Immortalized, Episode 1: Size Matters

It’s Valentine’s Day, which is an odd choice to debut a show about competitive taxidermy, but it works for me. My wife is allergic to V-day, which she considers to be the antithesis of all things romantic, so I get the stink-eye for bringing home flowers and artisan chocolates. However, I got a big smile when I told her that her real present was that we didn’t have to watch Archer, which she also hates, and that we would instead be sipping on cava and enjoying Immortalized. Our love is one for the storybooks.

Immortalized is what you’d get if Iron Chef and Duck Dynasty got trapped in an elevator overnight. We have a stable of reputed masters of the craft, all with quirks and specialties to mark them as characters. We have selected challengers, and in place of the secret ingredient, there’s a “theme”. This is all presided over by Zach Selwyn, a chap who looks like he got yanked out of line at Whole Foods and ordered to host the show at gunpoint. His manner and gestures all suggest he’s trying to signal for help without tipping off his captors.

The judging panel consists of, from left to right:

• Paul Rhymer: head of taxidermy for the Smithsonian, which sounds impressive if you have never been to the Smithsonian, where 90% of the taxidermy displays wouldn’t pass muster at a roadside attraction run by cannibal serial killers.
• Catherine Coan: artist, taxidermy competitor, and attractive woman wearing leather trousers.
• Brian Posehn: comic with no other reason to be here. He looks so much like my brother-in-law that I can’t look at him without thinking he’s going to start picking apart Bill Bellicheck’s clock management philosophy.

Having been introduced to the panel and their huge, comfy chairs, we meet our challenger, an affable bug weirdo from Petaluma named Kevin Clarke. Kevin looks like his neighbors will be describing him to local news cameras as a quiet type who kept to himself.

He will be challenging Immortalizer Beth Beverly, a rogue taxidermist from Philly, who announces pointedly that she once made a hat out of a fox scrotum. It’s going to take a while for me to adjust to taxidermy trash talk. Our theme is “Size Matters”. I’m not even going to put a placeholder joke here.

Zach dismisses the competitors with “Taxidermists: To your mounts!”, which is the sort of catch phrase that leaves you feeling sorry for everyone involved. With that, Kev and Bev walk off the set and pretty much go home. This explains the super-plush judge chairs; apparently they have to sit there for weeks at a stretch waiting for the action to resume.

We are then treated to some background and process on Kevin, who has a cute toddler son and an invisible wife. Cute son says “uh oh” a lot as he demolishes daddy’s rare specimens. Wife sounds resigned as she reminds Kev mid-interview that he has abandoned cute son at daycare. I should point out that the brief glimpses of Kev’s artwork look fascinating and beautiful, but mostly we see him looking fussy and ineffectual. And stalking the dollhouse aisles at toy stores, which an adult male simply cannot do without freaking people out.

Then we go to Philly to catch up with Beverly. We do get to see the fox scrotum hat, which is somewhere between a fascinator and a yarmulke. The life of a rogue taxidermist is wild and free. Bev treats us to a stream-of-consciousness meditation on what the theme means to her as she assembles a horned chimera using a neighbor cat and a huge fish tail.

We then return to the studio for dramatic music and opening of crates. There’s apparently a time limit on getting your display unboxed and ready for inspection, but there’s no clock or countdown except for Zach shouting time’s up.

The camera work here is a huge problem, because we never get a real look at Kev’s piece. The camera flies by a few times and focuses on a some odd details, but the overall impression is a pile of wings, some string, and beetles in chairs, all on a sheet of plywood with some train set grass and trees. It looks more like a cake than a sculpture. Maybe it’s good, maybe it’s crap, but I don’t feel like a really saw it. Given the obvious lack of time constraints in the filming schedule, you’d think they could have taken a few good stills.

We get a pretty good look at Bev’s princess unicorn catfish, which looks pretty cool in spite of the damage to the back fin and the messily mounted eyes. The rotating display helps.

Bev and Kev are then called upon to explain their work. Kev’s interpretation of the theme is pretty hard to miss and makes some sense, and Beverly made whatever she felt like at the time and is just bullshitting on all cylinders. The judges digest all this and feed it into some secret algorithm that allows them to compare two objects with nearly nothing in common and boom, home team wins.

There’s no mention of a prize, so I assume our taxidermists are in this for the pure thrill of high-level competition, or they get paid scale. Maybe it’s for bragging rights, maybe there’s something more sinister at work. Perhaps we will find out in upcoming episodes, which I will be watching, I fear. This may have been a messy beginning, but I must see where this is going.

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Posted by Will Judy on February 15, 2013. Filed under Headline, Popcorn. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry