Comedy about a simpler time
Yes, Netflix is hosting a sitcom about a video store struggling to survive, writes James Croot.
There’s a certain irony to a show about one of the world’s last video stores being hosted by Netflix.
After all, the company’s original mail order service and subsequent transformation into a global streaming platform was a factor in hastening the demise of bricksand-mortar home entertainment-oriented businesses.
But despite that, a few digs at its paymasters and its recommendation algorithm, Blockbuster is essentially a workplace comedy set in a location that rents out DVDs and Blu-Rays to a dwindling customer base.
The 10-episode series is the brainchild of Vanessa Ramos, a writer on Brooklyn NineNine and Superstore, so she knows the territory well. It’s not as anarchic, hilarious or ‘‘adult-oriented’’ as those two, but the potential is there and, in Randall Park, they have a terrific leading man to build the comedy around.
He plays Tim, the long-term Blockbuster employee and manager of the Grand Mill Shopping Centre store in Iron Creek, Michigan, who scrambles to keep the doors open when the failing company decides to dismantle its corporate infrastructure.
Tim will now be responsible for paying rent and all other aspects of his business and it will require a significant change in attitude.
‘‘There are ties to wear and James Patterson books to read,’’ he quips, although with immediate challenges like boosting membership and axing one of his employees to keep costs down, Tim will need more than pithy observations, especially given the state of the surrounding strip mall.
‘‘This town isn’t exactly the land of milk and honey – especially since the dairy and the apiary shut down,’’ as his oldest employee Connie (Olga Merediz) points out.
Along with the disasterprone Hannah (Madeleine Arthur) and confrontational, cynical teen Kayla (Kamaia Fairburn), Connie is perhaps more liability than asset, but to Tim, they’re family and, still traumatised by his parents’ divorce long ago, he’s not about to break them up.
Besides, he has two aces, aspiring film-maker Carlos (Tyler Alvarez), who managed to persuade a customer to rent Garden State after 2004, and Eliza (Melissa Fumero), his minimum-wage MBA and high school crush, forced back from Harvard to raise her teenage daughter. This provides the show’s Ross and Rachel tension.
There’s nothing revolutionary about Blockbuster. It is Superstore-lite and also serves up a big ol’ slice of 90s and noughties nostalgia, not only in terms of movie title namedropping and dialogue quotes, but also teenage antics from a simpler time.
With the writing quality and gag-ratio somewhat variable, it’s the amiable performances and characters who will have to win audiences over and keep Blockbuster alive beyond a single season.