Being able to watch the two episodes, the show definitely lives up to the anti-hype.
On the positive side, the diversity of the show is modern. Bonnie Boland seemed to be the most talented, Mel Stewart and Chuck McCann show some chops, Teresa Graves seems underutilized, and the guest stars (Tim Conway, Robert Culp, France Nuyen) play ball pretty well.
Like Laugh In, to the modern ear the jokes alternate between cornball and mildly funny. What they would have called the "blue" humour isn't much to the modern sensibility, aside from a latent creepiness that can pop up. Some of the formatting, like the four pane trick, is creative and could have probably had a future.
The problem is, instead of the bright colours, interesting music, and general upbeat mood, it's just rapid fire sketches, noises, and visuals in a sterile white room. This isn't accounting for the era, even in the TikTok age, the sketches come very quickly, to the viewer in 1969 it must have been a shock.
The random nature of the skits is part of the format and probably leads to killing it, as it makes any set-ups seem really laboured ("you get one phone call..."). The longer sketches ("E. Eddy Edwards", the "sex"/faces montage) also are unfortunately the complete duds of the package.
The ugly part is the synthezier, which aside from a riff that sounds like an NES theme from the 80s, just becomes a complete mess of noises and bad pacing.
The pace, the white light, and the constant weird "churning" noises go from annoying to literally disconcerting after about 5-10 minutes. Purely subjectively, my stomach started feeling uneasy in the second half of the second episode, there might be a weird harmonics issue.
It's interesting to watch and imagine what a family watching this in the era of 3 channels would have thought. Sadly, nothing else of note.
On the positive side, the diversity of the show is modern. Bonnie Boland seemed to be the most talented, Mel Stewart and Chuck McCann show some chops, Teresa Graves seems underutilized, and the guest stars (Tim Conway, Robert Culp, France Nuyen) play ball pretty well.
Like Laugh In, to the modern ear the jokes alternate between cornball and mildly funny. What they would have called the "blue" humour isn't much to the modern sensibility, aside from a latent creepiness that can pop up. Some of the formatting, like the four pane trick, is creative and could have probably had a future.
The problem is, instead of the bright colours, interesting music, and general upbeat mood, it's just rapid fire sketches, noises, and visuals in a sterile white room. This isn't accounting for the era, even in the TikTok age, the sketches come very quickly, to the viewer in 1969 it must have been a shock.
The random nature of the skits is part of the format and probably leads to killing it, as it makes any set-ups seem really laboured ("you get one phone call..."). The longer sketches ("E. Eddy Edwards", the "sex"/faces montage) also are unfortunately the complete duds of the package.
The ugly part is the synthezier, which aside from a riff that sounds like an NES theme from the 80s, just becomes a complete mess of noises and bad pacing.
The pace, the white light, and the constant weird "churning" noises go from annoying to literally disconcerting after about 5-10 minutes. Purely subjectively, my stomach started feeling uneasy in the second half of the second episode, there might be a weird harmonics issue.
It's interesting to watch and imagine what a family watching this in the era of 3 channels would have thought. Sadly, nothing else of note.