My overall rating of "Flight of the Conchords"'s Season 1: 5/10
This episode seems to abandon the series' usual kind of lighthearted and whimsical yet everyday-relatable humour and try its hand at some darker kind. It's surprising how the very second scene in Murray's "Honda Accord" (the call from his wife) reminded me of "Porkin' across America" and surprisingly the tone of the episode was indeed such, with things getting progressively worse and worse with no reprieve. Now, I'd personally felt that "Porkin' across America" didn't really work because of how contrived the hopelessness and darkness felt in there and just how much the tragedy squeezed out any comedy - that webseries didn't measure up to the brilliant "Sex House" (not that I've rated either of the two on this site, nor rewatched in a bit). So what I'm saying is, it is, in my opinion, possible to do that type of humour really really well, or very poorly, and here we see more of the latter - just things illogically contriving to bring pain to Murray, without anything actually _funny_ or witty. The songs, the unique feature of this comedy, also weren't at all good.
This episode seems to abandon the series' usual kind of lighthearted and whimsical yet everyday-relatable humour and try its hand at some darker kind. It's surprising how the very second scene in Murray's "Honda Accord" (the call from his wife) reminded me of "Porkin' across America" and surprisingly the tone of the episode was indeed such, with things getting progressively worse and worse with no reprieve. Now, I'd personally felt that "Porkin' across America" didn't really work because of how contrived the hopelessness and darkness felt in there and just how much the tragedy squeezed out any comedy - that webseries didn't measure up to the brilliant "Sex House" (not that I've rated either of the two on this site, nor rewatched in a bit). So what I'm saying is, it is, in my opinion, possible to do that type of humour really really well, or very poorly, and here we see more of the latter - just things illogically contriving to bring pain to Murray, without anything actually _funny_ or witty. The songs, the unique feature of this comedy, also weren't at all good.
