In This Exclusive Excerpt From the Extended Version of The Joy of Trash I Look Back With Sadness and Disappointment at Kelsey Grammer's Ill-Fated Gary the Rat
Spike TV was a revolutionary proposition: a maverick new cable channel that wasn’t exclusively for a female audience. Before Comedy Central’s The Man Show bravely paved the way for the cultural revolution that was Spike TV, literally every television show and movie was made for women and women alone. Some were about shoe shopping. Others were about feelings. None had ANYTHING to offer men.
Then a marketing wizard had a unique idea: what if someone made something for the fellas? What if there wasn’t just a single Man Show pumping out all-important testosterone in a suffocating sea of estrogen but an entire bottom-feeding cable channel filled with shows specifically for men?
Ah, but Spike TV wasn’t for everybody. It wasn’t for quiche-eating, tea-sipping fancy lads who watched PBS and listened to NPR. On the contrary, it was for REAL MEN. Spike TV was for men who were so manly and so macho that they weren’t ultimately men at all but rather dudes, guys and bros. I’m talking about the kind of Hooters-loving, Donald Trump-worshipping, gun-wielding dude-bros Nick Adams lionizes on his Twitter feed.
Spike TV was for dudes, guys and bros who lustily embraced the lazy cliches of boorish American masculinity, who loved boobs, bacon, funny, horny animals, swearing and our culture’s preeminent Lees—Pamela and Stan.
Spike TV served an audience that had never even been acknowledged, let alone catered to or respected: frat boys, gamers and horny teenagers who proudly washed down big bags of Dorito’s with two liters of Mountain Dew.
The cable channel for men made straight white men who loved boobs and video games and farts and superheroes feel seen and valued and understood for the first time with its infamous animation shows.
While not a hit with a mass audience, Gary the Rat did quite well with furries into looking at humanoid feet
Spike TV’s animation bock afforded some of the most beloved entertainers in pop culture an opportunity to do some of their most reviled work.
Love Nickelodeon’s adorably repulsive cat and mouse team Ren & Stimpy? You won’t after that sick fuck John K. has his way with them on our dime and our channel!
Dig Stan the Man, the legendary creator of Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four and just about half the popular superheroes in existence and have a hard-on for sexy Pamela Anderson Lee? Then you might be able to tolerate their ill-fated, misconceived collaboration Stripperella.
Enjoy the erudite verbal comedy of Cheers, Frasier and The Simpsons icon Kelsey Grammer? Then we dare you to suffer through thirteen laugh-free episodes of his Spike TV animated series Gary the Rat!
Grammer was supposed to bring taste, refinement and a very big name to Spike TV’s frat house of the airwaves. Instead the Down Periscope star sunk to Spike TV’s level of puerile, rancid misogyny.
The one semi-joke of Gary the Rat is that its protagonist, Gary Andrews, is a real rat bastard of a lawyer who inexplicably transforms into a real rat, a six foot tall talking humanoid rodent who can still perform his job just fine despite being an unprecedented freak of nature.
It’s a uniquely limited premise laid out in Twilight Zone-style narration, with a wannabe Rod Serling explaining, “Gary Andrews is a successful Wall Street lawyer. He has money, prestige and power. But, in winning the rat race Gary has gone too far.”
In case the symbolism of a rat bastard obsessed with winning the rat race becoming a genuine rat is too subtle our titular anti-hero is shown reading a newspaper with the giant, unlikely headline, “Gary Andrews Wins Again. Lawyer Uses Sub-Human Tactics…” while his legs sprout fur and he finds himself transformed, instantly, from a human being to a rat.
Gary the Rat toys briefly with the notion that Gary’s demotion is a ham-fisted form of cosmic justice, a way of making the metaphorical clumsily lyrical. But it’s ultimately too deeply committed to empty nihilism to treat Gary’s peculiar condition as anything other than a dumb cosmic joke without a punchline or a point.
The Spike TV flop began life online as Flash Animated shorts for the long-defunct website mediatrip.com and shares with turn of the millennium product and its peers Ren & Stimpy Party Cartoons and Stripperella a weakness for empty provocation.
Gary the Rat is the television equivalent of an early online edge-lord. It’s dedicated to the the popular, possibly true notion that everyone and everything sucks, which is a comedically as well as philosophically empty starting place for a comedy.
The mellifluous star of Gary the Rat is at the center of one of the most iconic and talked about animated sequences of all time.
I’m talking of course about the legendary scene in The Simpsons where Grammar’s perpetually aghast, rage-poisoned Sideshow Bob stops on a rake. And then another rake. And then still another rake. And then a rake after that. Sideshow Bob follows it up by stepping on the rake a fifth time and then a six, seventh, eighth and finally a ninth time.
Sideshow Bob’s low-level humiliation is first funny, and then unfunny, and then REALLY unfunny and then it goes all the way around to being hilarious as well as weirdly cathartic.
I’ve dubbed that dynamic The Rake Effect. Gary the Rat has a much different, much less fruitful relationship with repetition. It’s a gloomy graveyard of running jokes that are brutally unfunny the first time around and grow dispiriting and soul-crushing with repetition.
This better not awaken anything within you!
Episodes begin, for example, with a dream sequence where Gary the Rat imagines a scenario that ends with his violent death, leading him to swear off everything from Viagra to eating garbage.
This seems appropriate, since Gary the Rat is a nightmare that will make you wish that you were dead rather than suffering through the televised torments of the damned.
A brutal gauntlet of regular bits follow, each more empty than the last. Gary the Rat has a one-sided phone conversation with a mother (voiced in one episode, and one episode only by Betty White) in an abusive nursing home that he makes no pretense of not despising.
Then Gary gets a delivery of fine cheese from an oblivious stoner delivery boy who thinks he’s a dog. Gary then tangles with Johnny Bugz (Robb Cullen), an exterminator who is forever being paid one thousand dollars to exterminate Gary the Rat despite his prey occupying a place high above him on the socioeconomic ladder.
Because Gary the Rat is committed to empty provocation above all things, Bugz’s sidekick is a cat he seems to have a disturbing sexual attraction to. Like Ren & Stimpy “Adult Party Cartoon”, Gary the Rat is unafraid to dip a toe deep into the murky waters of bestiality-themed humor both in terms of Johnny Bugz’s alarmingly intimate relationship with his feline and in Gary the Rat being wooed by various human women for whom him being a giant anthropomorphic rodent is NOT a deal-breaker.
Gary has a combative relationship with his asshole boss Jack Harrison (Billy Gardell), who treats Gary like he’s something less than human because he is. Everyone just sort of accepts that a six foot tall rat man talks and practices law but Gary is nevertheless treated with disdain because humanity is only slightly more fond of rats with Ivy League degrees and ritzy than they are the kind congregate in sewers and back alleys.
Gary may be the only one with fur and claws and a weird, pointless curse but pretty much everyone in Gary the Rat is a monster and an animal of some sort. Gary’s profession puts him in contact with mobsters, con artists, back-stabbers and career criminals who never quite make him seem sympathetic or likable by comparison.
Ted Danson, David Hyde Pierce and John Mahoney all contribute voices to guest characters who are ugly outside and inside. Their game but patently unfunny performances serve as a grim reminder of just how far the snobby have fallen.
Gary the Rat barely aspires to comedy, let alone satire. In a smarter, funnier cartoon, everyone immediately accepting that a man who was previously a member in semi-good standing of the human race is now a giant rat would qualify as inspired absurdism, meta-humor or Adult Swim-style anti-humor. Alas, Gary the Rat doesn’t offer meta humor or anti-comedy so much as it represents non-comedy.
At the end of every opening credit sequence, the titular anti-hero takes a long, hard look at his transformed image in the mirror and says, with a combination of resignation and despair appropriate for the misery that follows, “Gary the Rat. Shit” or “Gary the Rat. This just sucks.”
He’s talking about his regrettable lot and the cruelty of fate but those words double as succinct, pithy and accurate mini-reviews of the show itself.
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