TV Review: 'Delco Proper' Not Proper, But Funny

Anyone who's anyone from the Southeast area of Pennsylvania known as Delco - short for Delaware County - will tell you we are our own breed. We're horrible drivers, we're abrasive and the bar known as Barns (Barnaby's) is the hot drinking spot for a true Delconian.

Delco is so cool that the Oscar-winning film "Silver Linings Playbook" was shot in part in some of its communities. We didn't get to see the attitude that is definitive of the area, but it definitely put us on the map.

Now we have the Comedy Central web series called "Delco Proper", a series of short scenarios that could seem aberrant to those not familiar with this wonderful pocket of the state, but is not at all shocking to those who call Delco home.

In the first episode, Tommy, Izzy and John attend a high school classmate's funeral, or as Tommy refers to as, a "high school reunion".

"It's a funeral, Tommy," says John.

"OK, a sad high school reunion," Tommy assuredly responds.

In Delco, one seems to stick around longer than they mean to, and when an impromptu high school "reunion" isn't happening at a local watering hole, a funeral will suffice. Anytime you see more than one of your classmates in public, it can almost always be a "sad" high school reunion, funeral not needed.

It's part of our charm.

In Delco, we don't ask ourselves why we haven't left yet, we ask why everyone else is still here.

Meanwhile, Izzy wants to kick funeral-goer Donny's ass and hopefully throw him through a stained-glass window. Why? Who knows, it's Delco. Who says we need a legit reason to fight someone?

What transpires in the six-minute episode is, I guess you could say, Delco proper: arguing at a funeral; trying to get laid at said funeral; cursing during a eulogy. It's not to say that these are inappropriate events, they are, but not so inappropriate to us in Delco. There's nothing so shocking that could happen here that would make us say, "that would never happen here!", it's usually always, "only in Delco".

A shock to the pride of Delconians is that aside from the show's name, you wouldn't even know it was set in Delco. There are no defining landmarks that screams Delco - give us a Wawa or something! The characters and situations are typical of our people, you could easily see that if you've lived here long enough, but there's no way to say it's about us if it weren't for the show name. If you took Delco out of the title this would seem like the workings of any other show about foul-mouthed guys pushing themselves in unnecessarily comical situations, or one that exploits a certain event to benefit their own selfish means (which is typical in Delco).

That said, "Delco Proper" is a pop of laughs for its short runtime. It borrows heavily from the film "Clerks" where dialogue is a profanity-laced look at life yet is comforting in that it sounds authentic and true to life, and the characters mirror that film's Dante and Randall (who, also, cause trouble at a funeral). The situations the characters get involved in combine the craziness of the aforementioned with the workings of a "Seinfeld" episode

I'm not saying I didn't laugh, but there is nothing about Delco in this series, so far, whose physical identity resembles the name.

Rating: B-

On Netflix: Same Old Routine on 'Orange is the New Black'

After a powerful and manipulative tornado named Vee ripped through Litchfield in season two of Netflix's hit dramedy series "Orange is the New Black",  things have come back to normal, or even the monotonous, in the follow-up season that premiered a few hours earlier of its June 12 release.

The season starts off quite soft with a Mother's Day celebration at the clink which was a nice breather after everything that had happened at Litchfield in the last season. This allowed us to get reacquainted with a few of our favorites: Red is out of the infirmary; Daya is still pregnant; Poussey, Taystee and Black Cindy are doing whatever they do; and everyone else is everyone else.

Taking a turn for the worse, Alex is "magically" back at Litchfield, continuing a tireless plotline of Piper and her (former) lover still crossing paths at what seems to be the only women's prison in the country - or one of two, after another was temporarily featured at the start of season two.

As the show slowly gets its footing. We find out Litchfield maybe closing, Alex and Piper are angrily in love with each other, and Bennett and Daya are engaged, yet the baby drama doesn't end when Pornstache's mother gets entangled in a shakedown scheme to adopt the baby.

This appears to be the main driving points of the season this year, and with the regular order of 13 episodes it's going to be a long one, and one that will focus strongly on the show's most uninteresting character: its lead, Piper.

It's hard to have a show about any lead character when they're not interesting after the first season. Seeing Piper struggle adjusting to prison life was great, but with all of the time after that focusing more and more on Alex it becomes a drawn-out exercise of whining and a never-ending carousel of emotions that doesn't stop in every episode.

Seeing that season three will, once again, focus on that on-again, off-again relationship, Piper and Alex's only plot on the show has already been played out, but how to compensate for that?

Sure, there are a bunch of funny, endearing and colorful cast members in this diverse ensemble, but nothing they bring to the table can bring the show back up to it's great second season with Lorraine Toussaint's scene-stealing performance as Vee. No subplots or actions are leaving me with an urgency to keep going to the next episode. I keep watching because it feels like a chore: you may want to hold it off until later, but you half-ass getting through it just to be done.

The show is as masterfully created as it ever and the cast is flawless as always, but nothing at Litchfield seems to be going on. The characters are routine and the biggest plot points are ones not even being built up to amount to much by season's end.

Rating: C

On Netflix: 'Happy Valley' is 2014's Best New Cop Show

Sarah Lancashire as Sgt. Catherine Cawood in the miniseries "Happy Valley".

West Yorkshire Police Sgt. Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) charges onto the screen in just the first three minutes of the entire miniseries with her backstory. She's 47, divorced and has two kids (one dead, and one who doesn't talk to her). She has one grandchild, and her sister, a recovering heroin-addict, lives with her. That's how she introduces herself to a man, and us, who's threatening to light himself on fire at a playground after a break-up with his girlfriend.

Sgt. Catherine Cawood is the tough, yet fragile lead character in "Happy Valley", a BBC One production named after an area of West Yorkshire known for its drug problem. But drugs isn't the focus of this series. Instead, it toes the line of a "Fargo" storyline, with an extortion/kidnapping plot and a likeable female officer at the center. Though, this story doesn't have as much humor peppered into it as the Oscar-winning film.