The Melskys care for Joe’s dog while he’s away Joe checks on them during a blackout Joe is apologetic to the parents when he reluctantly reports their eldest child Nicole to the principal for talking back in class. Nonetheless, Joe takes pains to love and care for them, even patriarch Mike, played with unpredictable chaotic energy by Connor O’Malley. Joe’s next-door neighbors, the Melskys, are often agents of chaos in his life: in the show’s very first episode, they are shown walking into Joe’s house, mistakenly believing it to be for sale (they end up buying the one next door). And I don’t just mean the people who you feel closest to emotionally I mean the people that are in the closest physical proximity to you every day. What is revealed over and over in Joe Pera Talks With You is the beauty and pain of trying to love the people who are closest to you. The show also revels in other vérité moments whether it’s Joe talking to children in choir auditions about their fears or listening to his grandmother and her friends in the hair salon discuss what they’ve learned in their lives - the effect is startling but remarkable, hearing real people speak in a regular cadence as part of the show.īut just as small absurdities, odd incongruities, and apparent non sequiturs flicker in and out of our daily lives, so too does each episode of the show carry a touch of the absurd: Joe writes a musical for his students about Alberta, Canada’s very real and highly successful seventy-year-long rat control program Sarah teaches the women at her ladies’ wine night about various defensive knife maneuvers (a demonstration underscored by the earlier reveal that she is a doomsday prepper) Joe and his grandma hand out candy on Halloween dressed as the blond twins from The Matrix Reloaded Joe reads the church announcements but devolves into leading the congregation in a singalong of “Baba O’Reilly” by The Who. It’s an effect that reads as warm and neighborly coming from someone as consistently amiable and charmingly unpolished as Kelly. This gives the show a verisimilitude that’s hard to describe: Joe’s best friend Gene is played by former NBC Late Night cameraman Gene Kelly, who delivers many of his lines like he’s reading them out of a storybook for his grandchildren. In fact, many of the show’s adult and child actors are not professionals at all. The show’s supporting characters are not the usual assortment of oddballs-with-calculatedly-zany-traits you’d find in most sitcoms. The low-key setting is far from any major centers of popular culture, which allows Pera to affectionately represent the mundane, quotidian rhythms of life in a place where, one quickly senses, most people don’t mind living somewhere “out of the way.” In each episode, Pera chooses almost deliberately inconsequential subjects for his focus: going to the salon, Saturday morning breakfast at the diner, attending church, taking a piano lesson, buying a “retirement chair,” or going to Milwaukee for the weekend. He is an unassuming but somehow essential part of the community landscape, interacting with kids and their parents around town (along with his eventual girlfriend, Sarah, the band teacher). In the show, Pera plays a version of himself as a middle school choir teacher in Marquette, Michigan, the largest town in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. It’s a sharp contrast with the frenzied ever-increasing jokes-per-minute ratio of many comedies of the present era in network and streaming television. It’s a shame to see it go, because Joe Pera Talks With You might have been one of the most grace-filled shows on television.īefore his show first arrived on TV four years ago, Joe Pera was known most widely for his stand-up comedy and for his animated Adult Swim special, “ Joe Pera Talks You to Sleep.” In both cases, Pera’s delivery makes the difference: he is always unhurried and deliberate, a stylistic choice that, when combined with his tall frame and lumbering gate, has led many reviewers to describe his style as “grandfatherly.” Pera uses this style to great effect in direct-to-camera addresses and asides in Joe Pera Talks With You, giving the whole show a consistently laconic pace. Joe Pera Talks With You aired on Adult Swim from 2018 until last December, but the show’s eponymous creator confirmed in a summer newsletter to fans that the show was not renewed by the network. One of television’s best comedies was canceled last month after three seasons.
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