Carpet Bros.: Big Stars, Small Laughs

Here at NTV HQ, we’ve been referring to Carpet Brothers as “The 60Frames show with the famous people in it,” a description which has proven oddly useful. Not that 60Frames doesn’t have other interesting people attached to its projects — but other series seem to be structured around one celebrity at most. So Carpet, starring both Tim Meadows and David Spade as carpet retailer competitors, caught our attention.

How did Carpet Brothers secure its cast? All too easily, thanks to creator Matt Piedmont. Piedmont got his start as a Saturday Night Live writer, and his resume owes an awful lot to those eight years on the show’s staff. After he left, Piedmont made some script sales but otherwise proceeded to bounce from one project starring SNL alumni to another — including several Bud.tv series, some of which starred Tim Meadows, as well as David Spade’s The Showbiz Show. He probably has their numbers on speed dial, just in case an opportunity to make something short for the Internet comes up.

And how does Piedmont’s 12 years of comedy experience play? Not so great. Featuring Meadows as the eldest brother of the Raylon carpeting family (his two younger brothers are both white, a potentially funny gag that goes unplayed in the first episode), Carpet Brothers staggers along at a surprisingly slow pace, its deadpan humor never really popping off the screen. The choice to bounce between documentary and narrative styles means that very little story is told in this first four-minute sequence, and the bulk of the episode is devoted to awkward individual interviews with the three brothers (which probably made it easier to schedule shoot dates, but doesn’t help establish the characters and their relationships).

The highlight of this first installment is definitely the Fellini-influenced introduction of David Spade as the family business’s biggest threat — both visually dynamic and hilarious. But when the best thing about your series is the presence of David Spade, well, you’re just Rules of Engagement, aren’t you?

It’s tempting to write Piedmont off as a product of what is arguably SNL’s least-funny years… Really, it’s damn tempting. But there are flashes of originality in Carpet Brothers, and if it could just pick up the pace and work harder on getting some bigger laughs, it’s not impossible to imagine it improving on this first installment. Maybe with more David Spade? Not something I ever imagined myself wanting. But there you go.