Week 40: Flight of the Conchords, Season 1

It seems like everyone I know has been bugging me to watch Flight of the Conchords, a half-hour series on HBO chronicling the lives of the two members of a struggling New Zealand band who relocated to NYC. I've been trying to watch it forever but being "liberated" from HBO (read: can't afford it) means that I have to wait to get it via Netflix. Hence the long delay. Sorry.

We finally watched the first season this weekend and of course, loved it. The two leads, band members Jemaine and Bret, are dead-pan dry and lovably nerdy, clueless and obsessive. Their songs are hysterical, especially in episode 1, "Part-Time Model", which is the funniest thing I've ever heard. You can read the lyrics to it here.

The best gag in the entire show is that Jemaine and Bret have only one fan. Her name is Mel, and she's a complete psychotic. She is terrific in every scene and in my opinion, they should use her a lot more. By the way, the girl who plays Mel, Kristen Schaal, just joined the cast of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. She's a dead-ringer for a deranged Chelsea Clinton, if you're into deranged Chelsea Clinton look-alikes. Which I am.

It was probably a bad idea to watch so many episodes in one stretch together. After a while the shtick started to wear off and we were fast-forwarding here and there to move things along. All of the songs, while hilarious, are basically the same, so it wears thin after five or six episdoes. This is definitely a show that is perfect in a single half-hour dose each week, so lucky you if you get HBO. Me, I'll have to keep waiting for Netflix, but I'll happily do so.