Blunt Talk, "I Seem to Be Running Out of Dreams for Myself"

Blunt Talk is, to put it mildly, a very odd one. It’s a show so juvenile and mostly inept at eliciting a laugh, and yet still possesses a strange, inconceivable watchability. It defies explanation, really, but I’ll give it my best shot.

The series stars Patrick Stewart as Walter Blunt, a pompous, Piers Morgan-esque anchor of a failing news program, who off-camera is a whining, insecure vice machine (the debut episode alone has him dabbling in all sorts of drugs, alcohol, and prostitution and clashing with police). The show appears at first glance to be a one-joke premise, the joke being simply seeing the serious and authoritative Brit we all remember as Captain Picard taking part in crass and naughty acts (another Star Trek alum even makes a cameo reinforcing this idea).

These escapades are not that funny, though. Each dirty deed palpably strains to be as outrageous and shocking as possible, to little avail. It might have been funny in another time when this material would have been considered edgy, but it seems rather benign in this era of television. And yet, the parts that are funny—a few dashes of wit among the crudity—are absolute howlers (a dirty historical anecdote that comes back to resonate in the final moments being the biggest laugh).

The appeal doesn’t really lie in the humor, however limited it may be, or anything else at the surface level. The office comedy and behind-the-scenes media satire tropes that it’s looking to parody are haphazardly intercut with random, surreal stuff. It shouldn’t work, for it feels like the show’s trying to be surreal for the sake of being surreal, just as it’s raunchy only for raunch’s sake. But there’s something inexplicably engrossing in the clash between the weirdness, the regular old plot structure, and even some of the vulgarity, unfunny as it is for its own sake. This is mostly a result of Stewart’s skills (and only him, really, for the other characters so far are little more than yes men or enablers of his bad habit), as he uses everything at his disposal to navigate the happenings onscreen. Even though for now he seems a little aloof and as lost as we are, there’s no doubt that he’s having fun.

He’ll have to make some sense of it all soon, for this empty surrealness and crude juvenilia doesn’t look to be sustainable for long. But it might be worth staying tuned for at least a little while to see if Stewart can mold the program into something more.