IM DYING UP HERE SEASON 3 SERIES
The series begins with a suicide, that of a rising star comedian, Clay (played by Sebastian Stan), who’s just had a tremendously successful appearance on The Tonight Show and decided that there’s nowhere to go but down. It’s a premium cable drama, so there’s plenty of nudity, mostly by women in only one episode – or one scene – about the sexual exploits of male characters.Īs any hourlong cable drama with multiple overlapping storylines promises, there are many repetitive and frustrating plots about the inner turmoil of the neurotic young white male. Goldie and Cassie both exist along a spectrum on I’m Dying Up Here as victim and perpetrator of anti-woman discrimination, but the show’s treatment of women characters other than those two demonstrates that the writers’ room may not be as progressive as it believes. Goldie marginalizes Cassie not just because of Cassie’s offbeat material, but also because Goldie gives the best spots to male comedians. Like many of the comedians at the Cellar, Cassie has a deeply dysfunctional relationship with Goldie, the club owner. Goldie and many of the club’s regular comics insist that people will be too depressed to laugh, but Cassie is confident she can make the material work. Cassie, an up-and-coming comedian played by the always-great Ari Graynor, spends much of the season developing a routine about her parents dying. Since the series focuses on the way that comedy was changed by these young comedians, it’s impossible to have any stake in the doings of these fictional characters, knowing that elsewhere in town, real historical figures are reshaping comedy.ĭespite the difficulty of investing in the show’s reality, it does successfully examine standup comedy in some insightful ways. The real world still exists on I’m Dying Up Here : Johnny Carson and Richard Pryor both make cameos (Dylan Baker and Brandon Ford Green, respectively), and characters make offhand remarks about The Comedy Store. The Comedy Store’s now-famous lineup of comedians have been replaced by fictional characters, generally played ably by a cast that includes a mix of comedians-turned-actors and actors playing comedians. Its main characters are composites of real people: Instead of matriarchal Comedy Store owner-operator Mitzi Shore, it’s Cellar owner-operator Goldie Herschlag (played typically by Melissa Leo – matriarchal, vicious, and assertive).
That I’m Dying Up Here is loosely fictionalized is one of its bigger drawbacks. The show pays more attention to Carson than to the wage issue, and it doesn’t pay that much attention to either. These events loom large over the series the comics are desperate to be on Carson, and are frustrated by the lack of pay at The Cellar, the fictionalized stand-in for The Comedy Store, which still exists today (not to be confused with New York’s actual club, The Comedy Cellar ). In 1979, fed up with not getting paid for their stage time, LA comedians picketed The Comedy Store for months, forever changing the business. In 1972, The Tonight Show moved production from New York to Los Angeles, making LA the place to be for aspiring comics hoping to get noticed – and The Comedy Store was one of the best places in the city to do it. Knoedelseder’s I’m Dying Up Here is more or less bookended by two significant moments in standup history.
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