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Critic Reviews
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It’s a brave, and at times uneven, experiment. It’s also a reminder of a time when television was a much simpler and campier place.
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The Spoils of Babylon is a star-studded, droll spoof of television miniseries from the ’80s.
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The real laughs come from seeing so many famous people in absurd situations waxing nostalgic for the age of the melodrama, hen the romance was good, the green screens were bad, and the fashion was even worse. [10 Jan 2013, p.67]
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Some of these bits work very well, albeit as free-floating shards of comedy.... But parody works best when its subject is either truly iconic or still relatively fresh in the minds of the audience and, mercifully, the B-list miniseries of yesteryear are neither.
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Over six episodes, almost no cliche of TV epics is left unlampooned. In the end, ironically, Spoils of Babylon creates some excess of its own.
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The behind-the-scenes story that Jonrosh lays out for us is, alas, more amusing, even sight-unseen, than anything in the story proper.... What we do see is curiously tone-deaf and rarely pays off as you hope it will.
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It’s all in good fun, lets us in on the joke and--save for one dumb plot device--is well done and believable in its contextual universe.
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The first two episodes prove as tiresomely pleased-with-themselves as my run-on sentences. A half-hour is too much of not enough.
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This parody of bad vintage miniseries is asinine--it's supposed to be--and from time to time hilarious. [13 Jan 2014, p.49]
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As enjoyable as it is to watch, it seems at the same time ridiculously far to go for a joke. You can't escape the feeling that an extraordinary amount of time, money, and talent have been spent on a thin premise.
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If the first two installments are any indication, Spoils of Babylon will be a short-lived but entertaining hoot, an ideal addition to the IFC "Always On. Slightly Off" comedy brand that includes "Portlandia," "The Birthday Boys" and "Maron."
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The Spoils of Babylon is an entertaining and spot-on spoof of the overdone potboiler miniseries of the 1970s and '80s.
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Smaller tastings of silliness should make for a nice Thursday night alternative this winter.
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The show has enough originality and sheer wackiness to maintain viewer interest, not to mention ridiculous effects that are anything but special.
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The Spoils of Babylon is a dada high-wire act presided over by quasi-satirical nutters, and the chaos they invoke is oddly life-affirming.
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[A strange, zany, funny, and very star-studded six-episode series.
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Reproduction isn’t The Spoils Of Babylon’s comic strong suit, absurdity is. Crummy special effects are cute, but the miniseries finds its voice by bursting Jonrosh’s bubble, illuminating his shortcomings as a filmmaker through mealy mouthed dialogue, incomprehensible blocking, and continuity errors.
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While Episode 1 is a bit of a bore, the second episode is flat-out hilarious.
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The comedy is at its best when Babylon behaves like a real melodrama--with tropes taken to exaggerated extremes — rather than relying too much on the visual gags of a bygone era.
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It’s good for some dumb laughs, and--important in this age when complex television dramas consume so many of our brain cells--it doesn’t demand much of a mental commitment.
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This is silliness for its own wonderfully ridiculous sake.
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Some of the stylistic touches are amusing, including a bombastic theme song belted by Steve Lawrence, but the strain shows as Babylon's sketchy premise is elongated to miniseries length.
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These first two episodes are gut-busting, non-stop fun.
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The casting should be a modest draw, though again, the nature of the exercise feels better suited to Web shorts than even half-hour episodes. That said, the show is fitfully funny, and while perhaps unworthy of Jonrosh’s full daylong opus, as ways of idly killing time go, hey, it beats dying.
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Part of the joke is that The Spoils of Babylon was utterly unwatchable, and that’s why the network never showed it; it seems they achieved that goal a little too well.
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The new comedy delivers on its crazy promise.
Awards & Rankings
User score distribution:
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Positive: 14 out of 24
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Mixed: 4 out of 24
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Negative: 6 out of 24
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Jan 9, 2014
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Jan 24, 2014
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Feb 16, 2014