Live tweeting turned into a TV series
The show: Difficult People, Season 1, Episode 5 The moment: The tween blogger
Julie (show creator Julie Klausner) enters the diner where her GBF Billy (Billy Eichner) works, and flips open her laptop. (The two are comedians playing struggling versions of themselves.) “Have you heard of Cissy Donato?” she asks.
“No, but I’m pretty sure someone called me that in my youth,” Billy replies.
“She’s a YouTube child star who has seven million subscribers,” Julie says.
She shows him a clip of Cissy whining, “People are begging me for my Nicki Minaj impression.”
“Are you trying to waterboard my eyes?” Billy asks.
“We are being lapped by people less talented and way younger than we are,” Julie says.
“We could log 10,000 hours of practice and these medium talents would still get three million views,” Billy agrees.
“Malcolm Gladwell is a dirty little liar,” Julie says. “And a lousy kisser.”
Welcome to Seinfeld 2.0, where the leads are nastier, more self-involved and less successful. They happen to be right: The 2010s are rife with mediocrity. The wrong people succeed for the wrong reasons. Complaining about that is fun.
But is it enough for a series? Jerry Seinfeld had a voice, a point of view. Julie and Billy specialize in picking apart what other people do. They don’t want to be famous for making pop culture — they want to be famous for commenting on it.
Their quips are quick and they make me snicker. Their comedy pals do fun cameos. But the enterprise feels like — and rarely goes deeper than — live tweeting with production values. Difficult People streams on Shomi. Johanna Schneller is a media connoisseur who zeroes in on pop-culture moments. She usually appears Monday through Thursday.