energies 
towards 
something 
more 

deserving and give “Single 
Parents” a chance.

By Craig Stowe
©2018 Tribune Content Agency, LLC
10/03/18

Los Angeles Times Daily Crossword Puzzle

Edited by Rich Norris and Joyce Nichols Lewis

10/03/18

ANSWER TO PREVIOUS PUZZLE:

Release Date: Wednesday, October 3, 2018

ACROSS
1 Party with a 
piñata
7 Tin alloys
14 Online icon
15 Expo entry
16 Begrudge
17 31-day month
18 Jabber
19 Surge protector?
20 __-Cat: winter 
vehicle
21 “That wasn’t nice 
of you”
22 Italian tenor 
Andrea
24 Cricket club
25 Went down
26 Dander reaction, 
perhaps
30 1979 Hockey 
Hall of Fame 
inductee
31 Shakespearean 
bad guy
32 __ the line
33 Word with dating 
or skating
35 Airport NW of 
LAX
37 Egged on
38 Strainers
40 2018 Stanley 
Cup champs, 
familiarly
42 Yard tool
43 Swear (to)
44 Tennis immortal 
Arthur
45 “Fareed Zakaria 
GPS” network
46 Took the helm
48 Revolutionary 
icon
49 Butter square
52 Marmalade 
morsels
53 Feathery 
accessory
54 Marine animals 
named for 
flowers
56 Nabokov novel
59 Athletic shoe
60 Island group that 
includes São 
Miguel
61 Italian Riviera 
resort
62 Triple Crown 
winners

DOWN
1 Many miles
2 “Now __ seen 
it all!”

3 *Life of affluence
4 It might be rare
5 Fail big-time
6 “The creation of 
beauty is __”: 
Emerson
7 Complaint
8 Show a real 
talent for
9 *Specialty
10 “Humble and 
Kind” singer 
McGraw
11 Falls back
12 Nothing, in 
Quebec
13 Texas 
ballplayer, to 
fans
17 *Magician’s 
riffled prop
19 Yearns (for)
21 La Brea 
attraction
22 Barnyard bleat
23 Bakery 
employee
24 __ nova
25 *Swimming 
option
27 Perches for 
tots, and what 
the answers to 
starred clues 
literally contain

28 Common soccer 
score
29 Nash who wrote 
“Parsley / Is 
gharsley”
34 Big nights
36 Desert refuges
39 “Revolution 
From Within” 
writer Gloria
41 Prof.’s degree
47 Month after 
17-Across, south 
of the border

48 __ scheme
49 Bridge call
50 LPGA 
golfer 
Nordqvist
51 Video game 
rating
53 Nincompoop
55 Spoil
56 “Well, 
__-di-dah!”
57 Ball holder
58 Pack 
animal

Stand-up is to the comedy 

industry as PornHub is to the 
pornography industry: You need 
to sift through a lot of shit to get 
to the good stuff and it’s mostly 
watched 
and 
performed 
by 

straight, white men. Like porn, if 
you want to get into the industry, 
you have to learn from the best. 
And in my foolish and curious 
eyes, I got the Playboy of comedy 
internships. I would be working 
at the best comedy club in New 
York City (which, for the sake of 
this article, I will just call “The 
Club”). My internship at The 
Club was unpaid, of course, but 
the opportunity of a lifetime. The 
red-carpeted halls were filled 
with signed portraits of some 
of the biggest names in comedy, 
from Ellen DeGeneres to Dave 
Chappelle to Jimmy Fallon. I was 
in comedy heaven. My first day on 
the job, I arrived at The Club in my 
Gilda Radner T-Shirt ready to take 
on the world and start my plot for 
comedic domination. I was now 
working at The Club. I could hang 
out with famous comedians every 
night. I could live marvelously 
like Midge Maisel. I could get free 
drinks and have running bits with 
the bartender Kenny.

I snapped out of my daydream 

with a call from my boss, Randy. 
I told him I was waiting at the 
club eagerly. He kind of chuckled 
when he said, “I’m not there, I’m 
in Washington Heights, that’s 
where I work. Come here to 
Washington Heights, a full hour 
subway away from The Club.” So, 
I trekked to Washington Heights 
to what I presumed would be a 
cheap office building filled to the 
brim with comedians throwing 
jokes at each other and playing 
mini basketball with crumpled 
paper balls.

Alas, when Randy opened the 

door I discovered that his “office” 
was a closet-like room in his tiny 
apartment. His office looked more 
like a serial killer’s hideout than a 
comedy club director’s. The walls 
were covered in post-its scribbled 
with odd things like “money 
ideas” and “funny one-liners.” 
A small IKEA desk was shoved 
in the corner by the radiator, 
topped with an outdated Dell 
computer that hummed like my 
grandmother’s washing machine. 
The floor was covered with 
cardboard 
boxes 
overflowing 

with papers and stacks of books 
on everything from comedy to 
bitcoin. In a swivel chair lined 
with an orthotics insert sat Randy, 
an overweight, washed-up, failed 
comedian in black sweatpants, a 
striped polo and Costco slippers. 
He resembled what Jerry Seinfeld 
might look like if he let himself go 
or a Jewish Louis C.K. He didn’t 
look me in the eye, only motioned 
me to join him in the un-air-
conditioned “office.”

The only place to sit was a 

small foot stool next to his desk. 

I sat below him, like a shoe-
shine at a train station. In a long-
winded speech that included 
two poor Christopher Walken 
impressions, four D-list celebrity 
name drops, three uncomfortable 
Harvey Weinstein jokes and six 
digressions involving soup, Randy 
instructed me on my extensive 
intern responsibilities. I would 
craft, 
respond 
and 
forward 

emails all goddamn day. Randy 

firmly believed that the more 
emails he sent, the more likely 
people would attend shows and 
stand-up classes. Through the 
emails I sent while Randy was 
loudly meditating in his bedroom 
just three feet away, I discovered 
there were more people like me, 
more interns. There was actually 
a group of five boys gathered at a 
Marriott downtown doing work 
for Randy. They were working 
in the hotel lobby because Randy 
didn’t allow boys in his house 
for the sake of his eight-year-
old daughter. Therefore, he only 
allowed the six female interns 
to work in his office, where we 
performed all the secretarial 
duties 
expected 
of 
comedy 

interns. Meanwhile, the boys at 
the Marriott were writing and 
pitching jokes to Randy to be used 
in comedy roasts and classes. And 
they said misogyny was dead, or 
was it chivalry?

You’d think, Dear Reader, at 

this point I’d haul my ass far away 
from this sexist abuser of free 
labor. Alas, for weeks I continued 
to stick it out thinking that this is 
what comedy was. This was my 
ticket to success. This was how I 
would finally get to hug Tina Fey. 

We would get into The Club 

on Thursday nights for free if we 
brought enough people. Randy 
was always asking us to bring 
people to shows, sending us email 
after email to bring our lovers, 
friends and family with the 
promise of one day performing 
ourselves in front a crowd at The 
Club. I brought every friend I 
had in New York, of which there 
were few, in hopes of getting a 
spot on The Club stage. Every 
Thursday, I sat in the same spot 
with the other interns and Randy, 
drinking mediocre beer watching 
mediocre comics tell mediocre 
jokes. The same scrawny white 
guys, usually named Paul or John 
or Joe, got up every week making 

the same jokes about their penises 
and the women who didn’t want 
to have sex with them. They 
all mocked “kids these days” 
and how political correctness 
has made this generation weak, 
reminding the audience that 
maybe it wasn’t all that bad to 
beat your kids in the first place. 
They were racist and homophobic 
and Islamophobic and sexist and, 
naturally, not funny. I went back, 
every week, hoping maybe one 
female comedian would get up 
and remind me why I wanted to 
do this in the first place.

That female comedian was 

Gina Yashere (“The Stand Ups”). 
It was the first time I genuinely 
laughed all summer. Her routine 
was 
honest 
and 
hilarious. 

She 
shared 
everything 
from 

her mother’s anxieties to her 
struggles as a gay woman of color 
in comedy. After Gina, there was 
Taylor Tomlinson (“The Comedy 
Lineup”) whose self-deprecating 
humor and hilarious anecdotes 
about being a young female 
comedian resonated deeply with 
me and my struggles in comedy. 
Gina and Taylor and the dream 
of performing in front of a paying 
audience at a place as prestigious 
as The Club kept me going, 
reminding me why I wanted this 
internship in the first place. Still, 
as the summer droned on, Randy’s 
empty promises proved fruitless. 
And the Pauls and Johns and Joes 
kept coming back, leaving the 
Ginas and Taylors quite literally 
in the dark. It was then I decided 
to jump ship, leave Randy’s dingy-
ass apartment and never look 
back. While the internship was 
not exactly what I expected or 
hoped it would be, it taught me 
the importance of getting out of 
something that doesn’t feel right. 
Whether it’s an icky feeling in the 
pit of your stomach or just a hunch 
that something isn’t right, that 
feeling is valid and important.

I certainly learned some things 

about comedy while working at 
The Club. Firstly, straight, white 
men will always think they are 
funny, even if a silent crowd and 10 
years of failure prove otherwise. 
Secondly, stand-up comedy is a 
science. After seeing the same 
comedians experiment with the 
same material night after night, I 
noticed the ways they tailored and 
altered their performances based 
on responses from the crowd. 
Stand-up is also an art, and like 
any art, it takes time and practice 
and loads of repetition. Thirdly, 
the representation of women and 
people of color in the world of 
stand-up comedy, both on stage 
and in the crowd, is abysmal. We 
have to do better.

Still, Dear Reader, after all 

that, I’m committed to trying to 
make it in the wild, wild west of 
the comedy industry, no matter 
how many Pauls, Johns, Joes or 
Randys try to stand in my way.

Stand up & sit down

DAILY COMEDY COLUMN

BECKY 

PORTMAN

DOMINIC POLSINELLI / DAILY

‘Single Parents’ is the hope 
network television needs

Alt-J 
has 
commissioned 

remixes of their music frequently, 
usually by EDM producers. The 
recently released Reduxer is a full-
length reimagining of their 2017 
Relaxer by 11 teams of producers 
and rappers. The list includes 
Danny Brown, Pusha T and Rejjie 
Snow, along with several artists 
from outside the English-speaking 
world like Lomepal, Kontra K and 
PJ Sin Suela. If this sounds like 
a strange, improbable project, 
it’s because it is — the album 
showcases many talented artists 
trying their best with lackluster, 
ill-fitting material. The result is a 
contradictory mess that produces 
several decent tracks almost in 
spite of itself.

The British trio’s music has 

always been balanced between a 
quaint sensibility and an electronic 
sheen. The band’s first two albums 
pair frenetic percussion, buzzing 
synths and vocal distortion with 
cinematic strings and simple, 
folkish melodies. Their lyrics are 
elliptical 
and 
reference-heavy, 

revolving around sex, death and 
the 
English 
countryside. 
It’s 

difficult to say if this assemblage 
adds up to a coherent statement — 
I wouldn’t be the first to suggest 
that Alt-J embodies a certain 
kind of mannerism that values 
novelty over coherence, but the 
staging of the uneasy stylistic 
tensions is, at its best, compelling. 
Relaxer is a bit more of a muddled 
statement than the first two 
albums — not only does the chasm 
widen between the band’s “loud” 
and “quiet” personas, but the 
acoustic and analog sound of the 
first two albums is replaced by 
drum machines and seething 
synthesizers. Even the bassoon 
solo in “Last Year” and the huge 
orchestral swells in “Pleader” 
come across as digital beings, 
surreally 
summoned 
in 
a 

barren landscape.

Though “Deadcrush” and 

“3WW” begin to resemble hip hop, 
Reduxer is a decidedly new, and 
improbable, direction for the band. 
Hip hop is not the ideal format 
for an Alt-J remix. Alt-J makes 
complicated, 
slowly-developing 

instrumentals, whereas hip hop is 
a performer-centric genre where 
instrumentals are constructed out 
of a small handful of contrasting 
phrases. 
Hip-hop 
producers 

sample music wildly alien to their 
milieu all the time, but the issue 
with the “official” remix as a form 
is that remixes need to do justice 

to the original song. They retain 
the original title, and there’s a 
certain pressure on it to follow the 
original’s content. The content of 
Relaxer resists incorporation into 
rap music, even as the artists are 
pressured to do a version of the 
original songs.

Reduxer is weighed down by its 

own format. The commissioned 
artists seem at a loss as to what 
to do with what they have been 
given. There are moments of all-
out incoherence, such as in the 
remix of “Hit Me Like That Snare” 
by Jimi Charles Moody. The blues-
rock vocalist/producer makes a 
heroic attempt to rescue the song 
from itself (“Leather slings fall 
like oxygen masks / We’re going 
down, fuck my life in half”). The 
juxtaposition between Moody’s 
soulful R&B vocals and the 
ludicrous original is jarring.

More often, though, the weaker 

remixes are just boring rehashes 
of the original, with little added 

besides a verse or two from the 
rapper. The Lomepal version of 
“3WW” takes the second half of the 
song and barely alters it. His voice 
and flow are pleasant, but it doesn’t 
really feel like he really put a stamp 
on it. The Kontra K version of “In 
Cold Blood” does much the same 
thing. GoldLink and Terrance 
Martin’s remix of “Last Year” only 
barely escapes this mode through 
a deft re-contextualization of 
Marika Hackman’s vocals, but 
it flatlines with Joe Newman’s 
aimless verse, in which he counts 
to 10 in Japanese and monotones 
about leaving porridge on the boil.

However, there are moments of 

successful translation. Hex, Paigey 
Cakey and ADP turn “Adeline” 
into glazed-over codeine trap. The 
version of “Deadcrush” by Danny 
Brown and The Alchemist takes 
the original into a nightmarish 
clown world. Twin Shadow and 
Pusha T’s version of “In Cold 
Blood” strips the song for parts 
and quantizes them to a gliding 
trap beat. The most successful of 
the collection is PJ Sin Suela and 
Trooko’s version of “Pleader.” I 
didn’t think the lines “To behold 
such warmth / Call to arms these 
harmonies” could sound sinister, 
but they absolutely do here. It’s a 
remix that recalls the older term 
“flip” — this is a complete, and 
brilliant reversal, of the original.

A remix is not an homage, and 

the album loses a lot of potential 
by treating the form so narrowly. 
There are moments of brilliance, 
but they mostly arise from the 
artists going entirely counter to 
the material. Overall, the album 
feels like a pointless exercise in 
Procrustean accommodation — 
one is left with the impression 
that their talents are best applied 
elsewhere.

EMILY YANG

For the Daily

Reduxer

Alt-J

Infectious Music 

ALLY OWENS

For the Daily

TV REVIEW

“Single 
Parents”

Pilot

ABC

Wed. @ 9:30 p.m.

Alt-J remixes their sound 
and the results are mixed

6A — Wednesday, October 3, 2018
Arts
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

ALBUM REVIEW

