You may remember when we first spoke of this show with a trailer a while back and now we get to see the finished piece. But despite the star talent, does it work? We figure this out after the jump.

Look, Marc Maron is a comedic genius. His WTF Podcast is stellar and his stand-up is right up there with the best of the best, but I’m not entirely convinced G. Redford Considers is the right setting for him. In the pilot episode we see G. Redford getting ready to take on his fellowship, but really he kind of doesn’t want to leave knowing that his smug asshole of a colleague is getting ready to take over the position. In the pilot episode we get to meet a lot of the characters and although you get your steady cast of stereotypical shout outs to every college/high school kid you’ve ever seen in film or TV, and with that they offer a nice change of pace from Maron’s graspy voice. As a matter of fact, I think the series could’ve  used a little more of this and as a matter of fact this is where the series begins to falter.

I’ve always found Marc to be hysterically uptempo and cranky, and this short features a cranky professor in G. Redford but the dialogue just comes off as monotonous and more so the jokes and punchlines just do not sound like Maron jokes or punch lines. Marc has always been to wind up, pitch, wind up pitch, and with this I feel like he’s the Tyrannosaurus Rex looking for a caged goat for other people to stare at whilst eating…yes Marc Maron comes off as the star, but its FORCED upon you. As mentioned the introduction of characters were rather entertaining, but there was not one character that I saw that I felt NEEDED to be in there especially when you consider that the premise of the show follows a guy that is ‘considering’ leaving his post for another. So, let’s say this is a pilot show that gets picked up for a season?  Is the premise just going to be G. Redford constantly deciding whether or not he leaves as his soon to be successor gets ready to take over his job? What’s the fear? If G. leaves, he has a job, if he stays he has a job, it really isn’t much of a consideration and certainly not one that I could see going on and on and on for an entire run of shows.

To make matters worse, the dialogue is just written piss poor. Like ‘Professor, have you ever slept with someone in a movie theater?’ How do you SLEEP with someone in a movie theater? Doesn’t even make sense to me. You can bang, fuck, finger, kiss, and rape a chick in a movie theater, but SLEEP? That’s what beds are for.  Even Marc delivered a line something along the lines of ‘Do I Stream DVDs?’ How do you STREAM a DVD? People WATCH DVDs, they don’t STREAM them. You STREAM movies from Netflix, you WATCH movies on DVD. Bit of a difference when your target audience are those of whom are STREAMING this pilot. It’s the little things.

That said, there are a lot of positives with this series mostly in the art and voice production department. The art is done by Sam Lubicz with the animation done by Nicole Josephian and if there is one thing TRULY awesome with the series its the look and feel. Anyone familiar with the MAD sketches or even some of Conan’s Rob Smigel bits will love the picasso looking depictions of some of Hollywood’s finest and everyone is animated rather well with lip movement working just fine to go along with decent voice work. Again, the problem with the voices is that there is TOO much Marc for starters and not enough of anyone else, but more so the dialogue is so bad no matter what good came out of the actual acting is sullied. However, another redeeming factor is that the direction of the scenes are very well done showing that the Brundiges BOTH know what they are doing when behind a ‘lens’ and when you add that, Marc Maron trying his best to save this, and the art direction, those qualities give it a higher grade than it’s supposed to, but…

G. Redford may be considering a lot of things, but in this case maybe he should just retire or find new writers.

6 out of 10

http://youtu.be/K9qJtkAMapw