The Bitter End Review
Like all creative endeavors, webseries are born from a variety of places. Some draw upon life experiences, some are designed to break storytelling barriers and some just creep up on their creator. While a majority are explicitly designed for the Internet, other webseries start out as scripts for television pilots that never materialized. Then there’s The Bitter End, a comedy gem that sprouted from the fertile minds of Dan Beirne, Etan Muskat and Brent Skagford during the trio’s impov theater performances in Montreal.
The six-episode first season follows two estranged brothers, Bernard (Beirne) and Les (Skagford), as they reconnect following Les’ stint in drug rehabilitation. Younger brother Bernard, an aspiring novelist who works at a printing store and has a crush on coffee shop waitress Eden (Vanessa Matsui), allows the thirty-year-old Les to stay at his small, one-bedroom apartment while the older sibling attempts to get his life back together. But just as Oscar Madison and Felix Unger of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple had trouble adapting to each other’s peculiarities, the same holds true for the two brothers—resulting in equally humorous outcomes.
Although unintentional, Les’ re-entry into society has a negative impact on Bernard’s courtship of Eden. In the first episode, for instance, Les strays from searching for a job on Craig’s List to finding a sexual partner instead. He even goes so far as to photograph his private parts—using Bernard’s digital camera—and emailing the picture to a willing female. When Bernard then uses the same camera to help Eden record a video audition tape, however, the struggling actress is horrified to stumble across the image. “Why are you showing me your dick?” she asks a clueless Bernard. In later episodes Les gives his younger brother romantic advice, including bedroom techniques, which also backfire on the relatively innocent Bernard.
The Bitter End has a natural feel to it, almost like an MTV reality show but without the annoying confessionals. The acting and dialogue likewise fuel such a comparison as they add a sense of believability—as well as relatability—to the action, something that was apparently intentional. “Our show is really about how the people you’re closest with can fuck your life up the most,” Dan Bierne told the Montreal Mirror in September 2009. “Some of our scenarios are based on things that have happened to us, things we’re extremely embarrassed about. And while it’s all filtered through the eyes of our main characters, hopefully the honesty of the origins of the stuff comes through. We’re writing sad comedy from an honest place, you know?”
While The Bitter End is a comedy that features its fair share of laugh-out-loud moments, the true brilliance of the webseries is its ability to allow separate storylines to simmer along during the episodes only to converge and boil-over by the end in both brilliant and hysterical fashion. Episode five, entitled “The Victor,” is a prime example. Now dating, Eden offers to send Bernard’s finished manuscript to her publisher ex-boyfriend, Victor (Graham Cuthbertson). Les, meanwhile, gets dumped by his high-school age girlfriend, Ashley (Erin Agostino), and uses Bernard’s cell phone to leave a message begging her to come back. But when Victor calls to offer Bernard such accolades as “I just spent all night with your baby and, I gotta tell ya, she’s terrific,” Les assumes it’s Ashley’s new boyfriend and threatens to kill him, leading to comedic entanglements for all involved.
The three creators of The Bitter End met in Montreal and eventually became fixtures in the local improv theater scene. The webseries slowly evolved from those performances, initially becoming a live production at the Theatre Ste-Catherine in August 2008 before being filmed for the Internet. “The thing about improv shows is that they disappear at the end of the night,” Brent Skagford explained to the Montreal Mirror. “So something like this is an important step for us. There’s a lot of really interesting things happening on the Web right now. The industry is only just developing, nobody really knows where it’s going, especially when it comes to generating revenue, so we figured we’d just put something out there.”
Luckily for fans of the medium, The Bitter End not only works as a webseries but is an entertaining one as well. Dan Beirne, Etan Muskat and Brent Skagford have not only crafted a very humorous comedy but one filled with slightly-offbeat-yet-recognizable characters and storylines that build slowly and offer a funnier payoff than most of the one-liner sitcoms found on television. In fact, the Montreal Gazette declared The Bitter End the “funniest Canadian sitcom of the year” in 2009 and while such a statement may or may not be true, the show is without a doubt one of the funniest webseries on the Internet.
Anthony Letizia (May 3, 2010)
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