A quick review of tonight’s Brockmire coming up just as soon as I get the latest about Taylor Swift and Drake’s sex tape…
“Breakout Year” opens with perhaps the most ridiculous glimpse yet of Brockmire’s lost years abroad, as we discover that he was briefly famous in the Philippines as the star of a Pinoy remake of Hart to Hart, where the actress playing Mrs. Hart only ever said “I am your wife.”
I can’t speak to the state of American pop cultural exports in that part of the world and whether Brockmire could actually get such a job and be successful in it, but the rest of “Breakout Year” does an impressive and plausible job of charting his return to fame post-Morristown/Butler riots and the many forms it takes. This season was filmed last summer and is dated in some spots (Charles keeps talking about Vines), but on the whole shows a very savvy instinct about the life cycle of an internet celebrity, and the many different kinds of fans Brockmire might acquire along the way. When we got to Brockmire filming an ASMR haircut video, I almost fell off my chair, because that is a very specific and deep slice of the world online.
That it takes Charles so long to realize he should just have Brockmire tell his stories in podcast form is a bit of a stretch, given that this is his thing (back when Vine still existed, he had many Vine loops!), but it’s fun watching Brockmire grapple with being recognized and with his various new demographics, up through the arrival of his new hipster fans who come when This American Life plays a Brockmire podcast excerpt in one of its episodes. Brockmire’s understanding of how this all works is long out of date, and when Jules tries to do it the old-fashioned way by getting him a network TV interview, he gets pre-empted by new Taylor/Drake developments. So instead, he has to wait for Ira Glass himself to bless him with the life-changing TAR seal of approval, which seems to be putting Jim’s life back on track…
…until Jules announces that she’s pregnant. Which is not something two colossal messes like Jules and Jim (took me a while to put those names together, because he always goes by his surname) are probably equipped to handle. But we’ll deal with that next week, folks. This one, though? Was a ton of fun.
What did everybody else think?