Childrens Hospital: TV Premiere

Back in 2008, Daily Show alum Rob Corddry teamed up with a gaggle of seasoned comedy vets to create a web series called Childrens' Hospital. With David Wain as co-producer, Corddry created ten, 5-minute episodes of the show that soon caught the eye of his old bosses at Comedy Central. TV being the business that it is, CC eventually passed on Childrens' Hospital, leading Cartoon Network's Adult Swim branch to snatch the show up. Starting in August Adult Swim will be airing a collection of all new episodes produced specifically for the network. Between now and then they'll be airing the entire first season of Childrens' Hospital two episodes at a time on Sundays.

Childrens' Hospital is really a perfect fit for Adult Swim. It occurs in short, joke-packed chunks that only have the slightest hint of a plot. The humor is a mix between surreal nonsense, weird non-sequiturs and all-out parody, a perfect intersection of the kind of content we're used to seeing on cable TV and the always-changing world of Internet video. The only thing separating Childrens' Hospital from the better stuff you'll find on Youtube is that it's populated with familiar celebrity faces.

Of course, at least half of the jokes in Childrens' Hospital wouldn't work without a couple decades' worth of self-serious medical dramas informing the public consciousness. All of the usual tropes are present in the series, demonstrating just how ridiculous a lot of those shows are when taken at face value. The first two episodes focus heavily on the absurd romantic stories of shows like Grey's Anatomy. It seems that half the hospital is in some kind of sexual entanglement and all of the pairings start and end abruptly for no reason other than to manufacture angst. Taken in such a condensed form, these parodies of network TV conventions end up playing out beautifully. Ironically, if Childrens' Hospital was a standard half-hour comedy that relied on plot arch and character development, the parody would end up rounding right back to convention. Web series might be short for the sake of economy and the average Internet attention span, but the 5-minute format also has inherent comedic advantages.

But just because Childrens' Hospital was created for the Internet on the cheap doesn't mean that the cast or crew give it anything less than their best. Some jokes (like The State's own Ken Marino reaching for his yarmulke in moments of romantic drama) are pure subtlety and no one really mugs for the camera even though a production like this would probably allow for it. This isn't to say that Childrens' Hospital isn't plenty silly. After all, Rob Corddry spends 100% of every episode running around in clown makeup and one character closes an episode monologing about laser guns. What makes the silliness in this series work is that it all revolves around the unearned seriousness of most TV shows, so a sort of meta-theme is present to tie it all together. Childrens' Hospital isn't exactly a love letter to television (in fact it revels in the death knells of the medium) but no one can accuse it of being anything less than conversant about the target of its satire.

Best Moment: Lake Bell's Dr. Cat Black has some of the funniest fake voiceover content I've ever heard. It's airheaded philosophy at its best.

Notes: Hospital show parodies are nothing new (re: Scrubs) but this is the first I've seen that points out how blithely misogynistic the genre tends to be. The women on Childrens' Hospital are all extraordinarily flighty, dumb and over-sexualized.

Episode(s) Rating: 5/5- It's not difficult to dive into Childrens' Hospital and while it's easy enough to find the entire first season online, the TV premiere is an ample appetizer for the Adult Swim exclusive second season.