“Stacks” is not good. Let’s start there and get it out of the way before we get to the part where I contradict myself and say it’s actually extremely good (which it isn’t… it’s bad). Patrick Stickles ( frontman for Titus Andronicus), who created this quasi-parody pilot with director Ray Concepcion, is one of the wittiest and poignant punk lyricists in the game. He may even be a good writer in general. But this? This is not good.
Mundanity is often a stand-in for depth, and that’s especially true here. The first two minutes of this 36-minute pilot involves Stacks (the titular character, obviously) hitting the snooze alarm a bunch of times, coughing a fuck-ton and feeding his cats. All of this is an accurate tone-setter for a plot that can be summed up in one sentence: Stacks goes to band practice with Titus Andronicus, then goes to an interview. Not that simplicity is equal to boredom or a lack of complexity (sometimes simple really is better), but what fills the space of this simplistic plot is a lot of coughing and badly delivered lines.
The bad acting starts just after the two-minute mark when Stacks is on the phone with Laura Ballance of Merge Records and Superchunk fame. She tells our main character that the first single off the new Titus Andronicus album didn’t do well and Stacks replies with, “I don’t know what we’re going to do yet, but we’re going to come up with something,” before almost looking straight into the camera as if he were edging a fourth wall break. Of course, the implication is that this pilot itself is that something he’s come up with. He’s talking about the thing we are currently watching. Cool.
So, by the 2:30 mark in this show, the audience already knows exactly what to expect. It’s going to be boring, as it is in the first two minutes. It’s going to be badly acted, as shown in the flat exchange between Ballance and our hero. It’s going to be self-referential without ever directly mentioning that his big idea is this thing he’s referencing. This exact idea didn’t quite work for “Seinfeld” or “Episodes” when they did directly cover their own shows within their shows, so maybe Stickles’ thought is that taking a more winking approach to this idea would make it clever. It doesn’t. Instead, the show strains under its relentless attempt to be clever without ever getting there.
And it tries to be weird without the acting to support that weight either. At one point, he raps with his bartender friend, who suggests they should get their rap duo back together. Okay. That’s certainly a thing that exists, I guess. During practice with Titus Andronicus, the weird is in the form of an obsession with playing craps, but the flat deliveries don’t sell it and the show doesn’t stick with the idea long enough for this to even have an arc of any kind. Stacks simply shows up to practice, says, “Oh fuck, you’re playing craps! Can I play?” He plays, wins, and they practice. After practice, some of the band members go back to playing. All this occurs while the drummer reads a book.
In every scene, Stacks mentions how he’s tired. He converses with someone about the failed single or the failed previous record. They hint at needing to “find something” to fix this situation of failure (again, this show is that “something”). And he moves on to the next scene. A lot of times, we get a musical interlude that’s usually a song off the new album. Hopefully, the rap is not at all off the new album.
All of that is bad, of course, but then comes a part I actually liked. Nearly twenty minutes into this damn thing, Stacks goes to an interview mentioned in the first few minutes during his phone call with Merge. This is the first case of comedic chemistry, and it doesn’t exactly mean the deliveries are particularly good (although, Stickles isn’t a bad actor either, and Cary Kehayan who plays the journalist is honestly pretty good) or the jokes are all that much better. But the insufferable music journalist and the exasperated Stacks play off each other well. The journalist says something a little insane, and Stacks reacts with something equally insane, which the journalist then reacts to with something insane. Each of the characters plays both the straight man and the comic, and the pay off is Stacks and Titus Andronicus performing a single off their new album in an attempt to convince the journalist this particular song is more relevant than he gives it credit.
The scene shows Titus Andronicus making fun of itself in a hyper-self-aware manner that almost serves as a juxtaposition to the self-referential “this show is about making this show” bullshit occurring during the entire rest of the pilot and shines a light on the insular nature of this entire concept, a meta-commentary inside a meta-commentary inside a meta-commentary. And honestly, even though the delivery and everything is still pretty fucking bad, it makes the entire thing almost good.
Don’t get me wrong here. It isn’t good. It’s painful to watch. And I watched the entire thing a second time (in segments, but still), which sucked. But as a piece of art not meant to be enjoyed, and perhaps too on the nose, Stickles has something here. He’s overtly saying that it sucks to have to keep grinding to sell albums in new ways. He specifically says about a billion times that he’d rather be on tour.
It makes me wonder if this is torturous to watch because it’s torturous for Titus Andronicus to do this shit every single time they have to make a new album. Perhaps, this is meant to make us feel the way they feel. That’s an admirable attempt even if it kind of fucking sucks to watch.
Alllllllllllll that said, this could have been good in its own way if Stickles and Concepcion just took a slightly different approach. I doubt this will ever become a series, and that’s most likely not the intention here at all. In a way, it’s a shame this is just something made to market the new album because it could be amazing with just a few changes going forward. The bedrock is here and the precedent exists for an honestly great series. This, I’ll discuss tomorrow in the second part of this article.