In the book version of his popular website Stuff White People Like, Christian Lander offered the following description of Portland: “Essentially a Lord Of The Flies scenario in the Pacific Northwest instead of the South Pacific. In both cases, we have a situation whereby a homogenous group of people is left alone in an area with no one to keep them in check. Eventually the euphoria and self-congratulation devolves into savagery and murder. Portland has not yet reached the stage where they smash Piggy’s glasses, but there is a strong likelihood that the city will have mass riots and murder when the local grocery co-op runs out of organic wild salmon.”
While I don’t think real Portland subscribes exactly to this viewpoint—the inciting incident will obviously be when our stockpile of craft microbrews finally dries up—the Portlandia universe is certainly one that always seems to be teetering on the edge of a psychotic break. Many of the show’s strongest sketches have gotten their mileage from taking characters who are incredibly serious about one thing—be it playing the gentlest music or painting birds on every surface—and then showing just how worked up they get when that worldview is challenged even a little bit. Witness Toni and Candace, who feel as if they’re one Yelp review away from lighting their entire customer base on fire; or Dave and Kath, who are so tightly wound that one dream can lead them to run with the coyotes and devour house pets. And the events of the season finale “Blackout” are ones designed to try the souls of all the city’s fair-trade residents, as the power to the entire city is shut down with the press of a button.
While the idea of a city-wide blackout would be interesting enough on its own—perhaps converting Portlandia into a “Revolution meets the Super Bowl” scenario—the reason why “Blackout” is so interesting is that it’s a culmination of much of the previous season. Any of you who have been reading these reviews know that I’m an ardent supporter of Portlandia’s efforts to move away from standalone sketches in its third season, incorporating more serialized elements in to its episodes and tightening up its runner sketches. Part of that is a qualitative thing—I genuinely believe the characters and world Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein have build can support the move—but much of it is because I can’t think of any other sketch comedy show that’s done this before. You never saw Monty Python’s Flying Circus, for instance, turning the Dead Parrot pet shop into a recurring location, or Saturday Night Live weaving narrative callbacks into Hans and Franz sketches.
Portlandia has been trying this more ambitious format ever since the success of “Brunch Special,” and “Blackout” showed it’s been playing a longer game than even I expected. The blackout is triggered by the city’s utter lack of management following the Mayor’s abdication in “Off The Grid” and rejecting his replacement in “The Temp,” which has essentially left Portland managed by a voicemail inbox for weeks. Fred and Carrie are the only ones in a position to save the city, but after the events of “Alexandra” and “No-Fo-O-Fo-Bridge” they’re barely on speaking terms. The end result of this is that there’s a new sense of engagement with the episode—their quest to find the mayor and restore the power isn’t a random adventure, it’s the third act of a story. (And one that’s still allowed to be funny, as they awkwardly dance around their separation and hiss “Stop interrogating me!” the minute a flashlight beam touches either of their faces.)
Fred and Carrie pursue the Mayor into the woods outside the city, only to discover that he’s moved to the “end of the road” and gone full Colonel Kurtz, living in a commune, speaking only in strange hushed tones and animalistic yelps. “You make me laugh, man with glass windows on his face!” he says cheerfully when Fred tries to communicate through the latter. Here’s another instance where three seasons worth of time with these characters leads to a satisfying payoff, as after some false starts, Fred and Carrie find exactly the right words to penetrate the Mayor’s psyche. The Fred-Carrie-Mayor trifecta is the strongest combination the show has, and watching this conversation play out is a delight: “The neighboring city… Under the cover of darkness, they might erect a Space Needle in Portland!” “Space Needle… ” “Portland could become a suburb of Seattle!” “This word disturbs me.”
Another earlier story given its third act in “Blackout” is Peter and Nance’s B&B, now over the rough patches of “Soft Opening” and open to the public—at least until the lights go out, at which point Nance has to herd the entire population into a “panic parlor” and Peter has a series of elaborate nervous breakdowns. (“Just an alert to you guys, I’ve discovered that I have a fear of the dark. Is the house on fire? I’m imagining suffocating.”) A gentleman named Birdman (played by Armisen’s fellow Saturday Night Live alum Bill Hader) comes into the B&B at the tensest moment, and decides that it’s time for all the residents to go on a “walkabout.” “I think Mother Nature wants you to get to know her a little better,” he leers at Peter and Nance, who are both still disturbed that neither can remember checking him in.
Birdman is one of Portlandia’s less successful guest stars—not by any fault of Hader’s, but he’s playing a character who’s intentionally too broad for the show’s sense of humor, and the intentional broadness doesn’t make him as funny in execution as he was in theory. (Blackadder’s Lord Flashheart comes to mind as another easy example of this trope.) The thick Australian accent he adopts does provide some good reactions from Armisen however, as Peter is so flustered by his inability to interpret Birdman’s words he can’t even pronounce his own name or those of the Beatles. (“Tom. Gehrig?”) And he also deserves credit for one of the episode’s better lines, delivered to the B&B clientele at walkabout’s peak: “Your spirit animal should be entering you now! That is not a spirit animal, that is an arrow.”