Stellar comedy ‘Quiz Lady’ comes up a winner
Awkwafina aka Karen Lum has been a regular sidekick and supporting cast member in several recent films. She voiced Scuttle in the recent “The Little Mermaid” reboot and was third-billed in this year’s “Renfield.”
In “Quiz Lady,” she plays the title role of Annie Yum, a nondescript worker stuck in the back of an office, who lives alone with her beloved bulldog Mr. Linguini and obsessively watches (and successfully beats) her favorite game show “Can’t Stop the Quiz.”
The show has had the same host for decades. His name is Terry McTeer (Will Ferrell, playing yet another eccentric TV figure), and any resemblance to Alex Trebek late of “Jeopardy” fame is accidental, I’m sure. Terry has catchphrases and wears a bow tie only once per show and then has the tie mounted on the studio’s walls.
Currently, the show has a long-running champion, a thoroughly annoying individual named Ron Heacock (Jason Schwartzman), whose bleached teeth look radioactive. Ron is a loathsomely conceited, arrogant smartypants, and Schwartzman is a blast.
When the story begins, Annie is informed by her mother’s nursing home that her mother has flown the coop. The truth is her mother owes an $80,000 gambling debt to a Tong member named Ken (Jon Park), and she has flown to Macao with her boyfriend Jeff.
This leaves Annie and her chaotic, homeless, loser older sister Jenny (Sandra Oh), who is still trying to find her “path” at age 39, to deal with the debt after Ken has his thugs kidnap Mr. Linguini. Eventually Anne and Jenny enlist the aid of Annie’s grumpy old nextdoor-neighbor Francine (the comic gold known as Holland Taylor). Francine has a photo of (the late) Paul Reubens on her wall. She thinks it is Alan Cumming.
I’m not making great claims for “Quiz Lady.” But its screenwriter Jen D’Angelo of the popular TV series “Workaholics” certainly knows how to put a story together, populate it with mostly lovably quirky types and launch it on the comic high seas. As the costumed proprietor of the Ben Franklin Hotel of Philadelphia, Tony Hale of “Veep” is a delight. As a nursing home worker named Marge, Angela Trimbur (TV’s “Search Party”) tries to tamp down
Marge’s flagrant disregard for human life. Oh’s lovably ditsy Jenny wants to tap into the “synergy of the universe,” while she waits for a settlement of a suit she’s brought against a seafood chain after she choked on a fish bone. A scene in which the “drugs kick in” for Annie will be familiar to fans of aforementioned “Workaholics.” Ferrell is also fun as
Terry, whose delusional relationship to his show has reached Ron Burgundian proportions.
Director Jessica Wu (TV’s “Billions”) is not exactly famous for her comedy chops. But her cast has them in excess. One might argue that “Quiz Lady,” the nickname Anne gets after a video of her getting all the show’s answers right goes viral, is longform sitcom television, perhaps why it has landed on Hulu after its debut in the Toronto Film Festival. If “Quiz Lady” is a sitcom, it’s a highly-evolved one that finds it refreshingly unnecessary to team its singleton sisters with love interests.
If you’re in the mood for a smartly made, smartly played comedy with the thoroughly likable Awkwafina as a person whose “superpower” is intelligence, “Quiz Lady” is a show you want to see.
(“Quiz Lady” contains profanity and drug use)