'Blue Mountain
State,' flunks the course
Tramps the familiar ground of gross-out college humor
By Tom Conroy
Jan 11, 2010
When a TV show leaves a reviewer struggling to come up with printable euphemisms or scientific terms, that’s usually a bad sign.
Spike’s new comedy series “Blue Mountain State” features graphic (by basic-cable standards) depictions of masturbation, voyeurism, urolagnia, multiple-partner sex and a mild form of coprophilia. Oh, and there’s also a tight shot of a guy vomiting in a goat’s feeding bowl.
The series, which will air on Tuesdays at 10 p.m. but is getting a sneak preview tonight at 11 p.m., is either a knockoff or (to give the show’s creators the benefit of the doubt) a parody of the post-“Animal House” college sex comedies of the late ’70s and early ’80s.
Alex (Darin Brooks) is a freshman who plans to spend four years taking it easy as Blue Mountain State University’s second-string quarterback; Sammy (Chris Romano, who is also credited as one of the series’ creators under the name Romanski) is Alex’s dorky best friend and roommate.
Alex is meant to be the sort of glib charmer played by Tim Matheson in “Animal House” and by Joel McHale in “Community,” but Brooks can’t quite pull it off. It doesn’t help that the producers have followed (or parodied?) the tradition of hiring actors who seem to be pushing 30 to play college students.
Romanski the screenwriter has given Romano the actor the task of performing most of the disgusting behavior mentioned above. The actor certainly gives the impression that his character is enjoying himself.
The creators might argue that the gross-out humor is part of the parody, but they simply copy, with no irony, many of the worst features of the college sex genre — for example, gratuitous female nudity (again, within the constraints of basic cable) and the clichéd character of the controlling virgin girlfriend.
Here and there, some cleverness emerges. As the team’s coach, Ed Marinaro, a former football player who proved he could act in such series as “Hill Street Blues” and “Sisters,” gives an amusingly obscene version of the typical football pep talk. It’s unclear whether the character’s resemblance to Al Pacino in “Any Given Sunday” is attributable to the show’s makeup artists or simply the ravages of time.
The character of an overbearing senior player named Thad (Alan Ritchson) starts out funny — he’s constantly forced to deny that his hazing rituals are “gay” — but the script, typically, takes this too far.
Oddly for a show that shares its genre’s obsession with closeted homosexuality, there is far more male seminudity than female seminudity in the premiere episode.
Again, maybe that’s part of the subtle parody. But since this is Spike’s first attempt at a situation comedy, a more likely explanation is incompetence.
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