Flight of the Conchords - Season 2: Review
How the Second Season of the HBO Sitcom Shapes Up Against the Last
Apr 29, 2009
The first season of Flight of the Conchords was a surprise hit among HBO viewers. It featured a parody folk band and their fictional lives in New York City, trying to achieve success. Their mundane lives and a deadpan sense of humour, interspersed with absurd parody songs proved hilarious viewing. Fans practically demanded a second season and these demands were soon met.
Flight of the Conchords Plot
The first season ended with Bret and Jermaine's manager, Murrary, taking on a second band who achieve massive success with a completely awful and irritating song entitled 'Doggy Bounce'. It seems Bret, Jermaine and their band will be left behind as Murray finds fame and riches without them.
The second season begins with the pair visiting Murray for a band meeting in his extravagant new office. It soon becomes hilariously evident that 'The Doggy Bounce' is worryingly similar to a song that was released over a decade earlier. This brings Murray's career as a band manager crashing back down to square one, and sets up the beginning of what turns out to be another superb season of Flight of the Conchords.
As Good as Season 1?
The problem the band and the shows producers faced when planning a second season was very simple. The band (the real life band that is) had used up all their songs. Early on when asked about a second season Bret and Jermaine simply replied that it might be a problem seeing as they had pretty much used the fruits of their entire career in the first 12 episodes.
The answer? Write more songs, obviously! Of course rather than years and years of carefully creating, honing and selecting songs, the band were forced to create new ones in a much shorter time. In a video podcast the band pointed out that there was quite a big difference between the first season and the second. In the first season, the challenge was to take two of their songs and write a story around them; the challenge in the second season was to write a story and then write two songs around that.
Unfortunately this different approach does seem to have affected the show. The quality of the songs is simply not as good as it was. There are a lot of throw-away tunes that really don't offer much amusement, and don't really add to the storyline at all. That being said, there are still some great ones in there.
The saving grace is that the scripts are still just as solid as they used to be, and the jokes are still superb and plentiful to boot. Another thing that will always make the show watchable is that the three main characters are just incredibly like-able. Their naivete and small-fish-in-a-big-pond demeanor is constantly both hilarious and endearing.
All in all, many fans will probably not be as impressed with the second season as they were with first one. The good thing is, chances are they won't be disappointed either.
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