Chicago Sun-Times: Don’t bother with ‘Second City’ Documentary

There is a new PBS documentary called “Second City”, featuring the history of the troupe and the now-famous former members. But the reviewer from the Chicago Sun-Times says don’t even bother. I have been a fan of former ‘Second City’ cast members for years, and can really feel the reviewers pain. To me, nothing is more interesting than listening to a comedian talk about the serious business of being funny. However, that doesn’t seem to be a topic in the new documentary:

Don’t give it a ‘Second’ thought
It would be so easy to improve on doc about improv group

January 4, 2007
BY DOUG ELFMAN Television Critic

live where I live partly because my sky high apartment hangs one block from Second City. On the way to the L, walking past the house of improv makes me smile. What I’m saying today is I am the ideal potential viewer for the PBS documentary “Second City,” but I don’t like it. Not one bit.

I’ll admit to a wish that complicates my review. I wish “Second City” were nothing more than long interviews with improv actors describing the methods that created their best characters and sketches. Art is process, and those are the truths I want.

As an alternative, I wish “Second City” discussed vital differences among types of sketch actors, the way writer Virginia Heffernan did for a New Yorker profile on Tina Fey a few years ago. (Second City-ers are aesthetes. Harvard Lampooners are conceptualizers. Groundlings are eccentrics.)

Instead, “Second City” examines angles of commerce as much as comedy. It is one of those two-hour retrospectives that flashcards through 50 years of the history of what’s shiny this week. Most of it zeroes in on “SCTV,” the Canadian cum NBC show that followed “Saturday Night Live.”

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It’s also missing attention to Del Close, Stephen Colbert, Steve Carell and others. You almost have to sit through both parts of this film beforu get juicy smartness from Tina Fey, Martin Short, Patrick McKenna and Alan Arkin.

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