FX’s ‘The League’ shreds decency

BY GLENN GARVIN Comments 0
Published: November 4, 2009

Let’s be clear here: I am not saying FX’s new sitcom "The League,” 9:30 p.m. Thursdays, isn’t funny. I’m just saying it’s not for everybody.

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If you’re sensitive about deviant sex, for instance — or even normal sex, if it’s had in restaurant restrooms — you might want to give the show a pass. If drug use to the point of catatonia seems inappropriate as a springboard for humor, you probably shouldn’t tune in. If emotional bullying, sexual blackmail and jokes about developmentally challenged puppies offend you — if you have a shred of human decency — "The League” isn’t for you.

A kind of sociopathic "Sex and the City” for men that substitutes football for shoes and dope for cosmos, "The League” is about a group of arrested-development buddies (one is actually a woman, but she slings locker-room raunch with the best of them) whose fantasy-football league is an extension of their ethically stunted, emotionally retarded, sexually starved lives.

League champ Pete (Mark Duplass, "The Puffy Chair”) is ruthless and arrogant: "It’s not just that you lose — it’s that you try so hard and you still lose,” he mocks his putative friends. Perennial runner-up Kevin (Stephen Rannazzisi, "Samantha Who?”) is so henpecked he conducts league business while sitting on the toilet, the only place he can hide from his wife.

The crass, manipulative Ruxin (Nick Kroll, "Reno 911”) would be diagnosed as paranoid except that everybody else really is plotting against him. Brain-dead stoner Taco (Jon Lajoie, star of countless scatological YouTube videos) is given to such aphorisms as "I love having sex in Priuses; not only are you having sex but you’re saving the environment.” And Andre (Paul Scheer, "30 Rock”) is the group’s punching bag going back to high school.

The testosterone-infused interplay as they taunt each other over career potholes, curdled marriages and sexual depravities and deprivations is scathing and hilarious, though an astonishing percentage of it cannot even be alluded to here.