Netflix’s freewheeling ‘Chelsea’ gets lost somewhere midstream
If Chelsea is a work in progress, someone had better get to work.
In the very early going, at least, Chelsea Handler’s new Netflix talk show is less a series than a barely associated set of ideas. Perhaps someday those ideas and star impulses will coalesce into a coherent, watchable whole — but nothing on display in the show (new episodes Wednesday, Thursday and Friday;
out of four) would lead egEE you to believe that day is coming anytime soon.
The appeal the Netflix platform might hold for a talk show host is fairly obvious. Off the air,
Chelsea is free from commercial breaks, time-slot constraints and ratings pressure — leaving Handler free to do almost anything she wants, assuming she has figured out what that is.
There is, however, an equally obvious drawback for viewers. While those old-style constraints can hamper artistic freedom, they also force a host to go beyond considering what he or she wants to considering what we might want. No artist should be bound by audience expectations, but a pop-culture entertainer who ignores our desires is asking for trouble. Or at the very least, ask- ing to work in solitude.
If there’s a unifying concept at work here that distinguishes
Chelsea from Handler’s former E! series, Chelsea Lately, it’s the idea that the host is using the show and her guests as learning tools. As she put it in her opener, “I’m treating this show like the college education I never got.”
Yet somewhere between concept and execution, Chelsea has gone oddly awry. Rather than humorously highlighting her attempts at education, the taped bits that showed Handler learning about topics such as comic books and telenovelas came across as condescending at best and insulting at worst. In real life, Handler may be the most curious, open, empathetic person on Earth. On air, she’s projecting no great interest in learning from — or even listening to — the people around her.
Those people were the typical talk show mixed bag, from Drew Barrymore, Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Evans to Education Secre- tary John King Jr. The rambling chatter bounced between the serious and the inane but mostly avoided politics — a strange choice, considering Handler’s opening insistence that we “needed” her in an election year. But no worries: For that, your best bet is Samantha Bee, who has quickly made her TBS show Full Frontal an indispensable weekly stop.
Still, formats can be tweaked and directions altered. What ultimately matters more is whether you are amused by Handler’s comedy style, built as it is upon humblebrags about her dissolute lifestyle (“Call me old-fashioned, but I just want to live in reality — and then alter that reality with drugs”) and a firm conviction that adding the “F-word” to any sentence automatically makes it funny. As you’ve probably gleaned from that description, it is not a style that has ever worked particularly well for me.
If it works for you, however, start streaming.