Titus – Seasons One & Two
Picture: C+
Sound: C+ Extras: C+ Episodes: C+
Christopher Titus is yet another stand-up comedian who
came out of nowhere and had a hit TV show.
Titus (2000) was a series that made fun of dysfunctional families
and deals with a semi-alcoholic father (Stacy Keach) at home and mentally ill
mother (Francis Fisher) in a mental institute.
Instead of being the kind of innovative comedy like we would have had in
the 1970s like Soap, All In The Family or Alice, we get an
outright comedy that is trying to be funny very often with things that have
nothing funny going for them. Here
comes the first two seasons on DVD.
Add a brother and ancillary characters and the show is a
mess without focus. Remarkably, to show
how low comedy on TV has fallen, this received Emmy nominations, but thankfully
no wins. Since Mr. Keach was typecast
as the character he played, there was no ironic distance to his work. The episodes are as follows, with audio
commentary tracks indicated by an *:
1) Dad’s
Dead*
2) Sex With
Pudding
3) Dad
Moves Out
4) The
Breakup*
5) Titus
Integritous
6) Red
Asphalt
7) Mom’s
Not Nuts
8) Intervention
9) Episode
Eleven
10) Titus Is Dead
11) The Test
12) The Surprise Party
13) What’s Up, Hollywood?
14) Locking Up Mom
15) The Perfect Thanksgiving
16) Tommy’s Girlfriend
17) The Reconciliation
18) The Last Noelle*
19) Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!
20) When I Say Jump
21) Episode 27
22) The Smell Of Success
23) Deprogramming Erin
24) Nascar
25) Life Forward
26) The Gift Of The Car Guy
27) Tommy’s Girlfriend II
28) Hard Ass
29) Private Dave
30) Three Strikes
31) The Pit
32) The Pendulum
33) The Wedding
That is two seasons worth of shows with little growth and
a formula that pretends not to be a formula.
It’s a shame that the show could not do something more innovative with
the material at hand, but instead goes for the obvious celebrated ugliness that
is an acquired taste at best. Think
cult status. I had hoped the show would
work better on DVD, but that did not change a thing. I just did not realize how crass the series was, but some people
love this. More power to them, I guess.
The 1.33 X 1 image was filmed and is not bad, though the
DVD has definition limits. This looks
better than it did in its original broadcast.
The Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo has no surround information and the
fidelity is good enough. Extras include
a booklet inside the box that contains the six DVDs in three slender cases, a
hidden intro by Titus on DVD 1, a couple of trailers on DVD 3, and on DVD
6: Hard Laughs is a featurette
about the making of the show, promo for the show’s debut episode, rehearsal
footage and a repeat of the two previews from DVD 3.
- Nicholas Sheffo
