Saving
Rent Webseries Review
Taking a diverse assortment of characters that would
not normally interact and placing them together in an offbeat environment
is a time-honored comic tradition. Slews of serial narratives, from
Gilligan’s Island to The Office on television
as well as such webseries as The Guild and The Video Makers
online, have utilized such a plot device both effectively and successfully.
Saving
Rent follows
in similar footsteps with a twelve-episode season that is both funny
and relevant while again proving that an independently-produced webseries
can be just as enjoyable as any sitcom on television.
Advertising
manager Mike (Vincent Giovanni) and girlfriend Kelley (Alice Cutler)
relocate from Boston to Los Angeles only to find life on the West Coast
different than expected when Mike loses his job due to a weakened economy.
With his life-savings spent on a luxurious home and his pride preventing
him from telling Kelley that about his unemployment status, Mike hatches
a plan to rent out the extra rooms in their large abode to a small handful
of strangers. After interviewing the usual assortment of suspects—or
in this case, unusual assortment—the two decide upon Paul (Jacob
Lane), a Canadian trying to make it as an actor in L.A.; Suzie (Mallory
McGill), a waitress who insists she is twenty-one despite looking much
younger; Tina (Ashley Palmer), a wannabe porn-star; and Chucho (Alex
Ruiz), a seemingly illegal Mexican immigrant who doesn’t speak
English.
Having
thus set up the situation in the first episode, co-creators Gary Teperman
and Ernie Lee then develop the comedy by exploring this oddball collection
of roommates and the lengths they go to in order to achieve personal
success. With a premise already built on one lie—the fact that
Mike lost his job but still pretends to go to work everyday—Saving
Rent expands upon it by giving each member of the ensemble cast
secrets and lies of their own.
While Paul
is not above dropping the name William Shatner as a reference during
his initial rental interview with Mike and Kelley, for instance, he
is in actuality the epitome of a struggling actor in Los Angeles and
is forced to take such meandering jobs as portraying a pirate on Hollywood
Boulevard and a fake patient for medical students to diagnose. Suzie,
meanwhile, is not a twenty-one-year-old world traveler but a teenage
runaway, and while Tina does have the ambition to be an adult film start,
she has yet to break into the industry. It also turns out that Chucho
is neither Mexican nor unable to speak English, and even Kelley gets
into the act by secretly selling weed and marijuana-laced brownies on
the side.
Each episode
of the webseries begins with a short, thirty-second opening sequence
featuring a theme-song reminiscent of any number of television sitcoms
produced by Norman Lear in the 1970s and 80s. While Saving Rent
may not be a classic along the likes of All in the Family,
Maude and The Jeffersons, it is just as much an exploration
of its times as those legendary Lear shows of the past. In the 1970s,
it was racial and gender inequality that were the country’s primary
struggles; for the years 2008-2010, it’s the economy and the struggles
of every day Americans who have faced lay-offs and difficulty making
ends meet. While Mike may be more middle-to-upper class economically
as opposed to working class, the situation of suddenly finding himself
unemployed and potentially losing his home because of an inability to
pay his mortgage is just as much a sign of the times as anything else.
Of course,
the growing webseries medium itself is another staple of the times in
which we live, something not lost on the cast and crew of Saving
Rent. “We always intended to shoot it as a webseries,”
Alice Cutler, who not only portrays wife Kelley but served as an executive
producer and writer on the show, told Somojo
Magazine
in October 2009. “More
and more people are watching TV on the Internet, higher profile actors
are appearing on webseries, and it’s so easy to promote online
content. And with sites like Facebook and Twitter, you can get the word
out to thousands instantly without spending a dime.”
With its
classic premise and relevant subject matter, Saving Rent is
a situation comedy for our uncertain economic times that fits in nicely
with other webseries of its genre. It is also a show that anyone can
identify with—who hasn’t, after all, lied to both others
and themselves about the various crossroads that life sometimes leads.
Saving Rent proves that we are not alone with the struggles
we face, and helps us to both gain perspective and laugh along the way
as well. What could be more right for the times than that?
Anthony
Letizia (April 5, 2010)
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