​ "Bush Man" – Wrecked S03E01 Review

And so we're back with the TBS hit summer season. At least, I assume it's a hit because they keep bringing it back for what is now Wrecked's third season.

If you haven' seen the show before, Wrecked started as a very loose parody of Lost. And started six years after Lost ended. So TBS, thy name is "timely".

A plane crashes on the island and the obvious hero Liam (James Scott) dies a few minutes into the episode. That leaves a group of slobs and losers to try to fend for themselves. The main characters are:

Owen (Zach Cregger): a flight attendant who thinks he can become a leader. He can't.
Danny (Brian Sacca): the son of a rich man who fancies himself a police officer. He isn't.
Emma (Ginger Gonzaga) and Florence (Jessica Lowe): Friends who have absolutely no survival talents.
Karen (Brooke Dillman): the ruthless hardened fighter and survivor: the Locke character from Lost with even less social graces.
Todd (Will Greenberg): An annoying loud-mouthed jerk, who is the fiancée of Jess, who loves Todd anyway.
Pack (Asif Ali): A talent agent who is stuck on 21st century technology.
Steve (Rhys Darby): An idiot from New Zealand who lets the power of the situation go to his head.

Together with the other survivors, the group fights to live on a deserted island. In season 2 pirates find them and try to hold Danny for ransom. The survivors escape the island and end up on the pirate's cruise liner base. Which was a Red Hot Chili Peppers tribute cruiser before the pirates took it. The survivors enjoy their relative luxury for a few episodes but a whacked-out non-main-cast survivor sinks the ship. At the end of season 2, the main cast plus survivor Chet (George Basil) find themselves on an island beach surrounded by land mines. And in a cut scene we see Emma--who disappeared near the end of season 1. Well, okay, we see her severed head in a control room along with the heads of some other people we've never seen.

So "Bush Man" initially focuses on another man, Mumbles, who is running through the jungle. He sees the plane come crashing down, and then three goofs in hunter outfits kill him while arguing among themselves.

Back to the beach, and Danny has a vision of the future where his buddy Owen is with a wife, Gwen, and has two sons. Rather than Owen's current girlfriend, Florence. In the future vision Danny is alive, so he figures he can just walk through the land mines. He can't. He steps on one, and Owen and Florence stay behind to help him while the others go into the island interior after Steve sees a hunter watching them.

Danny has seen every action movie. Ever. And talks Owen through defusing the bomb. This part is mildly funny, as Danny precisely describes what Owen is seeing. And the land mine even has a helpful sign on the access panel saying "Access Panel". However, all the wires are red so when Danny tells Owen to cut the red wire, it's of no help whatsoever. They end up tying Danny's boot to the land mine, and then throwing it away. Where it blows up their lifeboat from the liner.

Meanwhile, Steve licks branches and tracks the hunter he saw. Pack hangs behind to eat some berries he saw, but when he rejoins the others they spot the berry stains on Pack's mouth. A gorilla attacks them, and everyone climbs up into a tree except for Pack, who is sick from the berries. Declan, a guy in great clothing (Jonno Roberts) shows up and shoots the gorilla dead just as Danny and the others arrive.

And... that's it. Hey, it's only 30 minutes. You were expecting War & Peace?

Wrecked remains a mildly funny parody of... something. It started out as a Lost parody. But it either forgot or abandoned that, and became more of a general loser/slob series. There's some surreal stuff like Airplane!, some observational comedy, some Scary Movie-style jokes at whatever happens to be popular, some ironic jumpcuts (Mumbles says heroes will come to the island: cut to the survivors screaming in panic), and some slapstick. And a lot of open-mouthed headache-inducing screaming. It's basically just a lot of everything, all thrown together into one big pot and mixed together.

This season it looks like they're doing more of a The Most Dangerous Game-type parody. The hunters are incompetent boobs except for their apparent leader, the aforementioned Declan. The survivors are still spending most of their time arguing among themselves and stabbing each other's backs.

The main problem with Wrecked is that it's still not sure what it wants to be. Sometimes it goes for surreal Zucker Brothers-style humor. But the Shipley brothers, Jordan and Justin, are no Zuckers. Angie Tribeca, also on TBS, does the whole weird surreal thing much better.

So I get an occasional snicker out of Wrecked. There are parts that are funny. And everybody's humor is different. So what doesn't amuse me might amuse you. Give it a try if you want to see way-out comedy rather than slice-of-life sitcoms.

But that's just my opinion, I could be wrong. What do you think?