Party Down

[WyldeMan45]

I love this show and I just cannot get enough of how pathetically funny this cast is. I'm very happy something came about for just about everybody from Veronica Mars, and not to forget Ms. Mars will be appearing in the finale of next week's Party Down! The final image of Ron laying on the pavement surrounded by his whiskey vomit, begging for an ambulance was probably one of the most pathetic and insanely hilarious things i've seen all year.


"I feel like I'm finally getting the hang of this," Henry Pollard, the actor-turned-bartender hero of "Party Down," declares early in next week's season finale. It has taken Henry a long time to adjust to his fall from the star of a national commercial with his own catch phrase ("Are we having fun yet?") to a waiter for a low-rent L.A. catering company, but he's found his place in this strange world.

"Party Down" needed a lot of off-camera time to find itself -- it was pitched to half the channels on cable at various points over the last few years, and came close to getting on the air at a few of them before Starz picked it up -- but once it premiered in March, it quickly established itself as one of the funniest comedies on television.

The cast -- including Adam Scott as the wry Henry, Ken Marino as delusional team leader Ron, Lizzy Caplan as dour comedian (and Henry's wary girlfriend) Casey, Martin Starr as bitter screenwriter Roman, Ryan Hansen as vapid actor Kyle and Jane Lynch as cheerfully delusional actress Constance -- is marvelous in the way the members bounce off each other, and off the show's many and varied guest stars. Because each episode takes place entirely at an event being catered by Party Down, each episode has its own look and feel, and provides a great showcase for guests like J.K. Simmons (a profane movie mogul), Steven Weber (a creepy Russian mobster) and Ed Begley Jr. (a Viagra-popping ex-boyfriend of Constance). There are some minor continuing elements (notably the reluctant Henry/Casey romance), but each episode is mostly its own entity, a watchwork farce that builds and builds to hilarious, and often painful, conclusion.

The season's final two episodes continue the brilliance. Tonight has Ron catering his 20th high school class reunion, under the mortifying misconception that this will impress all the people (including Molly Parker from "Swingtown") who thought he was a loser as a teenager.

"Be like a movie!" an old friend tells him. "You can score one for the losers."

Alas, Ron and the gang are still losers in the finale, which guest-stars Kristen Bell as Uda, a former Party Down employee who now runs her own relentlessly efficient catering outfit and who relegates Ron's team to support staff at a high-profile Hollywood wedding. When Roman protests being assigned to point guests toward the bathroom by noting he went to college, Uda coolly tells him, "I didn't. But I still get the irony."

Lynch was unavailable for these final two episodes because she was filming the pilot for Fox's "Glee" -- and may, in fact, be the only cast member not to return next season, because of her commitment to the other show -- and so Constance is temporarily replaced by her best friend and roommate, Bobbi St. Brown (Jennifer Coolidge), who is somehow even worse at her job than Constance. At one point, Bobbi accidentally arranges a plate of appetizers as a swastika. "It started out as a snowflake," she explains.

(If you don't get Starz but do subscribe to Netflix, the video rental service is streaming all of this season's episodes to date on its website.)

Many of the cast members, and guest stars like Bell, came to "Party Down" because the show is produced by "Veronica Mars" creator Rob Thomas and "VM" producers John Enbom and Dan Etheridge.

(Paul Rudd, an old friend of Thomas' who at one point in the show's development was going to play Henry, is also a producer but hasn't had time to contribute much this year due to his movie career. Now that the show has been renewed for a second season, Thomas hopes he can, at the very least, guest star in the near future: "Paul is desperate to do the show, and I think it's a little odd for all of us that he hasn't. It's about a hole in his schedule and finding the right bit of business.")

Though none of the writers has experience in writing traditional comedy, "Veronica Mars" was often very funny, and, as Thomas notes, "We're all fans of comedy."

For Enbom, who ran the show day to day and wrote most of the episodes, "it was a matter of me going into a small, windowless cubicle in the Starz building and banging them out over a few months. I had to remind myself, 'It's not only a comedy, but a premium cable comedy, and you have to stop self-censoring yourself, and take all your impulses and just run with them.' Once I got the hang of it, it was kind of great, but it was amazing how long it took to shake off those mental blocks."

Thomas has had a strange year in the business. Last spring, he was developing the "90210" sequel for the CW, the "Cupid" remake for ABC, another pilot for ABC, plus "Party Down." Since then, he dropped out of "90210" before a pilot was even shot, the other ABC pilot wasn't picked up and the new "Cupid" has been plagued by creative difficulties and low ratings, and almost certainly won't be back next season. "Party Down," unlikely as it is after all this time, is his last show standing.

"It's just nice doing a show for a network that clearly loves the show and (is) happy you're doing it with them," Thomas says of his relationship with Starz. "This year has taught me that I would be much happier -- even if the number of viewers are in the hundreds of thousands, rather than millions -- if I can be doing something I'm proud of with a supportive group of people. There are some quirks of working with a network that's new to original programming ... but God, I'll take this experience."

Spoilers for the penultimate episode of "Party Down" season one coming up just as soon as I accept a personal gift from Dennis Quaid's manager's lawyer...



"Be like a movie. You can score one for the losers." -Donnie

It goes just as well with the hilarious, albeit very painful, "James Rolf High School Twentieth Reunion," which is the Ron humiliation episode to end all Ron humiliation episodes.

The idea that Ron would think being a cater-waiter at his own reunion, even a "team leader," would impress all his old classmates was a brilliant example of something so sad it's funny (or vice versa), and Ken Marino did a great job throughout of portraying Ron's oblivious hopefulness. Ron is just as delusional as Constance(*) or Roman, though his dreams are much smaller. In his mind, he is an impressive leader of men now, and he does have a shot at Melinda, and everything's going to work out perfectly, just like the movie his old buddy Donnie suggests Ron's starring in. And while I think there have been far, far too many onscreen vomit jokes in the years since "The 40-Year-Old Virgin," I thought the one at the end here was hilarious, both because it was perfectly set up earlier with the reference to how Ron got the "Bluto" nickname and all of Ron's waiting for the right moment with Melinda, and because Ron was pleading for her to call 911 to save his life, even as he kept on puking.

This was also a great Casey episode, as she did everything in her power to keep Henry from quitting to move back in with his parents. Lizzy Caplan's delight at meeting Donnie and realizing that she had just found the perfect object lesson for Henry was very nicely-played.

More fine guest casting this episode, not just with Coolidge, but Joe Lo Truglio (one of Marino's old buddies from The State) perfectly cast as Donnie, Molly Parker as Melinda and Kyle Bornheimer (from "Worst Week") as popular Mark Defino. If this is the caliber of people they can get when they're just calling in favors for a show no one's even seen, I look forward to seeing who turns up next season now that word of mouth is spreading a little.

What did everybody else think?