Note: This review based on Episode 7 "Business Gay" which is available online...not being a Super Channel subscriber, it's impossible to find the show as neither the producers nor SC have seen fit to release Season 1 on DVD.
Now, if you're going to post a single episode online, better make it your best. If Business Gay is a barometer for the series as a whole, Tiny Plastic Men is terrible.
It's the story of three toy designers, the cranky one, the naive one and the cynical one. Under appreciated and toiling away in the basement of a larger toy conglomerate, it has shades of "The IT Crowd"...but without the laughs. In this episode, the guys trick their idea-stealing superior into appropriating a very obviously gay Transformers pastiche as his own invention. It backfires, and said superior ends up pretending to be gay in order to secure an endorsement from a stunt cast George Laraque playing a gay football player.
The entire episode is just one 23 minute long gay joke. Not only that, it's a hopelessly regressive gay joke relying on passé stereotypes of the effeminate, touchy-feely homosexual. The robots are pink! They hold bake sales! They turn into kitchen wear! These are the kinds of jokes you'd expect from a brainstorming session between Ted Nugent and Rush Limbaugh.
Even done well, the gay robot storyline is *at best* a B-plot. Sadly, its the entire focus of the episode, the supposed main characters popping in for cranky, naive or cynical commentary/"jokes". There's no investment in the story or characters since everyone seems content to just sit back and make a few glib comments here and there.
Tiny Plastic Men makes the same mistakes of a few other Canadian comedies in that the writers are preoccupied with constantly firing off constant jokes or "clever" lines that none of them are given time to setup and develop so the punchline falls flat. Worst of all are the extended "Family Guy"-esque cutaway sequences. Instead of simply cutting away, delivering the joke and cutting back, we have to sit through painfully long sequences that have nothing to add to the main story. n In this episode, there was even an extended cutaway sequence WITHIN a cutaway sequence that featured too many "jokes". I wasn't even sure what the purpose of the video game character cutaway gag was, and how it fit in with the story.
You'd think Riley Beach's animated sequences would at least be clever (his shorts are quite hilarious) but they suffer from the same bland writing and faffing about as the rest of the show. I think the Kitten Assassin sequences are a running joke with the series, but all they amount to are a couple scenes of a stiffly animated cat firing a weapon. No jokes, no context...just the image of a cuddly animal in a violent act, as though "Happy Tree Friends" hadn't exhausted that idea 15 years ago. If the writers are so intent on ripping off Family Guy, they could have at least put the cat in parodies of known war films...but that would be asking too much, wouldn't it?
Finally, the show isn't very well shot. The lighting is garish and the actor's shadows are frequent, which is the mark of sloppy cinematography. There also appears to be some audio syncing issues. I can normally put up with that if the writing or characters are interesting, but...
No idea how this show is up for Best Comedy Series at the Canadian Screen Awards. It definitely speak more to the dearth of Canadian television comedy than it does to this show's comedic chops.
If you like a funny, basement dwelling workplace comedy, watch "The IT Crowd". If you like decently executed cutaway sequences, watch "Family Guy". Don't watch "Tiny Plastic Men".
