The
idea of a sketch comedy show with Jim Carrey, Chris Rock and Jamie Foxx
is enough to send shivers of anticipation running through most folks,
but it’s already happened, about a dozen years ago on the fifth season
of In Living Color. That reunion would cost you, what, around
$35 million right off the top these days? And that’s not even counting
David Alan Grier and his Ambien prescription.
An unruly, irreverent half-hour show, In Living Color
was the brainchild of Keenan Ivory Wayans, and it was the perfect match
for the upstart Fox Network. By the fall of 1993 and into ’94, Keenan,
his brother Damon and his sister Kim had all departed — the result of
various contract and creative squabbles — but the series still employed
a few original cast members, including Carrey, Grier and Tommy
Davidson, to go along with a new roster that included Alexandra
Wentworth, Anne-Marie Johnson, Marc Wilmore, Reggie McFadden and
others. Rock, meanwhile, migrated over from Saturday Night Live to do a bit of part-time night-player work.
This season honestly isn’t the show’s best, as it showcases the
difficulty of sketch comedy in the half-hour format unless comedic
capriciousness is fully embraced, a la David Cross and Bob Odenkirk’s Mr. Show. There’s a funny if too brief African-Americanized send-up of The Mary Tyler Moore Show,
and the idea of a talk show built around the illegitimate black
children of white celebrities — wherein Carrey delivers a perfectly
unctuous turn as Geraldo Rivera — similarly runs out of steam after
just scratching the surface potential of its conceit. These partially
birthed bits are most emblematic of the show’s struggles, but the
series also has a tendency to infuse overt “wackiness” into basically
funny ideas, as it does in Grier’s “Loomis Simmons: Custom Built
Condoms,” about a small businessman/sexual pinch hitter.
Foxx and Tommy Davidson’s recurrent “Ace and the Main Man” sketches,
in which they hold forth as chattering security guards at a variety of
locations, don’t particularly hold up as anything more than unfunny
placeholders for a clutch of celebrity cameos (Tupac’s is refreshing,
though for all the wrong reasons — Johnny Gill’s, not so much). Among
the bits that do sustain an edge are an “Ike Turner &
Hooch” bit, interrupted by fake news coverage of white looting after
the Reginald Denny case verdict, and “Jerry Seinfeld in the Ghetto,” in
which Carrey pontificates: “Projects? Looking at the state of it, I
hope they’re grading on a curve” and, “Why do they call it ‘the hood’?
Is it like the entire city’s a big sweatshirt and that’s the part you
pull over your head? What… is the deal?” Likewise, some of the musical
segments (Us3, Souls of Mischief, Me’Shell NdegeOcello, Leaders of the
New School) are bracing because so there’s so little performance
footage on some of these acts.
Housed on three double-sided discs in slimline cases stored in turn in a cardboard slipcase, all 26 episodes of In Living Color: Season Five
are presented in 1.33:1 full frame, with English 2.0 stereo mix and
optional English and Spanish subtitles. There was some uproar,
previously, over the fact that the DVD releases of the series featured
abridged episodes, trimmed for syndication. The packaging on In Living Color: Season Four
more clearly advertised that fact, but we’re back here to a policy of
don’t ask, don’t tell, and I honestly can’t discern whether or not
these are the condensed versions, though I suspect they are.
Furthermore, there are still no supplemental extras to add additional
value to the set. While it’s obvious that the major headliners (and
even probably Grier) have busy schedules and better things to do with
their time, it’s a shame that some of the series’ writer-producers
weren’t corralled for commentary tracks or retrospective interviews. In Living Color was a trailblazing series in its own right, and while it’s quite nice to get full-season releases (paging Lorne Michaels and Saturday Night Live!), they deserve to go out on a higher, slightly better-packaged note than here. B- (Show) C- (Disc)