“Call of the Mild”
Not available for streaming on Hulu or CBS All Access; there are some pretty good deals on DVD copies of the third season on Amazon.
There’s something good, I think, about a show once in a while asking you to suspend your disbelief so much that you don’t even recognize it anymore. For instance: In “Call of the Mild,” the “guys” of the show, after watching a commercial starring Bobby as a rugged outdoorsman, decide to spend a week in a cabin in the mountains together to “test their mettle.” (Elaine protests; “You don’t understand it because you’re a woman,” Jim says.) After insisting that they stay somewhere remote and cut off, they bring only bagged groceries, and upon discovering there’s no refrigerator, store them outside. Obviously, they are gone the next morning. That’s a lot to swallow there already, especially considering Alex was there and thought storing the food outside of their cabin in the middle of the woods was a good idea.
At least there’s this scene:
The idiots in the cabin forage, fish, and hunt with no success (Alex catches what look like sardines), and then we flash forward to the end of the week. They all have five-o’clock shadows—how you know time has passed—and are apparently alive despite not having eaten anything besides some berries and tiny fish. Suddenly, a giant turkey wanders into the cabin and Alex is dispatched to kill it, right as Jim names it Ernie. At the garage, Louie finally gets a phone call from Alex. Elaine is worried, as they’re two days late, so Louie invites her into his dispatcher’s cage and closes all the blinds. When Elaine leaves, he’s hanging from a hook. So maybe not all disbelief has to be suspended.
“Latka’s Cookies”
Not available for streaming on Hulu or CBS All Access; there are some pretty good deals on DVD copies of the third season on Amazon.
There is also something to be said for a show that portrays casual cocaine usage as a mostly positive thing. After Latka’s grandma dies and leaves him the secret recipe to her cookies, he gets the whole garage hooked on them even though they’re initially inedible. The reason they are hooked on them, obviously, is that the secret ingredient is cocaine, quickly identified by Jim as being from southern Peru in “’74, before the rains.”
Latka too gets hooked on his cookies—and quits his job at the garage to make them full-time—and when Alex comes over to tell him about the coke, he finds a gibberish-spouting mess. (Really, it doesn’t read that much differently from Andy Kaufman’s portrayal of Latka anyway.) While going through a pretty minor-seeming withdrawal, Latka hallucinates his idol, Famous Amos, coming to visit him. Amos tells him that while he would love to say that the only things that matter in life are free, he can’t, because it’s not true. Latka wakes up and realizes that all he wants to do is make money. “Today, I am an American,” he says. It’s almost beautiful.