Strangers with Candy

This new show from Comedy Central is completely loopy! Give it a few minutes of your time and you too will succomb! Amy Sedaris is outrageously funny as Jerry Blank, a 47 year old reprehensible ex-convict trying to graduate Flashpoint High "right where she left off." Her catatonic senior citizen father and alcoholic and abusive step-mother are both superb!

Jerry always struggles to do the right thing. She rarely succeeds. Every episode Jerry has a new pet. A lobster (that is boiled accidentally). A turtle (who is shot out the living room sliding glass doors after a serious one-on-one with a golf club, and is later cremated and commingled with Jerry's mother's ashes). And a constrictor (nothing untoward it seems happens to this pet). Poor Jerry, as she struggles to gain weight to play Ma in Raisin in the Sun and spy on a nice classmate who the teachers feel is retarded!

At the end of each episode I feel gratified that Jerry never does the right thing, but that is ok. In fact the episodes end happily because Jerry gave someone an overdose of home brewed drugs or she snitched on her retarded friend who stood up for her. The list of Jerry's misdeeds is long, but as her teacher, Mr. Jellinek, advises her, "...stick with what you know!"

I remember this show with great fondness, and am happy to see it is arriving on DVD -- plus the feature length movie version will hit screens this summer! What more could one ask for, except maybe a fantasy sequence where Jeri turns into the incredibly cute Amy Sedaris while she's making love to a classmate, male or female or both at once. It seems like a century ago since this was on the air. Look at how far Mr. Colbert has come in what is actually a relatively short period of time. As for Amy, check out her IMDb page and see how lovely she looks in real life. And this is a middle-aged woman! Why couldn't all middle-aged women look like this?

I'm surprised to see only one negative review on IMDB. Having been a fan of the show since its debut, I knew from the start it would be a love or hate series for many people.

It's a great show not for its intellectual qualities (or on the surface, lack thereof), but its originality. Teen dramacom parodies have come before, though none as brave as this. SwC reminds me in part of the Nickelodeon series from the early-mid 90s such as "Salute your Shorts", which is perhaps why I and many others who grew up in that era have a soft spot for it.

It's sad to think we might not see many more divisive T.V series. The dumbing down of the masses by shows in which greedy people vote one another off fake islands ensures subtly and wit will soon be regarded as the real enemies of television.

Stranger's With Candy has such a funny premise, and a highly un-believable one that you just have see it to believe it. I loved this series, bravo for Comedy Central to show it. In some respects it was like a very warped after school special but mixed in were themes of older adults trying to attend 'school', to compete against youngsters, and re-live a hey-day they never had in the first place.

Jeri is a character that is trying to get her life back ontrack, and at her age, she went right back to the beginning, the high school she dropped out of. Oh -- gosh-- how funny it would be to see ANY of the high school drop outs decide to go back after 15, 20, 25 years of leaving and to RE-LIVE that horror all over again!!!

This series was funny, bittersweet, and yes, more like a warped after school special but the question "Strangers With Candy" asked that we all should be asking is:

"Do I set my work aspirations higher or do I chose to work at the plastic flower plant plant like everyone else?"

Amy Sederis is brilliant as Jerri Blank amid a cast of other excellent comic writer/actors, including Paul Dinello and "The Daily Show's" Stephen Colbert. It had me consistently on the floor with it's inventiveness, audacity and vicious wit (i.e., the prayer at the Families of Alcoholics meeting: "Dear God, please give me the strength to blame those who did this to me, to accuse those who didn't, and the wisdom to know the difference.") It's long since disappeared from Comedy Central, but DVDs of Seasons One and Two are out, and a movie version by the same team is on its way for 2005. BTW, whoever suggested that the writers were "white supremists," I sincerely hope you are joking. It's called satire, in the vein of Swift and Voltaire.