Philomena Cunk is flying close to the sun.
The obstinately disinterested host of such Charlie Brooker-created educational programming as Cunk on Britain, Cunk on Earth and Cunk on Life is turning her misdirected fascination at least partially inward to tackle the entertainment industry in the appropriately titled Netflix miniseries Cunk on Cinema.
This means baiting critics, who have a greater knowledge of and investment in the topic that’s under Cunk’s withering gaze, and baiting the experts whose increasingly implausible flummoxitude — not a real word — in the face of Cunk’s probingly incurious curiosity is the comedy franchise’s bread and butter.
Surely Brooker and writer-star Diane Morgan know that Cunk and her gimmick won’t play forever, so Cunk on Cinema may mean they’ve decided to take the premise about as far as it can go without becoming a parody of a thing that’s already a parody.
The seams are certainly showing in the delicately threaded tapestry that is Cunk in this series. At six episodes of under 15 minutes apiece, Cunk on Cinema doesn’t overstay its welcome or entirely strain the credulity of viewers who are more in on the joke than her interview subjects. But the ratio of punchlines that fizzle to punchlines that hit is probably closer to even than at any previous point in the franchise.
Still, Cunk on Cinema offers more laughs than just about anything else you’re likely to watch this month, and I’m prepared to follow the miseducation of Philomena Cunk until the wheels entirely come off.
Cunk on Cinema is structurally simple, as television presenter Cunk (Morgan) takes viewers on a history of filmic media going all the way back to, well, the absence of movies.
“Movies haven’t always been with us. In fact, for centuries Earth was a barren wasteland devoid of entertainment content,” she observes, walking through a sea of classic paintings and noting, “For centuries, eyes were literally useless, because there was nothing worth looking at.”
She traces the advent of photography and then moving pictures, touching on landmarks like The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat (“It’s almost as boring as Ben Affleck,” she notes), The Birth of a Nation (“A typically woke Hollywood fantasy”), and into the comedies of Charlie Chaplin (“To this day, the only homeless person it’s okay to openly laugh at”) and Buster Keaton.
I don’t want to accuse Cunk on Cinema of being intellectually nourishing by any stretch of the imagination, but as bite-sized introductions to film studies go, it has some validity. Working her way through her usual assortment of photogenic backdrops, from film studios to the base of the Hollywood sign to various libraries and repositories, Cunk touches at least briefly on a range of noteworthy, properly contextualized bits of history — from an acceptable definition of the Kuleshov effect to a rudimentary explanation of the Hays Code to an acknowledgement of the impact of TV on the films of the 1950s and 1960s.
Cunk’s droll approach to classic films and the medium’s evolution alternates between willfully ignorant and perceptively counter-logical, going amusingly deep on E.T. as a grooming narrative and resorting to social media-friendly one-liners like, “Do you have to have seen the first 2000 films in the series in order to understand 2001?” It’s possible that some parts of Cunk on Cinema benefit from knowing about the films and industry conventions she’s lampooning. But I’m not sure how knowledgable one need be to find it funny to keep referring to Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin as “Batshit Pumpkin” over and over. I found it funny over and over.
As always, Cunk can’t do it alone and she’s assembled a group of experts, from the usual dry British intellectuals to a scattering of film critics to an amusing range of cinematic craftsmen (mostly men) to actual A-listers including Michael Bay and Benedict Cumberbatch.
A key piece of the appeal of Cunk has been tracing how realistic it is for her subjects not to know what she’s doing as she peppers them with questions like “What was The Jizz Slinger?” or, regarding the behavior of Taxi Driver antihero Travis Bickle, remarks that “If they remade it today, he’d be violating Uber’s code of conduct, wouldn’t he?”
I’m guessing the screening process for Cunk on Cinema had to be different from her earlier series and that more people probably had to be rejected for being excessively in on the joke. Moreover, it’s easy to notice that Cunk has needed to shift her style of inquiry in a way that’s interesting, but increasingly repetitive.
If your interview subject is in on the joke, the worst thing you can do is ask a lengthy, ridiculous question based on an absurd premise — the meat and potatoes of her finest moments, previously — because if they laugh or, perish the thought, attempt to counter with a joke of their own, you’ve wasted a lot of rope just to hang yourself. But if you ask a simple question based on a malapropism or misheard or misread title or concept, at the very least you’ll get several seconds of well-earned confusion, and then several more seconds of confusion while the interviewee tries to come up with a sincere response or a joke. That confusion is gold, or as much gold as you happen to find in jokes like “The Jizz Slinger.”
With most of the scholars and scribes, Cunk on Cinema settles for “confusion,” as opposed to the delicious obtuseness that earlier seasons yielded. It’s good for chuckles, but it denies viewers those moments of brilliance from previous series, when Philomena Cunk would actually intrigue an expert with a bizarre supposition or only half-jesting theory.
It’s fairly reasonable to believe that a serious-minded historian or zoologist might not know Philomena Cunk and her thing, but it’s harder to imagine an entertainment journalist or film critic with no awareness of this increasingly long-running franchise. But not impossible!
Some of these interview subjects are performers, or at least people with years of experience talking to the press or appearing in the public eye, which forces viewers to engage in guesswork.
So … Benedict Cumberbatch? Pretty clearly in on the joke and intentionally giving Cunk only stone-faced bafflement. Die Hard scribe Steven E. de Souza? Pretty clearly not in on the joke and being genuine in not understanding what he’s in the middle of.
And Michael Bay? This could be one of the year’s great debates, like a TV equivalent of You Can See Everything. Michael Bay has a team. They must have briefed him and advised him on how to react to certain pieces of obvious bait. At the same time, Michael Bay has an ego, and it’s possible he went in with one goal — not looking like a total fool — and that goal went out the window, or very nearly went out the window, in the face of one rambling trademark Cunk family story. This puts Bay in a liminal space halfway between professional and cool (as his team must’ve wanted him to appear) and thoroughly risible (as schadenfreude-hungry audiences may crave).
(Disclaimer: My guesses could all be off! Cumberbatch might have been sincerely perplexed, de Souza might have been playing Cunk like a fiddle, and Michael Bay? Well, I should know better than to think I know what’s in Michael Bay’s mind.)
Morgan remains a droll genius, never better than in the walk-and-talk monologue on a studio lot in the final episode. The material is so perfectly tailored to her voice that she can get laughs even on flaccid punchlines that sound like outtakes from Brooker’s angry political comedy (see his Wipe shows) rather than from Cunk, who does not feel like the sort of character who would bother with a J.D. Vance joke out of nowhere. Now Cunk’s obsession with AI and Brooker’s contempt for it? Those mesh admirably.
Simply put, the Cunk formula still works, but it probably can’t work forever. Now bring on Cunk on TV. I’m available for talking head segments and I promise to look confused when she mispronounces “Quibi.”
