National Post (National Edition)
Why Nirvanna the Band the Show is best Canadian TV in 20 years.
WHY NIRVANNA THE BAND THE SHOW IS THE BEST CANADIAN TV SHOW IN THE LAST TWO DECADES
Amadcap comedy about an ambitious musical act trying to find fame in downtown Toronto, Nirvanna the Band the Show first materialized in 2007 as a plucky, low-budget web series, created by longtime friends Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol. Last year, it returned as a splashy, extravagant half-hour network sitcom on Viceland, revamped for the commercial mainstream.
Its ideas are bolder and its means are more radical. Its budgets are bigger, and because the creative team is so resourceful every dollar does the work of 10. Even the title has expanded: “Nirvanna” gained a letter to curb the threat of being sued. The combined effect of these advances is a marvellous accomplishment. Nirvanna the Band the Show is the best show to air on television in this country in nearly 20 years.
As in the web series, Johnson and McCarrol play a pair of luckless, determined indie musicians — the latter the straight man, the former the clown — whose dream is to perform at the humble Queen street club the Rivoli, which they nevertheless consider, amusingly, as prestigious as Carnegie Hall. What’s changed in the decade since Johnson and McCarrol devised this scenario are their real-life circumstances.
McCarrol is an esteemed multi-instrumentalist who plays sold-out shows as one half of brother-sister synthpop duo Brave Shores. Johnson writes, directs, and stars in celebrated feature films, including The Dirties and Sundance-feted Operation Avalanche. Both have made careers of the gifts that seemed in chrysalis 10 years back. They hardly needed this revival — and that gives the whole enterprise the feeling of a lark indulged on someone else’s dime.
Every episode of Nirvanna the Band proceeds from the same basic premise: Matt and Jay attempt to book a show at the Rivoli, usually by way of some outrageous, wildly complicated scheme. But the schemes themselves — high-concept capers of the stunt-theatrical variety — are engineered with such bravura that the action crackles with slapstick thrill. They achieve this by relying on the truth.
In the web series, Johnson and McCarrol developed a sneaky, low-cost tactic for farcical antics: they would hit the streets in character, filming their unstaged interactions with often mystified passersby. The new series not only retains the technique — it amplifies it. Each week Johnson and McCarrol mastermind a feat of mischief in the world, and it’s a tour de force on the knifeedge of reality every time.
The comedy occasioned when fictional characters confront real people who don’t know any better has been explored on television before, namely on The Ali G Show. But what distinguishes Nirvanna the Band is both the attitude — Johnson and McCarrol never make anyone other than themselves look ridiculous — and, crucially, the ambition. Johnson and McCarrol aren’t interested in merely fooling the people they encounter, as Sacha Baron Cohen made into uncharitable sport. Instead, they aspire to weave them as seamlessly as possible into the fantasy they want to create. Bystanders become unwitting actors; total strangers take centre stage, simply because they happened to wander into the frame.
It’s an unusually democratic approach to filmmaking. Everyone gets a voice — even if they don’t know what they’re using it for.
Here are a few of the adventures undertaken in Nirvanna the Band’s first season: Matt and Jay build a low-rent Christmas float and infiltrate the Toronto Santa Claus Parade as it winds along College street in Little Italy. Matt and Jay stage a loud altercation during the première of The Force Awakens and are ejected from the Scotiabank Theatre. Matt and Jay travel to the Sundance Film Festival and conduct interviews with the press on behalf of a movie that does not exist. All of these things actually happened — the float actually made it to the parade, the cinema actually kicked them out of the screening, journalists actually talked to them in Park City.
Authenticity lends these exploits an energy that couldn’t be simulated. That anything at all could have happened, in other words, electrifies what ultimately did.
Better yet, Nirvanna the Band fashions its elaborate stunt-work into shapes and models familiar from movies and TV: structural homage, you might say. The web series was fairly thronged with references to pop culture, in the form of quotations, excerpts, and jokes that riffed on staples like Castlevania or The Wire. The new series, though, is more meta with its intertextuality. As on Dan Harmon’s Community, entire episodes will emulate the form and rhythms of a movie or a genre — quite often more than one simultaneously. The Force Awakens bit, for instance, comes amid a spoof of the Netflix series Daredevil. (Its climax is a blockbuster fight scene in which Matt wields Devil Sticks in a black mask.) The Santa Claus parade is infiltrated during a parody that, somehow, combines Rashomon and Home Alone.
In one episode — my favourite of the season — Matt and Jay meet for dinner at the Mandarin Buffet for a tete-a-tete that begins as a pitch-perfect imitation of My Dinner with Andre (replete with tinted film stock and shot-for-shot recreations only obsessives would notice) and ends as an oddly touching ode to Lost. And of course, it mounts this exercise in scrupulous multi-purpose tribute in a real Mandarin, around real diners and restaurant staff, roping them into the drama in a manner that — if one weren’t so certain of the truth — would seem utterly beyond belief.
This is a standing-ovation triumph, a performance of not just skill but virtuosity. At the end of every half-hour the question poses itself anew: How on earth did they pull that off?
The second season of the show, which premièred on Viceland on Friday, ups the ante. It’s as if, having at last acclimated newcomers to the lunacy, Johnson and McCarrol are free to really let loose.
Witness “The Buddy”, episode 3, a master stroke. Matt and Jay have split up for the evening: Jay wants to “do his own thing” and attend a party for musicians, and Matt, inspired by Mrs. Doubtfire, elects to don a costume and meet Jay as someone new. Matt arrives in a shaggy wig and crooked false teeth — an outfit straight out of Toni Erdmann. In character as “Tony,” Matt persuades Jay to dine with him at the restaurant in front of the Rivoli, and Jay insists Matt himself, the real Matt, come along. So emerges a daring recreation of Mrs. Doubtfire’s climactic restaurant scene, in which Robin Williams must dash back and forth between tables after a hasty costume change. Kitchens are invaded. Chokings (and rescues) are staged. Johnson has said it’s the best thing he’s ever done as a filmmaker. It’s not hard to agree.
The complexity of this episode — on a conceptual level alone — is staggering. The layers of allusion are stacked like a Russian nesting doll: Within Mrs. Doubtfire, one finds Toni Erdmann, and within Toni Erdmann, one finds, ludicrously, a longforgotten ’90s anti-drug PSA. The audience is not obliged to follow every reference — in fact I’m certain even the savviest close observers will occasionally miss a cue. The energy is infectious even when the specifics remain unclear. To watch the show is to be swept up in the verve of their brio. And of course Johnson and McCarrol are still arranging this web of references in the fray of a bustling dinner service: At any given moment, you feel, an errant diner or server unprepared could spoil the whole thing. It’s not only audacious. It is truly remarkable, and it must be seen to be believed.
Nirvanna the Band has always seemed a little precarious. There are the stunts, which are not only in peril of real-world disaster, but, perhaps more dangerously, of failing to elicit interesting results. (Johnson and McCarrol avoid this problem in part by attempting vastly more than they wind up committing to film.) But there’s also the sheer density of the series, which, especially to the uninitiated, is daunting: the intricate arrangement of jokes, careful plotting of action and meticulous orchestration of references demand considerably more from an audience than one tends to expect of a mainstream sitcom. But if a show this unabashedly silly can still qualify as “difficult” — if something so overtly low-brow can prove nonetheless sophisticated and complex — the difficulty is, at least, not without reward. That’s the trade-off with a work of mad genius.
What’s achieved is wellworth the risk.