At the beginning of the book, there’s a conflict keeping our lovers apart, and by the last page, there’s a happy ending. This is what the RWA guidelines call “emotional justice”. Good is rewarded. Evil is punished. Everyone gets what they deserve.
— Robin Epstein, This American Life : “Inside The Romance Industry” (09.19.2003)
The concept of “emotional justice” extends far beyond the field of romance novels. The insistence on fairness — people getting what they deserve — has been a pillar of American popular culture for generations. In the last 20 years or so, as ways of disseminating content have grown exponentially, this content has become far more eclectic. This dynamic produced David Cross’s The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret in 2009. It subverts one of the central assertions of this norm: victims deserve our empathy.
The first two seasons detail the antics of a very dim-witted man, Todd Margaret. Show creator David Cross plays the titular character as one part moron and two parts self-centered jackass. Margaret alienates everyone. When it first debuted, PopMatter’s critic Jesse Hicks referred to David Cross’s portrayal as “one-note”. I agree that Margaret is very narrowly drawn, but it’s one of the things that I enjoyed about the show.
Through all 12 episodes of the first two seasons, Margaret is beset with plagues and trials. He’s a man truly victimized by circumstance. As the trials become more severe and far-fetched, you’d imagine the audience would feel some sympathy for Mr. Margaret. However, Cross plays him as such a self-centered jerk that you never really do feel sorry for him. As the show goes on, he actually becomes less and less sympathetic, and you actually want fate to punish him more.
Cross rebooted the series a little less than three years after the final episode of The Increasingly Bad Decisions of Todd Margaret aired. The third season starts off a bit slow. The first few episodes are far too dependent on the viewer knowing the original series to catch the jokes. The few times when I was able to catch the reference, it was more self-satisfying then funny. The cast remains the same, with one notable exception. The characters they play have the same names, but are changed slightly in the reboot. Like the first two season, the cast carries the show: Cross gets funny people to do very funny things.
The most obvious example is Cross’s own portrayal of Todd Margaret. This Todd Margaret is a successful businessman. The series opens with a seeming well-adjusted Todd Margaret, with a full head of hair and a goatee. He wakes up and tells his girlfriend Stephanie Daley (Amber Tamblyn) a dream in which he went to England, bad things happened, and he ended up blowing up the world. Like in the original, he’s heading off to England to oversee the promotion of “Thunder Muscle” energy drink.
There are hints he is as myopically narcissistic as ever, but he figures out a way to hide it just enough to fool a few people. As the show goes on, the character devolves back to the Todd Margaret of the first two series. He reaches his full-blown cluelessness in a scene at an Indian restaurant. Margaret decides to recreate the dream by recreating the conditions that caused the first. In this scene, Margaret personifies the over-consumptive, bullying, clueless, vulgar, and brass ugly American. It’s at this point that the series hits its stride.
Sharon Horgan returns as Alice Bell, the love interest he meets in England. Season three continues the gag of Bell being interested in “molecular gastronomy”, in which she creates odd chemical concoctions instead of real food. Like Margaret, she’s far more successful in season three. In the original series, she became a proxy for the audience. Further, her scenes with Margaret offered him in a more sympathetic light: he could be well intended, just hopelessly self-destructive. The love-struck idiot is a time-tested comedic trope; it gave Margaret the only sympathetic characteristic he had in the entire first series.
In the third season, Bell is the sexual aggressor. There is no courting or romance. Their relationship is a quick seduction followed by a faster descent into verbal abuse. Near the end of the series, Cross reveals that Bell leads a racist political movement. While this seems a cruel thing to do to one of the shows most likable characters, it does create some great gags.
A second key figure is Brett Wilks (Will Arnett). In both series, Wilks acts as a foil for Margaret. Like in the first two seasons, he falls for a ridiculous scam. This time, instead of listening to self-help tapes on how to succeed by abusing people, he gets recruited by a cult. Each episode begins with a reading from the cult’s holy book about “the catalyst”. In all three seasons, Arnett stands out as one of the most consistently funny characters.
Dave Malford (Blake Harrison) is also there as Margaret’s personal assistant. Malford is the son of an English lord. In the original series, he was the malicious force driving Margaret down his path of doom. From the beginning, he openly screws with Margaret; his gleeful ill will propelled the two seasons. In the third season, he plays someone who’s actually trying to help Margaret. Unfortunately, this character suffers the most in the reboot. Malford is kind of a human personification of Bugs Bunny. He may be cunning and mildly sadistic, but when you are screwing with maroons like Margaret or Elmer Fudd, it’s kind of OK. All of this is lost in the third season. He has some decent comedic moments, but that is all.
The fifth piece of the core characters is Doug Whitney. Jack McBreyer takes over for Spike Jones in season three and, as suggested by the casting, there are a lot of changes to this character. McBreyer’s Whitney’s obsessed with the acquisition of a new microwave. Later, he gets partnered with Wilks as members of the cult. Some of the funniest moments of the season come from the pairing of McBreyer and Arnett.
While only a tangential character, Sara Pascoe reprises her role as Pam, Margaret’s uninhibited neighbor. Through the first four episodes, she just pops in and out. Late in season three, she is revealed as an artist who wins “The Turner Prize”, an annual award given to visual artists in England. While the level of difficulty is rather low for mocking contemporary art, the device creates a few genuinely funny moments.
In addition to the exceptional casts, there are several quick funny snippets throughout the series. Some are vulgar, from a joke based on “fucking John Hamm”, to one of the English racists saying in a saccharine way: “She’s with Hitler now”. Cross has a talent for writing jokes or situations where the audience simultanesouly laughs and feels ashamed for laughing.
In essence, and in a very loose way, The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret retells the book of Job, with Cross substituting Margaret for Job. With Margaret, it’s impossible to tell where the stupidity ends and the pathological selfishness begins. He’s such an awful human being that we end up rooting for the Devil, which makes for moments of great comedy.