Alpha House: Season One Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		4.0
Audio		3.5
Extras		0.0
Overall		3.5

Alpha House: Season One Blu-ray Movie Review

Boys Will Be Boys

Reviewed by Michael Reuben December 28, 2014

Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau is no stranger to political comedy. It's been a regular feature of his daily comic strip for years, and Trudeau was also the writer of Robert Altman's hilarious sendup of the campaign trail, Tanner '88 and its mordant sequel, Tanner on Tanner. For Amazon's original programming division, Amazon Studios, Trudeau has now created a contemporary political sitcom called Alpha House, loosely inspired by the real-life experience of three members of Congress (Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York and Dick Durbin of Illinois and Rep. George Miller of California) who share living quarters in D.C. Like Trudeau's other work, Alpha House is studded with topical references and cameos by real politicians and media figures, some of them intentional, others achieved by inserting actors into existing news footage, Forrest Gump-style. But as is usually the case with Trudeau, the comedy arises from character: from human foibles played out in a setting so public that there's usually a camera to catch people in their weakest moments and a voracious news cycle eager to pounce on the latest morsel of gossip.

Alpha House is a risky proposition in today's polarized atmosphere, and a portion of the audience at either end of the political spectrum won't be able to enjoy it simply because the mere mention of certain names and issues triggers outrage with Pavlovian reliability. If you can put all that aside, however, Alpha House is a very funny experience, with a superb cast that understands just how to explore Trudeau's witty insights about ambition, insecurity, the allure of power and the fear, once you have it, of losing it and becoming irrelevant. These phenomena are neither left nor right, red nor blue, liberal nor conservative. They are, however, recognizably human, which is always the best source for comedy.

Amazon released the pilot for Alpha House on April 19, 2013. The ten episodes of Season One followed, beginning on November 15, 2013 and concluding on January 10, 2014.

In the pilot episode, the house owned by Sen. Louis Laffer, Jr., of Nevada (R) (Matt Malloy) has three additional occupants: Sen. Gil John Biggs of South Carolina (R) (John Goodman, the star of the show); Sen. Robert Bettencourt of Pennsylvania (R) (Clark Johnson of Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire); and Sen. Vernon Smits (R), whose state is never mentioned (Bill Murray). But Sen. Smits disappears almost immediately, arrested and jailed on corruption charges, returning only in brief and unexpected cameos. This leaves the three remaining housemates with the immediate problem of finding a replacement. They eventually settle on a first-term rising star from Florida, Sen. Andy Guzman (Mark Consuelos), also a Republican, whose easy charm, attractive smile and immigrant credentials are already stirring presidential buzz, not to mention a wealthy and attractive Cuban-American PAC chairwoman named Adriana de Portago (Yara Martinez). Any similarity to current Florida senator Marco Rubio is purely coincidental, although the recently divorced Andy's roving eye and flirtatious manner are more reminiscent of Jack Kennedy or Bill Clinton. The ruthless electoral consultant that Andy hires, Graydon Talbot (Richard Cox), will have his work cut out for him, even if he does have the best numbers guy in the business. (The kid, Dilly DeSantis, played by Owen Campbell, speaks in techno-jargon, and is so socially inept that he can't look anyone in the eye.)

Gil John is the elder statesman of the group. Having risen to prominence on his reputation as the winning basketball coach of the North Carolina Tar Heels, he now employs a former player, the Nigerian-born Hakeem Agabi (Bjorn Dupaty), as his bodyguard. An old-style pol, Gil John has been repeatedly re-elected without major challenge, and he knows the ways of Capitol Hill so well that he's bored by everyone's posturing, including his own. His problem, however, is that he's now being challenged in the primary by an upstart newcomer named Digger Mancusi (Frederick Weller), a younger basketball coach from Duke University who speaks in even denser sports metaphors than Gil John. More importantly, Digger has Tea Party backing. After so many years of unchallenged incumbency, Gil John's competitive edge needs sharpening, a fact of which his harried chief of staff, Tammy Stackhouse (Alicia Sable), and ambitious wife, Maddie (Julie White, initially just a voice on the telephone), never tire of reminding him.

Louis Laffer is also fighting a tough primary battle against a Tea Party-backed opponent named Al Hickok (Ted King), and Louis has a serious public image problem. Hickok is a cattle rancher who drives a pickup truck, carries a rifle and has so many occasions to use it that the media literally captures him defending his property like a cowboy of the Old West. Louis, by contrast, is a mild-mannered Mormon and a devoted family man who has always worked in an office and prefers a tidy household to a fully stocked gun rack. (Louis' quest for a housekeeper who meets his exacting standards is one of the series' many entertaining subplots.) So desperate is Louis to "man up" his image that he adds himself to Gil John's factfinding tour to Afghanistan, with predictably disastrous results that his loyal staff then works hard to spin into something positive. (The travails of the staffers as they try to manage their bosses provide some of the show's best moments.) As Season One evolves, though, it turns out that Louis didn't become a senator by accident. He actually does know something about how to represent the people of Nevada, just not in a way that looks good on TV.

Robert Bettencourt isn't currently running for re-election, but he sees how his old friends are struggling, and he is already planning ahead. One prong of the effort focuses on Robert's efforts to promote energy independence by visiting with Pennsylvanians whose lives have been improved by the fracking industry. Unfortunately, due to gaps in the advance work done by Robert's chief of staff, Aaron Stimson (Kobi Libii), the fracking tour does not turn out as planned. Robert is also being dogged by a trumped-up ethics complaint before the committee chaired by his nemesis, Sen. Carly Armiston of New York (D) (Cynthia Nixon), who is the show's self-righteous yin to the equally self-righteous yang of Sen. Paul Mower (Kenneth Tigar), a Bible-thumper about whom even his fellow Republicans have nothing favorable to say. Robert's true passion in life, however, isn't legislation; it's match-making. He refers to himself as "the Love Doctor", and one of his first questions upon meeting a new staffer is their relationship status. Knowing the ridiculous hours that senatorial aides work to fulfill their bosses' demands, Robert cannot resist pairing them off, which is why, during the course of Season One, his own chief aide, Aaron, acquires a girlfriend, despite his frequent protests that he doesn't want one.

It's typical of Alpha House's light approach that the four senators' neighbor and good friend is a member of the opposition, Sen. Rosalyn DuPeche of Illinois (D) (Wanda Sykes). She tends their garden when they're away on junkets, but at work they pretend to shun each other, because that's the "official" stance. Indeed, one of the most fertile sources of comedy in Alpha House is the disconnect between the private and public faces presented by both politicians and media figures, a disconnect of which they all seem to be well aware. When broadcaster Chris Matthews parodies himself interrupting his guests and praising his own opinion, the "performance" is so convincing that you have to wonder whether, at some level, Matthews isn't performing some sort of mea culpa. Kelly Ripa (who is married to Consuelos), Jane Pauley (who is married to Trudeau), Grover Norquist, Joe Scarborough and many more appear as scarily convincing alternate versions of themselves.

Alpha House: Season One Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

According to IMDb, Alpha House was shot digitally with the Arri Alexa. Matthew J. Lloyd, one of the cinematographers for the TV adaptation of Fargo, shot the pilot, with the remainder of Season One shot by Patrick Capone (Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues). The visual design is very much that of a typical TV sitcom: flat, brightly lit, with the characters prominently displayed in the frame and little attempt to stylize the surroundings or convey any sense of the environment. Unlike House of Cards, which transformed the nation's capital into a neo-noir hall of shadows, Alpha House keeps it light and unthreatening. The notable exception occurs during the "factfinding" trip to Afghanistan, when the nighttime flight in a military-style aircraft is simulated with intense washes of red and blue lights, and the experience on the ground is bathed in bright yellow to simulate the hot desert sun.

Amazon's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray of Season One (ten episodes plus the pilot) provides a good though unexceptional image. Detail is plentiful, colors are as vivid as the material allows, and black levels appear to be properly set. If the Blu-ray image isn't particularly exciting, it's not the fault of the disc so much as a reflection of the show's unassuming aesthetic. The average bitrate of 17.99 Mbps is on the low side, but it is adequate for digitally originated material that consists largely of talking heads.

Alpha House: Season One Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

Alpha House may have a 5.1 sound mix in name, which is encoded on Blu-ray in lossless DTS-HD MA, but it is entirely a front-oriented affair, as are most sitcoms, with priority given to dialogue anchored in the center, while the jocular musical score by Anton Sanko (Big Love) is spread across the front soundstage. An occasional scene, such as the State of the Union address, will utilize the surrounds to convey the large space of the congressional chamber and moments of applause, but this soundtrack is almost entirely about the voices of the characters, which are clearly reproduced.

Alpha House: Season One Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

The disc has no extras.

Alpha House: Season One Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Season One of Alpha House was sufficiently successful that Amazon commissioned a second season of ten episodes, all of which became available for streaming on October 24, 2014. The extremely high price that Amazon is charging for the Season One Blu-ray ($49.99 list; $28.79 street as of this writing) makes the streaming option more attractive. The show itself is well worth your time, largely because the exceptional cast, led by Goodman, manages to find a gently funny side in subject matter that is too often an occasion for anger, bitterness and conflict. But if Amazon is serious about selling the show on Blu-ray, it needs to reconsider its pricing.