Laura Marling's Sprawling "Once I Was An Eagle"

Laura Marling's age has always been the big talking point when it comes to her music.  She released her debut album, Alas I Cannot Swim, in 2008 when she was only 17 and it was as assured and confident as anything a 30 year old could put out.  But instead of greeting it with open arms and warm adulation, some critics looked at it with a skeptical eye.  Her music was weathered and world-weary, and those who didn't like the album usually did so because they questioned the authenticity of somebody her age speaking with such raw jadedness.  These criticisms have mostly subsided, partially through the sheer power of Marling's prolificness, and over the course of her releasing 4 albums in the last 5 years, she's only gotten better and more polished.  Marling has gained relative popularity in the UK, her native country, but she hasn't made as big of a splash here, which is an unfortunate bit of irony, given that Once I Was An Eagle might be the Great American Folk Record that's been needed for a long time.

The album opens up with four songs that feel more like one, a sweeping entity with movements that shift and blend into one another.  It's fitting that a song called "Breathe" concludes this opening tetralogy, because the whole thing feels like a gigantic exhalation to start the album off, establishing its themes of love and loss and the hardened nature that results from it.  Eagle is about a clash of opposing compulsions; a toughened exterior masking a soft, damaged center.  On "I Was An Eagle," Marling steels herself, singing "Oh, I will not be a victim of romance / I will not be a victim of circumstance / chance or circumstance or any man / who could get his dirty little hands on me."  If that installment serves as the peak of emotion in the four-part introduction, then "You Know" takes a more measured step back, looking upon a separation with numb wisdom: "We were a child then I'm sure / but if we were a child then we are children / no more."  The album kind of works as Marling empowering herself to overcome men and heartbreak, but she wisely doesn't paint herself solely as the victim.  "Breathe" is all about how mutually destructive the relationship in question could be, plainly stating "How cruel you were to me...how cruel I am to you."

Those four songs serve to inform the rest of the album, directly continuing with "Master Hunter," a ferocious, percussive song that's a splash of cold water in the face after the brooding acoustics that come before it.  After all of the trudging through the battlefield of failed love, she comes out on the other side hardened, snarling "I cured my skin, now nothing gets in."  Much of the tension on Eagle comes from this spectrum of calcification, which constantly shifts its position on the dial.  That's what makes songs like "Little Love Caster," the hypnotic Spanish-guitar inflected lullaby that follows, so interesting.  When the chorus hits and she says "I can't seem to say / 'I'd like you to stay'," it could have two different meanings: 1. Further affirmation of her emotional callousness or 2. She's become so used to being hardened that when she does find something real, she can't bring to herself to admit it.  Later, "Undine" also skates on this precarious middle ground.  It's a song about all-consuming love (notice how "undine" sounds like "undying"), yet it's one the few songs on the album that doesn't seem to be spoken from Marling's perspective.

With the exception of "Master Hunter," the first half sticks pretty closely to folk tropes, but the back half of the album is where it really begins to stretch out.  Back-to-back songs "Where Can I Go?" and "Once" both liven things up by adding an organ to the mix.  The latter in particular is a really soulful song; ironic, given that the lyrics almost function as an origin story for the guardedness exhibited on the rest of Once I Was An Eagle.  "Once, once is enough to break you / Once, once is enough to make you think twice / About laying your love out on the line," she forlornly sings, and it's one of the rawest points on the album.  This entire section is the highlight of the album, as "Pray For Me," Eagle's best song, comes right after.  It's a surging, galvanizing that just builds and builds until it's ready to topple over at any second.  Throughout many of the songs one the album, there's a recurring riff that appears in slightly different forms, and I've seen a few people complain that it gets repetitive, but I think it ties things together beautifully and it's used most effectively on "Pray For Me."

If the first quarter of the album chronicle the dissolution of a relationship, and the next two are devoted to the emotional fallout, then the last quarter is all about the healing process.  "Love Be Brave" is the turning point, "Here comes a change over me / Something strange takes over me / I am brave and love is sweet."  So much of what came before this section was about the inability to feel or running away from true feelings, but here things thaw, as exhibited in "Saved These Words," which starts out restrained until it can't help but burst open.  In one of the verses, Marling sings, "Love's not easy, not always fun," and that feels like the mission statement of Once I Was An Eagle.  It's a long album that's filled with peaks and valleys, and it's an emotionally exhausting experience, but one that's worthwhile.  There's an interesting pacing and rhythm, and the album forms knots and tangles, each song informing those before and after.  In the process, Marling reaches a sense of enlightenment, and you're likely to find some insight in there too.

Kanye West's "Yeezus" and the Year of Event Albums

People are always talking about whether a year is or isn't a good year for music.  Personally, since I've been alive -- or at least since I've been music savvy -- I haven't experienced a bad year of music.  Sure, I can say that I like 2006 more than 2007 musically, but I feel like there's always a handful of good stuff to find in any given year.  If there's one thing that distinguishes 2013 from every other year in recent memory, aside from the fact that it's been a particularly good one, is that it's the year of the "event" album.  More than usual, there seems to be a ton of big albums that have caused the world to collectively get excited.  Some albums created a buzz because they were a long-awaited comeback -- My Bloody Valentine released a new album for the first time in 22 years(!) and they picked up right where they left off, while Justin Timberlake followed up his breakthrough pop album, FutureSex/LoveSounds, 7 years later with an album that was somehow more expansive.  Others stirred up the masses just because of how surprising they were, like David Bowie and Vampire Weekend, with the former revealing that he's still got some creativity left in him and the latter dropping an album so mature and well-constructed, that it converted tons of haters.  Meanwhile, some albums made waves through the sheer power of marketing.  Daft Punk's Random Access Memories could also be seen as a comeback, but it's more notable for how well-planned its release was, a perfect combination of mystery and anticipation. And coming up, Jay-Z will release the first truly commercial album, with Magna Carta Holy Grail's interesting/soul-sucking partnership with Samsung.

Despite all of these event albums, none have been more newsworthy than Kanye West's Yeezus.  With just 10 songs and no real singles, it had all the makings of being a minor album (and the slightly lower sales seem to prove that right in the eyes of America), but it's turned out to be quite the opposite.  It may not be the album that breaks the Billboard charts, but it's captured the fervor of the critical community, sparking more thinkpieces than the internet can handle.  Reviewers always want to put Kanye's music in the larger context of his persona, with tons of paragraphs devoted to Kanye the character instead of Kanye the musician.  I had this noble idea that I'd write a purist review of Yeezus where I'd "just talk about the music, man."  There'd be nothing about Kim Kardashian, Kanye becoming a father, or any indulgent analysis of his psyche.

About two listens into Yeezus, I realized how much of a fool's errand that was.  The album seems to be more about himself than any of his other albums, somehow.  I eventually realized that it's not that his personality is more important than the music, it's just that his personality is so indelibly married to the music that it's hard not to at least consider it.  It's so fascinating to fall down the circular rabbit hole of figuring Kanye West out: has the persona bled into the person or does the persona exist because of who he already was as a person?  Kanye's songs have always been about the balance between his ego and his self-awareness about his own flaws, but Yeezus transitions into full ego.  It starts right out of the gate with "On Sight," a clarion call for how abrasive and unapologetic the album will be.  "How much do I not give a fuck?," he asks at one point, and it seems the answer is alot, as we see Kanye as angry and brazen as ever this time around.

Yeezus is full of willful contradictions, which just makes it more interesting to pick apart.  The largest aspect in this regard -- perhaps fittingly, given the title of the album -- is in relation to God.  He oddly mixes aggrandizing with humbleness, stating "I am a god," but immediately following it up with "even though I'm a man of God."  In fact, Kanye constantly makes parallels to himself as a god, and it's ludicrous, but at the same time, is it?  After all, he's got a heavy persecution complex, is misunderstood by many, and has a devoted set of arduous acolytes.  That certainly sounds familiar.  Like a Greek god, his wanton actions have averse effects on the less powerful ("When I park my Range Rover / slightly scratch your Corolla / Okay, I smashed your Corolla").  Yet for all the claims of being a higher being, much of the first half of the album is downright feral, like the outro of "Black Skinhead" or the screaming on "I Am a God."  However, the contradictions don't stop there.  "New Slaves" contains some interesting and thoughtful parallels between religion and segregation, yet on the very next song he talks about "owning" a woman.  If there's an overriding theme to Yeezus, it's this matching of opposites.  What shouldn't be good actually is, the ugly sounds pretty, and the one who is fascinated with himself also has others who are fascinated with him.

Musically, the album is just as scattered as it is thematically.  Over the course of 10 songs, Yeezus gives us acid house, spacey electronics, trap music, and most surprisingly reggae/dancehall.  There's no greater example of this than "I'm In It," which is just a giant mishmash, careening from style to style.  Sonically, it's brash and ugly, and I expect that it'll turn many off, but I think it completely succeeds.  There's a dark, industrial sound to many of these songs and listening to this album almost feels like a trip into the headspace of Kanye West, with random sounds popping up at will.  There's an autotuned bridge here, a synth bleat there; anything goes.  The album is all about expecting the unexpected, constantly shifting whenever you get anywhere close to reaching a comfort zone.  Take "Send It Up" for instance, which is a siren-blaring, cold song for much of its runtime, but suddenly ends with a Beenie Man sample that's a weirdly moving rumination on the nature of memory.  Then there's "Bound 2," my favorite song on the album, which recalls Kanye's old soul-sampling days.  Again, it's full of juxtapositions -- the verses are vulgar, but the chorus and the bridge are deeply romantic.  Yeezus is all about emptiness and disconnect, so to end on a note with just a glimmer of optimism floored me.  It's a song that'll linger in your mind long after the last "uh huh, honey."  Kanye saves the best for last, but the centerpiece that holds everything together is the mid-album cut, "Blood On the Leaves."  It's the imperial march of Yeezus, with a commanding beat co-produced by TNGHT, that's likely to get every synapse firing.

If there's any weak spot to be found, then it's definitely in the lyrics.  Some detractors have pointed out how uncomfortably misogynistic and hedonistic his lyrics are, and they're turned up to 11 here, but honestly I've never had a problem with that.  It's interesting and puzzling that we're allowed to separate art from the artist in movies and television shows, but we often have difficulty doing it with music.  You don't hear many people saying that Taxi Driver is a bad movie because Travis Bickle is a racist creep or that Mad Men sucks because Don Draper is a womanizing douchebag.  If we're able to make that disconnect with movies and TV, then I think rap music deserves the same type of consideration.  Plus, Kanye West is certainly doing a more insightful construction of a character than many other rappers who have a women problem.  No, my slight issue is that the quality of rapping has taken a bit of a hit.  Kanye has always been criticized for being a subpar rapper (claims I've never really agreed with), but many of those same people noted his gradual improvement and were impressed by how hungry he sounded on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.  If that's the case, then Yeezus is a definite step back.  It's a quotable album for sure, but in a way that feels specifically constructed to generate a bunch of pull quotes.  The album could've been named Random Access Punchlines with all of the tossed off lines about Asian pussy and croissant demanding that it contains.  Even still, there's some interesting stuff to be found in the lyrics.  West doesn't make any apologies and he even goes as far as attempting to justify himself, rapping "you see there's leaders and there's followers / but I'd rather be a dick than a swallower."  In general, "New Slaves" has his most inspired bits, less of a rap than it is a ferocious barrage of Kanye riffing and venting.

In my review of Chance the Rapper's Acid Rap, I spoke about The College Dropout and recalled how warm Kanye West's music used to be.  It's almost hard to believe that the same guy could make something 10 years later that's so cold and mechanical, keeping you at arms length.  Every other one of his albums are so expansive, yet this one closes in on you.  In a way, it feels like a battle between a bunch of ideas trying to make it to the surface.  Kanye has always been able to rope things in and give his records a cohesive feeling, but here the hodgepodge is the structure.  In lesser hands, this album would completely fall apart, but somehow Kanye is able to keep it from doing so.  Yeezus is hardly his best work, but it's still a fascinating and arresting album nonetheless.

Assessing Mad Men's Strange, Ominous, and Revealing 6th Season

At some point, I'm going to have to start a tally on this blog for every time I reference season 5 of Mad Men, given how many times I've already mentioned it in just 35+ posts.  I only reference it constantly because it's such a towering work of art, one of my favorite seasons of television ever.  There's not a bad episode in the bunch, but the middle stretch of episodes in particular -- from "Signal 30" to "Lady Lazarus" -- are probably the best string of episodes I've seen since the last 9 episodes of The Sopranos.  After such an artful, auteur-driven season, anything after that was bound to be somewhat of a letdown.  Season 6 of Mad Men almost felt conscious of this fact, seemingly going down its own rabbit hole and becoming as weird as ever.

Not since The Sopranos (maybe I need to start another tally) have I seen such bizarre things seem so natural.  By the time the second or third strange plot point occurs, you just sort of roll with it, like "yeah, that happened."  In one season, we got: Peggy stabbing Abe with a makeshift spear, Bob Benson and his gay grifter friend, Ken Cosgrove getting shot in the face, and the entirety of "The Crash."  The reason all of it felt so natural is because of how much it was in tune with the season's goal of presenting this world as one that is slightly oblique.  Season 6's events took place in 1968, and it kind of paralleled the time period, which saw the nation witness a side of themselves that they'd never seen before.  So it was only fitting that Mad Men felt a little less Mad Men-y this year too.  There was so much violence and tragedy in the world that it couldn't help but make its presence known in the show.  Sirens and news reports of national unrest could be heard and seen in many scenes throughout the season, as if the background was slowly seeping into these usually sealed off lives.

The off-kilter nature of the season made it feel like a slight disappointment for a very long time, which was something I didn't know how to process coming from my favorite show on television.  It's not that I thought it was a bad season, I don't think I could ever truly dislike a season of Mad Men.  There were some superb individual moments and episodes, but to me it wasn't creating a satisfying whole.  Perhaps it was just a me problem and not the show's problem, but I found the thematic throughline of the season and a given episode much harder to suss out.  I loved "The Flood," "For Immediate Release," and "The Crash," but nothing completely bowled me over the way that other seasons were capable of doing.

It wasn't until near the end that things truly started to cohere.  As it turns out, the key to the puzzle of the season was, naturally, Don Draper.  At the beginning of the season, when it looked like we were going to get the same old infidelity story and we kept getting flashbacks to Don's youth (flashbacks have never been the show's strong suit), it seemed like Matt Weiner was just treading water with the character.  Much like on Weiner's old job at The Sopranos, he highlighted the fact that Don is not somebody we're supposed to root for.  He's a man who does what he wants, with little regard to others, just leaving destruction in his wake.  This all culminated in the penultimate episode, "The Quality of Mercy," where Peggy literally calls him a monster, giving voice to many of the audience's thoughts as we've watched him over the last few years.  It was then that everything with Don began to transform.  Don's been driving everyone away in his life, particularly the women closest to him: Peggy, Sally, Joan, and Megan.  All of the flashbacks about motherhood and prostitution take on more power in this light, and what initially seemed aimless and ham-fisted revealed itself to be informative in regard to Don's slow wilting.

So, aside from Don, what was the season about as a whole?  In the finale, Betty has a line when she's speaking to Don on the phone about Sally where she says "the good isn't beating out the bad," and even though it was specifically about Sally's behavior, it's fitting for a season that's all about personal wars being waged.  Some were internal, like Don vs. his past, and others were external, but there was a tug of war going on in every corner of Sterling Cooper & Partners.  From the merger between SCDP and CGC to Don and Megan's marriage, season 6 was all about sustaining that which cannot be sustained.  We know that both are doomed to crumble, or at least slightly fall apart, and every episode has an ominous inevitability that Mad Men excels at.  Another big element of the season was the idea of ownership over things that can't be owned.  Prostitution, which often makes the customer feel like they have complete ownership even when they don't, is brought up multiple times throughout the season, and it ties into many of the stories this year, like Don and Ted's battle for Peggy.  They both treat her like she's the concept that they want her to be and not the person that she actually is.

What intrigued me the most about this season was how it subverted our expectations of what television does, but taking common ideas and putting a little slant on them instead of just eschewing them completely.  "History repeats itself" is not exactly new territory, but when other shows or movies try to play with that theme, they always treat time as if its a circle, neatly looping back where it started.  Mad Men is the first show I've seen that really gets how time works, and season 6 wasn't just about how history repeats itself, but instead about how it often folds in on itself.  The season constantly played on the ideas of doubles and duality -- Bob Benson's false identity mirroring Don Draper's, Sterling and Cutler playing similar roles, a character named Margaret getting axed as soon as Peggy comes back -- but it wasn't neat and clean in its parallels.  Characters' pasts bled into their present, creating an inseparable mixture within them.

We're also trained to believe in the idea that "the truth will set you free," yet throughout the season we got examples of that not being the case.  When characters gave into their desires or admitted something about themselves, it usually turned out to cause trouble, like the romantic entanglements of Peggy and Ted.  Even if it was just momentarily, like everybody being mad at Joan when she tried to go after the Avon account by herself or when Pete found out that Bob was lying about his identity, the true sides of these characters often threatened to topple their carefully constructed fronts.  We see this most significantly in the finale, where Don Draper, a man who's kept his past so guarded behind walls of his own making, finally reveals the real nature of his upbringing during a Hershey pitch.  For once, he's trying to better himself -- quitting drinking, deciding not to run away to California, opening up about his past -- and what reward does he get?  He gets suspended from his job, Megan walks out on him, and though he's made some roads to connecting with his children, they're only baby steps closer to him than they were before.

I usually hate it when seasons completely structure themselves around the ending, but "In Care Of" really worked for me in the way that it snapped together all of the previously disparate pieces of season 6.  It was all about these pyrrhic victories, how we may feel like we've made progress but we're still not any further down the road.  I suspect now that I know what the season was trying to get at, I'd enjoy it much more on the rewatch.  Even at the end of this initial watch, I thought this was still one of the best things on TV this year, a strange season from a willfully contrarian show.  If anything, it served as a nice precursor to the end, an interlude bridging the gap between the restless 5th season and a hopefully staggering final run.

Am I Over the Moon For CBS's Under the Dome?

I just finished Stephen King's novel, Under the Dome, last week after starting it ages ago.  I had many problems with finishing it -- my tablet stopped working, the book was 1078 pages long, and I was incredibly busy with school -- but overall, I found it to be a pretty good book with a not-so-great ending.  In the months leading up to the television adaptation premiering, there were some things that gave me hope (the choice of Brian K. Vaughan to be the showrunner, the producers stating that they wouldn't follow the book's ending) and others that made me worry (the fact that it was going to be on CBS, the mostly bland cast).  Ever since Lost's popularity, networks have been desperately searching for the next buzzworthy, mysterious sci-fi show, and they've all been some combination of terrible, unsuccessful, and derivative, so I didn't have high hopes for Under the Dome.

If there's one thing that I'm still divided on is the show's decision to not be a miniseries, as it was originally conceived.  On the positive side, this choice could allow for more expansive stories that get into some of the less developed cardboard characters.  On the other hand, the ongoing nature of the show could cause the story to drag on, especially given the limiting premise and thin time frame of the book.  Some might say that critics lobby the "how is this premise sustainable?" skepticism all the time, particularly with Lost, a show that also had its characters isolated in one location, but managed to consistently blow the doors off of its original concept.  However, the castaways on Lost weren't trapped in the same way that the citizens of Chester's Mill are, where the dome literally gives them no other choice than to stay in town, not only cut off from others, but also being unable to hear what's going on beyond it (a small, but major deviation from the book).  The book takes place over the course of about 8-10 days, which can't really be done on the show if they want to run for multiple seasons, and any longer time frame would have to deal with many logistical factors that come into consideration.

Luckily, the pilot moves along at a steady enough clip that you don't trouble yourself with thinking about these things for too long.  One of the biggest improvements that the show makes is its handle on the morality of the characters.  A major problem I had with the book was that everything was so morally black and white; the protagonists are all unvarnished do-gooders while the bad guys are so cartoonishly evil that's it was hard to find the battle between them fully engaging.  Thankfully, straight from the first scene we get some shades of gray, as we see Barbie, the show's leading man, mysteriously burying a body in the woods.  Big Jim Rennie, the town's used car salesman and Second Councilman, also gets a bit more coloring too, thanks in part to the writing and his portrayal by the great Dean Norris.  The budget on this one feels appropriately big as well, giving the scene of the invisible barrier coming down a real, visceral feeling.  The image of a cow split in half will certainly be the lingering image of the pilot, but the effects in the scenes of planes and trucks crashing into the dome are stirring as well.  Brian K. Vaughan is a talented writer, responsible for one of my favorite comics of all time in Y: the Last Man and some great episodes of Lost, and while he doesn't get to put much of his stamp on the episode, his small touches of pop culture references are great to hear again.

On the other hand, as much as it hurts me to say it, most of the rest of the dialogue is horrible.  Most pilots have the problem of being a bit too heavy on exposition and I'm sure this one has that same problem if you look hard enough, but you'll most likely be too distracted by just how generic all of it is.  Matching the limp dialogue are the characters who, aside from Barbie and Big Jim Rennie, don't pop very well.  It's much like CBS's short-lived Jericho, another genre show about a mysterious event that traps a small town and also featured stock characters that seemed like a random hodgepodge of "diverse" people that didn't really fit together.  It certainly doesn't help that most of the casting is as uninspired as I initially suspected.  Aside from the actors I have residual love for, like Dean Norris, Mike Vogel, and Britt Robertson; nobody else is really that impressive.  The most significant in this regard is Alexander Koch, who plays Junior Rennie, the blandly evil son of Big Jim.  Koch isn't a great actor and probably skews a bit young for the role, but the writing of Junior is poor too -- less violent than it is in the book, but somehow more manipulative.

Overall though, I thought the pilot was a solid piece of television.  Summer is usually the time where the film industry releases their big-event, popcorn movies and most television shows go on a break before returning in the fall.  Under the Dome, with its expensive look and high-concept premise, looks to be the inception of summer blockbuster television.  I don't watch any other CBS dramas -- I'm working on catching up on Person of Interest and I've come to terms with the fact that I'm never going to get around to The Good Wife -- so I look forward to seeing the progression of Under the Dome, which isn't without its problems but has enough spark for me to want to keep watching.

Late to the Party #3: Undeclared (2001-2002)

Late to the Party is a recurring feature that addresses older movies, TV shows, albums, and books that I missed the first time around, for some reason or another.

Earlier in the week, I wrote about Freaks and Geeks and everything I said in that introduction could be doubled here.  If Freaks and Geeks was perennially at the top of the list of shows that I wanted to see, then Undeclared was always firmly in the number two position.  Undeclared is a spiritual successor to Freaks and Geeks in more ways than one: it was short-lived, featured a few of the same actors, and always told stories that put character at the forefront.  Coming right off of the cancellation of Freaks and Geeks in 2000, Judd Apatow split off from Paul Feig to create Undeclared, which graduated from the high school setting of the former to the hallowed halls and dingy dorms of college.

Undeclared was much more of a straight comedy than Freaks and Geeks was, which was suitable, given the setting.  The show feels like college as you remembered it, whereas Freaks and Geeks felt like high school as it actually was.  Yet it still was never about the over-the-top partying that we see in other college stories, opting to find comedy in simple hijinx.  Characters play pranks on each other, come up with schemes to make their work or studies easier, and generally just laze around, giving the show a laid-back feel that made it so relateable.  If there's one main connecting thread that ties Undeclared to Apatow's previous work, it's how it showed that the anxieties and insecurities of your teens don't go away once you leave high school, they just transform.  Behind the laughs and antics, all of the characters are concerned with getting the girl/guy, looking cool, avoiding failure, and figuring out what to do with their lives.  That the main characters are funny is enjoyable enough, but their clearly defined tics make them exponentially more endearing.

Because of this strong stable of characters, the writers were able to have fun with their combinations of cast members.  Like all comedies, there were the common pairings -- Steven and Lizzie, Marshall and Rachel, Lloyd and Ron -- but some of the best stories came from when the dynamics of the group were mixed up.  It helps that they all feel like actual college friends -- forced together by proximity but growing on each other to the point of syncing up to a single rhythm.  One difference that comes from Judd Apatow having primary creative control is his famous improvised style, which is easiest to detect in the hangout scenes that give us a clearer picture of how these characters interact with one another.  Like Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared featured a stellar cast of actors like Jay Baruchel and Seth Rogen, who are now mainstays in the comedy world, but it also had people like Carla Gallo and Monica Keena, who haven't been allowed to be as funny as they were in this show since its cancellation.  Another trait that Undeclared takes from its spiritual predecessor is its excellent world-building and use of recurring characters, making the main dorm hall feel full and real.  Many of the plotlines feature the usual checkmarks of college storytelling -- fraternities, parent's weekend, cheating on papers, etc. -- but the execution is refreshing, unique, and low-key.  Despite that, episodes can seriously bring monstrous laughs when they want to.  "Eric Visits Again" and "Truth or Dare" are the two funniest episodes, and they both feature hilarious comedic setpieces that are big and broad but still feel truthful to the heart of the show.

Watching this show in 2013, it's easy to get distracted by all the "hey it's that guy/girl!" moments.  In just 17 episodes, there are appearances from Amy Poehler, Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell, Adam Sandler, Kevin Hart, Jenna Fischer, Felicia Day, Fred Willard; and with all of that talent, it's retrospectively clear that we lost a special show.  I chose the exact right time in my life to binge on Undeclared, because all of the college aspects of the show really resonated with me.  I can certainly see its bones in something like the UK's Fresh Meat, another show that's set in college and has a killer sense of fun and a great group of characters.  Although it's not as praised or influential as Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared is a fantastic show that's a must-watch for any fan of comedy.