Karen Walker, meet George Costanza

Sometimes God just does you a solid.

Like at the end of Animal House, when that kid is sitting on his bed reading a Playboy magazine, and out of nowhere, a Playboy Bunny flies through the window and lands on his lap.

And the kid looks up to heaven and exclaims "Thank you God!"

So when I saw this, all I could do was look to heaven and say...

Thank. You. God.



Oh, and there's a :30 cut down, too!



I honestly can't believe it has come to this for Megan Mullally. Will and Grace was a pretty good sitcom, and the Karen Walker character that Mullally created, the smart mouthed lush with the jiggly rack and penchant for prescription drugs was an absolute classic. The lines that came out of her mouth were almost always so wrong that it made them so absolutely and incredibly right.

So what happened? Since Will and Grace, Mullally has seemed to suffer from the Seinfeld curse. She's a talented actress, comedic, funny, no reason she shouldn't be able to get a show. But much like Michael Richards and Jason Alexander and Julia Louis-Dreyfus, for Mullally... not so much.

Ok, ok. Julia Louis-Dreyfus has a show on CBS and it's doing well. But it took her 6 years after the fall of Seinfeld to get there. Michael Richards isn't going anywhere, I guess, since he forked himself at the Laugh Factory.

And Jason Alexander... well, it looks like the cheap, petty and amoral George Costanza may have been the career acme for Alexander, unless 1996's Dunston Checks In suddenly re-awakens to spawn a slew of sequels and spin-offs.***

Karen Walker, meet George Costanza. Two memorable characters created by two talented actors, who became victims maybe, of the personas they helped create. Or maybe it's just a question of bad management and representation.

But "Turn the Tub Around" ?

The first time I saw this I thought it was meant to fall under the heading of "so bad it's good."

Obviously I was mistaken, because this is just so bad, it's really, really bad.

There's just something ... off... about the look of this thing, like a cheaply produced music video which has been shot on video, then had a lot of heavy filtration added in post to try to hide the video-ness of it.

There's no one else in this unusually dark and creepy supermarket except Mullally and these 5 stock boys. I'm pretty sure the supermarket is so dark because most of the production lights are trained on Mullally's face, which after 10 seconds suddenly explodes into an overexposed, blown out, soft focused mask. Lighting and camera tricks like this date back to classic Hollywood, when they were used to photograph leading ladies to help to hide wrinkles, bags and other imperfections. The same techniques are also used in beauty ads, with a healthy, healthy dose of Inferno thrown in for good measure.

Maybe that's a good thing though, because before the lighting change Mullally bears a striking resemblance to Teri Hatcher's botox practice dummy.

Tyce DiOrio is the choreographer of record on this. Shame on you, Tyce DiOrio.

Shame. On. You.

You are a talented choreographer. America knows this to be true because we watch "So You Think You Can Dance" and the choreography on that show is always fabulous. So what happened here? There you are on the website, going on about the Turn The Tub Around signature move. Signature move? It's a Cabbage Patch followed by a Running Man. I think I put those two back to back and invented your signature move in the early '90's.

So then I thought maybe this was supposed to be campy.

But this isn't camp. This is crap.

Camp has a point. It is overblown, overdone, ostentatious and purposefully bad, and it often pokes fun at or takes the piss out of its subject. To do camp really well, you have to have mastered the genre you are attempting to lampoon. You have to know how to direct a really good music video to direct a music video that's so bad it's good. You have to know which camera angles work and which do not, where to place the camera, and how to move it. You need to know the best stylists and hair and make-up people. You have to understand dance, lip syncing and performance and know how to shoot them. Only then can you start fucking around with those conventions to turn out something which is good in its badness.

Camp, at its best, is entertaining and funny. But just because you think your storyboard is funny doesn't mean you simply hire an unremarkable comedy director with little or no music video experience to direct it.

This is not for amateurs, people.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but camp is not traditionally the purview of heterosexual males, and this video has "straight guy" written all over it.

***In an interesting side note, Matt LeBlanc of Friends fame, another "where are they now?" actor at the top of his game in the mid-90's, also co-starred with a monkey in Ed, which was also released in 1996. I wonder if Matt and Jason held hands as they jumped the shark together.