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Category:    Home > Reviews > Comedy > Titus - Seasons 1 & 2

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


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