Tonight's Episode: More Pricks Than Kicks

July 1, 2017 3:29 PM

Samuel Beckett: avant-garde dramatist, brooding Nobel Prize winner, poet, and…gritty television detective? Sadly, no, but he had the makings of a great one, at least as cut together by playwright Danny Thompson, cofounder of Chicago’s Theater Oobleck. Some twenty five years after Beckett’s death, Thompson repurposed Rosa Veim and Daniel Schmid’s footage of the moody genius wandering around 1969 Berlin into the opening credits of a nonexistent, 70s era Quinn Martin police procedural. [via Ayun Halliday, openculture.com] [SLYT]
posted by Room 641-A (12 comments total)

Jean Cocteau as Huggy Bear is something I would pay to see.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:45 PM on July 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

Really great opening,
now looking forward to seeing the rest of this program!
posted by Rash at 4:49 PM on July 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

Brilliant! Would watch again and again ...
posted by oheso at 5:25 PM on July 1, 2017

This is tone perfect. I bet it features his catchphrase "I can't go on, I can't go on, I'll go on."
posted by wittgenstein at 5:26 PM on July 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

Needs Jean Seberg as the Wry American Gal.
posted by languagehat at 5:29 PM on July 1, 2017 [3 favorites]

When his plucky assistant loses track of the mobster she was supposed to be tailing, Beckett just says "No matter. Fail again. Fail better."
posted by moonmilk at 6:20 PM on July 1, 2017 [1 favorite]

Theorizing that it was possible to travel through tropes created in one's own lifetime, absurdist playwright Samuel Beckett found himself leaping from tv show to tv show. With the help of holographic observers Vladimir and Estragon, he must subvert the conventions of genre narrative and muddy things that once seemed clear, in the hopes that the next leap will bring him back... home.
posted by condour75 at 8:03 PM on July 1, 2017 [7 favorites]

I'm imagining a detective story where the detective gives up on humanity altogether and just babbles about 18th century philosophy and makes bathroom jokes until the case accidentally solves itself, he then proceeds to collect his fee and spend the entirety on the services of an elderly sex worker and spend the night sleeping in a refrigerator box.
posted by idiopath at 9:25 PM on July 1, 2017 [4 favorites]

(that would be the three novels version at least, and those were the work he was most proud of, if I recall)
posted by idiopath at 9:26 PM on July 1, 2017

I also noticed they alluded to the trivia chestnut about how Beckett drove Andre the Giant to school as a child.
posted by jonp72 at 12:25 PM on July 2, 2017 [1 favorite]

After watching Beckett, YouTube recommended Quinn Martin's Tales of the Unexpected, which I thought would be some weird cop show/BBC/Roald Dahl mashup, but unfortunately, Wikipedia reveals that it actually was a thing.
posted by jonp72 at 12:29 PM on July 2, 2017

After coincidentally crossing paths with the criminals he's supposed to be looking for, Beckett yells "Freeze!" They do not go.
posted by jonp72 at 12:30 PM on July 2, 2017 [2 favorites]