Here Today
SONYThere is something amiss within Here Today, something that could rub viewers the wrong way. A feature filled with placeholder characters, this Billy Crystal-led piece is a very obvious contemplation on past generations of influence slipping away. Think for a moment about those that have influenced or inspired an individual. Even one. Norm Macdonald springs to mind. His sudden passing was a tragedy not just because his death was untimely. It has deprived those he influenced, those he engaged with, another round of good humour or bout of creativity. Here Today hopes to utilise this with its fading comedian character but does little more than glance at what audiences may feel, rather than what they experience.
A passion project for Crystal, the adage of the title marks a comedian in a spiral nearing his end. Here today, gone tomorrow. Very good. Pats on the back all round for that nugget of wisdom that feels about as on the nose as expected. Crystal shifted himself away from the glory days of When Harry Met Sally by using Here Today as a puff piece for the good old times. When writers would work from typewriters, when their jokes landed so poorly in testing rooms but powered on through anyway. A rather droll piece that sets up the writer's room segments would have, hopefully, had actual writers fired for material so poorly performed here. If Saturday Night Live did this, they’d be off the air within four minutes. Unfortunately, there is no way to get Crystal and company off of the screen.
Old man Crystal fails to work with technology, a young woman brings him down to reality. There is nothing within Here Today that cannot be imitated by anyone elsewhere. Every duo will have this dynamic, Here Today never makes it particularly unique to the talents at the heart of this. Crystal and Haddish are strong elsewhere and boring here. Routine and dull at the best of times, with weird flashbacks that aggrandise the life of a writer as Woody Allen would when he was feeling sorry for himself in the 1970s. Too many lovers and not enough money is the New York way of living it would seem. But after decades of corroborating those ideals through so many mouthpieces, it would appear Crystal has produced the dullest of them all.
The adage Here Today hints at is obvious; the charm it has is loose and the character depth is shallow. A real triple threat of miserably fine moments follows, ballooned by talent and pumped full of hot air. All Joking Aside but with a bigger pool of talent and a firmer hand in the Hollywood circle. If anything, that raises expectations and blows them out when Crystal and company can’t match up to what they hope to perceive and prove throughout this fairly dull and lonely comedy. A loss of reality is matched only by a loss of sense. Here Today features both. It begins as it means to go on, lucidly, poorly and strangely. There are no rewrites on the grand stage of life, as Here Today is so frequently telling its audience. No rewrites to this script, either. A death knell for Crystal’s twilight years.