Review – The League
The League – FX – 10:30pm Thursdays – USA
FX, a network famous for its gritty dramas The Shield, Rescue Me and Sons Of Anarchy, has had limited success when it’s come to comedy. Obviously their only standout is It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia while shows like Starved, Testees and Son Of The Beach have done about as well as shows called Starved, Testees and Son Of The Beach really deserve to.
Desperate to replicate the success of Always Sunny FX has launched The League, a new comedy that can best be described as It’s Always Sunny with fantasy football. Depending on how you feel about Dennis and the gang that’s either a great idea for a show or an awful idea for a show.
For me I found the first season of Always Sunny to be quite the laugh factory but the subsequent seasons quickly descended into the predictable formula of ‘controversial topic + yelling over the top of each other = every episode ever.’ The League doesn’t take very long to establish itself as being from the Always Sunny school of ‘don’t go there!’ comedy as the pilot alone features such rich topics as fingers up asses, paedophilia, and the smoking of pubes to get high.
The League revolves around Pete, his mates and their fantasy football league. Joining him in the league are Andre (the guy who smoked the pubes), Taco (the guy who smokes bongs), Ruxin (the guy accused of being a pedo) and Kevin (the guy who’s five year old says words like ‘whore’ because if Meet The Fockers taught us anything it’s that kids who swear are HIGH-larious)
Despite most of the jokes feeling very ‘been there done that’ The League still delivers a couple of solid gags. In the pilot we learn that Ruxin and Kevin are both lawyers and when Kevin makes a deal to reduce Ruxin’s clients sentence… but only if Ruxin gives up his first round pick in their fantasy draft… the scene delivers many laughs. Unfortunately that rare moment of cleverness was hidden within a show that preferred to rely on the old comedy standby of a character singing a sexually explicit wildly inappropriate song for a 5 year olds birthday party.
The League, while fairly flawed, was better than when Danny DeVito showed up to ruin It’s Always Sunny but this is still just more of the same jerk comedy we’ve come to expect from FX. Obviously if you like Sunny (even the DeVito years) you’ll like The League because it’s yet another comedy about assholes. For me, though, it just felt like I’d seen it all before and while I love FX’s edgy dramas I really haven’t been able to get on board with their “edgy” comedies and The League doesn’t change that trend.
Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Bad
