Please Enjoy A Little Reggie Dinkins
You should watch this show for yourself, because it's good, but also for me, so I have people to talk about it with.
There‘s a version of this blog that opens with about 400 words on the way things used to be. It has a big section about the Thursday night block that NBC rolled out a decade or two ago, the one that had Community, Parks & Rec, The Office, and 30 Rock all stacked up back-to-back from 8-10pm, a thing I still can’t believe happened all these years later, in part because of how crazy it seems now and in part because there are like three or four different kinds of joke delivery systems those shows perfected that we still lean on today. I know that version of this blog exists because I wrote it a few minutes ago, just before I scrapped it and wrote this paragraph instead. We all spend too much time lamenting the things we don’t have anymore. It’s good to look around at the things we have now and appreciate them for what they are, too. That‘s what I’m doing here. That’s why I’m writing about Reggie Dinkins.
Specifically, I’m writing about The Fall And Rise Of Reggie Dinkins, the new NBC sitcom from 30 Rock alums Robert Carlock and Sam Means, which stars Tracy Morgan as a disgraced former football player trying to rehabilitate his image through a documentary and Daniel Radcliffe as the disgraced director helming the project. Lord, is this sucker funny. In multiple ways, too, the way the best kinds of comedy are, with some jokes you have to be engaged with the world around you to appreciate and others that are just pure dumb fun. Perhaps you’ve seen the compilation of jokes in one episode about a fictional network television show called FDNY: Chicago. I’m going to post it here anyway, just because I can't risk you not knowing about it.
@nbc When the bean is on fire and the pizza's in a deeper dish than you're used to. 🫨 #TheFallandRiseofReggieDinkins | Mondays on NBC and streaming on Peacock
♬ original sound - NBC
Yes, that’s the voice of Dean Winters, Dennis Duffy from 30 Rock and Mayhem from the car insurance commercials. Yes, I pointed at the TV when I realized this. Yes, I get excited easily.
The show has an absolute embarrassment of riches to play with, too. Radcliffe is a pro in a way a bunch of former child actors are, but man, it looks like he is having so much fun being a goofball. He’s usually the straight man here, which you kind of have to be when you’re sharing a screen with Tracy Morgan, but he does get to cut loose every now and then, and sometimes flirt with Megan Thee Stallion. It’s great. I’m legitimately happy for him that he’s settled into this second act of his career.
The meal ticket here is Tracy Morgan, especially Tracy Morgan Saying Things With His Voice, which remains one of our most precious comedic resources. His deliveries of even regular lines of dialogue are funny, so when he’s given a lump of primo clay to mold, it’s really something to behold. The only tricky part is not slipping into Tracy Morgan Voice yourself after a mini-binge. I was heating up something for dinner last week and caught myself mumbling “Don’t mess with me, air fryer.” I’m sure you just heard it in your head in his voice, too. It’s a problem.
One of my favorite parts of the show is when they do a flashback to his playing days. I really appreciate that they make no effort to make him look like a professional athlete. Here’s one screencap from an episode early in the first season…
… which I include both to give you a helpful example and so I can post the screencap of what he said about his look when the flashback ended.
Just a perfect piece of business. I’m proud of everyone involved.
And if you were on the fence about giving this a go because you’ve been burned too many times by shows just starting to hit their groove and getting yoinked from the schedule, there’s good news on that front: the show was just picked up for a second season this week. You’re not leaping onto a sinking ship. You can binge through all the episodes out now — 10 episodes on Peacock — and be ready for season two when it drops.
Maybe this is coming off as a hard sell. I do that sometimes. (See above, re: “get excited.”) Some of that is because I want everyone to watch the shows I like so the shows run for many seasons and I have people to talk about them with, but some of it is less selfish. I got behind on the show myself as it was airing and just ripped through the first season in the last week or so. I was watching one episode a night right before bed. It was relaxing and fun and a great way to kick my brain into chill mode before I tried to shut it off for a while. You might be looking for something like that, too. If it also happens to feature Tracy Morgan shouting things like, well, these, that’s just a nice little bonus.
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STUFF I CLICKED ON
— Danny Chau with a great blog about David Attenborough, narrator of life, approaching 100 years old
— my beloved Phillies won both games of a doubleheader on walk-offs recently and Kelsey McKinney nailed how decadent that felt
— I read this huge delicious thing in Vulture about the Lively-Baldoni dueling lawsuits and then they went and settled the next day, which felt weirdly anticlimactic even though it never should’ve gotten that far to begin with
— I regret to inform you that this very dumb SNL sketch made me laugh a bunch
— I love an interview with David Letterman because he still gets so much glee out of poking bears and being a little shit (complimentary)
— The Bear dropped a surprise prequel episode called Gary and it made all of my TV critic friends mad lol
— it is genuinely shocking to me that a movie called The Sheep Detectives appears to be good, but here we are
— I covered this in the Friday newsletter but I still need people to know about the real-life Beekeeper situation
— Mina Kimes is gonna host the Spelling Bee
— “How TV Trained Us to Be Conspiracy Theorists”
— “‘Chonkers,’ the massive sea lion, is drawing crowds at San Francisco pier”
— “The future of a beloved dog statue on a New York warehouse is up in the air”
— kind of obsessed with the 21-year-old from Nigeria the Eagles drafted even though he’s never played football before
— there is never a bad time to watch the video of Marshawn Lynch and Will Arnett improvising a scene on Murderville, unless you are somewhere you can't play a video with cussing
Okay, that's it for this week. Please share and subscribe and watch Reggie Dinkins.
